Amazonpunk and the Giantess Setting

I recently finished reading Buddy Levy's River of Darkness, about Francesco de Orellana and the first European voyage down the Amazon in 1542. It is one of the most riveting books I have read, if perfunctorily written - the story is itself genuinely incredible, but the window it offers onto a world now disappeared is unparalleled. We are used to thinking of Amazonia as a pristine natural wilderness, but the truth is that it is anything but: it is a post-apocalyptic wasteland whose original human inhabitants have now almost entirely disappeared, and whose great civilizations were laid to ruin by disease centuries ago before being recaptured by jungle. I knew this story from the (also excellent) 1491, but in River of Darkness we see it from the ground up, as it was first observed by the conquistadores who witnessed these civilizations (albeit only briefly) when at their zenith.

I suppose I had always innocently and naively assumed that there was some mythological reason why the Amazon is referred to as 'the Amazon', so I was flabbergasted to learn that the reason was because Orellana and his men seem to have encountered there a race of powerful women who ran an empire of their own. From 'The Trumpeter's Tale', recounted in the book:

[The Trumpeter, an Indian captive of Orellana, said] that [the Amazons] lived in the interior seven days' journey away...The Captain asked if they were married, and the Indian said no. The Captain asked how they lived, and the Indian answered in the interior, and that he had been there many times, and seen their customs and way of life, since he had been sent there by his chief to carry the tribute. The Captain asked if they were numerous, and the Indian answered yes, and that he knew seventy of their villages by name. He then named them before those of us who were present, and said that he had been to several of them. The Captain then asked if their houses were made of straw, and the Indian answered no, that they were built of stone, and had proper doors, and that the roads that ran between these villages were walled on both sides, and that they had guards at intervals alone them, to collect dues from those who used them. [Another version describes these walls as paneled with silver all around for half a man's height from the floor, and against them were placed silver seats, which they used for their worship and their drunken feasts. There is the addition, too, of a temple ceiling lined with variegated feathers of parrots and macaws.]

The Captain asked if their villages were large, and the Indian answered that they were. He asked if they bore children, and the Indian answered yes. The Captain asked how they became pregnant, since they were not married and no men lived in their villages. He said that at certain times they felt desire for men and assembled a large army with which they went to make war on a neighbouring chief and brought his warriors by force to their villages where they kept them for as long as they wanted. Then, when they were pregnant, they sent their prisoners back unharmed. If when their time came they bore a male, they killed him or sent him to his father. If they are girls they rear them carefully and train them to war. He said that their queen was called Conori, and they had great quantities of gold and silver, and that the principal women are served on gold and silver plate and have gold and silver vessels, while the common women use earthware, otherwise wood.

He said that in the principal city, where the queen lived, there were five very large buildings used as temples, and sacred to the Sun. He added that they call these temples caranain, and that they contain gold and silver idols in female shape, and that from three feet above the floor these temples are lined with heavy wooden panelling painted in various colours. He said that they have many gold and silver vessels used in the divine service, and that the women are clothed in very fine wool. For in that land there are many llamas like those in Peru. Their clothing is a blanket, worn either girded across the breasts or thrown around the neck, or secured at the front with a pair of cords like a cloak. They wear their hair down to the ground and golden crowns on their heads, as wide as two fingers.

The Indian informed us further that no man is permitted to remain in the women's villages after sunset but must depart for home at that time, and that many provinces bordering on these women's lands are subject to them and pay tribute and services to them. But with others they remain at war...He added that these women are white and of very great stature and numerous.

Levy goes on: 

Carvajal (Orellana's chaplain) noted that it all sounded plausible since he and his compatriots had been hearing tales and reports as early as Quito: the women warriors were so famous that in order to see them, some Indians traveled over 3,500 miles just to behold them, "and anyone who should take it into his head to go down to the country of these women was destined to go a boy and return an old man".

I of course lap this kind of thing up and I suspect you probably do too, redolent as it is of high adventure in a world of ancient and unknown mystery and rumoured wonder. But it also chimes interestingly with two recent themes here on the blog - the meaning of '-punk' and also The Wizard Knight.

'Amazonpunk' first, then: doesn't the account above suggest to you a campaign setting based around the concept of the Amazon civilization, run by women, in which men are decidedly third-class citizens (if not effectively almost slaves)? Here the PCs - they would chiefly have to be men in order for this to really work - are rogues, vagrants, adventurers, and outlaws (or, perhaps, foreign visitors a la Tekumel) trying to eke out for themselves glory, riches and honour despite the system of social hierarchy being implacably opposed. Down in society's underbelly, they strive to work their way upwards, with the implicit end state as they accrue power being grudging acceptance or perhaps even accomodation into the social establishment. IN THIS SOCIETY, WOMEN ARE IN CHARGE! is a trope almost as old as SF itself, but one which is underexplored in fantasy RPGs - at least in OSR circles. Doing something new with hoary old cliche is always a worthy endeavour, and I see no reason why IN THIS SOCIETY, WOMEN ARE IN CHARGE! should be any different.

Oddly, in The Wizard Knight - a book that, like really all of Gene Wolfe's fiction, gives the impression of having mostly been written about men, and for a mostly male readership - we get an interesting twist on the Amazon tale. The Angrborn, the race of evil giants exiled from the realm of Skai, have a society that is only comprised of males. Initially it seems that this is just the way things are, but later we learn that there are in fact Angrborn females who, disgusted with the oppressiveness of their male counterparts, go off into the wilderness to found their own society. 

It is intriguing that Orellana's Amazons (whom his conquistadores later encountered and killed in some number) are described througout as being very tall, of great stature, etc. What if the Amazons in our Amazonpunk campaign are, then, originally descended from a group of female giants who set up a Queendom of their own and propagated through breeding with human males? This would, of course, over time result in the creation of a race of half-giantesses, perhaps now not all that much taller than humans, but certainly big and powerful enough to dominate an entire region and subdue and enslave populations as they saw fit. 

I like this idea, and think it is worth running with, not least because it conjures up in the mind a dream of pulp fantasy novellas from ages past - books that one perhaps never read, but which one nonetheless retains an awareness of from the hazy penumbra of nostalgia which shrouds this hobby of ours so completely.