Pathfinder 1E [Let's Read] Nidal, Land of Shadows

[Tristissima]

The book continues on to remind us that Kuthite religion is not the only influence on Nidalese culture. It’s obviously a duh, but it needs to be said, both because in-setting, foreigners are likely to think that it is, and out-of-setting players always love to reduce settings to the simple one-sentence introduction we use to aid decision-making. Of course, it then goes on to describe elements of Nidalese culture that are Kuthite, like the politicking of the Umbral Court and the slight difference in holiday celebrations that develop from fear, defiance, or zeal for the state religion.

But then we get a quick paragraph about Nidalese fashion. In terms of ancient Forgite RPG theory, immersionism is my primary creative agenda. A good amount of the juice I get from RPGs comes from feeling like I am deeply embedded in a fictional world ~ yes, I also enjoy Tolkien’s sub-creation theory, despite my polytheism. Fashion is one of those very subtle ways you can communicate culture and history, much like Tolkien’s fictional philology, and so I can become fascinated with the history of fashion in D&D worlds. It helps that one of my current RISK* sweeties, as well as an ex-RISK now-friend sweety of mine, has done deep study on fashion and the development thereof. Their drag, both of theirs, is everything.

Anyway, we’re told that the tension between stoic silence and a joyful quest for pain forms a central organizing factor of Nidalese fashion. They prefer greys and blacks in austere cuts, and express quality and fanciness with the garments’ elaborate structure and architecture, rather than in ornamentation. I imagine this structure is focused on draping and close tailoring, as their love of austere cuts would seem to preclude dramatic silhouettes or profiles. I can fully imagine a Nidalese socialite finding such things as bustles or shoulder pads or hoop skirts gauche attempts to distract from the tailor’s undoubtedly poor mastery of their craft, or at best of the unattractive body of the person wearing the outfit.

This seems to be confirmed by what we’re told of preferences in Pangolais, where silk and lace float off bodies in layers. Nisroch and Ridwan tend towards a more war-like look, giving up the float of those delicate fabrics for stiff leather, either glossy or welted for decoration. It’s a little harder to layer leather, but I can imagine that the higher classes often lean towards less stiff clothing. Buttery garments, one on top of the other, seem much more likely, or even things like suede.

Despite, or perhaps because of, the Nidalese distaste for ornamentation in clothing, they love to adorn their bodies by means of things like piercings, tattoos, brands, and scarification. Of course, the pain involved in these things no doubt help. Nothing is said about Nidalese traditions of these things, in terms of materials or locations or designs. I would imagine that, since the experience is more important than the product for most Kuthites, there isn’t much in terms of cultural trend. Rather, Nidalese body mod culture probably leans much more toward how it often functions in the US today ~ it’s a form of personal expression, with the artistic eye being the primary determiner of things like location, color, material, etc., and designs ranging from those deeply infused with personal meaning to perfunctory designs that the artist can do in their sleep to ridiculous and easy humor.

Nidalese disdain bright colors in general, but especially in gems and jewelry, favoring instead things like moonstones, onyxes, and smoky quartz. It’s not actually mentioned, but I would imagine that a Nidalese would judge aesthetics largely in terms of chiaroscuro and the drama of shapes.




* Romantic, Intimate, Sexual, and/or Kinky, that is.

 

[Tristissima]

Oops. Somehow my last post was a repeat of an earlier post >.<

This post is my deleting of that one, btw.

 

[Tristissima]

Here's the actual next post:

The Umbral Court, as with all groups of two or more people, has its divisions and its arguments. They work to hide them from their subjects and foreigners, hoping to build up an image of a cabal unified by their Kuthite devotion and their personal infusion with the Midnight Lord’s power. We are given two examples of their divisions: a political one concerning Nidal’s relationship with Cheliax, and a theological dispute concerning something called the Belevais Doctrine. That latter argument is one of my favoritest things in the book, by the way.

Nidalese city-dwellers and graduates of the School of the Pale Sun in Elith Lorin tend to be super-excited about Nidal’s alliance with the infernalists of Cheliax. The vampire sorcerer Kholas has voiced this opinion more eloquently, louder, and more often than anyone, making him something of the face of this contingent, who wish to expand their nation’s influence across all of Golarion and to bring more and more to the revealing ways of Zon-Kuthon’s pain.

However, Eloiander of Ridwan and the Uskwood druids have argued against them, pointing to the Nidalese’s special status as the chosen people of Zon-Kuthon, exalted in suffering above all the rest of Golarion. Foreigners, they say, mean little to the lord of the velstracs, and extermists (including Eloiander himself) have even gone so far as attempt to sabotage the alliance or make any Chelish in their borders’s stay unbearable.

I enjoy this conflict! It feels very well-placed so that the Cheliax-Nidal alliance can present all the dangers of a unified evil alliance to those games who want such a thing, but which clever heroes like the PCs can sabotage, defeating it by means of subterfuge instead of meeting an overwhelming force head-on. It can also provide a good reason for Nidalese PCs of any alignment to join forces with a party crusading for the forces of good ~ imagine the possibilities of an evil Nidalese Kuthite PC teaming up with a bunch of Iomedaean and Milanite PCs against the devil-worshippers of Cheliax. Even if the party is composed entirely of relatively typical Nidalese, this division can generate any number of plots.

The Belevais Doctrine, as I said, is one of the peaks of this book. It feels very reminiscent of actual theological debate (it would fit in with questions like the medieval European debates around things like God’s ability or inability to create a boulder He can’t move, or whether imagined things have enough reality to be considered moral patients, or whether Jesus ever shat and what that would mean about His blend of divinity and humanity), while also remaining very grounded in the reality of a pulpy fantasy setting. My main metric for such things in recent years is gem fusion from Steven Universe ~ which is clearly an allegory for romance and even sex, allowing the cartoon to comment on such things, but is also alien enough to spawn storylines of its own that would not make any sense if they were about such things. I feel like that’s the kind of allegory that Tolkien would be happy with.

OK, but WTF even is the Belevais Doctrine? It is an answer, the orthodoxy of which has haunted Nidalese theologians for centuries and yet is still very much in question, to a very important question to Nidalese culture: do the undead feel pain as intensely or as loudly, as the living? Adherents of the doctrine claim that pain exists to warn the living of danger or death, and that therefore those who have nothing to fear from most sources thereof, those who are already dead, cannot feel true pain by definition. Certainly, the undead can suffer ~ no Nidalese who can lookout their window would debate that ~ but the Belevais Doctrine seeks to distinguish misery or agony from pain itself. And it is pain that Zon-Kuthon bequeaths as gift to those he blesses.

Velstracs, according to the doctrine, are alone among the races of the Realms Beyond to feel true pain, either because they’ve replaced some skin with that of living mortal beings or simply through sufficient body modification in service to the Midnight Lord. Thus, its believers, believe that undead and non-velstrac outsiders are forever shut out from proper dedicated worship of Zon-Kuthon. The undead are the more politically important and contentious of the two groups, due to the large number of them within the shadowed borders of Nidal.

Belevaisians argue against raising the undead above living worshippers who profess an equal amount of piety in the Kuthite hierarchy, effectively holding them to a higher standard to achieve similar rank. As one would expect, they have made few friends and many enemies amongst the undead population of Nidal.

The fact that these two divisions are largely unrelated gives me intriguing ideas of rather complicated Nidalese political divisions. I’d love to explore them in a campaign someday: Belevaisian isolationists vs. undead-supporting expansionists vs. Belevaisian expansionists vs. undead-supporting isolationists. With four great poles around which to circle and (on the lower side of the scale) dozens of people in the Umbral Court, you can easily keep each faction down to a manageable but easily expandable 10-15 members. Imagine the sociocultural drawing-and-quartering you can put the PCs through, with what they think of as a single, god-given voice pulling them in four different directions!

 

[Tristissima]

We next get a list of the Great Kuthite Ceremonies, preceded by a note that everyone in the realm must find some way to join the public celebrations, whether it is performative or not, by dint of the generally oppressive atmosphere of the place. Which is a thing I’m certainly down with; my love for Nidal doesn’t mean I think it’s a nice place to live, nor even does my desire that Nidal be written in such a way that I coud play a good character who doesn’t reject everything about its culture. However, the writing gets a bit lurid and eager to convince us of Nidal’s EEEEVIIILLL for me.

For the 10 days before the first new moon of the new year, communities choose a victim (usually an enemy or prisoner, if they can, though the improperly pious function just fine, and the smaller villages often substitute a pig or a goat or, inviting Umbral suspicion, even an effigy) to lavish with the good life, no luxury denied. They then torture and eviscerate them on the night of the new moon, looking for portents in what are only described as the “ritual’s details.” I think I would choose to interpret that as a combination of, like, ancient Roman haruspicy and some of the things involved in the lead-up and interpretation of Afro-Diasporic sacrifice rituals, looking at like how the animal behaves and gaining knowledge therefrom.

I actually kind of hate this ritual, the Eternal Kiss. For one thing, it seems quite unconnected to anything in Kuthite ecclesiology, theology, or cosmology other than the timing. A shift of even just a handful of words would have been sufficient to shift that, sadly, making it the religion’s effort to learn what the coming year had in store for them. I am fairly certain that wordcount could have been cleared for another sentence giving us a brief description of how the Nidalese Kuthite faithful view the changing of the calendar or the passage of time. The other reason I hate it is because of its resemblance to a lot of Nahua/Azteca human sacrifice rituals involving an ixiptla (a word I’ve seen translated as “deity impersonator”). The issue isn’t taking inspiration or having resonance with Nahua culture ~ that’s something I’d love to see more of, actually ~ but in the text’s attempts to drive home, again, the EEEVIIILLLL of it. If you’re going to do that, it’s probably best to avoid any semblance to actual oppressed/colonized peoples.

The autumnal equinox plays host to the Festival of Night’s Return, which is given the couple of words necessary to tie it into the Kuthite approach to the world. Elements of Beltaine and Burning Man and medieval Catholic mortification of flesh all combine into the description of the holiday. The distinction between rural and urban celebrations is very clear in the Festival of Night’s Return. Out in the country, the villagers flagellate themselves with simple knotted cords or leather straps, causing no more injury than, say, a light-to-moderate SM scene, and the prayers are kept simple, largely similar to those of farmers everywhere, only worded to fit the Midnight Lord’s ways. Bonfires burn effigies of Sarenrae or Shelyn to show their god’s victory over beauty and light. (I’ve said before that I prefer a much more complicated relationship between the two siblings, and I’m frankly kind of surprised that no mention is made of Desna here. She is both an ancestral deity of the Kellid Nidalese and the primary divine agent working to end Zon-Kuthon’s hold over Nidal, after all). As the bonfire dies down and the self-whipping slows, villagers break off in groups or couples to, well, I believe the tasteful way to put it is the way the book puts it: “to celebrate.”

In the cities, Night’s Return is a carnivalesque affair, grand and grim. The Midnight Lord’s pre-dominance permits him to share the flames with no one, not even those he has vanquished. Well, the bones of the previous year’s sacrifices burn amongst the wood, but that’s different. The parade is filled with those who want to attract the Court’s attention or even favor, so everyone seeks to best those next to them, pushing themselves beyond their limits to shows of bloody, grisly devotion amongst the extravagant displays of shadow magic that burst throughout the streets. Here, the holiday drains the energy from all but the masochistic, preventing the kind of eager seeking of the fesh that marks the village holidays.

The third of the Great Celebrations is the one most tied to Nidalese culture, and thus my favorite among them. The first Moonday of Lamashan (mid-autumn, October-ish) remembers the terrible time just after Earthfall. Well, terrible for those without a shadowed god providing for their needs, anyway. Originally, it was celebrated by scavenging the bones of foreigners who’d starved, constructing a ceremonial table from them and serving a harvest feast upon it. Now, the bones are of a community’s dead, stretching back through the long generations, and it is a festival of remembrance of the past and thankfulness to Zon-Kuthon for having protected those ancestors so that they could give birth to those celebrating the rite. Among the Great Celebrations, I envision the Feast of the Survivors to be the homiest of them all, not too far in feel from a Kuthite Thanksgiving, to give a rough analogy. It’s when family members gather to spend time with everyone they love, even the ones they don’t love.

I am always annoyed by fantasy holidays with formulae like these, honestly. I mean, unless Moonday itself is important to the celebration in some way (think “the 7th day” in Abrahamic traditions, or the various associations of the days of the week with the orisha in Ifa and Yoruba-derived Afro-Diasporic traditions, for examples), it’s very much an industrial way of schedule things. As far as I can tell, most pre- or non-industrial festival calendars timed things to the seasons or the position of celestial bodies or the rhythms of agriculture than to any sort of an idea of “weekend” (which is an artifact of struggles against industrial, capitalist bosses).

The last of the Great Celebrations is the Shadowchaining. The first day of Kuthona (early winter, December-ish) hosts a parade of all those with animals magically bound to them, many changed by shadow but also those who are not, flaked by kneeling inhabitants who repeat standard prayers of humility and gratitude. The animals are allowed to hurt those praying, though not to injure or kill them, and then at the end are released to a snarling display of nature red in tooth and claw against some enemy of the faith from outside of Nidal, as the crowd cheers and roars.

Has anyone ever compiled a calendar with all of the various national, cultural, and religious holidays of Golarion, or even just Avistan? There have been so many described, I’m just kind of curious to see what lines up with what….

 

[MaskedGuy]

Are you same poster who does the reading on paizo.com too?

 

[Tristissima]

Are you same poster who does the reading on paizo.com too?

Sorry about the lateness of this reply; I've been caught up in editing a book.

I am indeed that same poster, yes! Why do you ask?

 

[MaskedGuy]

Its cool to recognize people from other forums

 

[Tristissima]

lbatross is a nice, little town, all cliffs and ports isolated in the mists of Conqueror’s Bay. Imagine the stereotype of the stern yet cozy English fisherman, and that’s kind of the image I get of the Nidalese in Albatross. At the moment, when I think of that image, the primary association I have with it is the installments of Susan Cooper’s Dark is Rising series that were set in Cornwall. Imagining that series in Nidal takes my imagination many intriguing places. The people of Albatross practice a no-doubt homey version of augury, tracking the motions and activities of the town’s namesake birds.

This is where the Umbral Court imprisons its agents who have done something against them but who can’t just be offed. Worse than the questionable nutrition of the town’s flavorless cuisine and the townsfolks’ barely monosyllabic conversation is the prohibition the Court has placed upon hurting the people here. No relief from one’s punishment can be found in sadism here.

Albatross makes me think of nothing more than The Prisoner, that treasure of British postmodern Cold War paranoia. If I were ever to run an adventure in or passing through Albatross, I think this blend of elements ~ Dark is Rising, The Prisoner, France-by-way-of-Conan-and-Hellraiser ~ would be plenty to give it an unforgettably unique flavor.

There’s a caligni druid here by the name of Alkaiva of the Uskwood. She lost a political tussle with Eloiander of Ridwan and was only saved by two of her aunts in the Umbral Court. For some reason, her white wolf is given a name that doesn’t feel very Nidalese to me at all. It doesn’t seem to mimic the linguistic conventions of any of the languages I would expect to feed into Nidalese (French, Gaelic, Scythian, maybe some English, even Greek, perhaps with French, Italian, Spanish, or Latin loanwords from Cheliax). “Xiaq” reads to me as more like . . . Inuit or Tlingit, maybe with some Chinese influence.

It’s actually kind of interesting in an understated way. Famously, Golarion has often felt kind of threadbare when it came to international politics, due to the manner of its development. The many realms were treated as the personal project of the various high-level designers, with a not-insurmountable-but-still-a resistance to encroach on another’s turf. Little bits like a druid of the Uskwood having an animal companion that seems to imply some connection to the Crown of the World, a connection which might maybe have had something to do with her conflict with Eloiander, give DMs a platform to build that international diplomacy for their campaigns.

I would actually absolutely adore playing a Pathfinder campaign of international diplomacy, roaming Avistan and maybe greater Golarion, too, shaping history with our words and relationships.

Alkaiva is given an impressive number of adventure hooks in just 100 words or so ~ everything from her messing around with the town’s augury tradition by using her powers to train the whitr albatrosses to dance, to her having secrets that could damage Eloiander’s political position by revealing that his anti-Cheliax stance isn’t just words, to Eloiander not being okay with leaving her alive.

I recently saw someone describe the Mindspin Mountains as the most Tolkienian area of Golarion. Which, I suppose, might make Nidal Mordor? Regardless, there is a small coal-mining village tucked into their foothills where two rivers converge called Ash Hollow. OK, so Nidal burns coal, evidently. Which changes some of my mental image of its culture ~ I had before imagined them more as something like Westeros or a grim version of Early Modern, Renaissance, or even medieval France and England. Large echoing rooms of castle-stone for the nobles with dramatic fireplaces fighting back any chill while providing a lovely stage for wineglass brooding. But coal shifts that image to one inspired by some years later; now I have to import some imagery of, like, 19th-century London.

Of course, it makes sense that they need coal, since the land is kept in shadow.

Thousands make a pilgrimage to Ash Hollow every year, however, for the Festival of Nigh’s Return, completely changing the town for that week (after all, it increases the population by multiple dozenfolds). They come to gather in the valley and on the hillsides near the mountain Aghor Thal to watch a giant, rose-shaped black iron crucible heated with a massive bonfire. It literally fills a cave mouth. Once it is good and hot at duck, the sacrifices begin and do not end until dawn. Millennia of use has awakened the cauldron as an evil idol served by a group of reclusive ascetics known as the Watchers on the Hill.

The Watchers on the Hill are led by a human oracle named Baegloth, a name which shows up in chronicles written many centuries ago in the founding documents and original historical references to the cult. This has led the villagers to believe that he and the rest of the Watchers are effectively immortal, their destruction only possible by destroying the Black Rose.

 

[Tristissima]

The Atteran Ranches are an area of Nidal that has gotten a bit more attention than a lot of the shadow-hugged nation’s other regions. For one thing, it is set up to very easily produce the sort of good-vs.-evil conflict that appeals to a certain type of gamer, or the freedom-vs.-oppression that does the same for a different type. For another, its heady mix of cowboys, rural horror, paranoia under totalitarianism, religion, whimsy-vs.-suffering, and familial drama gives it a simply enchanting flavor. Should I ever get the urge to play a game inspired by Mercedes Lackey or any number of CW shows, the Atteran Ranches are where I would do it.

The Ranches still practice many of the ancient ways of the Nidalese Kellids before Earthfall, modifying the ten-millenia-old practices to a more settled life between the Uskwood and Barrowmoor. And not just the horse-tending ways, either. We are specifically told that they continue to fight with archaic spear-using styles and practice antique funerary rites. With my immersionist tendencies, I quite appreciate that we are given the names and descriptions of not one but two breeds of horses the people of the Ranches have been husbanding and tending for all these centuries. Nidarrmars have dark hides and a reputation as fast, silent horses calm in the face of danger and easily trained, whereas the dappled grey chiardmars are quick and wild like moon shadows on the grass.

Much to the edification of the urban gossips of Nidal, the Atteran Ranches do indeed harbor Desnan dissidents. Both the family which has given its name to the Ranches as a whole since time immemorial and the Blackraven family have heirs who follow the ways of the Starsong. I really like their names: Daiye and Odarac. Daiye matches the emotional feel of Nidalese culture nicely, and Odarac really feels like a Frankish name of the sort that makes sense for the Kellid ur-culture of Nidal.

Daiye’s father Vaide (another good name!) is trying to cover for them by loudly and clumsily searching for non-existent Desnan agitators elsewhere. Hired Kuthite fanatics who call themselves “dream hunters” have come into the Ranches on his dime. The various clans of the region easily mislead these outsiders, taking advantage of their ignorance of the social landscape and ways.

But everyone knows that this is a situation that cannot hold. Sooner or later, the secret will out and on that day, fates will be settled.

I’ven’t looked at 2nd edition yet, but I believe I’ve picked up that the timeline advanced by ten years, is that so? Does anyone know if they’ve said anything yet about the situation of the Atteran Ranches, then?

We are pointed to other entries in this book to help flesh out the Ranches: Barrowmoor, Ravenscry, the Uthori Steppes, and Whitemound. It seems that a different book, Tombs of Golarion, also has some relevant information, in this case about the Cairn of Attai Horse-Speaker. I appreciate the linguistics there, as Attai could very conceivably be etymologically related to Atteran. These locations feel like a mix of British naming practices (the compound names) and Mongolian linguistics. Mongolian seems like a good mix there, in terms of the ur-culture. It helps keep Kellid from being too reductively Celtic/Scythian wile still having a strong resonance with the idea of a culture of horse-nomads.

Speaking of British-style names, Auginford is a small farming town with a problem. I have always appreciated how Paizo has leveraged its OGL and SRD to be unashamed of including characters mixing and matching and including information from their supplements, helping those bits of crunch actually feel integrated. The aristocratic sheriff Joeen Malsten is a hunter (from the Advanced Class guide), and has been talking with other nearby rulers to try t figure out whether Pangolais should be involved.

A very sort of Lovecraftian structure was revealed outside of Auginford by a rainstorm last year, all green flecks in black stone and patterns that seem to wriggle when you look at them. Its appearance presaged an outbreak of creepy, quiet sounds haunting people’s houses at night. The town’s chickens have been laying leathery-shelled blue eggs filled not with yolks orchicks but stinking slime and the wombs of the livestock have produced strangely-shaped, long-dead offspring.

Barrowmoor (mentioned, of course, in the description of the Atteran Ranches) has a quick description as a collection of charcoal cairns and tombs decorated with flint and braided horsehair. It has a very gothic feel to it, cold winds and a bleak feeling to the description of the land. I think of Scotland for some reason,or maybe i’m mistaking Robert E. Howard for Scotland in my head.

The use of the term “sheriff” in the description of Auginford might give us a little more information about the governmental structure of Nidal. It comes from the term “shire reeve”, a shire being either a district in general or basically equivalent to a county. Pre-feudally speaking, a shire was originally under the rule of an earl, and consisted of a group mof what were called hundreds (each ruled by a constable). A hundred was 10 tithings, and each tithing was a hide,mdefined as an area containing enough arable land to support a single household. I just learned the term for the office, term, or jurisdiction of a sheriff cuz I looked it up, and I just love the word: “shrievalty”. It makes me giggle.

Reeves were responsible historically for keeping the peace on behalf of the king in England and Wales, whereas in Scotland they were (and are) judges. As feudalism centered the idea of the manor, they also assisted the bailiffs (court functionaries), serving as the overseers of the peasants and the work they were feudally bound to perform for the lord of the manor. He also was in charge of selling the produce produced, collecting monies, and paying accounts.

Perhaps intriguingly, they were often peasants chosen once a year, sometimes by appointment from the lord but just as often elected by the peasants themselves. Occasionally, that election was protected from the lord’s veto, even!

What does this tell us about the Nidalese system, described by one commentator on this Let’s Read over at the Paizo forums as an all-encompassing church-state bureaucracy with no feudal admixture perhaps analogous to 1st-century Egypt or mid-20th-century Russia? (and I’ll add as a reminder that it seems to function by means of a military-academic complex.) I’m not overly sure. I like the idea of the shire-reeve being elected by the peasants, and imagining the small-story possibilities of the Umbral Court working to influence an election to get someone who suits their plans better than the alternatives into office. What U.S. citizen doesn’t like a good story of election tampering?

 

[Tristissima]

Blacksulfur Pond is a pretty standard creepy pond. It has no visible inlet and sits in the middle of a hush. It even looks black from a distance, though that illusion is revealed as such with a closer inspection. It is not the water that is black, but the pondbottom itself, a shimmering darkness. It is a dead pond, with no life of any type in it or on it or around it. If you ask the locals, they’ll tell you it’s got a fissure to the Darklands’s gasses, but in truth it’s a portal to a pond in the Shadow Plane, one not very well-known on the other side.

The Umbral Court once watched this portal for incursions, but they’ve been so rare that only Leorel of Nisroch (NE human abjurer 3) guards the pond. And he lives an hour away, without much drive to travel all that way very diligently. I like that he’s an abjurer, quite a bit actually. For one, it’s an all-too-oft-ignored subclass, and I appreciate it being presented here as being tied into the world/situation in a way with more meat than ticking off boxes (like, the “this university needs a professor from every school of magic” thing). For another, it’s not the school of magic I immediately associate with Nidal and its tropes, so seeing abjuration show up here helps imagine Nidal as a place with a complex and verisimilitudinous culture. Makes me want to play an abjurer Umbral agent, actually, with a similar job.

Brimstone Springs is high up in the Mindspins. Tolkien-ish territory, remember? Its named for the sulfurous and brightly colored Soulsheen Baths. As with many such places, they are popular as a cure for many things with all the toxic chemicals in their waters. Yeah, okay, confusing poison for medicine is a little over-the-top “fair is foul”, but it’s also extremely realistic. This is one of the times that restraint would actually make the setting seem more alien and one-dimensional.

The Nidalese especially enjoy immersing themselves in various poison waters that stain their skin yellow and grant them visions of their afterlives if they stay in them for a day. It also decides where they’re going; a drowning devil named Reinoks uses it to collect souls for Infernal Duke Crocell. They’re similarities to certain Hellish places have started to attract a number of Chelish tourists to Brimstone Spring, as well, setting up some nice chance for the isolationists v. Cheliax fans conflict to pop up in an unusual setting where many people would have their defenses lowered. Evidently, they’re featured in the Giantslayer adventure path’s gazetteer of the Minspins. I should read that, because now I really wanna play out an underhanded political adventure or even campaign in Brimstone Springs! The Latinist in me really loves the image of cloak-and-dagger political intrigue among the baths and the wandering steam.

I do wish I knew of even one or two NPCs published here or somewhere else that had yellow skin and knowledge that they would go to Hell when they died. It would make an interesting motivation for a good-aligned Chelaxian, actually ~ they don’t feel the need to be evil because they can rest assured that they will end up where they want to be after death, so they can safely and freely go against the grain of the culture.

The Cairn of Attai Horse-Speaker, the pre-Earthfall chieftain of the Atteran tribe, is said to be marked by an ancient statue and an entrance into the earth somewhere in Barrowmoor. It seems to be detailed in Tombs of Golarion.

The vampiric nobleman Volsazni Dezarr (a name that strikes me as more Varisi than Kellid) keeps a collection of light-related artifacts and holy wonders in the Castle of the Captive Sun, his ostentatiously named country home. His choice of guests is evidently also unusual, but we won’t know any details for some pages, it seems.

57 years ago (the equivalent of about 26 years culturally and only 8 to the elfs), the Order of the Scourge razed Citadel Gheisteno, headquarters of the Hellknight Order of the Crux, to the ground for betraying their founding ideals and the Measure and the Chain. All were killed. Considering that this was only 23 years or so after House Thrune (who, along with Iomedaean knights, helped the Scourge do this) won their civil war, bargaining Nidalese independence for Nidalese aid, I’m kind of surprised that we’re not told of this being a major international incident. By my math, remember, the culture should be reacting as if that civil war had ended only about a decade ago in our terms, and to any elf it would have been the equivalent only like 3 years ago! Even without that math, we can clearly see events from 1997 affecting today’s political situation. And whether the alliance with Nidal is a good thing is still a cause for instability in Nidal, anyway!

Lianne throws in another call-out to her two books set in Nidal, including their protagonists’ hometown of Crosspine in the gazetteer. It’s just a small village on the southeastern border of the Uskwood known for producing lots of arcane and druidic magic-users.