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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Terramotus" data-source="post: 3970713" data-attributes="member: 7220">Not to pick on you specifically, but your post had all of the points I wanted to hit.If you're trying to tie it back to the Cathars... no.  It would actually go back farther.  I have no great knowledge of Gnostic texts (and I suspect nobody here does either - yay Wikipedia theology), but archon is a Greek word.  Greek gnosticism is much older than that, and I don't believe that Languedoc had any contact with the Greek-speaking world at that time significant enough to have borrowed words.  So wrong timestamp.I have a challenge for you - go to your local game or book and ask people what an archon is.  I'm willing to bet that not a single person references gnosticism.   If someone does - bonus.  You've met someone pretty knowledgable. Uh...  what exactly are they going to expect, then?  As long as they're female and pretty, that sounds pretty compatible with the Greek myths I know.  Do a Google Image Search for dryad and see what comes up - the first page is all somewhere in that range.  That seems a decent indicator of what most people think of.  Besides, Greek myth was never as organized or as universal as most modern books make it out to be and usually served the author's needs.  I'm also going to call BS on any references to modern fantasy and expectations that the 4E designers need to hew closely to it.  There's a massive difference between mythology and anything created after the onset of mass culture: self-awareness.  The old stuff was local and generated out of the bugbears of the subconscious.  Modern works are all works of synthesis and come from a thought-world so different that it's nearly impossible for most modern people to comprehend the actual old mythology.  Witness the attempts to organize it into a cohesive system.  "Greek mythology" is largely an invention of certain poets, such as Hesiod and Homer, and of later generations.  Everyone worshipped local gods.  Why do you think there are so many competing origin stories, multiple names and differing personalities for the same gods?  I'm not an ancient Greek scholar, but I have studied it, and I recall that it's probably not an accident that Homer and Hesiod wrote around the time when Greek culture was finally coming into its own and becoming conscious of itself.  Their works probably served a similar purpose to help define their culture as Ben Franklin's Poor Richard's Almanac did for the United States.Anyway, the point of that tangent is that modern fantasy is a whole different ballgame.  It's put together with a consciousness of what came before from totally different areas, and for a totally different purpose.  The portrayal of various mythological creatures in modern fantasy amounts to little more than a temporary fad, as they change so often.  The stuff that hits you deep, where you live, is usually the old things, and modern fantasy is like a funhouse mirror held up to it.  I think Gaiman's been so successful because he's able to help people tap into that old mindset, not because he's doing anything particularly original.  But 20 years ago he would have been weird and out there.  No modern fantasy is on anything more than equal footing with the 4E designers with regard to "mythological truthiness" (with the possible exception of Tolkien, due to his influence), since they're all just modern self-aware syntheses anyway.Being upset at their moving in a different direction is like calling Star Wars a crappy movie because of the 70s haircuts, or dissing Cyberpunk stuff because it's focused on issues that people thought were important in the 80s.  Whatever.  Fads change.  You may be more attached to a particular older pop mythology, but it's all too far removed from the old real myths to give any of it a superior stamp of authenticity IMO.</blockquote>

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