Bogeys and Boggles

Question: I am about to embark on running a Tuatha game and was wondering how you handled the Fomorians. Can you also suggest some other Irish-centric creatures that could be used in that kind of game? I know that at least in the books that the Titanrealm opposing the Tuatha is Crom Cruach; what are your thoughts on this/how to portray it?

Ooh, a Tuatha-heavy game - an awesome and no doubt heroic endeavor, indeed. Luckily, Irish myth and folklore is positively brimming over with crazy-looking monsters and wild-eyed antagonists for you to use, so the only limit is your own creativity.

Fomorians are, on the whole, an odd people to manage, so how you portray them really depends on what your goals are in the story. They are often depicted in Irish folklore as hideous and monstrous, especially in later works, but they certainly aren't all monsters, since some of them, most notably Bres the Beautiful, were considered extremely handsome and some of them interbred with the Tuatha themselves. We have, in the past, usually handled this dichotomy by having there be different "classes" or "types" of Fomorians - nothing overly formal, just an idea that your average everyday footsolder Fomorian might be kind of trollishly hideous in a number of ways, but that high-Legend Fomorians may be anything their character requires them to be. Thus Ethniu, Bres and other important Fomorians might be as persuasive, attractive or multi-talented as the gods themselves, but you can still use the average everyday Fomorian as the lumpish, ogre-faced monster that modern folklore usually paints them as. Like the Tuatha themselves, or the fairy folk of later myth, the Fomorians and Fir Bolg are basically races of supernatural people, not necessarily undifferentiated monsters - more like the Alfar of Norse myth or the Peri of Persia.

In fact, here's a great artistic representation by John Duncan of a Fomorian army on the move - all certainly unsettling and nasty-looking, but definitely not identical or even similar:



If you'd like to play on the tensions between the different supernatural races of Ireland and bring the fairies into it (and don't we always want to bring the fairies into it?), we've also occasionally hinted that the darker, nastier forces among the fairy kingdoms are allied with the Fomorians while the more stand-up fairies remain loyal to the Tuatha. Especially if your game runs with an even Seelie/Unseelie Court split, you might be able to weave the Fomorians in together with other Irish issues to make them major players that can't be ignored with a few handy battles (because, after all, the Tuatha have tried battles and it just seems to keep not working).

As far as specific powers and behavior of the Fomorians, that really depends on your vision of them; mythology is very vague about them and there are conflicting scholarly theories on what they are and represent. Many interpreters of Irish myth link them strongly to the sea, citing their reported prowess as sailors and fishermen and noting that their name might be connected etymologically to an ancient root word for sea; you could easily give them watery powers and even some influence or guidance from the Titanrealm of Water if you wanted to. They are also strongly connected to war and conflict (as are the Tuatha themselves), so they're likely to have significant numbers of warriors and skilled tacticians in their ranks.

But you wanted to talk about other critters, not just the Fomorians, so let's take a quick look at the massive grab-bag of Irish folkloric creatures! The easiest go-to place for antagonists and NPCs is of course the fairies, who, far from all being happy little blonde women with wings and bags of pixie dust as generally portrayed in modern culture, run the gamut from horrifically bloodthirsty and terrifying monsters to benevolent, wise creatures who may grant requests (but always for a price!). Ogres, giants, goblins and other nasty creatures are among the ranks of the fairies as well as the pleasant courtiers of fairy royalty, and if they were considered to be abroad in Ireland well into the medieval period, they can only be even more numerous and dangerous now that the Titans have escaped. Then there are also many (many many) Celtic fairies and fairy creatures that are uniquely nasty and indigenous to the isles; things like the Sluagh, spirits of the restless dead who accompany the fairies through the world in hopes of stealing the souls of the living to travel with them, or the Selkie, a seal that can change into human shape and be trapped if its skin is stolen from it, or the Merrow, mermaids who lure men into the sea to remain with them forever in bliss or tear apart and consume them depending on their whim, or the Pooka and Kelpie, shape-changing creatures most often seen as horses who lure mortals to ride them and then drag them to strange otherworldly locales or throw them to their deaths. A particularly horrifying favorite of mine is the Nuckelavee, a centaur-like monster with no skin and a terrible habit of destroying everything in its path.

Basically, ancient Ireland was completely terrified of monsters coming after them, and therefore Irish folklore has one of the widest selections of horrible nasties to choose from. We could probably go on listing them all day, but this post is getting long enough as it is, and I've also given myself the shivers from looking at too many pictures of nasty Irish face-eaters.

As for Crom Cruach... well, Crom Cruach in the Scions books is, not to be too nice about it, a fucking terrible mess. Crom Cruach himself is certainly a great choice for a high-level Irish antagonist; as a sacrifice-receiving god who most scholars agree must have predated the Tuatha and has nothing to do with their worship, he is certainly described in the few sources remaining about him as nasty and dangerous, and in any case, the Tuatha don't like gods who aren't Tuatha trying to take up space on their islands. But, unfortunately, the Crom Cruach in the books resembles the mythic figure in name alone; the god Crom Cruach was most likely a fertility god, propitiated with blood sacrifices to convince him to keep crops alive and not wither them out of spite, while the Crom Cruach of the Scion books appears to be some kind of weird, maggot-ridden figure of decay, connotations that the god simply doesn't have. (These are most likely borrowed from the Sláine comic series, which features Crom Cruach as a giant maggot monster; but, as we've said many times before I'm looking at you Mikaboshi, modern comic books are definitely not acceptable scholarly sources no matter how awesome they might be to read. For heaven's sake, Moloch is a major player among the Fomorians in Sláine, and he's not even vaguely Irish.)

But Crom Cruach himself could certainly be used as an excellent antagonist even if you pare away all the nonsenses of the Scion books (i.e., he has nothing to do with decay and death other than receiving sacrifices, he has nothing to do with the Fomorians or Fir Bolg, and generally shouldn't be lumped together with Ireland's other antagonists just because it makes it easier to classify him). I would consider him either an old god, part of a bloodthirsty, anti-heroic time before the Tuatha who may be refusing to back off their turf or campaigning to regain his power and worship after they supplanted it, or perhaps a Titanic creature or even Avatar, most likely aligned with Ourea. And incidentally, Crom Dubh, who is also in the Scion books in absolutely butchered form, does not have anything to do with decay or the entirely different antagonists of the Fir Bolg, but he could still be a great antagonist in the same form, probably as an ally of Crom Cruach from that ancient, Tuatha-replaced sacrificial religion.

It's also worth noticing that what little we know of the worship of Crom Cruach and Crom Dubh is much more similar to the surviving mentions of practices of worshipers of the Gaulish gods on the continent than those ascribed to the Tuatha; so if you feel like bringing in a little rivalry from the Nemetondevos, you could always claim that the two of them were gods who had spread to the isles from the mainland (accompanied by Cernunnos, perhaps, who also appears now and then in Ireland), and play up political tensions in a number of ways as a result.

Ah, Ireland... nowhere else is there such a bewildering, dizzying profusion of creatures that want to kill everyone. Now there was a people who took their night terrors seriously.