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<blockquote data-quote="Blue Orange" data-source="post: 8784366" data-attributes="member: 7025997">Thanks for clearing that up about random beheadings and kirisute-gomen. I guess it was kind of like 'right of the first night' on this side of the Urals--one of those stories about the aristocracy told by later eras to make themselves look better.The translation bits are also fascinating--it's really hard to translate a document written by a completely different culture, with completely different cultural touchstones, and find something analogous. Spiritual taint can carry forward into later incarnations, as in Buddhism, rather than giving you a binary (or trinary) outcome at death, as in the West. There's also something amusing about seeing bits of your own culture used as 'exotic flavor'. (Perhaps it's only amusing because my country won WW2, though.)The four ages seem positively Tolkienian though. The 'lost civilization with advanced technology' trope seems inspired by the old Victorian one (think H. Rider Haggard's 'She' and more familiar to most, Lovecraft's 'At The Mountains of Madness'), but there may be local legends of which I am unaware!Thanks so much for this fascinating window into a game I will probably never get to play!</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Blue Orange, post: 8784366, member: 7025997"] Thanks for clearing that up about random beheadings and [I]kirisute-gomen[/I]. I guess it was kind of like 'right of the first night' on this side of the Urals--one of those stories about the aristocracy told by later eras to make themselves look better. The translation bits are also fascinating--it's really hard to translate a document written by a completely different culture, with completely different cultural touchstones, and find something analogous. Spiritual taint can carry forward into later incarnations, as in Buddhism, rather than giving you a binary (or trinary) outcome at death, as in the West. There's also something amusing about seeing bits of your own culture used as 'exotic flavor'. (Perhaps it's only amusing because my country won WW2, though.) The four ages seem positively Tolkienian though. The 'lost civilization with advanced technology' trope seems inspired by the old Victorian one (think H. Rider Haggard's 'She' and more familiar to most, Lovecraft's 'At The Mountains of Madness'), but there may be local legends of which I am unaware! Thanks so much for this fascinating window into a game I will probably never get to play! [/QUOTE]

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