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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 3301938" data-attributes="member: 4937">Indeed. There is plenty of archealogical evidence on the other hand which suggests otherwise, and if the size and scope of the human sacrifices were being exagerrated then they were originally exagerrated by the Aztecs themselves.  This is certainly true.  The Aztec pantheon is basically The toltec and Mayan pantheons shuffled around.  For example, in the Mayan version, Itzanama and not the feathered serpant is the chief of the Gods.  This is pretty common in polytheism.  We could say the same thing about the Greek gods.  Whats different is the level of rivalry between the gods.  Each diety seems to expand out into each of the other dieties roles in a way that the greek gods didn't despite also being patrons of various city states.   What is also different, is as you point out, these various deities seem to be based on conquering priest-kings from earlier ages - which if they are all based on mortal histories might explain why the pantheon is so nihilistic, tryrannical, cynical, bloodythirsty, and so forth.  (And before anyone charges me with not being PC enough, let's not forget that the Greeks had only stopped human sacrifice a couple of generations before the classical period which thier literature flurished in, and that the Pheonicians deities were probably as brutal as the Meso-Americans.)I've never seen the 2nd edition version.  But if anything, the 1st edition version softened things up alot.  If I were doing a full write up, I'd try to capture the distinctly Meso-American elements (all the gods are ghosts, they all hunger for human flesh, the 'heavens' are the great black scary void of space, the only people that can enter 'heaven' are those that died a violent and painful death, people that die peacefully go to 'hell', etc.)</blockquote>

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