I forgot to add that the baying of Gwyn's hounds was also a portent of the imminent death of a family member, which is basically the same thing as the wailing of the bainsidhe (banshee), where hell hounds and bainsidhe were both invasion creatures in the cavern under the castle at the end of the Demon Queen story. The moaning spirits also have "wailing" as part of their messaging. The relevance is that the Castle is Terate's family, and the story started a few weeks after Terate's death.

I mentioned that Bonespear Tower as a memorial to Kygar looks like it is playing off "Shakespeare." I mean that very literally, the tower actually "shakes."


- Xorus' player

---

>'=explain Who would deny, after all, that a rhetorical question is merely a statement?
You may not explain with a sentence ending in a question mark.

I've found an interconnecting thread for the Monastery in the Lysierian Hills, the forest, Castle Anwyn and as it turns out Bonespear Tower. While I've noticed the explicit parallel in Anwyn to The Graveyard with its "Shadow Out of Time" premise, I did not have a Lovecraftian subtext specific to Anwyn (or Bonespear Tower for that matter. You have to remember that Bonespear Tower has no windows and the top of it is designed to look like the head/maw of some massive entity of bones.)

It turns out to be in more of Clark Ashton Smith's stories. I will only do a bunch of excerpts for one of them, because there are so many relevant stories in the same setting, but one of the smoking guns is I found the source for the serpent encircled mirror. It dovetails a lot with all of this "Druidic" fairy stuff and transmogrifications.


Shakespeare and Shadow Valley

Some miscellaneous points regarding Shakespeare's fairies:

* Puck from Midsummer Night's Dream is a shapeshifting "hobgoblin fairy", but his name derives from the word pooka / pucca. The word originates in Old Norse, which is what Valaskar sounds like.

* Midsummer Night's Dream takes place in Cwm Pwcca, meaning Pucca Valley.

* Pookas are shapeshifter fairies. They often take the form of horses with chains, but they do not have to be horses. The Lovecraft story "The Mound" that Shadow Valley pulls from is about a race of humanoids that shapeshift things.

* Fairies are associated with fairy mounds. The castle has a keep on a mound, nymphs and satyrs are portrayed inside. The moaning spirits correspond to the things that guarded the mound in Lovecraft's "The Mound" (it talks about a chieftain named Grey Eagle after an interloper has his feet cut off, the moaning spirits have eagle claws.)

* Like the Lovecraft mythos fog thematics, Shakespeare's Puck (pooka) sometimes takes the form of Will-o-the-Wisp to pull his pranks. Castle Anwyn has ambient messaging relating lake fog to naiads. The exit to Shadow Valley notably has the fog pulling you off the ledge.

* The Queen of the Fairies corresponds to Terate's mother and Morgan la Fey. In Shakespeare she is called either Mab, or Titania the wife of Oberon (Alberich in the Nibelungliend.) I've mentioned the references to the Titans. Shakespeare probably chose to call her Titania because Ovid called the Roman Diana that (the Greek Artemis) in his "Metamorpheses", where the assumption was that the classical nymphs were the same thing as the fairies of Celtic folklore. Titania also has a bower in Midsummer Night's Dream.

* The common motif of fairies is that they kidnap children and replace them with "changeling" duplicates. This was explicitly introduced recently with the Ilvari, which were originally a Shadow World elven race (Ilyari) but were turned into fey instead. I do not know if that was original premise they intended in the late 90s. In any case, in the Germanic folklore, the known possible parents of changelings were water spirits, the devil, and female dwarfs.


The Werewolf Forest of Averoigne

While there is a primary Lovecraft basis behind the Broken Lands and Shadow Valley, there are also some secondary influences from other authors related to the Cthluhu/etc. mythos. Lovecraft and some other authors would use things from each other's works. I've noticed things from time to time as having originated instead in the stories of Clark Ashton Smith (such as his Hyperborean cycle.) The tomb spiders extension to the burial mound looks partly based on his "The Seven Geases", and the inside of Marlu's shrine in the Broken Lands looks based on his "The Devotee of Evil", where this guy uses gongs on a tripod to manifest cosmic evil and freezes himself into a black statue which gets compared to Satan being frozen in Dante's Inferno, which in turn is referencing the bottom of The Graveyard.

It turns out that Castle Anwyn and Bonespear Tower are based on stories Clark Ashton Smith set in the fictional region of France called Averoigne, which sounds more than a little like Avalon, and is based on the actual region of Auvergne bordering Burgundy. (Northern Auvergne is about the distance of Syracuse to Rochester from Avallon, Burgundy.) This is probably intentional because the relevant stories make references to Merlin and/or his Roman historical basis in Ambrosius.[1]

To start with I'll quote from the first part of his poem titled "Averoigne":

"In Averoigne the enchantress weaves

Weird spells that call a changeling sun,

Or hale the moon of Hecate

Down to the ivy-hooded towers.

At evening, from her nightshade bowers,

The bidden vipers creep, to be

The envoys of her malison;

And philtres drained from tomb-fat leaves

Drip through her silver sieves.

In Averoigne swart phantoms flown

From pestilent moat and stagnant lake"

The enchantress in question is a "lamia", basically a succubus who seduces men with a false form and drains them. In Greek mythology the Libyan queen Lamia was a mistress of Zeus cursed by Hera into being a child-eating daemon. This particular one lives in a special enchanted forest reached through a cromlech, exactly like the upended trilithon portal in The Graveyard. Malison is a curse, philtres are a love potion. This enchantress has a werewolf slave. The forest of Averoigne is infamous for having werewolves, and as I noted before, Castle Anwyn may be referring to the knight of King Arthur's who was turned into a werewolf involving a magic ring.

Changeling is the fairy thing. Hecate is the chthonic Greek underworld goddess that is part of the witches cauldron scene in Macbeth I quoted earlier. (Supposedly Lamia is a daughter of Hecate in some stories. She is often depicted as half serpent, and John Keats wrote a book called Lamia and Other Poems.) Castle Anwyn is grown over with ivy, has a bower, and there are snakes all over the place. The stories also make "blood moon" references, and I think Shadow Valley is partly influenced by Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher", which does as well. They tend to center around the fictional town Vyones, which might explain the "vion" in Etrevion.


"The Colossus of Ylourgne"

There is no clean way to do this, so I will just pull relevant excerpts from each story. For a while now I've noticed that Bonespear Tower's story is vaguely Lovecraftian, but there was seemingly no specific Lovecraft story behind it. I think it might actually be partly based on the Ghostbusters movie, because my read on the intention was that the demon was supposed to possess the tower (the demon Maleskari is an enormous skeleton), the tower would become its body and then the dwarven sorcerer Bonespear intended on possessing the demon so the hundred foot tower of bones would be his immortal body.

It turns out this is pretty much exactly the plot of Clark Ashton Smith's "The Colossus of Ylourgne". There is a dwarf sorcerer Nathaire (described as a demon spawn like Merlin) who takes ten of his disciple students with him from Vyones, and they start emptying all of the graveyards at night. When the former student and narrator of the story finds what they're doing in the equivalent of Anwyn's pentagram chamber, he finds that they are constructing a 100 foot skeleton that they intend on covering with flesh to make into a colossal body so the dying Nathaire can transfer his spirit into it. (Dybbuks are spirits that possess people in Jewish folklore.)

By Analogy: Vruul

"It was said by the more devout and religious moiety that the Archfiend [Nathaire], with a legion of bat-winged assistants, had borne them away bodily at moonless midnight. There were clerics, and also reputable burghers, who professed to have seen the flight of man-like shapes upon the blotted stars together with others that were not men, and to have heard the wailing cries of the hell-bound crew as they passed in an evil cloud over the roofs and city walls."

Cambion Like Merlin

"Amid the seething of strange rumours, many half-forgotten tales were recalled, and new legends were created overnight Much was made of the obscure nativity of Nathaire and his dubitable wanderings before he had settled, six years previous, in Vyones. People said that he was fiend-begotten, like the fabled Merlin: his father being no less a personage than Alastor, demon of revenge; and his mother a deformed and dwarfish sorceress. From the former, he had taken his spitefulness and malignity; from the latter, his squat, puny physique. He had travelled in Orient lands, and had learned from Egyptian or Saracenic masters the unhallowed art of necromancy, in whose practice he was unrivalled."

Bodies rising from graveyards and taking off to become used for something else (only recently dead and useful bodies)

"Nightly, for a period of two weeks, the cemeteries of Vyones and also those of other towns, of villages and hamlets, gave up a ghastly quota of their tenants. From brazen bolted tombs, from common charnels, from shallow, unconsecrated trenches, from the marble lidded vaults of churches and cathedrals, the weird exodus went on without cessation. Worse than this, if possible, there were newly ceremented corpses that leapt from their biers or catafalques, and disregarding the horrified watchers, ran with great bounds of automatic frenzy into the night, never to be seen again by those who lamented them."

The Monastic Lich monastery?

"This destination, it somehow became rumoured, was the ruinous castle of Ylourgne, beyond the werewolf-haunted forest, in the outlying, semi-mountainous hills of Averoigne. Ylourgne, a great, craggy pile that had been built by a line of evil and marauding barons now extinct, was a place that even the goatherds preferred to shun. The wrathful spectres of its bloody lords were said to move turbulently in its crumbling halls; and its chatelaines were the Undead. No one cared to dwell in the shadow of its cliff-founded walls; and the nearest abode of living men was a small Cistercian monastery, more than a mile away on the opposite slope of the valley. The monks of this austere brotherhood held little commerce with the world beyond the hills; and few were the visitors who sought admission at their high-perched portals. But, during that dreadful summer, following the disappearances of the dead, a weird and disquieting tale went forth from the monastery throughout Averoigne.

...

At this time, no rumour of the ravished graves and biers had reached the Cistercians. The tale was brought to them later, after they had beheld, on many successive mornings, the passing of small or great companies of the dead towards the devil-taken castle. Hundreds of these liches, they swore, had filed by beneath the monastery; and doubtless many others had gone past unnoted in the dark. None, however, were seen to come forth from Ylourgne, which had swallowed them up like the undisgorging Pit."

The Castle of Ylourgne: Layout matches Castle Anwyn, including the glowing red eyes on the left side and the cavern

"The deep moat that had once surrounded the place was now dry, and had been partly filled by crumbling earth and detritus from the walls. The drawbridge had rotted away; but the blocks of the barbican, collapsing into the moat, had made a sort of rough causey on which it was possible to cross. Not without trepidation, and lifting their crucifixes as warriors lift their weapons in the escalade of an armed fortress, the brothers climbed over the ruin of the barbican into the courtyard.

This too, like the battlements, was seemingly deserted. Overgrown nettles, rank grasses and sapling trees were rooted between its paving-stones. The high, massive donjon, the chapel, and that portion of the castellated structure containing the great hall, had preserved their main outlines after centuries of dilapidation. To the left of the broad bailey, a doorway yawned like the mouth of a dark cavern in the cliffy mass of the hall-building; and from this doorway there issued a thin, bluish vapour, writhing in phantom coils towards the unclouded heavens.

Approaching the doorway, the brothers beheld a gleaming of red fires within, like the eyes of dragons blinking through infernal murk. They felt sure that the place was an outpost of Erebus, an ante-chamber of the Pit; but nevertheless, they entered bravely, chanting loud exorcisms and brandishing their mighty crosses of hornbeam.

The Cavern (Note: There are other stories with similar caverns under donjons that are also relevant.)

They stood on the threshold of a colossal chamber, which seemed to have been made by the tearing down of upper floors and inner partitions adjacent to the castle hall, itself a room of huge extent. The chamber seemed to recede through interminable shadow, shafted with sunlight falling through the rents of ruin: sunlight that was powerless to dissipate the infernal gloom and mystery.

The monks averred later that they saw many people moving about the place, together with sundry demons, some of whom were shadowy and gigantic, and others barely to be distinguished from the men. These people, as well as their familiars, were occupied with the tending of reverberatory furnaces and immense pear-shaped and gourd-shaped vessels such as were used in alchemy. Some, also, were stooping above great fuming cauldrons, like sorcerers, busy with the brewing of terrible drugs. Against the opposite wall, there were two enormous vats, built of stone and mortar, whose circular sides rose higher than a man's head, so that Bernard and Stephane were unable to determine their contents. One of the vats gave forth a whitish glimmering; the other, a ruddy luminosity.

Near the vats, and somewhat between them, there stood a sort of low couch or litter, made of luxurious, weirdly figured fabrics such as the Saracens weave. On this the monks discerned a dwarfish being, pale and wizened, with eyes of chill flame that shone like evil beryls through the dusk. The dwarf, who had all the air of a feeble moribund, was supervising the toils of the men and their familiars.

The dazed eyes of the brothers began to comprehend other details. They saw that several corpses, among which they recognized that of Theophile, were lying on the middle floor, together with a heap of human bones that had been wrenched asunder at the joints, and great lumps of flesh piled like the carvings of butchers. One of the men was lifting the bones and dropping them into a cauldron beneath which there glowed a rubycoloured fire; and another was flinging the lumps of flesh into a tub filled with some hueless liquid that gave forth an evil hissing as of a thousand serpents.

The Serpent Encircled Mirror

Alone in his attic chamber, Gaspard du Nord, student of alchemy and sorcery and quondam pupil of Nathaire, sought repeatedly, but always in vain, to consult the viper-circled mirror. The glass remained obscure and cloudy, as with the risen fumes of Satanical alembics or baleful necromantic braziers. Haggard and weary with long nights of watching, Gaspard knew that Nathaire was even more vigilant than he.

Colossal Demon Skeleton

"Gaspard had seen certain of the experiments and evocations of Nathaire, and was all too familiar with the appurtenances of the dark arts. Within certain limits, he was not squeamish; nor was it likely that he would have been terrified overmuch by the shadowy, uncouth shapes of demons who toiled in the pit below him side by side with the blackclad pupils of the sorcerer. But a cold horror clutched his heart when he saw the incredible, enormous thing that occupied the central floor: the colossal human skeleton a hundred feet in length, stretching for more than the extent of the old castle hall; the skeleton whose bony right foot the group of men and devils, to all appearance, were busily clothing with human flesh!"

Gaspard ends up getting thrown into oubliette beneath the castle after spotting the hundred foot skeleton, roughly corresponding to where the dungeon is under Castle Anwyn. The "storage shed" in Bonespear Tower is supposed to be an oubliette, but I think it's called a storage shed because most such things billed that way for tourists were really just used for storage, like a hill castle / tower would use something like that as a water cistern. But I think the idea was supposed to be they were imprisoning someone/thing inside, with the lever as some kind of psychological torture. Maybe if you pull the lever down, the now missing trap door opens, but you need to stand on the lever in the up position to climb out. In Castle Varunar you have a different form of the "forgotten room" where it's at the top of the castle keep.

In any event, there are other things like shadowy figures corresponding to what can be seen in the distance of the Bonespear Courtyard, and the description of the courtyard over-run with shrubs. There is a "mound" of bones outside Bonespear, which is a meaningful word. I know there is a skull artifact that was made later showing the dead construction workers being reanimated and piling on top of each other, but I'd bet that was not the original concept, the bones more likely coming from raiding cemeteries. The students end up being carried along with Nathaire the colossus, and Gaspard gets this magic dust in his face from the cathedral in Vyones, which is what Castle Anwyn's gargoyles are based on from another story. The dust makes the colossus dig a grave for itself and lie down, crushing the students.


"The Maker of Gargoyles"

In this one a gargoyle sculptor with obsession issues causes the gargoyles he made for the cathedral of Vyones to become sentient. The griffin shaped one carries his wrath and hatred, the satyr shaped one has his obsessive lust for women and tries to kidnap them. The gargoyles commit brutal murders. He tries to stop it by smashing their faces, like in the Dark Shrine of the Broken Lands (vruul are basically gargoyles that fly off with people), which promptly gets him dropped off the cathedral.

In this story the Archbishop of Averoigne is said to be Ambrosius, which is sometimes taken to be Merlin's last name, or corresponds to the Roman-Britain historical figure associated with King Vortigern. I should point out that Clark Ashton Smith uses the adjective "misshapen" a lot to imply the horribleness of things, and that word gets used over and over again in Bonespear Tower. The greenish monster is misshapen, the creatures are misshapen, the sword that Bonespear wants to trap Maleskari within is misshapen. The word is a hint to look to Clark Ashton Smith in the same way The Graveyard's throne room is filled with Lovecraft buzzwords.

Compare with the strange sentience description of Castle Anwyn's gargoyles

"Always to the stone-cutter, even more than to those who had criticized and abhorred his productions, the gargoyles were alive, they possessed a vitality and a sentiency of their own."

"A Rendezvous in Averoigne"

This is a similar castle structure with underground cavern, where the masters of the castle are basically vampires. The salient point with this one is that when they go into the cavern and stake the vampire, the whole castle and surrounding lake ends up vanishing from reality. This is what almost happened at the end of the Demon Queen storyline with Castle Anwyn. The cavern is described as the lower level of the "donjon" and filled with yellow lichen of the kind where there is no sunlight. At the end when it all vanishes, it is described as being like waking up from an evil dream, which is again the recurring dream theme to these areas.


"The Enchantress of Sylaire"

"Now the path steepened, climbing a densely wooded hill. The trees thinned to straggly, stunted pines, encircling a brown, open moorland as the tonsure encircles a monk's crown. The moor was studded with Druidic monoliths, dating from ages prior to the Roman occupation of Averoigne. Almost at its center, there towered a massive cromlech, consisting of two upright slabs that supported a third like the lintel of a door. The path ran straight to the cromlech. 'This is the portal of my domain,' said Sephora, as they neared it. 'I grow faint with fatigue. You must take me in your arms and carry me through the ancient doorway.'"

Note that Onar's shrine past the underground stronghold in the Coastal Cliffs has seven monoliths that are topped in this way. That cavern glows yellow from lichen, so you basically have a yellow triangle with a skull symbol in it, which is the poison hazard symbol. No idea if that's what they intended. In any case, The Graveyard has a trilithon portal like this that is now broken, which was a Lord of Essaence style of magical gateway.

This enchantress is a lamia (basically a succubus) who has a werewolf servant who is a jealous former lover. He tells the narrator she has no mirrors, because vampires avoid having their illusions broken. He gave the narrator a mirror that would let him see the enchantress in her true, hideous form, though he ends up not using it on her. So this is an evil woman with mirror story, which used to show the demon queen in Castle Anwyn, whereas the mirror with the serpents on it came instead from "The Colossus of Ylourgne." Averoigne stories have a bunch of succubus things in them, and that's how you get cambions like Merlin.


"The Beast of Averoigne"

In this one there is a serpentine monster that arises because some unholy comet is passing by the planet. The relevance is that The Broken Lands is implicitly about Shadow World text regarding the moon of the Dark Gods, Charon, having dormant Lord of Essaence portals which got re-opened by the extra-planar comet Sa'kain causing the Dark Gods to gain access to the world (again?) The story involves unleashing a demon in a ring belonging to a sorcerer from ancient Hyperborea. In this case the beast turns out to be the abbot of the monastery. The abbot's name is Theophile, which is one of the monks in "The Colossus of Ylourgne."


"The End of the Story"

In this one the narrator travels to a monastery that contains a great deal of forgotten, lost, forbidden and esoteric texts. He finds a short manuscript the abbot warns him is cursed and he should not read, but of course he does anyway and becomes totally obsessed with following it to find out what is at "the end of the story." The story involves a satyr. It makes you want to pursue the ruins of a castle nearby, where there turns out to be another of these vampiric women.

This takes the illusory form of a water nymph named Nycea, which is obviously based on Nicea of Greek mythology, who is raped by Dionysus and gives birth to Telete. Given the Morgan le Fay / morgens / Morrigan / naiads thing with Castle Anwyn, it stands way out that this devotee of Artemis (Diana or "Titania" as Ovid and Shakespeare have it) has a name so similar to Terate. Notably, Norandar read the scroll that drove Terate mad, and it made him obsessed with Rayyne.

The abbot is described going through a number of expressions. Jovial, sorrowful, mad. I think this might be the origin of the emotive faces in the Monastery with the monastic liches, probably cross-alluding to the Muses. I still have no explanation for the shadowbox, the noblewoman on the horse statue, or the mystical symbol they have past the archway. These stories do describe the monks having cells. This particular story does not involve ascetic monks, but some of the others do.


"Out of the Aeons"

This is a story Lovecraft co-wrote with a woman, the same one who worked on the wax museum story the Graveyard throne room is based on, and Lovecraft refers to Averoigne in this story. (Specifically, he refers to the castle ruins from "The End of the Story", which are referenced in other Clark Ashton Smith stories.) It involves beings like Yig and Cthulhu. The general idea is there is a mummy who was instantly petrified Medusa-style, but his insides are still alive, so he has been aware for many thousands of years. The mummy is perceived to be slowly moving over weeks, which the museum people dismiss as a decay process.

I think this is why The Rift room with the mummy that has wings says you swear you thought you saw the wings move. It could also be the basis of the graveyard of statues in The Rift. I also think the room with the man with black eyes sitting on a throne in a black marble room with blood pumping through it, saying slaughter them all, is probably supposed to represent Onar with his "living stone" thing. I know they came up with a story later explaining obsidian is his material for causing the first murder, but his obsidian altar in the Coastal Cliffs is older and is more likely to be related to the stuff with the pumas.

There was something else I had in mind, but it's escaping me at the moment. I've got to dig more into Ambrosius. I noticed that the story of Vortigern trying to build a tower that kept crumbling involved Merlin/Ambrosius, because they thought they needed to bless it with the blood of a cambion (a half-demonic child born as a result of incubus/succubus like Merlin.) It turned out there were two dragons fighting underneath the tower.[4] (Again, Shadow Valley, the wyrm. And that line in "The Colossus of Ylourgne".) I noticed that Vortigern was obsessed with a woman named Rowena. This stood out to me because the woman who had auctioned off the Maleskari referencing "demon blade" was named Rowena Dekdarion, niece of the guy that runs the defenses for the College of Loremasters in the Shadow World setting.


- Xorus' player

[1] The Lady of the Lake had "enchanted" Merlin to enthrall him and made him teach her all of his sorcery. He ends up being entombed magically, in a tree or cave or tower and perceived as mist, which might be what that question mark room in the crypt was about on Tsoran's map. The reason for this is that the word for it in legend "glas tann" is taken sometimes to be the etymological origin of Glastonbury, and Glastonbury is the fake crypt of King Arthur and Guenevere that Anwyn's crypt is based on.

[2] Perhaps "Saracenic" and "Cistercian" from "The Colossus of Ylourgne" could be plausible roots for the seraceris and csetairi.

[3] Keats wrote famous poems about Lamia giving her the half-serpent form. Remember that the ghostly bard of Castle Anwyn was named Keat.

[4] The White and Red dragon story shows up in the Mabinogian (Queen Mab? Coincidence?) as related to Gwyn ap Nudd's father Llud/Nudd/Nodens, where Gwyn is the fairy king / king of Annwn.

[5] Last night's episode of The Blacklist had Raymond Reddington talking about Edward I's architect, describing castles-within-castle and barbicans and gatehouses. I'm pretty sure we can chalk that one up at least to coincidence.

---

>'=explain Who would deny, after all, that a rhetorical question is merely a statement?
You may not explain with a sentence ending in a question mark.

Another excerpt about the serpent encircled magic mirror in "The Colossus of Ylourgne":

Because of this knowledge and insight, Gaspard preferred to remain silent when he heard of Nathaire's departure. Also, he did not think it well to revive the memory of his own past pupilage. Alone with his books, in a sparsely furnished attic, he frowned above a small, oblong mirror, framed with an arabesque of golden vipers, that had once been the property of Nathaire.

It was not the reflection of his own comely and youthful though subtly lined face that caused him to frown. Indeed, the mirror was of another kind than that which reflects the features of the gazer. In its depths, for a few instants, he had beheld a strange and ominous-looking scene, whose participants were known to him but whose location he could not recognize or orientate. Before he could study it closely, the mirror had clouded as if with the rising of alchemic fumes, and he had seen no more.

This clouding, he reflected, could mean only one thing: Nathaire had known himself watched and had put forth a counterspell that rendered the clairvoyant mirror useless. It was the realization of this fact, together with the brief, sinister glimpse of Nathaire's present activities, that troubled Gaspard and caused a chill horror to mount slowly in his mind: a horror that had not yet found a palpable form or a name.

[Cavern Niche]

Once past the perimeter of the pentagram, the room narrows into a curved niche. Mounted on the stone of the back wall is a large mirror, its frame thickly carved with serpentine figures that writhe and curl around each other. The mirror seems strangely compelling. You also see an ancient carved chest.

Obvious exits: north, northeast, northwest

>look mirror

The longer you look at them, the sinuous forms along the frame of the mirror almost seem to move. Gazing into the mirror itself shows you nothing -- its face is a flat black pool of darkness with not even a ripple upon it.

These Averoigne stories are all set in Chretien de Troyes, Perceval era mid-12th century France. Its monsters are Greco-Roman mythological throwbacks and referring to Celtic precursors of Gaul before Christianity, where that general process is associated with King Arthur legends and this other 5th century stuff. There's actually a story involving time travel between 12th and 5th century Auveroigne involving his Hyperborea and Yog Sothoth who is relevant to the Lovecraft part of the Broken Lands.

- Xorus' player

---

>'=explain Who would deny, after all, that a rhetorical question is merely a statement?
You may not explain with a sentence ending in a question mark.

The Celtic gods (e.g. Morrigan) that turned into the Irish Aos Si / "faeries" were called the Tuath Dé Danann, where Danann refers to "Dana" who some people try to link to the Hindu goddess Danu, who was the mother of the serpent demon Vritra related to Shadow Valley. Originally they were called Tuath Dé, but Irish monks began using that term to refer to the Israelites, as the people of God. In other words, the Celtic gods and the Israelites were being spoken of with the same word, which relates back to the seemingly bizarre mezuzah in the Castle Anwyn barracks. I mentioned earlier that strictly speaking a mezuzah should be written in Hebrew and makes no Celtic sense.

There is an historical pseudo-archaeological / religious movement called British Israelism which holds that the island was colonized by Phoenicians (Philistines) and Hebrews, and that the British royal family has authority descending through King David. I mentioned before that I think the scuttling thing with red eyes is the Monty Python killer rabbit, where the next room would be the Aramaic written in the Phoenician alphabet in the Cave of Caerbannog by Joseph of Arimathea.

These people argue that St. Patrick is basically an etymological cover-up, where "saint patriarch" becomes "saint patrick", and that what really happened is prophets came to Ireland. Specifically, the prophet Jacob is supposed to be the "real" St. Patrick, and you have arguments like the Stone of Sconce involved with Scottish coronations is actually "Jacob's Stone" which Jacob consecrated after having a dream vision of the ladder to heaven on it. (I interpreted earlier the stairway into darkness in The Rift as a "stairway to heaven", but that is a Led Zeppelin song, the actual thing in lore is Jacob's Ladder.[1]) That could relate to the "wondrous stone" notion of the Holy Grail.


Synthesizing Glastonbury

More generally, Glastonbury Abbey (whose monks identified it with the Isle of Avalon and whose name descends from Merlin's enchanted tomb) was supposedly founded by Joseph of Arimathea, who supposedly brought Jesus there when he was 12. St. Patrick retired at Glastonbury Abbey, where he has his own chapel. Glastonbury Abbey is where King Arthur and Guenevere's bodies were fraudulently found, and their description looks exactly like the bodies in the Castle Anwyn crypt. The abbey was built on the mound of Glastonbury Tor, which is supposed to be the entrance to Annwn, associated with Gwynn ap Nudd the king of Annwn and the faeries.

St. Patrick first harrowed his Purgatory with visions of demons and wailing of souls from Jesus, and I think some versions have him splitting the chasm open with his staff. One legend has him defeating some serpent there with its blood making Lough Derg turn red, symbolic of vanquishing the last refuge of paganism. He supposedly drove all of the reptiles out of Ireland by forcing them off the cliff into Lough Beag, and Lough Ne'halin is seemingly a purgatory reference next to cliffs.

Jacob's Ladder is depicted on the abbey at Bath, where I mentioned earlier the thermal spring past Icemule might be a reference to the Roman baths at Bath, and Bath and Glastonbury were part of the same bishopric in the 12th century. Edward I was the one who moved the bodies of King Arthur and Guenevere into a black marble crypt, and had Caernarfon Castle built, which is the coronation site for the princes of Wales. Glastonbury is a possible Holy Grail location, where Joseph of Arimathea was the first Grail Keeper. The skulls on pikes around the ivory throne are probably a round table / Siege Perilous reference, and the skull chapel might refer to the Chapel Perilous associated with Arthur's dream quest. There are stories of Sir Gawain (the one who goes to St. Patrick's Purgatory) having to take refuge in the Chapel Perilous.[2]


- Xorus' player


[1] The MC Escher looking stairway monument could more specifically refer to the same thing being in the Jim Henson muppet movie "Labyrinth", where David Bowie plays the king of the goblins (basically the faerie king kidnapping a baby), and Jennifer Connelly has a stuffed bear named Lancelot and one of the muppets Sir Didymus rides a dog named Ambrosius. (Didymus is a name for Thomas the Apostle.) This would not really be any more silly than involving Monty Python references.

[2] The "Castle Perilous" gets equated with the "Grail castle", and remember that the Grail king of the Perceval stories derives from Bran the Blessed. Sometimes Gawain it taken to be the one who is supposed to sit on Siege Perilous and find the Grail, and this relates over to St. Patrick's Purgatory such as the monk Raymond de Perillos. In some stories what happens when the Chosen One sits on the Siege Perilous is there is an inexplicable radiance, and that is what is described in the room with the chair.

It is Walpurgis Night so I am focusing on Lovecraft's "The Dreams in the Witch House", which turns out to involve the exact same premise as the end of "The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath." In the latter story the dreamer is very nearly tricked by Nyarlathotep (who corresponds to Bandur) into traveling to the black throne of Azatoth in the heart of Chaos, and the same idea is used in this story but starting from the real world instead of the Dreamlands.

I think this might actually be one of the secondary texts influencing The Broken Lands (the original parts are all related to Nyarlathotep in some way). The Dream-Quest story explains most of the landscape of the Broken Lands as a direct correspondence of the journey through the Underworld of the Dreamlands. However, it is not able to provide an explanation for the crystal forest or sea of mud, which should correspond to Rolemaster trans-planar entities called Crystls and Hoard.


(1) The Broken Lands

It turns out there are corresponding things in this story, where the dreamer is traveling to other worlds beyond our own physical reality. While the protagonist in the Dream Cycle, Randolph Carter, is a straight up occultist, in this story Walter Gilman is a university student of physics and mathematics. This is Lovecraft trying to make horror out of "non-Euclidean geometry" and space-time, and the idea that his ancient alien deities with their black magic are actually representing a vaster understanding of the cosmos than we are capable ourselves. So this character is trying to connect folklore, esoteric and forbidden knowledge (e.g. The Necronomicon), and the black magic preserved from untold aeons within witch-cults and the like with advanced mathematics, so the prehistorical is ineffably more advanced than our high reason.

The idea is the witch gained the power to traverse between portals (and assorted magical powers) through an advanced understanding (passing through irregular "angles") surpassing the insights Einstein and so on were trying to codify with equations. This is interesting because I had connected the Nonominos of Castle Anwyn to the war on King Math over the magic cauldron that is the precursor to Holy Grail legends. But there are seemingly allusions in-game to this story as well, where advanced math is associated with a reality-dream merging and witches. There is a kidnapping and sacrifice thing, which dovetails easily enough with faerie changeling lore.[1]

He encounters the Elder Things in his dream traveling, though the term is never used. These are related to the "Shadow out of Time" story relevant to The Graveyard and The Broken Lands. They were creators of synthetic artificial life, including the shoggoths which correspond to the magru. The fissure in the Castle Anwyn pentagram chamber leading into the darkness with the whooshing always makes me think of them, their emergence was traumatic for the race of the Pnakotic Manuscripts.


Crystyl Forest

"During the night of April 19–20 the new development occurred. Gilman was half-involuntarily moving about in the twilight abysses with the bubble-mass and the small polyhedron floating ahead, when he noticed the peculiarly regular angles formed by the edges of some gigantic neighbouring prism-clusters. In another second he was out of the abyss and standing tremulously on a rocky hillside bathed in intense, diffused green light. He was barefooted and in his night-clothes, and when he tried to walk discovered that he could scarcely lift his feet. A swirling vapour hid everything but the immediate sloping terrain from sight, and he shrank from the thought of the sounds that might surge out of that vapour."

Dark Vorteces (vorteces with the purple/violet appear elsewhere, e.g. "The Haunter in the Dark")

"In his dream-delirium Gilman heard the hellish, alien-rhythmed chant of the Sabbat coming from an infinite distance, and knew the black man must be there. Confused memories mixed themselves with his mathematics, and he believed his subconscious mind held the angles which he needed to guide him back to the normal world—alone and unaided for the first time. He felt sure he was in the immemorially sealed loft above his own room, but whether he could ever escape through the slanting floor or the long-stopped egress he doubted greatly. Besides, would not an escape from a dream-loft bring him merely into a dream-house—an abnormal projection of the actual place he sought? He was wholly bewildered as to the relation betwixt dream and reality in all his experiences.

The passage through the vague abysses would be frightful, for the Walpurgis-rhythm would be vibrating, and at last he would have to hear that hitherto veiled cosmic pulsing which he so mortally dreaded. Even now he could detect a low, monstrous shaking whose tempo he suspected all too well. At Sabbat-time it always mounted and reached through to the worlds to summon the initiate to nameless rites. Half the chants of the Sabbat were patterned on this faintly overheard pulsing which no earthly ear could endure in its unveiled spatial fulness. Gilman wondered, too, whether he could trust his instinct to take him back to the right part of space. How could he be sure he would not land on that green-litten hillside of a far planet, on the tessellated terrace above the city of tentacled monsters somewhere beyond the galaxy, or in the spiral black vortices of that ultimate void of Chaos wherein reigns the mindless daemon-sultan Azathoth?

Just before he made the plunge the violet light went out and left him in utter blackness. The witch—old Keziah—Nahab—that must have meant her death. And mixed with the distant chant of the Sabbat and the whimpers of Brown Jenkin in the gulf below he thought he heard another and wilder whine from unknown depths. Joe Mazurewicz—the prayers against the Crawling Chaos now turning to an inexplicably triumphant shriek—worlds of sardonic actuality impinging on vortices of febrile dream—Iä! Shub-Niggurath! The Goat with a Thousand Young. . . ."

Mud Monsters who split in halves (the "black man" is Nyarlathotep; more colored light references, the myklian have spectrum and the dome pulses)

" As once before, the hideous crone seized Gilman by the shoulders, yanking him out of bed and into empty space. Again the infinitude of the shrieking twilight abysses flashed past him, but in another second he thought he was in a dark, muddy, unknown alley of foetid odours, with the rotting walls of ancient houses towering up on every hand.

Ahead was the robed black man he had seen in the peaked space in the other dream, while from a lesser distance the old woman was beckoning and grimacing imperiously. Brown Jenkin was rubbing itself with a kind of affectionate playfulness around the ankles of the black man, which the deep mud largely concealed. There was a dark open doorway on the right, to which the black man silently pointed. Into this the grimacing crone started, dragging Gilman after her by his pajama sleeve. There were evil-smelling staircases which creaked ominously, and on which the old woman seemed to radiate a faint violet light; and finally a door leading off a landing. The crone fumbled with the latch and pushed the door open, motioning to Gilman to wait and disappearing inside the black aperture.

The youth’s oversensitive ears caught a hideous strangled cry, and presently the beldame came out of the room bearing a small, senseless form which she thrust at the dreamer as if ordering him to carry it. The sight of this form, and the expression on its face, broke the spell. Still too dazed to cry out, he plunged recklessly down the noisome staircase and into the mud outside; halting only when seized and choked by the waiting black man. As consciousness departed he heard the faint, shrill tittering of the fanged, rat-like abnormality.

On the morning of the 29th Gilman awaked into a maelstrom of horror. The instant he opened his eyes he knew something was terribly wrong, for he was back in his old garret room with the slanting wall and ceiling, sprawled on the now unmade bed. His throat was aching inexplicably, and as he struggled to a sitting posture he saw with growing fright that his feet and pajama-bottoms were brown with caked mud. For the moment his recollections were hopelessly hazy, but he knew at least that he must have been sleep-walking. Elwood had been lost too deeply in slumber to hear and stop him. On the floor were confused muddy prints, but oddly enough they did not extend all the way to the door. The more Gilman looked at them, the more peculiar they seemed; for in addition to those he could recognise as his there were some smaller, almost round markings—such as the legs of a large chair or table might make, except that most of them tended to be divided into halves. There were also some curious muddy rat-tracks leading out of a fresh hole and back into it again. Utter bewilderment and the fear of madness racked Gilman as he staggered to the door and saw that there were no muddy prints outside. The more he remembered of his hideous dream the more terrified he felt, and it added to his desperation to hear Joe Mazurewicz chanting mournfully two floors below.

Descending to Elwood’s room he roused his still-sleeping host and began telling of how he had found himself, but Elwood could form no idea of what might really have happened. Where Gilman could have been, how he got back to his room without making tracks in the hall, and how the muddy, furniture-like prints came to be mixed with his in the garret chamber, were wholly beyond conjecture. Then there were those dark, livid marks on his throat, as if he had tried to strangle himself. He put his hands up to them, but found that they did not even approximately fit"

(2) Castle Anwyn and The Rift

The scuttling thing with the evil eyes in the dark corner of the barracks, which I've taken as a Monty Python reference to the killer rabbit who slays or chases off the knights, could also refer to Brown Jenkins the evil rat familiar in "The Dreams in the Witch-House." This would be in addition to the Joseph of Arimathea and the pseudoarchaeological British Israelism intents. Lovecraft's "witch-cult" thing stems from another pseudohistorical movement associated with Margaret Murray. Their notion is that there is a surviving pagan cult around a Horned God (e.g. Pan, Cernunnos, presumably Herne the Hunter), and this is because of faeries surviving underground in a stone age level of development.[2] In fact, I think this is what the fenghai refer to, with their petroglyphs and demon skulls.

It turns out that around World War I, Margaret Murray was recovering in Glastonbury, and became fixated on the folklore associated with Glastonbury Abbey and its relation to King Arthur, Joseph of Arimathea, and the Holy Grail. The scholar Jessie Weston who I mentioned earlier as having argued that St. Patrick's Purgatory is tied to the Chapel Perilous and the Grail quest also happened to rip this witch-cult pseudo-scholar apart on the subject. (The bone chair is the Siege Perilous, the chapel is the Chapel Perilous, and the Demon Queen resides in Morgan le Fay's Vale Perilous.[3]) Weird coincidence, right? Lovecraft cites her book along with Frazer's "The Golden Bough."

The Dreams in the Witch House (Old Keziah is the Salem witch who is now a "ghost."

"That was in 1692—the gaoler had gone mad and babbled of a small, white-fanged furry thing which scuttled out of Keziah’s cell, and not even Cotton Mather could explain the curves and angles smeared on the grey stone walls with some red, sticky fluid. Old Keziah, he reflected, might have had excellent reasons for living in a room with peculiar angles; for was it not through certain angles that she claimed to have gone outside the boundaries of the world of space we know?"

#2581: Summoning Circle

[The Rift]

Your wandering brings you to a small clearing. The ground is dry and parched, and there are large lines scratched into the surface and coated in a red, sticky substance. Following the lines a moment, you realize they make a rune covered circle, and that you are standing in the center of it. A cold wind whips around you at that point, and you hear howls in the distance.

Obvious exits: northeast, southeast, west

#6591: (In "The Dreams in the Witch House" there is an otherworldly artifact brought back with hieroglyphs.)

[Castle Barracks]

Walking into this room is like walking into winter. A gripping cold that defies explanation holds the chamber in its fist. Wooden bunks stand in rows along the walls, almost all of them in one piece -- surprising with so much wreckage to be found in other parts of this old fortification. Some strange characters have been painted over the doorframe with a red-tinted pigment.

Obvious exits: south

>look doorframe

The characters crowning this doorframe look as if they were daubed on in a hurry--dried paint dribbles down from the corners. The symbols are angular, each one like a little, mysterious picture.

The idea in "The Dreams in the Witch House" is that usually intermediaries are required to travel between worlds, but that it would be possible for those with a deep enough cosmic understanding to do so themselves. These intermediaries are "the quasi-animals and queer hybrids which legend depicts as witches' familiars." So, the evil scuttling thing as a Brown Jenkins allusion would refer to this idea of dreaming yourself into parallel or higher realities, and the merger of dreams and reality.



(3) Spike the War Rat

So, this was totally unexpected, but "The Dreams in the Witch House" might be inspiration for Spike the War Rat and the Bregandian War. Spike was basically a really advanced familiar made by Devestior, a very large white rat transformed magically akin to Walter Gilman at the end of "The Dreams in the Witch-House", where it is implied he become such a thing eating his own heart and burrowing out of his chest. The Bregandans were supposed to heavily use magic the likes we have never seen.

What is preserved of the Breganda War is pretty flimsy, but there are things that stand out. There were a set of colored keys that were supposed to open a portal to Breganda, which allegedly was another continent rather than another world. Thalior had the black key. There was a golden key. I think two others. This would be a straight reference to Lovecraft's "Through the Gates of the Silver Key", which is referenced by the portal to The Broken Lands and the crystal dome.

The Bregandans had the elongated hand of the old crone, the bulging eyes Norandar had in the Demon Queen storyline where he was physically transforming under the influence of powerful magic. In spite of the common spelling Bregandia, it was actually "Breganda." This is probably a reference to Bregan D'Aerth, a dark elven mercenary group in the underworld of the Forgotten Realms setting of Dungeons & Dragons. This is the same source where Shar, Despana, and Tormtor originated. The storyline also kept making references to "snakes with wings", with the word "wyvern" also being used, which relates back to this whole dragon / wyrm thread out of Shadow Valley.

http://www.gemstone.net/etimes/et3/spotlite.html

A very old rat, Spike is covered with soft, white fur except for his paws, which are coal black and sport razor-sharp claws. A long muscular tail completes his formidable physical armament. The bodily weaponry was counterbalanced by Spike's grey eyes, sparkling with intelligence that seemed to reflect great knowledge.

Spike: "... Devestior, from what I understand, used these magics on me. I can't really explain just what they were, but it opened my eyes, gave me a sense of wisdom. Soon I started to understand what he was saying. My body grew of enormous size, for all other war rats are about half my size. Devestior created this collar for me, and with it came the ability to understand and ration thoughts."

The Dreams in the Witch House (Brown Jenkins)

"That was in 1692—the gaoler had gone mad and babbled of a small, white-fanged furry thing which scuttled out of Keziah’s cell, and not even Cotton Mather could explain the curves and angles smeared on the grey stone walls with some red, sticky fluid."

"Witnesses said it had long hair and the shape of a rat, but that its sharp-toothed, bearded face was evilly human while its paws were like tiny human hands. It took messages betwixt old Keziah and the devil, and was nursed on the witch’s blood—which it sucked like a vampire. Its voice was a kind of loathsome titter, and it could speak all languages"

The Dreams in the Witch House (Walter Gilman)

"This object was the partly crushed skeleton of a huge, diseased rat, whose abnormalities of form are still a topic of debate and source of singular reticence among the members of Miskatonic’s department of comparative anatomy. Very little concerning this skeleton has leaked out, but the workmen who found it whisper in shocked tones about the long, brownish hairs with which it was associated.

The bones of the tiny paws, it is rumoured, imply prehensile characteristics more typical of a diminutive monkey than of a rat; while the small skull with its savage yellow fangs is of the utmost anomalousness, appearing from certain angles like a miniature, monstrously degraded parody of a human skull."

Miscellaneous

(1) The Halfling Ardo

When I was looking at the Chamber of the Dead I did not catch the description of the body of Belle's husband. I mentioned before how this ice sarcophagus is an allusion to the shrine of Bandur Etrevion under The Graveyard. Ardo is holding an emerald falcon pin. This is a pointed reference to kestrels being falcons. The implication is a lot more subtle in the murals of the burial mound, in this case the word "falcon" is being used explicitly.

>look halfling

The body of a male halfling lies in peaceful repose, his silky beard flowing down his chest and tattooed arms crossed over that. On the corpse's face, you can still discern a somewhat mixed expression. It appears to be less than a happy demeanor, but still resigned to a fate that can never be changed. The body's hands are lightly clasped around each other, gently cradling an emerald falcon pin as though it were a fragile and precious egg.

Ardo was the one Lorminstra told about the Stones of Virtue. She initially appeared as an "old crone", then transformed into a "young lass." The witch in Lovecraft's "The Dreams in the Witch House" is constantly referred to as an "old crone", and I mentioned before the Grail bearer in Chretien de Troyes' "Perceval" is described only as a "young maiden" (lass). Incidentally, the hunting area includes snow crones and frost/ice giants, and this is the one that corresponds to "King Arthur's Cave" where supposedly the body of a giant was found. The cave is associated with Vortigern who is also relevant for Merlin and Maximus reasons.

Since the ice sarcophagus is technically a Satanic reference, I wonder if "Belle" was supposed to be a "Beauty and the Beast" joke. I did not notice earlier that these are the "Sleeping Lady Mountains", which would refer to the Empress Kadaena in terms of the "sleeping queen" and "repose in silent waiting" poems, and I mentioned earlier my suspicions of a sleeping beauty subtext which itself originates in Arthurian legends and the Nibelung with Siegfried's valkyrie wife.


(2) Malaphor

In hindsight this should have been obvious. Malaphor is a portmanteau word that crosses "malapropism" and "metaphor." (Remember, the language games in play are often word mergers, like Daephron Illian might be in Iruaric.) Malaphors typically refer to situations where people mix and match cliches or idiomatic turns of speech. Malapropism is when you use the wrong word when it is similar sounding. For example, "for all intensive purposes" is a malapropism of "for all intents and purposes."

Metaphors would be "you hit the nail on the head" or "that's right on the nose", an analogy without using words like "like" and "as." These would be dead metaphors or cliches, because the visual imagery is no longer invoked, the meaning goes straight past it. Mixed metaphors would be things like "to take arms against a sea of troubles", unless you are Xerxes lashing the sea for its insolence it is incompatible. Malaphors would be "you hit the nail right on the nose."

It is a mixed metaphor that is done unintentionally to ridiculous effect, because it is kind of like a malapropism of cliches. I think naming the Ashrim royal advisor and mage "Malaphor" in the Vvrael quest was basically an inside joke along the lines of: "We are going to mix together a whole bunch of high-brow subtexts from literature and mythology as a huge convoluted allegory, but the surface story is going to look like a ridiculous melodrama." FEED US TERATE mixed with Dante's Paradiso.


(3) Spenser

Something I overlooked is Edmund Spenser's incomplete epic poem "The Faerie Queen", where King Arthur is madly in love with the faerie queen and his knights embody virtues. Since it is incomplete there were only six virtues, like the six Stones of Virtue. His were Holiness, Temperance, Chastity, Friendship, Justice, Courtesy. Ours are Honor, Truth, Humility, Faith, Courage, Piety. Dante's "Paradiso" is based on seven virtues: Prudence, Justice, Temperance, Fortitude, Faith, Hope, Charity.[4]

There could be something to figure out in there, I think the virtues on the Stone loresongs can be interpreted more than one way. With Dante it all comes down to love, where God is Love with a capital L. Vices being perversions of love in virtues. So Mount Aenatumgana as Mount Purgatory fits well enough.


- Xorus' player


[1] The story also make a lot out of shrieking and wailing, the guy ends up going deaf from his ear drums rupturing. This fits easily enough with the bainsidghe and moaning spirits.

[2] It is also associated with Diana (the Greek goddess Artemis) who is called Titania by Ovid, which is Shakespeare's name for the Queen of the Faeries. There is a "Mother Goddess" thing about it. This is interesting because the Temple in the Landing has an elf worshipper of the Mother Goddess. The problem is that there is no such deity in the Shadow World lore, including locally for the module covering what we call the Darkstone Bay region.

[3] I forgot to mention it, but the Chapel Perilous has a cloth covering of an altar, which is associated with the Shroud of Turin. This could refer to the altars in the chapel or the crypt of Castle Anwyn.

[4] There is also a Bower of Bliss belonging to a witch who imprisons people, and the poem is an allegory asserting Arthurian descent for the Tudors. Spenser was Shakespeare contemporary.

[5] The Rift room with the throne with the figure with black voids for eyes, I forgot to mention that Terate's "Fallen One" form looked that way.

[6] Supposedly when Terate died there was a pulse of blue light in the skies. And his body basically disappeared. This might refer to Dante becoming encircled in light and acquiring a flash of understanding when he is united with God. Incidentally, Terate also acted with the word "stoic" in the story climax, which was a Christian apocatastasis notion. The stoic version of apocatastasis is a contemplative Zeus concept.

[7] There is a Hangman's Brook in "The Dreams in the Witch House", with a bridge where you can see an island with the witch and rat familiar appearing. I will have to dig for any smoking gun correspondence, but it is possible this was the basis of Hangman's Bridge by Vornavis.

These dream chess references calls to my mind Ingmar Bergman (The Seventh Seal). I'm not sure if you've already noted it or not, but that might be another potential way for those references to have got into GS.

I've been noticing that there is a strong tendency toward not just dreams but also fringe and pseudo-historical interpretations. Their Holy Grail premise is using the magic cauldron and "wondrous stone" of Lucifer versions. Universal salvation. Possibly the "holy blood" conspiracy through Alberich and the Merovingians. The link between St. Patrick's Purgatory and the Chapel Perilous comes from Jessie Weston, the translator of the "wondrous stone" variant into English, and her work is disregarded today as reading too much into things. The seeming presence of the witch-cult theory of Margaret Murray, relevant to the Lovecraft stories, both of which are based on Frazer's "Golden Bough" theory about Diana (=> Titania => Queen of Anwyn). The possible reference to British Israelism which asserts the descent of Israelites in Ireland.

The Lovecraft stories involved are all focused on esotericism and occultism. That poem Risper quoted is titled "A Poem on Mr. L'Estrange" from 1661. In that time period Roger L'Estrange was a Royalist pamphleteer who had it in for John Milton. He had a special and ridiculous objection to part of Paradise Lost addressing monarchs. He was given license to censor seditious texts and any non-conformist ideas, suppressing the press wherever there was any hint of rebelliousness toward monarchy. So, that is the missing Paradise Lost reference I kept expecting to turn up, I had already found it but did not follow through on it. There could be more but it's not easy reading.

- Xorus' player

---

Your orase runestaff glows intensely with a verdant light!
d100 == 1 FUMBLE!
You feel the unnatural surge of necrotic power wane away.
Cast Roundtime 3 Seconds.

Earlier in the scene from "Lohengrin" it establishes that Elsa has only ever seen this knight in a dream vision. (She is accused of murder to become the Duchess, and they are seeking the truth from ordeal by combat. The story later involves a witch follower of Wotan and Freia, who wants to end Christianity and return the Viking religion to Germany.) The idea in the opera is that his mystical powers from the Grail only work if their nature and his identity remain unknown, so the whole thing is a "forbidden question" motif. The horn at his side might explain why Terate wore this: "a black leather shoulder satchel clasped with a ki-lin horn carved in the shape of a sickle."

The sickle can obviously be read as a grim reaper / Death thing. The ki-lin in mythology appear with the deaths of sages, so there is a psychopomp aspect to them. The faces in the monastic lich monastery might allude to the Muses, so their creature description corresponding to the aerial mount ki-rin of Rolemaster might refer to the pegasus, and then those Muses are water nymphs which are analogs to the Volva and then the valkyries which are psychopomps and this is Norse religion based.

THE KING

Speak Elsa! What have you to confide to me?

ELSA

(quietly transfigured

staring ahead of her)

Lonely, in troubled days

I prayed to the Lord,

my most heartfelt grief

I poured out in prayer.

And from my groans

there issued a plaintive sound

that grew into a mighteous roar

as it echoed through the skies:

I listened as it receded into the distance

until my ear could scarce hear it;

my eyes closed

and I fell into a deep sleep.

ALL THE MEN

How extraordinary! Is she dreaming? Is she enraptured?

THE KING

(as though trying to wake Elsa from the dream)

Elsa, defend yourself before the court!

(Elsa's expression goes from one of dream-like detachment to one of frenzied transfiguration)

ELSA

In splendid, shining armour

a knight approached,

a man of such pure virtue

as I had never seen before:

a golden horn at his side,

leaning on a sword -

thus he appeared to me

from nowhere, this warrior true;

with kindly gestures

he gave me comfort;

I will wait for the knight,

he shall be my champion!

The roar might refer to the vision of the Emperor Drake received by Lord Strendor Soulrester. The problem is that his account looks like it's probably a paraphrase, and it is the exact wording that really matters for this purpose. This is the rest of the scene in Wagner's "Lohengrin" leading up to the first excerpt of it in the last post:

FRIEDRICH

Her dreamy state deceives me not;

you hear how she raves about a lover!

I have sound reason to make the accusation I do!

Her crime was reliably testified;

but to have to dispel your doubts with a witness

would truly offend my pride!

Here am I, here is my sword! Who of you

dares fight against my honour?

BRABANTIANS

None of us! We will only fight for you!

FRIEDRICH

And you, O King! Do you remember how I have served you,

how I defeated the wild Dane in battle?

THE KING

Heaven forbid that I should need you to remind me!

I freely admit that you are of the highest virtue;

in nobody's possession but yours

would I wish to know Brabant. -

God alone

must decide in this matter!

ALL THE MEN

Ordeal by battle! Ordeal by battle! Let it begin!

THE KING

I ask you, Friedrich, count of Telramund!

Do you agree to a fight to the death,

to defend your honour in an ordeal by battle?

FRIEDRICH

Yes!

THE KING

And now I ask you, Elsa of Brabant!

Do you agree to let a fight to the death take place here,

to let a champion represent you in an ordeal by battle?

ELSA

(without looking up)

Yes!

THE KING

Whom do you choose to be your champion?

FRIEDRICH

Learn now

the name of her lover!

BRABANTIANS

Pay heed!

ELSA

(She still looks enraptured;

everyone watches her

in expectation)

I will wait for the knight,

he shall be my champion!

(without looking round)

Hear what reward I offer

the one sent by God:

in my father's lands

he shall wear the crown.

I shall consider myself happy

if he takes my possessions -

if he wishes to call me spouse,

I shall give him all that I am!

ALL THE MEN

(to themselves)

A wondrous prize, where it God's to give!

He who fights for it would be wagering a great deal!

THE KING

It is already midday, the sun stands at its zenith:

it is time, let the call go forth!

(The herald comes forward with the four trumpeters; he orders them to

the four points of the compass, they proceed to the edge of the

Judgement Circle and sound the call)

HERALD

Let him who has come to fight in the trial by combat

for Elsa of Brabant come forward!

(There is a long silence)

(Elsa, who has hitherto been completely calm, now begins to look worried as she waits expectantly)

ALL THE MEN

The calls has died away unanswered!

Things do not bode well for her!

FRIEDRICH

(pointing to Elsa)

Behold, did I accuse her falsely?

I have right on my side!

ELSA

(moving towards the king)

I beseech you, beloved King,

one more call to my knight!

He is surely a long way off and could not hear!

Void Blade Loresong

Images begin to seep out of the void blade, filling your mind with brief flashes at first, that gradually grow into complexity and form. You see an elven youth, fair of feature and gifted with unusual intelligence. He follows in the footsteps of his Queen and mother, learning the sorcerous arts, pushing further and further into arcane theory researched within ancient tomes found in the castle's extensive library. His fame is further augmented upon the day he finds a wondrous stone which speaks through the heavens. Then one day, an elderly journeyman happens by, begging to winter within the castle's protection. The unknown traveler is found dead the following morning, having succumbed to age and the elements, and leaving behind nothing but his ragged clothing and meager belongings. Included in these is a satchel containing a collection of scrolls.

The scrolls are found to be covered with archaic writing, which piques the young prince's interest when brought to his attention. He begins to study them, an occupation that gradually consumes all of his waking hours. He labors over them for months, painstakingly translating them, and finally they begin to reveal secrets old and terrible. To the youth, the knowledge to be gained seems well worth the risk of putting the lore into practice. He could never have foreseen what cataclysmic malevolence his decision would release upon the world.

This phrase "elderly journeyman" is weird. What we are looking at it a wandering journeyman who is so old he dies of old age, and yet he possesses a collection of scrolls of extreme power and antiquity in the domain of sorcery.[1] Not a "master", a "journeyman." I've not found anything interesting yet using that specific phrase, but what I think is going on in context is that this is a reference to Merlin. Where Daephron Illian had that old man aging backwards into a baby thing, then aging back forwards rapidly and dying of old age, referring to the T.H. White "Once and Future King" version which happens to be the basis of Disney's "The Sword in the Stone".

Merlin is often depicted as disguising himself as a beggar, and the journeyman refers to the apprenticeship concept. Merlin's apprentice on the Isle of Avalon is the Lady of the Lake, the Queen of Avalon (Annwn => Terate's mother), who has bewitched him into teaching her all of his magic and secrets, and he ends up in an enchanted tomb which has been etymologically associated as the root of Glastonbury Abbey. So I would bet that question mark room in the crypt was about the journeyman.[2]

- Xorus' player


[1] The Vvrael quest was ambiguous about its chronology with when the Queen and Terate were corrupted, these would presumably have to be scrolls written by Daephron Illian, which means they came from Rhoska-Tor. But inconsistent or ambiguous time with prophetic knowledge is a hallmark theme of these areas. One of the big question marks in the story is how the puzzle box ended up on the ship to Ta'Ashrim right before the Sea Elf War, which a prophet like Merlin would presumably see was about to happen. It was probably whoever this journeyman was with the scrolls. The loresong might be hinting at that with saying Terate "never could have foreseen" it.

[2] Which specific Merlin-disguised-as-beggar story I would have to dig. Sometimes it is King Uther Pendragon, who we could take as Terate's father if Terate is supposed to be Arthur. Uther is strikingly close to Uthex of The Broken Lands. Uther was in love with Arthur's mother Igraine/Ygraine, also spelled Ygerne, which looks a lot like Clark Ashton Smith's "The Colossus of Ylourgne" which is where they took the serpent encircled mirror. That story compares its sorcerer to Merlin explicitly.

[3] Another odd thing is that Terate studying the scrolls is described as unleashing the malevolence, when it was Malaphor who broke the seal on the box and Daephron Illian who opened the rift. There might have been something unrecorded in these events that makes sense of it. I'm wondering if the implication with the time rift somehow is that Terate causes the Vvrael, and the elderly journeyman is Daephron Illian aging backwards, who writes the scrolls in the past and is a baby at the time of the box. It is a temporal rift the Vvrael are acting through, so there is no reason it cannot be backwards. Terate becomes the fallen one, but the causal chain runs backwards. What made little sense was that Lorminstra chose Terate in the present, but the implication is that he became corrupted a long time ago. The contradiction has to be intentional. Remember that Terate's "Fallen One" form was maximally old for the age mechanics (300s), but his pure uncorrupted form always returned him to his youth (20s).

Or not necessarily traveling backwards in time, but living forward with life force bound to box, making moves to ensure something in the future happens. The other aspect of the trans-temporal telepathy in the Bandur Etrevion story is the idea that someone in the past possesses someone in the future, where the person in the future knows things they cannot possibly know with "uninvited memories" and understanding for no reason, and this only happens to people who are unusually gifted.[1]

It reminds me of speculations made several months before the Vvrael quest ended that Daephron Illian was somehow merged with or possessing Terate. When Malaphor unleashed the black knight and the baby, Daephron Illian's notes were destroyed. Yet somehow Terate had what must have been such scrolls locked away in Castle Anwyn, which was found after the Vvrael quest.[2] This is something where I'd need to see only the primary sources (logs) and strip away any interpretations that were made.

- Xorus' player


[1] Merlin was a cambion, half-demon by way of incubus and thus his powers, so he was a "demonic" hybrid like Terate and Schrek. This feels relevant.

[2] In other words, Malaphor had notes Daephron Illian made with the puzzle box, whereas Terate had notes he wrote later. We've always taken it for granted that Daephron Illian was absorbed within the box for the entire time period. But he just needed to be dead in the present, he could have been wandering around. When his life force is unleashed when the box is opened, his physical form ends up aging very rapidly, which might be because he already lived that full life and his life force is being cashed out. Maybe he had an error-of-my-ways moment, so the Vvrael sent that knight to prevent him from screwing things up, only his corrupt form moving forward.

---

>'=explain Who would deny, after all, that a rhetorical question is merely a statement?
You may not explain with a sentence ending in a question mark.

No. I found a more full log of Malaphor's ghost where he claimed that Daephron Illian did in fact bind himself in the box, and pulling him out was "pluck[ing] Daephron as a babe from the swirling mists of time." Since the box is sealing the opening into the Rift, it is making use of the fact that the rift is a temporal rift. Malaphor made a point of saying mortals and immortals, where anti-mana infused people like Terate were effectively immortal, had entered the Rift over the millennia by piercing the veil.

Malaphor himself hedged with "I think it was intentional" that Daephron thrust himself through time when he sealed the box. He also made a point of saying "I cannot see the future", the Vvrael was an accident, and of the box "I would think that something so intricately entwined with the Rift itself, would always be important."


Chosen Orbs

This is the show description on the Chosen orbs: (Heliocentric model. Nice.)

You see a long, veil iron chain, each heavy link obviously hand-forged and intricately etched with a scale pattern. Carried on the chain is an orb made of crystal-clear vaalin. The sphere appears to be hollow, for inside you see a minute cosmos, with twinkling stars and tiny planets surrounded by their orbiting moons. In the center of the amazing conglomeration floats an eye with a serpentine pupil, golden in color as a yellow sun. It hangs like the anchor in the midst of the surrounding firmament.

This is consistent with Dante's Paradiso where God is associated with the Sun, beyond the fixed stars and the primum mobile of the last sphere of physical existence, the "orb" being his "sphere" cosmos. When people peer into the orb it makes this humming sound which is a symptom of greater essence focii in the Shadow World lore.


Dying Old Age to Infancy to Dying Old Age

The rift trap on boxes was changed around the time of the Vvrael quest to its present form of a star field. The thought has occurred to me that a baby in a temporal rift field of stars, having accelerated to dying of old age and suddenly back to embryonic form, might be lifted from "2001: A Space Odyssey" and its "star child." (The last lines of Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso is "stars.") Otherwise Daephron Illian being turned into a baby makes no sense, even if aging backwards refers to Merlin.

(1) The movie is an allegory for The Odyssey, where they are going to Jupiter, the Roman name for the king of the gods Zeus. The relevance would be Aeneas from Virgil's "The Aeneid" comes from Homer's "Iliad", and Virgil puts him on his own odyssey, which underlies Dante in "The Divine Comedy".[1]

(2) The "star gate" with that surreal acid trip merger into higher awareness of reality, with the famous extreme close ups of the actor's eye under the rainbow of colors, would by analogy be the Eye of the Drake / Dante gaining understanding of God. (There was a flash of blue light that settled among the stars when he Terate died, which probably refers the encompassing light when Dante enters and becomes able to understand.) The astronaut is reaching his arm out pointing to the monolith right before he is transformed from dying of old age into a glowing fetus, which is a pretty obvious reference to Michelangelo's Adam and God painting in the Sistine Chapel.

(3) Dante's Paradiso is literally Dante traveling from Earth to the other planets, and eventually beyond physical existence itself. (When you walk through the nebulous sphere it would correspond to The Empyrean.) So it makes sense to pull on "2001: A Space Odyssey" where they travel to Jupiter and beyond material reality.


- Xorus' player

[1] Interestingly, Snorri Sturluson who wrote of Sigurd and Brynhild identified Aeneas with Vidar, the son of Odin who avenges the death of the king of the gods at the time of Ragnarok (killing the wolf where Castle Anwyn depicts wolves.)

---

>'=explain Who would deny, after all, that a rhetorical question is merely a statement?
You may not explain with a sentence ending in a question mark.

* The "old hag" is also referred to by the exact word "lass" in the fourth continuation of Perceval. Earlier I assumed the "young lass" was a reference to the "young maiden" who is the Grail bearer from Perceval. Her casks containing healing balm. The casks in Castle Anwyn have healing wine, though I'm not sure it works right.

* "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court" is a time travel based King Arthur story, where the guy supplants Merlin by fraudulently passing off future knowledge as his own magic. He uses lightning rods to detonate explosives destroying Merlin's tower, which might be what the lightning rod room in The Rift is referencing.

* The fountain in the bower is likely to be a reference to "The Lady of the Fountain", one of Welsh romances associated with the Mabinogion that interrelate with Chretien de Troyes, in this case the story of Owain who is the one that harrows St. Patrick's Purgatory. There is a magic ring in that story that protected true lovers from bodily harm. Her deceased husband (who Owain killed) is the Black Knight. There are also knights of something called the Waste Fountain. It depicts Arthur sitting on "green rushes", basically a seat made of plants, like the bower. The fountain has a cup and it is a magical fountain that makes storms. This version with the Knight of the Fountain has a great mound and a troll, and Owain (Owen) becomes Earl of the Fountain: http://www.celtic-twilight.com/camelot/gilbert/hg_kachapter7.htm

* The viper encircled mirror in "The Colossus of Ylourgne" belonged to Nathaire, who is directly compared to Merlin for being born half-demonic, so corresponding to the "looking glass" of Merlin in Spenser's "The Faerie Queene" which had the exact same power of showing the viewer what they want to see remotely. In Spenser's version is is a crystal / glass sphere, which could conceivably have something to do with the description on the Chosen orbs. Meanwhile that makes the serpent mirror in Castle Anwyn the analog of Merlin's "looking glass", and so Alice's "looking glass" which is a portal to a dream world. By analogy, piercing the vale, the Vale Perilous.

<<is this any relation to the mighty Quin telling everyone "Something is hiding out there. Beyond a curtain of light. You look like the sort who might be able to find it.">> - Clunk

Somewhere way back in this thread I pointed out the phrase "curtain of light" is used in the first dream vision Bran has in the Game of Thrones book from 1996, and that is in the context of him seeing to the northern edge of the world, beyond which is the "heart of winter" and darkness. In the ICE Age lore context the equivalent of the Eye of the Drake, "the Eye of Utha", creates a powerful essence barrier that cuts off the other hemisphere of the planet where there are supposed to be lots of evil things.

So I would not be surprised at all if this was originally supposed to be related to the Vvrael quest. Veil, curtain. Maybe. It got retconned last year to refer to the light show in the sky when the lunar conjunction of Liabo and Lornon happens causing the Red Forest to reappear in our reality. But I doubt that was the original intent.

- Xorus' player

---

>'=explain Who would deny, after all, that a rhetorical question is merely a statement?
You may not explain with a sentence ending in a question mark.

I was just searching around The Drake's Shrine doing a cursory analysis when I noticed that the whole ice platform is in the shape of a heart. In the context of the "curtain of light" this could be read as the "heart of winter". But another way of reading it, since the "rainbows" wording and color spectrum pulsating nebulous sphere are allusions to the end of Dante's Paradiso, is that when Dante enters the Empyrean he sees an enormous rose symbolizing divine love. Heart => Love.

The souls are all enthroned in the petals of the rose, and the angels are described as being like bees, which is interesting because of the hornet thing in Castle Anwyn and the vaespilon as Latin for wasps and Gana/Shiva thing with the bee swarm on the demon. The whole purgatory motif in the game is about souls making their way to the gates, where you have the Lake of Tears connected to the base of Koar's throne in the shrine, which leads to the Eye of the Drake itself.


Notes:

(1) One of the "clear vaalin orbs" symbolizing the Ptolemaic cosmology of Dante's "Divine Comedy" with the serpent eye as the sun is on Koar's throne, so in a sense that is his one eye being open watching from his throne while he slumbers. These are the Chosen orbs. If you loresing this it should probably give the description of the shrine's construction which quotes the Book of Revelation. I do not know what else has loresongs in the shrine, I've got no bard characters.

(2) The giant dragon statue next to the throne is something you climb up and the room description refers to "Ice Shrine." This can be taken as an allusion to Dante having to climb up the back of Satan to reach Purgatory, which is symbolized in the ice shrine of The Graveyard.

(3) The words "behemoth" and "leviathan" are used in the Drake's Shrine, which are Biblical references, so it is worth noting that the Beast in the prophetic Book of Revelation is in multiple forms but the first one is the dragon.

(4) The shrine was built 100,000-ish years ago and sealed off from mortals. The inside depicts combinations of dragons and humanoid armies that make no sense for the Age of the Drakes, and there is writing that can actually be read in spite of being that old. In other words, there are a bunch of things in there that only make sense if someone involved in its construction could see the distant future, which is the whole prophecy thing happening in the subtext.

(5) There are ancient animals frozen into the ice, including a saber tooth tiger and an equine the size of a large cat. I will have to dig to see if I can figure out what that is supposed to symbolize, other than the obvious "Ice Age" pun.

(6) The "ribcage" wording for the red Cavern of Ages along with the heart and eye and all of that, with the dragon skeleton in the water, is suggesting that the mountain and maybe the Dragonspine range itself is part of the "Great Drake"'s body now that it has morphed itself into the rock.


But here is a really cool one where they basically threw down the gauntlet and said, "Try to figure me out. This means something, and it's really obscure." The alternating red and black stone refers to "ablaq", a Muslim architectural motif borrowed from the Byzantines, which medieval Europeans brought back with them from seeing the Dome of the Rock and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. Likewise, Caernarfon Castle had octagonal towers because it was Byzantine, and Edward I was trying to imply some authority of Roman heritage. This is "Romanesque" and might be what the row of double columns is implying. Then you have the heraldry:

Challenge Accepted

[Sunrise Alcove, Ice Shrine]

The octagonal alcove is surrounded by a row of double columns. On the west wall, between an arch of alternating red and black stone and a high doorway, stands a frieze of carved felines. Three pairs of lions rampant, each with hind paws planted on the ground and forepaws on the back of his companion stand in the icy shadows like silent guardians. They depict an attitude of strength at first glance, but the curling tongues of ice-covered flame licking at their backs impart a whiff of evil.

Obvious exits: northeast, southwest, northwest

>look frieze

The enigmatic figures beg the question of their meaning. What were they and what symbolic message were they meant to communicate? The visual idiom is no doubt buried in the mists of time, however, the exceptional quality of the sculpture is its own reward.

This is referring to the crest of the Earl of Carnarvon (Welsh: Caernarfon). The two octagonal alcoves refer to the octagon shaped towers at the entryway of the bridge and barbican to Caernarfon Castle, which I pointed out is the symbolic meaning of their presence at Castle Anwyn. This would be strong evidence that the "The Dream of Macsen Wledig" (the Roman Emperor Maximus) from the Mabinogion where thirteen people are sent to the highest mountain in the world was totally intentional.

The heraldry of the earl is only three lions rampant with hind paws on the ground. The more specific notion of "three pairs" of lions rampant might mean something else. One of the earliest examples in Europe was six lions rampant for Geoffrey Plantagenet, Count of Anjou and Duke of Normandy, in the 12th century which was that Mabinogion time period. The crest of the Earl of Carnarvon has the lions rampant facing the same way ("sinister"), which might be what the "whiff of evil" is about.[1]


- Xorus' player

[1] On the other hand, Roger of Leybourne had six lions rampant at the time of Edward I, where he had charge over Carlisle Castle. Carlisle Castle is where Perceval first reaches King Arthur's court according to Chretien de Troyes, who calls it Carduel rather than Carlisle, and it is the place where Owaine leaves from for his adventure. But these lions rampant do not have both hind legs on the ground. So it would have to be a cross reference anyway, though the triangular layouts would be out.

[2] Another possibility would be that it is a cross of Caernarfon Castle symbolism / heraldry with Moissac Abbey in France, one of the earliest examples of Romanesque architecture. It has a tympanum depicting the apocalypse from the Book of Revelation, supported by a trumeau (basically a column) with three pairs of crossing lions.

---

>'=explain Who would deny, after all, that a rhetorical question is merely a statement?
You may not explain with a sentence ending in a question mark.

I'm going to dig more deeply into some of the actual books. Since I know now that the "old hag" is specifically Gerbert's Continuation of Perceval, that will be a place to read through in more detail. In that one he breaks his sword trying to force open the gates of Paradise (Aenatumgana), and later sits on the Siege Perilous which had previously killed six knights. This is the story where he and a lady sit in a "window seat", and the chair of bone is hidden behind a window seat in Castle Anwyn. I will have to find an English full text and see if the knights have severed heads. He then sees blue smoke and realizes there is a forge, and slays two serpents (dragons) down there getting to the smith to reforge his Grail sword. This could interpolate with Merlin and Vortigern's tower with the two dragons in the underground cavern.

I've noticed that there are some stories featuring "ivory horns", so I will have to look into those to pin down the probable meaning of Terate's ki-lin horn. There is also a "Castle of the Magical Chessboard", so if I can find some specific or exact language it could validate this potential chess thread. I've noticed that Jessie Weston has talked about the Nibelung while also talking about Perceval, and it turns out she also wrote a book analyzing those Wagner operas for their mythology backgrounds.


Possible Threads That Might Turn Up:

(1) William Blake wrote his "prophetic books", one of which stars John Milton, and it opens with a hymn titled "And did those feet in ancient time" which is about Joseph of Arimathea supposedly bringing Jesus to England which is the basis of Glastonbury Abbey. His longest one "Jerusalem" is an apocatastatic version of Judgment Day where the lake of fire becomes water of life, there is a "Vala", and the characters represent multiple things. (e.g. The Jews are equivalent with the British Druids.)

(2) "The Seventh Seal" by Ingmar Bergman (visions, dreams, chess game) has them going to Elsinore, the castle of the knight. This happens to be the castle of Hamlet, which is the Shakespeare play that actually features Purgatory. I've interpreted Hamlet as playing off Stoic vs. Christian apocatastasis before, but I'm not aware if that is a thing in the scholarly literature. Something could turn up in that in any case. Its basis text is 12th century Viking Scandinavia, and we have Siegfried/Nibelung.

(3) Malaphor's apprentice Tindal might be playing off the Protestant reformer Tyndell, so I have to look into what Martin Luther & Co. were revising about Purgatory. Luther said heaven was empty of even the saints until the end times, and that the souls "sleep" until Judgment Day. This would be one of the more subtle and obscure things. Apocatastasis is purely implied by the Lucifer redemption thing and the repeated instances of the word "stoic", borrowing imagery is a lot more obvious.


- Xorus' player

[1] That Temple of Jupiter I mentioned was Roman Heliopolis, and it was once thought to be about the worship of Helios. Since Koar's eye is conflated with the sun in the Drake's Shrine, that would probably be the relevance of it. It was also Phoenicia but I do not necessarily have any relevance to read into it.

---

>'=explain Who would deny, after all, that a rhetorical question is merely a statement?
You may not explain with a sentence ending in a question mark.

I forgot to mention that in Blake's version of Revelation, the seven angels of the apocalypse are instead "Eyes of God".

So that is another tie-in for the Eye of the Drake as God in this context.


- Xorus' player

---

>'=explain Who would deny, after all, that a rhetorical question is merely a statement?
You may not explain with a sentence ending in a question mark.

>This is kind of a stretch, but I found the phrase "unearthly emerald light" in a book titled Resurrectionists from 1987, which looks like a collection of short stories.

If you want to bring things back around to Arthurian legend, in the film 'Excalibur', an emerald light was used thematically throughout to represent the influence of old magic and the fae world - such as when Excalibur itself was prominently featured, the Dragon, or the old magic of the land in response to the influx of Christianity. Often that emerald light was staged to shine from a lower/ground-based light source instead of from above. Considering that the film was done in the early 80s, it's a pretty neat use of set-based lighting effects without relying on cell modification.

- Overlord EK

>You now regard Eorgina with a warm demeanor.

#2634:

[The Rift]

The path you travel upon winds its way through the scrubby ground. Amid the bushes hangs a man, suspended from his ankle. His face is a purple crimson from the blood pooled within, and his eyes have rolled back into his head. While this is not uncommon, perhaps more remarkable is the fact that the rope is anchored in the ground, and the man hangs upwards.

Obvious exits: southwest, northwest

This might refer to Merlin's prophecy of the three deaths. It comes in more than one version, but basically he foresees the death of someone, with seemingly three different ways of dying. In one version a baron is supposed to fall off his horse and break his neck, and die be hanging, and die by drowning. He falls off his horse on a bridge, his foot catches on a bridge support, and his head is in the river. Another version has a man falling off a rock, catching his leg in a tree.

In other words, the prophecy is of someone dying by hanging upside down in a seemingly impossible way, which is what is going on in this Rift room. And then you have the whole prophecy of death, visions of the past and future thing with The Rift itself. There are not three deaths in this scene, but it is close enough to be plausible.


- Xorus' player

I took a break from everything game related for about a month. I'm in a "deep reading" phase at the moment. Instead of scanning across lots of potential sources, I'm reading straight through primary source materials. I will eventually write a much more detailed update, but I can provide some bullet points now.


(1) From Ritual To Romance

Jessie Weston (first English translator of Wolfram von Eschanbach's Parzival, the Germanic "wondrous stone" version of Perceval that is the basis of Wagner's operas) wrote a book called "From Ritual To Romance" where she tries to argue that the Wasteland mythology centered on the Grail King is the essence of the story, and that it is surviving fragments of the Nature/Fertility Cult described in Frazer's The Golden Bough.

This is in contrast to normal scholarship which regards the wasteland as an irrelevant feature appearing in later texts. She regarded some later and more esoteric texts as having preserved older, more original aspects that had already been obscured by the time of Chretien de Troyes. She believed Gawain was the original Grail Knight, and that Perceval was a more Christianized substitute, and then Galahad was an even more Christianized substitute for Perceval later.

Her basic thesis is that it is descended from a common Aryan tradition, by which she means the Indo-Iranian religion represented by the Rig Veda. She argues that the Gawain as Grail knight versions show him bringing fertility back to the land (by asking the purpose of the Lance) by returning the flow of the waters, which she argued is preserved from the story of the slumbering serpent dragon Vritra who was slayed by the Vedic god Indra. I've pointed out earlier in this thread that Vritra is probably the root word for the Vvrael, and his story appears to be the mythological (non-Lovecraftian) basis of the Shadow Valley story.

This would be a fairly huge coincidence. She also made an argument linking Gawain to the Chapel/Cemetary Perilous and St. Patrick's Purgatory. The pentagram in Castle Anwyn's cavern is now most likely a reference to Gawain's pentagram shield in "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight", which symbolized five virtues akin to the Stones of Virtue in the Vvrael quest. Anwyn's crypt clearly corresponds to Glastonbury's bodies of Arthur and Guenevere, but the third body is probably supposed to be the Dead Knight on the bier in the Gawain variants (I previously suggested the werewolf knight Melion), where the "Dolorous Stroke" that befalls the land is an injury on the knight rather than the Grail King. In contrast, the Grail King suffers from extreme old age (or is actually dead), but the quest restores him to youth/life. This is reflected in Terate.


(2) Diu Crone

The only version of the Grail story where Gawain actually is the one that does and completes the Grail quest is a Germanic version by Heinrich von dem Turlin. It contains aspects that are clearly of relatively old origin, such as things that must have descended from Gawain's original Irish/Welsh form. The basic premise of Diu Crone ("The Crown") is that the author is providing a bunch of Arthurian stories, and each one is metaphorically compared to a jewel in a crown.

The importance of this point is that each Stone of Virtue has a loresong depicting a virtuous feat, and the Vvrael quest ended by the (gem)stones being inserted into the crown symbol of Koar on Mount Aenatumgana. Another point is that this is one of the versions where the maiden who bears the Grail is weeping. Lorminstra is depicted as a weeping young lass when you screw around with the stones, and the point of the Lake of Tears is that she filled up from weeping over lost souls.


(3) The Griffin Sword

The First Griffin Sword War now appears to me to be clearly based on the Germanic versions of the Grail sword story, linked into the Perceval cycle by the Gerbert continuation which is referenced by the sitting window in Castle Anwyn. In this version the Grail Sword breaks and has to reforged at its source. The Grail Sword is depicted as having a sapphire hilt, which was also true of the Griffin Sword. The Griffin Sword was veil-iron, like Terate's void blade, and the story on the Stone of Virtue is about Taki Rassein's "Aramier" but the image it describes is actually the Griffin Sword.

Without splicing into the details of one story to the next, the point is that there are versions where instead of answering a question, the broken pieces of the Grail sword have to be reforged by putting those pieces in a lake, which restores the "guardian" of the Grail items, the Grail King or "Fisher King" which dually motivates why they invented the Lake of Tears (which I still think might also be an Alice in Wonderland reference.)

At the end of the First Griffin Sword War they brought the pieces to a "guardian" who made them answer a question about the nature / purpose of the Lake of Tears, which is the stereotypical feature of stories involving encountering the Grail King, where failing to ask the question causes the land to suffer and the guardian to not be healed. (It might be a coincidence but the questers were all tested separately, and the only one who chose to attack the guardian and actually landed a hit was ambushing the guardian's left leg, which corresponds to the injury of the Fisher King and Bran the Blessed and which Weston argues traces way back to ancient religion.)

The First Griffin Sword War had a black stone that presumably corresponded to the "wondrous stone", and the person who broke the Griffin Sword in the first place turned out to be the prophet who initiated the quest, an allusion to the fact that in Perceval stories he always does not know his own name at first. Incidentally, there are serious chronology problems in the Vvrael story, involving huge compressions of time. This is a hallmark defect of Perceval stories and so was probably intentional, especially since time paradoxes are inherent features of the stories behind The Graveyard and The Broken Lands.


(4) Perceval and Siegfried

She does not mention it in From Ritual To Romance, but in Jessie Weston's book on Wagner's operas (the Chamber of the Dead room alludes to his Lohengrin, Parzival's son), she argues that Perceval and Siegfried originated in a common earlier "Aryan" hero. The emphasis is on the broken Grail Sword version of the story, represented in the Gebert continuation and the Gawain versions. The central idea in Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen is that Siegfried has to reforge his broken sword, which was originally stuck in a tree like the Arthurian sword-in-the-stone.

So while Terate makes references to Perceval, his last name Niebelun refers to the Nibelung, which refers to Siegfried who is supposed to be the same hero under that interpretation. Earlier I argued that the dwarf Alberich connects over on a fairy king premise due to the etymology of his name. I think that is probably a coincidence, the equation of Perceval and Siegfried is very idiosyncratic and specific to Jessie Weston.


(5) Mini-Summary

So, basically, Terate is in the role of the Grail King. (There was a vision of him sitting on the bone chair and being restored by dark power, where the chair corresponds to the Siege Perilous, which can only be sat in by the future Grail King and thus descendant from Joseph of Arimathea who is related to other parts of Castle Anwyn.) Castle Anwyn is based on allusions to Purgatory. Terate has a Lucifer / Fallen One motif, which refers to the "wondrous stone" version of the Grail, where it fell from heaven in the fall of Lucifer. Generally speaking, Castle Anwyn is making reference to the fairy / folklore school of thought behind the Grail, and the nymphs/satyrs it depicts while related to this probably refer to Weston's view of the Grail story originating in surviving fragments of an ancient nature / fertility cult.

The point of the Vvrael quest story is the Koar is a dying / sick god king (Lorminstra was dying at one point), which is the mythological wasteland root, but it is Christianized by introducing the whole Book of Revelation and Judgment Day concept, where Terate / Lucifer is redeemed / restored in apocatastasis. Koar is depicted as the "Great Drake", which refers to the Great Dragon from the Book of Revelation, where they inverted it so he represents God rather than The Beast.


- Xorus' player

(As an aside, there is a coat-of-arms in Castle Anwyn, depicting a wolf with a helm and wreath. It was a huge pain trying to reverse engineer that, but it is the German coat-of-arms for the surname "Wolf", and very similar to the coat-of-arms for "Wolfram". While you could read the werewolf thing into it, it's probably a reference to Wolfram von Eschenbach, because his version of the Parzival story is being used.)

---

>'=explain Who would deny, after all, that a rhetorical question is merely a statement?
You may not explain with a sentence ending in a question mark.

For what it is worth, I managed to track down one of the GMs that ran the Vvrael quest, and they confirmed the basic point that:

(1) There are threads of comparative mythology throughout.

(2) There is a lot of Latin and archaic languages.

(3) It is a wild, warped vision with tons of weird references thrown together.


Remembering is another matter. The problem is that this was done by multiple people, so I'm talking Greek by speaking to any one person. This one was mostly not involved in the room painting, which is my heaviest source for interpreting it. Some of the rooms in The Rift are meaningful, but I'm sure others are purely illustration.


- Xorus' player

---

>'=explain Who would deny, after all, that a rhetorical question is merely a statement?
You may not explain with a sentence ending in a question mark.