Question: I have a question concerning the Loa. Your site mentions Agwe as the Lord of the Underworld, but he doesn't have the Death Purview. I'm just curious as to why not.
The phrase is misleading, so our fault, not yours. Scion: Demigod sets Agwe as the boatman who collects the souls of the dead and ferries them to the Underworld; while this is all nicely death-flavored, it's really an example of a deity with Psychopomp, not Death. The Loa don't technically have a "lord" of the Underworld in the sense of figures like Hades or Yama; the closest thing they've got is Agwe picking up dead people and the Baron with his retinue of ghede and grave-spirits whooping it up, and neither of them is exactly reigning over the place with an iron fist.
Unfortunately, the Loa are a terrible mess in the original sourcebooks, and we haven't touched much of their stuff online in a while because we knew we were going to need to rewrite them. It looks like they're winning the poll over to the right, so they'll probably be the next project we tackle; in the meantime, there are sadly oddities, inconsistencies and weirdnesses still present in the Loa section of the site that are waiting to be fixed. By rights, Agwe probably shouldn't have anything to do with the underworld at all, as he's a figure associated with the ocean and we've never been able to find anything linking him to the dead even as a psychpomp - but then again, we suspect Agwe won't be staying on the roster after we finish our rewrite, so it may be a moot point.
what is guinee anyway? is it what the book discusses or is that version more bullshit?
ReplyDeleteI'm not an Loa expert (my mythological interests are little further east then that), but Guinee is a part of West Africa that is called Guinea in english and Guinee in french, so they may have just lifted the entry from wikipedia and made something up.
Deletethe wikipedia entry says that it's the land that African slaves seek to return to after death. Never-mind that voodoo has moved way beyond Africa when you can just make something up.
DeleteGuinee is the afterlife of modern vodun. It doesn't exist in African myth, but it's not made-up, just as recent as the rest of the diaspora religions.
DeleteHow much of an overhaul are planning for the Loa? Will you be redoing the family tree/PSP or will you be doing a full PDF complete with a new cosmology, politics, etc.?
ReplyDeleteThey're getting their faces overhauled off, the whole works. We did a full post on most of the things we were planning to change up back here.
DeleteWe're still not sure yet if we're going to do it in PDF form or just on the website itself, but it'll definitely be a whole new world either way.
All the overhauling
DeleteOriginal questioner here. Thanks for the response! Although I'm a big Amatsukami fan I did vote for the Loa overhaul just because now I want to see what you do with the Loa. Some of their figures seem fascinating.
ReplyDeleteVery glad you enjoyed it :)
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