Question: What does the word Tal'ich mean? Also, while the meanings of the four quarterly boons are given in the text, could you give us the meanings of the other boon names?
Sure! All the names for Tal'ich and its boons are in the Yucatec Mayan language (for consistency's sake; elsewhere in the supplement, K'iche and Tzotzil terminology is also used). The word tal'ich is a compound of the verb tal (to wear or take) and the stem -ich (face). It thus roughly translates to wearing faces, referring to the K'uh ability to change between different aspects. Behind the scenes trivia: the purview was originally called yaab'ich, meaning many faces, but we realized partway through the process that English-speakers who weren't sure how to handle double vowels or glottal stops were going to end up pronouncing it very unfortunately, so we ended up changing it.
As you noticed, the names of the four directional boons are simple: likin means east, xaman means north, chikin means west and nohol means south. The dual-natured boons are very straightforward as well; uinic chupla literally means male/female, utzil keban translates directly to goodness/evil, caan cab equates to heaven/earth and sucun palil means grandfather/child, where grandfather is a generic term for an aged person. Chun, the name of the level 9 boon, is a word that can mean both foundation and tree-trunk, referring to both the Scion's grounded foundation in mastering all four quarters and the symbolic presence of Yaxche, the world tree, at their center. And, finally, pakte means all things together, which is what the level 10 boon for the K'uh is all about.
We can't speak every language that Scion's pantheons use (let's be real, we can't speak even a fraction of them), but we do our best to make sure that flavorful pantheon-specific purview names are as close to the original language's ideas as possible.
Question asker here. Thank you so much for this! :D
ReplyDeleteI love how Dvoeverie and Hajj have the meaning of every boon name in their descriptions. Would it be too much to ask that you continue that practice for future supplements, cuz I love finding out what obscure words in ancient languages mean!
We usually do that, actually - I think we just didn't find a great place to integrate into the dualistic Tal'ich boons. Thanks for the vote of interest!
DeleteThis is something that I'm curious about regarding that purview; are the either/or and the directional boons tracked separately? Since the directional boons have a required order to transition between them, I was wondering if that implied that you could have a directional boon AND a either/or boon active at the same time. Otherwise, what happens when you switch from a directional boon to a few either/or boons and then need to go back?
ReplyDeleteI saw your question in the box, but I'll answer here real quick!
DeleteThey are tracked separately. At any given time, your K'uh Scion (provided she has all the relevant boons) will have active:
1) Male OR Female
2) Young OR Old
3) Positive OR Negative
4) East OR North OR West OR South
So you actually get to do a neat mix-and-match of four different kinds of aspects at once which do different things for you. You can be an old male negative west aspect, or a young male positive south aspect, or a young female positive north aspect, or any other combination that works best for you at the time. It's a bit like having a large grab bag of different personas for each Maya god to experiment with, since so many of them have multiple roles in their religion.
So yes, track all four separately. You only move from directional boon to direction boon, and it doesn't affect any of the dual aspects, which only move between their two options.