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Monday 28 March 2022

Deities acute and obtuse


Here's a question that we really ought to settle once and for all. Richard Hetley, who is a veteran of Fabled Lands campaigns on Kickstarter and has been invaluable to us as an editor and design consultant, recently asked about Ebron, the god of Uttaku who crops up in The War-Torn Kingdom:


Richard Hetley: "I mention this delightfully angular deity because he came up in discussion about the Fabled Lands app. Replies there said 'Yes, it's been confirmed by the authors that Ebron has angles, not angels. Must be some sort of Lovecraftian non-Euclidean god.' I was fairly certain that this was not the case. I had even corrected the misconception where possible. But then I couldn't find a reference in our e-mails, so I didn't say anything. Care to clarify, for the ten thousandth time, whether Ebron was in possession of angles or angels?"

Jamie Thomson: "It most definitely is angles! And it first made an appearance in the Heart of Harkun radio play. And yes, he is a kind of non-Euclidean deity, that's a nice way of putting it, but not Lovecraftian. Imagine it more as a Zen koan, like you meditate on the mystery of how god can have fourteen angles in the same way the early Christian Greek churches used the Trinity as a mystery to meditate on, but not to be taken literally. Of course, the Western Christians decided to do just that, and so you get the Nicene creed, where they actually conceive of a threefold god."

20 comments:

  1. Any news on any chance of getting Fabled Lands Book 8 out?

    I've had A Idea for 2 things you could put in Fabled Lands Book 8. What do you think

    1 is something that lets you permanently increase 1 stats maximum to 13 whilst also lowering 1 stats maximum to 11

    1 idea would be something that boosts your agility whilst dropping your Strength

    This means that the item would permanently increase your maximum Thievery to 13 whilst lowering your maximum Combat to 11

    The other thing may be getting A Choice 1 of 2 Nahual Gems and they can only be used in Spirit Fights

    1 increase's your Attack Roll but it also lowers your Defence and the other increase's your Defence but it also lowers your Attack Roll

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    1. Paul Gresty is working on FL book 8 whenever he can. I expect we'll see more variations on spirit combat, among other things.

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  2. On the angle thing, once you consider blood vessels, bones, muscles, etc., the human body has considerably more than 14 angles. Ebron's a piker the in the angle department. Clearly he needs some angels to help him out.

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    1. Good point. I'm going to leave it to Jamie to answer that one as I think it was his idea. He'll find the right angle on this.

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    2. Even though it is Jamies idea I have no doubt that someone as smart as you are take what I think is called a educated guess

      PS I just thought I'd say that's I'm not being sarcastic or clever, rather I have a very high opinion of Mister Morris's intelligent

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  3. I've had 5 very good, in my opinion, ideas for release days for when or if, hopefully and fingers crossed when, Book 8 gets released. Here they are. What do you think

    Idea 1 is to release it on your Birthday and call it your Birthday treat to fans of The Series

    Idea 2 is to release it on Jamies Birthday and persuade him to call it his Birthday treat to fans of The Series

    Idea 3 is to release it on Pauls Birthday and persuade him to call it his Birthday treat to fans of The Series

    Idea 4 is that because the The quality of books is out of this world release Book 8 on May The 4th

    The idea behind that is that a lot of people call May The 4th Star Wars Day, Star Wars is based in a far off galaxy and the quality of The Books is out of this world

    The 5th idea has A April Fools them, so in January of the year your going to release it you convince everyone that it won't come out before June

    But its actually coming out in April that year and The part that makes it A April Fool Joke is that it comes out on April The 1st

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    1. I don't know that Paul or Jamie would be keen to reveal their exact birthdays to the world, but I do think a Star Wars open-world gamebook in the style of Fabled Lands would be a great idea.

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  4. To tread on dangerous grounds, does this deity have anything to do with The Order of the Nine Angles? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Order_of_Nine_Angles

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    1. Oh boy, more Nazis!? Maybe I should just denounce Jamie now. "I am not now, nor have I ever been, a supporter of Grieve Marlock..."

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    2. Sorry, I just couldn't resist. But also, and this is the reason why I remembered them when reading this post, for years I thought their name was The Order of the Nine Angels and was disappointed when I discovered I was wrong. "Angles? Who cares about angles?".

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    3. I almost disappeared down the rabbit hole of Nazi occultism when researching "The Right Duke" scenario (https://fabledlands.blogspot.com/2017/05/the-right-duke-shakespearean-world-war.html ). That was the Thule Society, which I would have pronounced "THOO-lay" but apparently the Nazis pronounced "Thool". Possible rivalries with the Nine Angles chaps? Mike Mignola will be way ahead of us on all this stuff.

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    4. Shit: I pronounced it 'Thool' too. Does that make me a Nazi?

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  5. The Marlock brothers weren't supposed to be Nazi's were they? I always picked the republican side when I was a kid (there's just something about the concept of monarchy that I feel is repugnant to the dignity of humanity). I knew they were militaristic and repressive ("in might we trust" and all that), but I had always pegged them as Cromwellian rather than National Socialist.

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    1. Absolutely not! They are republicans -- and you're right, Jamie probably based them on the Roundheads more than anything else. I'd probably pick their side myself, only to fall out with them later for being too dictatorial.

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    2. Over all it's probably "better" to pick the King over Marlock (you get a perm. +1 Combat and the King will help you if you get kidnapped in book 4). Still, I go with Marlock because of the King's five-sided or so army in Book 4. Because you just know that even if they beat Marlock, that thing is going to dissolve into a four or five-sided civil war that will spread blood, war and horror through Sokara for decades.

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    3. I realize I've never asked Jamie which side he'd pick -- probably, like any author, he needs to combine both Roundhead and Royalist attitudes in order to write both points of view fairly. But it's interesting that he made it more profitable in player-terms to back the King. Revealing, perhaps?

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  6. I've got a idea how about we each list our favorite thing about each favorite lands book?. Here's

    he War-Torn Kingdom. Nostalgia due to it being the 1st 1 I owned

    Cities of Gold and Glory. The fact that you can raise your Sancitity to 12 simply by helping the people in the plague village

    Over The Blood Red Sea's. Nostalgia due to it being the 1st 1 I read

    The Plains of Howling Darkness. The fact that if you've got the time and patience you can get very rich simply by keep fighting Muggers in Yarimura

    Court of Hidden Faces. The fact that if you've got the time and patience you can get both very rich and very powerful by when in Aku keep walking up the stairs, keep getting enslaved, keep earning your freedom and overtime this gives you lots of stat boosts and lots of things you can sell, but only if you have somewhere to store the cash

    Lords of The Rising Sun. The fact that if you want to, play your cards right, know what your doing and are very lucky you can be 1 of The Countries most popular officials and 1 of its most wanted criminals

    Keep of The Liche Lord. The fact that if you know what your doing then whilst in Keladon you can take advantage of the fact that when betting on the fight that because's theirs no specified limit on what you can bet you could bet 1,500,000 Shards and walk away with 3,000,000 Shards

    The Serpent Kings Domain. The chance to either defeat and kill A God or defeat but spare A God, personally I always choose to spare him because I believe that if they come out then in later Books having spared Namgal will prove more beneficial then having killed him

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  7. Tried to respond on your M A R Barker thread and the follow-up, but no comments allowed. So...here. Hope you post.

    I don't know anything about M A R Barker. Never heard of him. But from reading a few posts it seems that a number of people rush to snap judgments.

    Being a white person and proud of it does NOT mean I am a white supremacist. That's like saying that being a meat-eater is discriminatory to vegans or being a soccer enthusiast is discriminatory to basketball players.

    We should encourage **ANYONE** to be proud of who and what they are, no matter the colour or gender. Under the surface, a few microns below our epidermis, we're all essentially the same. Same blood, same DNA, same bones and sinews and muscles and other human being materiel.

    Waving the flag to cheer yourself is one thing. Wielding the knife against others not like you is another.

    My 2 pence.

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    1. I had to close comments on the Barker furore because they were getting too repetitive. Summary: I'm opposed to Nazism and always have been. I just haven't yet seen evidence to convince me that Barker was a Nazi. (He wrote an unpleasant book in which a number of characters express vile opinions, but authors are not their characters.)

      Certainly nothing in Tekumel has anything to connect it with Nazism. There are no white races and the main societies are completely tolerant of trans and gay characters and have equality for women. Hitler would have hated it.

      My own take on the race issue is that I happen to be white. I'm neither proud of it nor ashamed because it's purely an accident of birth. I completely agree with you that ethnicity has no bearing on a person's worth. I regard myself as a human being, not "a white person".

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