One thing we do know is that Viceroy of Ferrond was not at first a hereditary position.
Do we know that?
Yes. We do.
"In 898 O.R. the heir to Viceroy Stinvri (The Viceroyalty had become hereditary some years previously) was crowned in Dyvers as Thrommel I, King of Furyondy..." WoGG, Folio Edition p. 10
rasgon wrote:
Smillan_31 wrote:
If Furyondy did come under the rulership of a Celestial House, it could have followed the same model as Nyrond and taken the name of the Viceroyalty as its house name
Do you think that House Nyrond is simply named after the province?
Yes.
rasgon wrote:
What, then, was the name of the ruling house of Nyrond before the Battle of a Fortnight's Length?
Don't know, but for all I know they didn't even have one. Maybe most post migration Oeridian noble families didn't have house names. Maybe it was just something weird that the Aerdi picked up from the Suel they conquered. In either case, most countries we have examples of in GH are named after tribal names, not the names of the family that rules them.
rasgon wrote:
My assumption was that the existing royal house was permitted to continue to exist after the Aerdi conquest in exchange for becoming a junior branch of the House of Rax, a Nyrond princess marrying a lesser Rax prince and their son designated heir to the viceroyalty.
Could have been, but as far as I know either one of us could be right. I can see the dynastic union, but I doubt the Rax would have allowed the resulting heir to rule using the name of the previously-ruling native dynasty. To me it could be too much of a rallying point in the case of rebellion, and would just be asking for trouble.
Good points. I guess we can assume that none of the four viceroyalties were initially hereditary, but became so, unless you think Ferrond was unique in that respect and that's why it is alone in not having a named house.
The tribal name of the founders of Nyrond was Nehron (The Adventure Begins, 57), and a House Nehron would be equivalent to a House Aerdi, which of course doesn't exist. "Nyrond" was a name coined by the Aerdi; The Adventure Begins suggests that this name was actually derived from the name of the Nyr Dyv and might not actually have an etymological connection to the name of the Nehron tribe. The House of Nyrond could have been a cadet branch of the House of Rax that named itself after the Aerdi name for the province they came to rule or they could have been the existing ruling family of Nyrond that was forced to join the House of Rax as a junior branch after the Aerdi conquest, changing their name to fit the Aerdi style. The former sounds more likely to me now, though I can't rule out intermarriage with the previous rulers.
If the royal family of Nyrond changed their name in order to be less of a rallying point in case of rebellion, it had pretty much the opposite of the intended effect. Enough people rallied to the name 'House Nyrond' that the subsequent rebellion was entirely successful.
If I read the chronology right, Rax-Nyrond was a junior branch of the House of Rax given control over the Viceroyalty of Nyrond in -109 CY. In 86 CY or so, Overking Manshen became a Rax-Nyrond by proclamation, probably after wedding a member of that house. Rax-Nyrond remained remained the name of the ruling dynasty until 356 CY, when the House of Nyrond dropped the 'Rax' from their name and the ruling dynasty of Aerdy dropped the 'Nyrond' part. Though only Ivid the Undying refers to the Overking's house as Rax-Nyrond; both the LGG and, now that I re-read it, the original history in the Folio/Guide seem to indicate that Aerdy was ruled by Rax, the senior branch, and the junior branch only ever ruled Nyrond. Which honestly makes more sense, so I guess I should assume an error on Sargent's part.
In fact, the hyphenated form Rax-Nyrond only appears in Ivid the Undying. Elsewhere it's referred to as "the junior branch, then known as Nyrond" so perhaps it should be simply written as Nyrond or Nyrond-Rax. It wouldn't be Carl Sargent's only error in that book.
The Book of Artifacts says that the House of Hyeric was once the ruling house of Nyrond until it was exterminated, at least in part due to the influence of the Eye of Vecna. I connected the House of Hyeric to the ruins of Star Haunt in the Celadon, but perhaps the house ruled in Rel Mord all the way up to -109 CY.
It makes sense that the concept of royal houses was borrowed from the Suel, but there's some evidence that at least some Aerdi houses predated the Migrations (Johydee was a Cranden) and the words "house" and "tribe" were used interchangeably to describe the Migrations-era Suel political families.
Forgive me it was an error, as I was referring to Archbold's house, not Belvor's. I suppose it's House Nyrond then?
Glad I mistakenly said Belvor, though, as this discussion about Nyrond is interesting!
"Nyrond's strategic importance to the Great Kingdom did little to encourage just treatment at the hands of the Aerdi. The ruling house of the land was made subservient to the eastern House Rax, which ruled the territory..." LGG p. 77
That, to me, definitely says that Nyrond's previous royal house, whatever its name, survived the conquest, though ranking beneath the Rax.
"The Viceroyalty of Nyrond, which eventually included Urnst, was ruled from Rel Mord by a junior branch of House Rax." LGG p. 23
"Though not as vile or ruthless as some of their counterparts to the east, the Rax nobles exhibited insufferable arrogance." LGG p. 77
Again, pointing out that the Nyrond branch of the Rax were in charge.
"His (Lynwerd's) younger brother, Sewardnt is the rare rotten apple in the Nyrondese lineage, a throwback to the most decadent of Rax's heritage." Marklands, p. 68
So, yeah, this establishes that the current ruling house has descent from the Nyrondal branch of the Rax.
TAB states that this branch was named Nyrond, "A second sundering of the empire came in 356 CY, when the ruling Aerdi dynasty (the House of Rax) was split by an internal feud. The junior branch, Nyrond, declared its lands free of the Overking's rule..." But that same work later says that, "During this time, the royal House of Rax-Nyrond rebelled and formed the Kingdom of Nyrond," seemingly leaving us with a contradiction. You could however interpret the first quote to mean that "Nyrond is the current name of this junior branch, so that's what we're going to call it, while referring to it's rebellion, even though technically, at the time it was called Rax-Nyrond." Regardless, I think it's safe to assume that the current name is, as Rasgon states, Nyrond.
It's a bit of a historical irony that as much talk as there was about characteristic Rax traits, the Rax Overkings were actually Crandens by patrilineal descent. Manshen's wife may have been a Rax, and his mother Yalranda might for all we know have been a Rax by birth (depending on whether or not you think the Children of Johydee, one of which which Yalranda was, are literally descendants of Johydee and therefore at least partly of Cranden blood). Yalranda was said to have a prophetic gift for forging alliances between houses, so Manshen's odd decision to change the name of his dynasty might have been her idea. I've suggested elsewhere that there might have been other reasons that Manshen avoided using the name of his father Tenmaris's house; perhaps he wasn't truly the disgusting Tenmaris's son at all, but the product of Yalranda's dalliance with a man of the Rax line. But if this wasn't the case, the Raxes of Nyrond might have had a truer (from a patrilineal standpoint) claim to the Rax name than the Raxes of Rauxes did.
I wonder if that actually makes three major branches of the Rax family: the Rax-Nyronds, the previous House Rax, and then the descendants of Manshen. The previous head of the House wouldn't have been happy to have the Cranden Overking take his place; perhaps part of what was going on was that he fell into disfavor and Manshen had him executed.
Smillan's quotes above do seem to indicate intermarriage with Nyrond's existing dynasty, to my mind. The Overking gives the office of Viceroy of Nyrond to a Rax prince (a younger son, not the heir to the eastern Rax lands, wherever they were; it seems like ruling Nyrond is a better deal than having a mere duchy or whatever in Aerdy, but Rel Mord was probably considered a backwater at the time and the Aerdy dukeship surely offered more direct access to the Overking and power in the imperial court). The viceroy of Nyrond marries a daughter of Nyrond's royal house in order to cement his position there among the natives. Because it seems silly to invent a new name for this, I'm going to assume that Nyrond's royal house was House Nehron. The viceroy's family becomes known as House Nyrond or House Rax-Nyrond in order to distinguish his line from the descendants of his older brother, House Rax. Other members of the old House Nehron still have positions as nobles and courtiers in order to make nice with the locals.
In that way, members of House Nyrond definitely have Rax descent, but the preexisting royal family still exists, in subservient form.
I'm going to say the fall of the House of Hyeric came prior to the Aerdi conquest, with its surviving members fleeing to Star Haunt after being overthrown by the House of Nehron. In an earlier survey of the history of the Hand and Eye of Vecna, I had this happening in -159 CY (it could easily have been much long before this) in order to place it chronologically between other mentions of the Eye's appearance in the order they were listed. I'd suggested before that House Hyeric was connected to a heretical cult of Celestian, but now I'm more inclined to connect them to the Cult of Starry Wisdom, a Nyarlathotep cult described in Cults of Freeport.
Very nicely put together, Rasgon, especially the three branches of Rax and the bit about Yalranda. One other thing I found in TAB that I forgot to mention was that the Aerdi pretty much immediately "corrupted" Nehron into Nehrond, which then presumably evolved into Nyrond. It's in that same section that decribes Nehr- and Nyr- as meaning "lake." So, it's safe to presume that the early Rax-Nyronds were Rax-Nehronds.
From Ivid it seems safest to say that Manshen's wife was a Rax, although it could be interpreted to mean that Yalranda was a Rax, even though Ivid seems to be saying whichever one of them Manshen took the new house name from was a Rax-Nyrond. Could she (Yalrand or the unnamed wife) have been a Rax-Nyrond and then the Nyrond was dropped later?
What's the source for Hyeric? Can't remember where it is, and it's not in the Encyclopedia.
What's the source for Hyeric? Can't remember where it is, and it's not in the Encyclopedia.
The Book of Artifacts, page 35. "The Eye [of Vecna] was instrumental in the extermination of the house of Hyeric, once the ruling dynasty of Nyrond." There doesn't seem to have been any break in the dynastic succession since Nyrond's independence, so I think it probably happened prior to the Battle of a Fortnight's Length.
Star Haunt is from The Marklands. The connection with the House of Hyeric is entirely mine; the book only says that "The castle is said to have been built by an ancient Oeridian tribe overwhelmed by an inner madness." Possession of the Eye of Vecna would seem to qualify, though really this could be anything and "ancient Oeridian tribe" doesn't obviously mean the same thing as "former royal house." I'm thinking the castle was built back in the tribal days before their ascension to power.
My interpretation is that Nehron is the word in the Nyrondese dialect of Old Oeridian and Nehrond is what the Aerdi called them; obviously, the people of Nehron wouldn't care much how the Aerdi pronounced their kingdom's name until the Aerdi actually conquered them. Nehron was the name of their tribe, which possibly was derived from living next to the Nyr Dyv for a time (either to the north of the lake before they were driven east by other migrants - possibly by the Aerdi - or in what is now the County of Urnst until the Urnstans kicked them out and drove them to the east).
Whether the early Rax-Nyronds were Rax-Nehronds depends on whether the Aerdi word had evolved from Nehrond to Nyrond by that time.
Quote:
Could she (Yalrand or the unnamed wife) have been a Rax-Nyrond and then the Nyrond was dropped later?
It's possible, and I think that's what Ivid the Undying implies, though if this was the case I can imagine the Overking stubbornly keeping the Nyrond in his house name regardless of what a rebellious province chooses to do. The Guide/Folio history doesn't suggest this, though, and the Living Greyhawk Gazetteer seems to actively avoid calling the house anything but Rax.
It mostly doesn't much matter what house Yalranda was born into; she married into the Crandens, prophesied to the Crandens, and reigned as a Cranden. She may have been the one who prompted Manshen to change his own House to Rax or Rax-Nyrond, but I think the implication is that Manshen's wife was a Rax (or Rax-Nyrond) regardless of what Yalranda originally was. It could have been that both his wife and mother were born into the Rax family, or it might have just been his wife. Perhaps his wife and mother belonged to two different branches of the Rax family.
What is the name of House of margraves Rollo and Walgar of Bissel?
Mick, I asked the same question last year in this thread. The best guess was Skogend, because the Margrave was the Baron of Skogend. The source is LG Bissel. That's what I used IMC. I had the Skogends intermarried with the Qualtaines of Sterich; Querchard's aunt was married to Margrave Walgar. But that was so one of my players, who was the bastard grand-daughter of Margrave Walgar, would be related to the Qualtaine's also, since my campaign was taking place in Sterich. They were also intermarried with the Elgarins of the County of Flen through another of Querchard's aunts.
That's good enough for me then. Thank you very much :)
Prego! How is the wiki going?
Slow and steady. It's in Italian and quite chaotic in some parts, otherwise I'd gladly show it :) I am waiting for Anna to release the coat of arms for the major houses, so I could start working on family trees and so on (I'll probably grab the templates from Wikipedia, although they're a bit complex.
I am going through all the WoG Folio right now, as it will be the basis for everything else.
That's good enough for me then. Thank you very much :)
Prego! How is the wiki going?
Slow and steady. It's in Italian and quite chaotic in some parts, otherwise I'd gladly show it :) I am waiting for Anna to release the coat of arms for the major houses, so I could start working on family trees and so on (I'll probably grab the templates from Wikipedia, although they're a bit complex.
I am going through all the WoG Folio right now, as it will be the basis for everything else.
Cool! Is this pre-Wars? I got the impression that is the time-period for your campaign. Even in Italian, if you feel like sharing when it's done, I'd like a look at it. I've puzzled some good info out of some GH sites that are in French and German. Or at least I think I did.
Here I am again!
Any ideas on possible houses/clans in Sunndi? What about Hazendel and the royal houses?
Besides: "The County of Sunndi was once a fief within a fief, being granted to a loyal peer of the Overking's Herzog of the [[South Province]] of the Great Kingdom". Any idea who this peer was and the name of the Overking at the time?
I admit I colpetely forgot this line from the original Folio, under Wild Coast: "Legendary natives of the Wild Coast include such persons as Mordenkainen, Robilar, and Tenser, to name but a few.".
Just thought I could share.
Here I am again!
Any ideas on possible houses/clans in Sunndi? What about Hazendel and the royal houses?
Besides: "The County of Sunndi was once a fief within a fief, being granted to a loyal peer of the Overking's Herzog of the [[South Province]] of the Great Kingdom". Any idea who this peer was and the name of the Overking at the time?
Mick, there was a LG Sunndi group and their website is still available on the Wayback Machine. The Kingdom of Sunndi and Downloads pages look like they have much of the info you may want. As far as the identity of the peer, it might have been Azharadian, who conquered Sunndi for the Kingdom of Aerdy in -72 CY according to the Sunndi LG Triad.
Just a question about Woolly bay - does the term refer to "wool" or "uncertainty"? I need to know for a correct translation.
I thought I had seen references to it partially being due to there being a lot of fog on the Bay, but I'm not seeing anything now. The mention in WoG as to its naming refers to how the ships moving on it are likely to be pirates as merchants, so I'd go with the second definition, although in english the meaning in the sense of being hazy or uncertain is derived from wool.
It's based on the idiomatic expression "Wild and Woolly," meaning "marked by boisterous and untamed ways of living and by a lack of refinement." The Wild Coast is next to Woolly Bay because they're both exciting and uncivilized places to be.
The best translation would use an equivalent idiom in your language, if there is one, rather than worrying about what meaning of "woolly" is being referenced. Really, the answer is that it isn't actually referring to the word "woolly" at all. Think of a word meaning "unrefined," perhaps, in the sense of wool that hasn't been spun into yarn yet or in some other sense more fitting for a body of water.
Honestly, just give it any name that sounds cool to you because the name Woolly is only ever going to make sense in English and doesn't even make much sense in English. It can't be translated directly without losing the original connotation.
In Italian, "chiassossa," "bruta," "cruda," or "grezza" might work.
In Italian, "chiassossa," "bruta," "cruda," or "grezza" might work.
All I've got is Wiktionary to work with, but "confuse" seemed to be a good approximation; "Baia Confuso"? Baia Grezza sounds cooler, at least to an English-speaker who knows nothing about Italian other than a few lines from Dante.
Forgive (or not) the thread necro here but my thoughts have returned to this topic (mostly due to rewatching GOT before the new season comes out) and another issue I would want to address in GH is the position of the church.
Obviously, there is the Old Faith as has been mentioned above but the Oeridians, for example, have 27 gods in all. How could that be incorporated into a single faith (assuming you wanted to as I would).
What about the Nine (or Seven to mirror the Aerdy Houses) Great Houses of the gods. Could each Aerdy House have a patron god / house of gods?
The Oeridian gods don't really work as a cohesive pantheon unless you add deities.
At the very least, you need to add the common gods. They need a god of magic, they need a god of the sun, they need a god of death, they need an oerth mother, and so on. By now, whoever the Oeridian tribes worshiped 1,000 years ago, they're an integral part of the pantheon.
The Oeridian gods in particular need at least another generation of elder gods to properly explain where they came from. Who were Celestian and Fharlanghn's parents? If Merikka is a cousin of the wind gods, who were her parents and grandparents? Who were Heironeous and Hextor's fathers? Who were Zilchus and Kurell's parents? The Oeridian gods are full of pairs of siblings, which implies that they have parents. If they don't, what makes them siblings? Did they hatch out of different sets of uncreated eggs at the beginning of time? Possible, but not very interesting.
Remember that the Oeridians don't exist anymore. The Oeridians have been dead for a thousand years. Except for scholars, almost no one speaks the Old Oeridian tongue. Almost no one is of purely Oeridian blood. No one's going to worship "the Oeridian pantheon" as if that's a thing that anyone still cares about in the modern age. Since the Great Migrations new gods have arisen, old ones have faded into obscurity, and the old pantheons have both blended and split.
So it's not going to be as simple as "each pantheon is a religion." Religions are going to be shaped by politics more than anything. People in the Great Kingdom believe what they believe because the Holy Censor of Medegia decreed it, and if they didn't they'd be burnt as heretics. The people in the Pale believe something else because the Pale was settled by people who fled the Great Kingdom after a religious schism. The people of Nyrond have different beliefs than the Great Kingdom because the two nations have a history of war and hatred which prevents ecumenical cooperation and encourages differentiation.
That's not to say that people aren't influenced by the mix of peoples who settled their nation, just that there's a lot of room for theological change since then.
Most churches are going to be state churches, or associated with cleric-led states like Veluna, Almor, Medegia, the Pale, and Ekbir. Keoland doesn't have a state church, so religion there is less homogeneous and more full of charismatic cults.
Remember that religion is more than a list of gods; it's a set of beliefs about the origin of the world, the nature of the afterlife and the soul, the origin of evil and the nature of sin. It's about what responsibilities people have to one another and the gods. Can a mortal become a god or is that blasphemy? Can sins be pardoned by buying indulgences? Does free will exist? Do the gods prefer animal sacrifices or is that a savage practice the gods abhor? Is a god the same person as their avatar or are avatars separate, created beings with goals and personalities of their own? Can angels fall? Are devils descended from fallen angels or are they a separate creation? Are demons divine accidents or do they predate the gods? How many hollyphants can dance on the head of a pin?
Broadly speaking, you can plug in any group of gods and the religion will be pretty much the same. I mean, obviously a pantheon of twelve evil gods will be different from a pantheon of twelve good gods, but a group of people who revere Wee Jas as the patron of magic isn't going to be terribly different from a group of people who revere Boccob as the patron of magic unless there are a lot of other things about them that are different.
Probably almost everyone acknowledges as many gods as possible, just to be safe, but some gods are going to be more important than others and some may disagree on whether two gods (for example, Bleredd and Fortubo) are masks of the same god. For simplicity, I prefer giving a given church twelve or so major deities that they consider to be the most important. The LGG's lists of which deities are most popular in a given nation are a good start.
As the previous thread I started that you link to above suggests, I still have issues with a variety of competing religions in a more gritty GH. I can visualise a cohesive church that honours several gods but the place of each of the many religions in society is something I struggle with.
The biggest I can see (and kind of the way I visualize it for my campaign) is a single church that existed for the Great Kingdom, something like the a mash-up of the Catholic Church and the state religion of Rome, where as the Church developed and the Great Kingdom grew, more gods were added, some deleted, some promoted, some demoted. That would have covered a good deal of the Flanaess. In provinces of the imperial GK, some local gods were such a big part of the culture that they remained the focus and were co-opted with a wink and a nod, with the imperial cults tacked for official purposes, eventually making some inroads with some of the native upper classes. In other places, revelatory religious movements centered around one god caught fire with the local population and eclipsed the old cults and gods. As the GK's empire broke down, things began to change more drastically, with the imperial Church being torn by official schisms, and rebellious provinces no longer accepting the authority of the Holy Censor. In other places, though there was no longer political cohesion and sometimes actual hostility, the Holy Censor remained a revered figure, and had to perform a cautious balancing act between the Overking and his flock in the rebellious former provinces.
I can visualise a cohesive church that honours several gods but the place of each of the many religions in society is something I struggle with.
A single church for the whole Flanaess?
Not necessarily but a relatively cohesive church in traditional feudal kingdoms, or at least the former Aerdy lands as Smillan sets out above. The Baklunish have their own religion as would the Flan (the Old Faith). Not sure what I would do with the Thillonrian barbarians but I think the three main traditions could be developed quite easily without overly damaging GH canon.
That's basically my take on it. The Great Kingdom once enforced a single state church, but when Nyrond became independent the faith split; Nyrond's church was then centered in the Prelacy of Almor before that land's desolation.
If you wanted an exact parallel of Westeros's deities:
The Old Gods = The Old Faith
The Father = Zilchus
The Mother = Sotillion
The Virgin = Atroa
The Crone = Wenta
The Smith = Bleredd
The Warrior = Hextor (Heironeous in Nyrond/Almor)
The Stranger = Nerull (or Celestian?)
The Red God = Pholtus
The Drowned God = Procan
The Storm God = Velnius
Nerull's cult is important in Ivid the Undying and elsewhere, so it might make sense to make Nerull part of the Seven. On the other hand, you could lump him in with the Old Faith instead and just have some evil, subversive Old Faith cultists do all the things the Nerull cultists do. In the official Aerdi church, you could replace Nerull with Celestian as the mysterious god who escorts souls across the Astral Plane to their final destination. Or you could use Telchur, I suppose, if you wanted to emphasize the other wind gods' seasonal aspects. You could fuse Telchur and Nerull together as a single god of winter and death.
The Flan gods could all be part of the Old Faith, and other important deities like Trithereon, St. Cuthbert, and Fharlanghn could be thought of as lesser gods, recognized but not major figures in the church pantheon.
Scott Lynch's Gentlemen Bastards series (The Lies of Locke Lamora, Red Seas Under Red Skies, and The Republic of Thieves) includes a fantasy pantheon known as the Twelve. The interesting thing about it was there was also a god known as the Nameless Thirteenth worshiped only by thieves. To others, the idea of a thirteenth god in the pantheon was a heresy, but thieves believed him to be their special pantheon, equal to the others but existing in secret. I thought that'd be a good approach for the faithful of Kurell.
They do show a Johann's End, which -- according to an article by Gary Holian -- is/was the first "town" liberated by the forces of Keoland and was used as a headquarters by Keolandish forces for the retaking of the rest of the Earldom.
Which article is that? _________________ My campaigns are multilayered tapestries upon which I texture themes and subject matter which, quite frankly, would simply be too strong for your hobbyist gamer. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Mp7Ikko8SI
The Kingdom of Keoland, by Gary Holian, in the Living Greyhawk Journal, back in 2000.
You reference a project I was working on -- with Gary -- back in 2013. So I don't remember exactly which issue that was. I'd have to go looking for it. Sorry.
The Kingdom of Keoland, by Gary Holian, in the Living Greyhawk Journal, back in 2000.
That article was my initial guess - but I checked it, did a search for "Johann" and "End" and didn't find either, which is why I asked.
Since you affirmed that it was this one, I just re-read the entirety of section (8) - The County of Flen - and still didn't find it. The map at the end shows Keoland's border as extending no further west than Godakin Keep - Johann's End would be off the map and not in Keoland. I did a text search on "retaking" and "liberate" and got nothing.
I really can't find the reference about Johann's End in this article. _________________ My campaigns are multilayered tapestries upon which I texture themes and subject matter which, quite frankly, would simply be too strong for your hobbyist gamer. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Mp7Ikko8SI
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