After many months in the wilderness of research, we finally come back bearing exotic gifts: the Alihah, the pantheon of the pre-Islamic Arabs, are finally finished and available for download!
Working on the Alihah was seriously a journey. I've always found Arab folklore incredibly fascinating, but their pre-literate oral religion was so thoroughly curbstomped by Islam in the seventh and eighth centuries that it almost completely vanished. Trying to reconstruct it from scraps of myths preserved by reclusive nomads, oral retellings recorded by Dutch explorers in the nineteenth century and echoes still remaining in modern Islam was a crazy undertaking; even now, much more educated on the subject than I was before, the result is a piecemeal patchwork of memories, folklore and half-remembered gods. We've never tried to write a full pantheon supplement for a pantheon with so little in the way of surviving mythology, so it was a really interesting experiment. I'm not sure if we'll do it again any time soon, but it was seriously a blast.
The Alihah are a very different flavor of gods, and their inescapable entwinement with the roots of Islam makes for a supplement that can go in a lot of potential directions. We hope you enjoy their secretive, nomadic, celestial deities and find plenty of material to help flesh out the Arab world in your Scion games. Also, there are jinn, like, everywhere in this darn thing.
We'll be resetting the next-pantheon poll over to the right momentarily with new voting options for the next round. The Maya won the last vote of 2012, so we're shedding our dusty desert travel gear in favor of sturdy machetes and jungle boots.
I seriously like how the Arabs have no concept of an afterlife, though I guess being stuck in your body for eternity can suck a bit.
ReplyDeleteYeah, that was one of the most interesting facets of their worldview for me. It's possible that they did have an afterlife and we just don't know about it anymore because there's so little recorded about the subject, but it seems at least equally likely that they just didn't bother with it. Especially for the nomadic desert tribes, it makes perfect sense that they would think of life as the constant process of moving, and therefore death is what happens when you simply stop.
DeleteIt's not as much being stuck in your body as just, well, stopping. Dead is dead. The souls are still there for Scion's purposes, but they're probably not doing much and were probably mostly something like asleep before the Shattering woke them all up.
Beats being stuck in Mictlan or Di Yu, though, I guess.
Have to admit, I was a little skeptical of the pantheon first reading it. Had no idea how I felt about it, because, well to put it bluntly, I knew nothing about them and what they were about. I knew of the Arabian nomads, but I knew nothing of their religion. I guess I assumed they had a more loosely interpreted religion or were part of one of the other religions in the area.
ReplyDeleteI never thought they had an entire religion like this. So thanks for that. Helped me understand a little and to also read an interesting pantheon. Thanks for the info, now I want to make an adventurer with this pantheon. :P
I'm glad your interest was sparked. :) They are a very little-known pantheon, probably because that part of the world is so thoroughly Muslim now that we always think of that first, but I think they're one of my favorites. So cool.
DeleteExcellent read so far.
ReplyDeleteA quick skim, though, still leaves me pondering the questions I always do after reading one of your supplements (aside from obvious character creation).
Scent the Divine/Titanic? Code of Heaven? Vestiges of a Distant Past?
And how do they interact with your other JSR Pantheons (Anunna, Bogovi, Elohim, and Inca)?
Man... someday I'm going to remember to just put those things in the post instead of having to be reminded that they exist.
DeleteScent the Divine perceives the Alihah as a combination of the smell of sweet dates and the distant cry of an owl. Scent the Titanic perceives minions of Whedh with a sensation of the world around them suddenly rushing toward you. Vestiges of a Distant Past grants rerolls for Art, Athletics, Control, Fortitude, Stealth and Survival; Code of Heaven considers betrayal, breach of hospitality and disrespect of religious customs to be unpardonable sins.
Also updated the master list.
As for relations, they're probably closest to the Elohim, whose areas of worship they overlap and were sometimes venerated alongside (but the Elohim are a bit territorial, so the Alihah probably have to handle them with kid gloves). The Anunna are probably more aware of their talents and power than most younger pantheons who haven't heard of them, though they're still likely to be aloof and superior (you know, like they are with everybody). They probably have little relationship with the Bogovi but are cautiously in favor of working together; and they probably have a great deal in common with the Apu, who have similar views on the sacred properties of landscape features and the importance of interacting with humanity through them.
DeleteAnother excellent pantheon! It would be interesting to play a child of the Alihah, especially with their return to modern affairs. I like the idea that these modern Scions, perhaps more than many other pantheons, are really making the world stand up and take notice.
ReplyDeleteGlad you like it! I'm pretty fond of the idea of forgotten gods forcing the world to remember them, too.
DeleteIn the past you have said that forgotten gods are probably not legend 12. How did you get over that hurdle in the process of making this supplement?
DeleteThat's why I said above that this pantheon was really an experiment - it was us trying out working with a pantheon that has so little remaining mythology that we probably wouldn't consider them Legend 12, and seeing if we could make it work. I think the results were mixed; the mythological landscape of Arabia is incredibly cool and I think we did pretty well with getting a lot of its characters, flavor and places to explore across, but I think the gods themselves were less vibrant than we would have liked thanks to their lack of remaining myths. We set out to find absolutely everything we could about them, and discovered that there really wasn't much; we wrote them up anyway and hopefully well, but we probably won't open them for play in our games any time soon.
DeleteA useful comparison: think of them as our Nemetondevos supplement. We tried our hand at working with a pantheon that didn't really have much left to work with, and while it was fun and produced some good stuff, I don't know that we'll do it again any time soon.
This is an interesting take on a pantheon that, I admit, I had no prior knowledge or much interest in. However, I did think it was a pretty awesome effort.
ReplyDeleteSo the Maya are next? Now we begin the count of days...
I have to admit that I was pretty excited to see them getting so many votes, because they've always been one of my secret favorites. But then, I like the religions of the middle east a lot, apparently.
DeleteThe Maya are indeed next. The Great Library Quest will begin on 12.19.19.17.13, and we will roll over into the next baktun in style.
This is fantastic.
ReplyDeleteThanks for your hard work and research for making this.
You're very welcome. :) It was a labor of love.
Delete