Author: admin

We’ve finally reached the end of the Happy Days theme song, I mean, the week!

Saturday is another difficult day. So far, I’ve given each day to a member of Vladimir’s pantheon, so you might think for Saturday I’d go with the last from the list above, Simargl. Simargl is interesting, and probably worth exploring in another blog post some day, but when we get right down to it, we’re not really sure if Simargl was even a real deity! The best guess at an etymology is that it’s a corruption of the Persian Simurgh, and the historian Boris Rybakov followed this vein to suggest Simargl was a wolf-eagle hybrid and lord over seed and vegetation, but this is pretty speculative. Another theory holds that Simargl is actually an accidental conflation of two separate beings Sem and Rgel, which may or may not also be vegetative deities. Even more so than the enigmatic Khors (who at least gets mention in the Tale of Igor’s Campaign), we really know nothing about Simargl beyond the name, which may actually be two names, and everything else is speculative linguistics.

If we instead try to extrapolate Saturday from the role of the syncretic deities, the task is still difficult. In Mesopotamian astronomy, the planet Saturn was associated with the deity Ninurta, a god of agriculture and healing. Why? Possibly because Saturn is the slowest planet, and there was a myth about Ninurta and a turtle. [see below] When the Greeks were translating the planets, they focused on the fact that he was the son of Enlil (the Sumerian equivalent of the later Babylonian Marduk), but rather than choosing one of Zeus’ many sons, they chose his father, Cronus. Cronus has some agricultural connotations, either because he ruled over a prosperous golden age, or because he traditionally held a sickle (which he used to castrate his father, Uranus). The Romans equated Cronus with Saturn, an agricultural deity and father of Jupiter, and also the quintessential father time. The time domain may actually come from confusion between Greek Cronus and Chronus, but it also has some amount of sense, what with the passing of the seasons. By the time we get to the Norse, there is apparently no good equivalent, and thus ‘Saturday’ is the only English day with a Latin rather than Germanic root.

So, this leaves us with slowness, agriculture, seasons, time, or just throwing up our hands and sticking with Latin Saturn. Simargl, if he existed, is actually not unreasonable given the possible connection to sowing of seeds. However, I think I’ll go in a different direction and choose Marzanna, alias Morena. Marzanna is a Western Slavic deity, not attested in any writings, but still encountered in modern folk traditions. The story goes that she was married to the god of spring, Jarilo, but slew him for his infidelities. Still, she felt remorse, and wasted away into despair. Her actions and demise are played out again year after year, creating the seasons in a sort of take on the Persophone myth. She is associated with death and winter, and her effigy is burnt in the spring to mark winter’s passing. Her close connection with time and the seasons make her, I think, a decent fit for Saturn, plus I think her myth is one of the most interesting of the Slavic tales.

(An aside, I never really got into the why of associating planets with deities in Mesopotamia. There’s some guesswork here, but each planet has certain attributes that separate it from the others. Mars is visibly red, like blood or rusted iron, so war seems logical. Mercury twinkles, and this seems to lead to an association with magic. Jupiter is the highest in the night sky, and so gets heavenly connotations, with either ruling, thunder, or both. Venus appears with the sun at dawn, and from there is associated with birth and fertility. Saturn moves most slowly in the sky.)

I hope you enjoyed this little foray into history, mythology, and language!

Back in January, the (admittedly small) world of TTRPG writers and designers was rocked by the news that Wizards of the Coast had plans to revoke the Open Gaming License, the foundation for much of the hobby’s smaller creators for the past two decades. WotC eventually relented (you can read Lin Codega’s reporting for the details), not only promising they wouldn’t revoke the OGL, but also releasing the core D&D rules, the 5th edition System Reference Document (or SRD) under a Creative Commons (CC-BY) license.

Pardon the acronym soup, but it’s essential for the point I’m getting to (and let’s be honest, if you’re reading this blog, you probably knew those already).

While I love that the 5e rules are now available under Creative Commons, some of my favorite monsters are not part of the SRD (or even available using the OGL, for that matter). Having already spent plenty of time in the past few years making my own lore about chaotic frog folk, I wanted to keep writing about them regardless of where I want to publish or under which license. So, I went about creating my own stat blocks, and that snowballed into what I’m calling the Khyberia SRD.

These are 5e compatible rules and stat blocks I’m releasing under a CC-BY license, so you are free to use these in whatever project you like, free or commercial, all I’m asking for is credit and a link back here. I plan to add to this document over time, so if you like what’s there so far, you can check back for further updates.

Special thanks to the Level Up: Advanced 5E project by EN Publishing, who are not only releasing their core content under a CC-BY license, but put together a handy guide on using Creative Commons for RPG projects, which I referenced extensively.

Khyberia SRD

See part 1 here

Tuesday is perhaps the most problematic day; while there are a plethora of Slavic war deities, none of them feel like a very good fit for one reason or another. There’s seven-headed Svetivit or Svantovit, a war god of the Polabian Slavs on the isle of Rugen, but he was probably likely a local deity unknown to the greater Slavic world or else possibly a hypostasis of another god like Perun (or maybe even multiple gods, hence the seven heads). There is Jarilo, whose name is derived from a Slavic folk festival, who is sometimes identified as a war god but is on the whole a more Dionysian figure of spring. There’s Chernobog, the “black god,” primarily a figure of personified bad luck, but might be the same as the war and victory god ‘Tjarnaglofi’ mentioned in the Danish Knytlinga Saga (but probably nott). ¹see Gorbachov – What Do We Know about *Čьrnobogъ https://brill.com/view/journals/ruhi/44/2-3/article-p209_209.xml Even Dazhbog, as a sky god and ancestral figure, is in some ways equivalent to the Germanic Tiwes, but lacks a martial character in any source.

This leads me to Stribog. Stribog is generally accepted as a god of wind, first and foremost. His only real association with war is an allusion to how the wind carries the arrows of an adversary, which while nothing, is admittedly not strong evidence. Tatischev associated Stribog with the Latin Mars, but never really justified why, and possibly was trying to overfit his model to match other pantheons. In order for me to justify Stribog, I had to dig a bit deeper into the whole process of how the different deities were associated with days of the week. As I mentioned, the whole process started in Mesopotamia, and the deity associated with the planet Mars was Nergal, a god of war but also of death and disease. When it came time for the Greeks to adapt the Babylonian system, there was not generally an exact match between deities in the two cultures, so they had to choose which particular aspects to emphasize. Now, Stribog is not a god of disease or death either, but of all the elements in Russian folklore, the wind seems to be primarily malevolent, spreading disease and misfortune (see Elizabeth Warner’s Russian Myth). This, together with the seeming importance of wind in Slavic mythology (there is possibly another West Slavic deity called Poxvist or Pozvizd, and many fantastic creatures associated with the whirlwind in South Slavic folklore), convinced me to promote Stribog for Tuesday.

There are a couple options for Wednesday… Stribog could be a vague fit, given the connection of wind with Mercury’s fleetness, but it seems a bit of a stretch for me. Svarog, a sky deity and ancestor of some other deities seems to me to have some parallels to the Norse Odin, but he’s elsewhere compared to Hephaestus, and also seems a closer parallel to Uranus. The best fit, then, is Veles or Volos. Veles is one of the deities we know the most about, both from written sources, surviving idols, and his later association with Saint Blaise in Russia. Veles is a chthonic deity, with parallels to Pluto, and as the god of cattle he also became associated with wealth. It is significant that his idol in Kyiv seems to have been located in the merchant’s quarter, and trade was Mercury’s domain as well. Veles also seems to have been associated with magic, which connects him not only to Mercury and Hermes but also Odin and Mesopotamian Nabu.

Thursday goes to Perun. Perun was a thunder god, much like Thor or Jupiter, and like Jupiter or Mesopotamian Marduk he was usually in the role as chief of the pantheon. Like Veles, Perun left a large trace on Slavic customs, often being conflated with Saint Elijah. Finally, in my research I found that Perun was was actually historically associated with Thursday, or Perundan, in the language of the Polabian Slavs! The same can’t be said for any other deities.

The obvious choice for Friday is probably Mokosh. As the patron of moist mother earth, she was a fertility deity like Freyja, Venus, Aphrodite, and Ishtar, and her presence among Vladimir’s idols marks her as an important deity, albeit there is less trace of her than either Perun or Veles. Another runner up might be the Zorya, twin (or triplet) deities associated with the dawn star and the evening star, that is, the planet Venus. I’d go with Mokosh over the Zorya though because, despite their recent popularity thanks to Neil Gaiman’s ‘American Gods,’ we’re not sure to the extent that the Zorya were major deities or more like pseudo-deities, as there aren’t surviving written records of them, only in customs and songs.

To be concluded…

My interest in Slavic mythology got kickstarted because I didn’t like the Slavic names for the days of the week.

I should back up. In English, the days of the week have a hidden meaning. Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday are actually named for the Germanic deities Tiwes (equivalent to Norse Tyr), Wotan (Odin), Thor, Frigg (or Freya), and the Latin Saturn. The days have similar meanings in German and Romance languages, though of course Tiwes, Wotan, Thor, and Frigg were only standing in for their Roman mythology counterparts Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, and Venus. We can trace their history all the way back to Mesopotamian astronomy and its association of the five visible planets (plus the sun and moon) with specific deities that somehow mirrored those planets’ characteristics. Thus, the English days of the week offer a microcosm of syncretic mythology from Mesopotamia through Greece to Rome and the furthest reaches of its empire.

In Slavic languages (I’m using Polish for my reference), the days of the week starting with Monday roughly translate as “After Sunday,” “Second,” “Middle,” “Fourth,” “Fifth,” “Sabbath,” and “No Work.” OK, I do admit that having a day called no work (Niedziela) is pretty awesome, but the rest are pretty lacking in creativity. Slavic months, on the other hand, are incredibly poetic, cataloging such events as the blooming of flowers, of the linden tree, the falling of leaves, and even the season of the red cochineal (an insect used to make red dye) throughout the seasons. I thus wondered, could one not simply look at comparative mythology to make English or Romance-style names for the days of the week in the Slavic languages?

Unfortunately, I found that it was not such an easy project. Unlike the mythologies of Europe and the Near East, Slavic mythology was never recorded in written form by its practitioners. The only solid written evidence we have about Slavic mythology was written by church chroniclers who were mainly interested in pointing out its folly rather than making a thorough accounting. Some folklore that survived into the Christian era seems to contain kernels from a half remembered mythology, and some stories can be guessed at due to a common linguistic source in Proto-Indo European religion, but any such anthropological or linguistic reconstruction is going to involve some amount of guesswork. This is all to say that we can’t hope to create a fully accurate reconstruction of the pre-Christian Slavic pantheon, but we can make some educated guesses.

Since a rereading of ‘American Gods’ got the project on my mind again, I thought it might be fun to run through my take on what the Big Seven Slavic deities might look like to rub shoulders with the Norse, Greeks, and Babylonians.

The clearest attestation of a Slavic pantheon comes from the Primary Chronicle. Here, we’re told that Grand Prince Vladimir I of Kyiv erected together idols to the deities Perun, Khors, Dazhbog, Stribog, Mokosh, and Simargl, and in a separate part of the city an idol to Volos or Veles. While this is the closest we come to a full fledged pantheon ion a primary source, we can also find primary sources that refer to other pan-Slavic deities (like Svarog and Svaorovich), deities worshiped in a more limited area (like Svantevit or Chernobog), and deities preserved in songs and ceremonies (like Zorya, Marzanna, and Jarillo), though some of these may not even be full fledged deities. There are a lot of suppositions and possibilities in this subject, so to make the clearest narrative I can, I’m just going to take the days of the week one at a time and give my top contender or two for the role.

For Sunday, our top contender is Dazhbog. ‘Bog’ is the word for god in various Slavic languages, and most scholars believe the ‘dazh-’ root comes from the root of the word ‘to give’ (in Polish, ‘I give’ is ‘daję’). This would make Dazhbog the giving god, a distributor of life and good fortune, a proper role for a solar deity. Dazhbog’s biggest pedigree, though, is that his name is used as a gloss in another text for an Egyptian solar deity and compared to Greek Apollo (his father, Svarog, is meanwhile compared to Hephaestus).

The other possible solar god of the Slavs is Khors. Other than the name, we know precious little of Khors. The long prevailing theory was that Khors was a transplanted Iranian deity (since Iranian people like the Sarmatians made up a significant minority in Kyiv) with Khors being derived from an Iranian word for the sun. This theory is sometimes furthered by suggesting that there is actually a single deity Khors-Dazhbog, with Daszbog being a descriptive epithet (essentially “Khors the giving god”). However, a newer argument by scholars including Michał Łuczyński posits Khors as a moon god, its name derived from a word for “emaciated” and referring to the waning moon (moon in Polish is ‘księżyc’). There’s also some evidence in the Tale of Igor’s Campaign (a mythic history of the Eastern Slavs comparable to the Illiad or the Odyssey) such as a journey which seems to take place at night cutting the path of Khors. Considering the next most likely name for a lunar deity, Jutrobog, has little reliable documentary evidence, I’m willing to give Monday to Khors.

Next time, we’ll tackle the dreaded Tuesday, and more!

Time to revisit Strixhaven again! In the first post, I talked about how I was inspired to create a Strixhaven adventure based on what we can learn in the real world from RPGs, starting with my favorite subject of history. Then, I looked at math and communication, which have fairly straightforward applications. Now let’s tackle the final subjects, science and art.

The fourth pub, the Sleeping Toad, goes with Witherbloom campus, focused particularly on the life sciences. Looking at lessons from RPGs, this was the most puzzling for me. I know that there is a large overlap between science nerds and RPG enthusiasts, but can we really learn science from a roleplaying game? Logic, sure, because the game world always has some sort of internal working that you can analyze, but real world science?

Then I started to think about Dungeon ecology: the idea that, even in a fictional, magical world, there should be a logic to how it would work as a real world. This is why some weird monsters like gelatinous cubes and carrion crawlers exist, as thought experiments for how lifecycles would play out in a fantastic megadungeon environment. For the challenge, then, the players end up tracing a food chain in the D&D cosmos, from the lowliest kobold to a fearsome dragon, and it also gave me a change to include some (optional) combat in an otherwise combat-lite adventure.

Lastly, the Beauty’s Mirror is there for art and the Prismari college. For this one, the lesson was obvious to me, because it is one that I developed a lot over the past few years, first as a DM and then as publisher on DMs Guild: to create! One of the revolutionary things about RPGs vs other types of games is that they involve the players in creating the game, whether a single character or an entire world or somewhere in between. In a world where problems often defy the established ideas, creativity is perhaps the most important thing we can teach, and possibly the hardest.

As with the challenge in the Beauty’s Dreamer, I wanted this one to be accessible to all skill levels, because the message here is similar: anyone can create, and the importance is not in the technical detail, but what you can express.

This project was borne out of an idea that I hold close to my heart, as someone who works in education, who loves RPGs, and who has my own kids that I want to share the hobby with: that we can learn from games! Whether is is formal education, like math, or something more nebulous, like communication or creativity, I am always looking for ways to find these lessons in the games I love.

You can find The Pub that Crawls on DMs Guild.

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