A Hobgoblin of the Very Worst Kind

One of my offspring is quite attached to a podcast in which a woman very nicely reads (pleasingly unvarnished and unbowdlerised) fairy tales and classic children's stories. One of them is Hans Christian Anderson's The Snow Queen. 

If you don't know The Snow Queen, it's framed by a sort of story-within-a-story in which an evil spirit has created a looking glass which causes everything to be reflected in a distorted way so as to appear like a twisted, sinister version of itself. The spirit and his cronies take the looking glass to heaven in order to make fun of God and the angels, but it shatters on the way into millions of tiny fragments, which then descend to earth to make various kinds of mischief.

The translation which is used in the podcast in question describes this evil spirit as 'one of the very worst kinds of hobgoblins' - a turn of phrase which never ceases to intrigue me, because of what it implies: that there are lots of different kinds of hobgoblin, some worse than others.

Having done some further investigations I'm not sure this translation is very accurate - the original Danish reads:

for det var en ond trold! det var en af de allerværste, det var "djævelen"!

And this, various online dictionaries informs me, means something like 'there was an evil troll; it was one of the very worst, it was a devil'. I don't speak Danish so I'm not sure, but I don't think there is anything here that implies there are different kinds of 'trold' ('Det var en af de alllerværste' = 'That was one of the very worst'?). MR James (who, astonishingly, translated it back in the day) rendered this 'There was a wicked troll. He was one of the very worst sort—he was the devil.' But, likewise, I don't know where 'sort' comes from here, unless it's just a way of accentuating the wickedness. The rendering of 'trold' as hobgoblin seems forgivable, because as I understand it 'trolls' in Scandinavian myth were more elf-like than ogre-like (as they tend to be in English fairy tales); somebody from that neck of the woods will now no doubt appear in the comments to tell me that I am a fool and wrong and that everything I say here is foolish wrongness. But this is the state of play as I see it, vis-a-vis translations of the opening section of The Snow Queen. 

Anyway, the concept of there being different kinds of hobgoblin interests me. This is because hobgoblins tend to be unjustly overlooked in D&D, at least in my experience. The main reason for this is that they have difficulty differentiating themselves from goblins and orcs. Goblins have the 'sneaky, malicious, deceptive' humanoid angle sewn up, and orcs have the 'evil, militaristic brute' territory. What then is a hobgoblin - other than an amalgam of both?

Over the years D&D staked out hobgoblins as a sort of lawful evil counterpart to the chaotic evil orcs - the idea being that hobgoblins are regimented, militarised, and hierarchical where orcs are savage and brutal. Characteristically this was spoiled in 2nd edition by making orcs lawful evil and militaristic as well, rendering hobgoblins almost redundant But thereafter, at least as far as I can tell (I am no expert on D&D post-2nd edition) the difference has been more clearly staked out: in 5th edition hobgoblins almost seem to resemble klingons:

This is not very inspired and feels inauthentic - sort of tacked on. The good thing about goblins and orc (and any really iconic monster) is that they tap into forms of disquiet that we feel viscerally. There is something scary about a small, sneaky, deceptive, malicious trickster. There is something scary about wanton cruelty and violence. There isn't anything all that viscerally scary about having a hypertrophied sense or order or honour, which appears to be what later editions riff on when it come to hobgoblins. We may disapprove of taking those things too far, but this in itself isn't enough to strike at any nerves in a primal sense (and in any case it overlaps with what we tend to think of when it comes to dwarfs). 

The implication that there are different kinds of hobgoblin frees us up a little bit. Instead of being a single monster type, it becomes more like a category or spectrum - a family, if you like, of different varieties of evil humanoids. The question then becomes, what are the different types of hobgoblin?

Well, there is the aforementioned 5th edition hobgoblin-as-klingon. You could even take this further and make them something almost like the Spartans of 300 stereotype turned to 11 - an entire race of satanic Lt Worfs without Captain Picard to keep them in check.

Then there is the hobgoblin of Warhammer, of course, who if anything, at least in older editions, was supposed to be something like a Hun, Mongol or Cossack - a nomadic steppe raider going everywhere on wolfback. I hadn't remembered this, but they were even supposed to be ruled by a 'Hobgobla Khan', the lord of the 'Mournguls':

Then there is the folkloric hobgoblin, suggested by the prefix 'Hob-'. Tolkien is the one responsible for describing hobgoblins as bigger variants of goblins (in the preface to The Hobbit); actually 'Hob' is said to be a medieval diminutive for Robert or Rob, which if anything suggests a small, familiar or even cutesy creature - more like a brownie, sprite or knocker:

These days in Britain you see Hobgoblin beer everywhere. The latest versions are very corporate and bland, but once upon a time it was a lovely, characterful beer (one of a line of ales with folkloric motifs brewed by Wychwood brewery). Here the hobgoblin is very much along the lines of a goblin, though one rooted much more in fairy tales than Tolkien - more like an evil woodsman who you might, nonetheless, enjoy a pint with in a tavern if he's in a good mood after a day's hunting: 

The most interesting hobgoblin variant may be White Wolf's from Changeling: The Lost, where they can take almost any form and inhabit the Hedge, the liminal realm between the realm of mortals and faerie:

You may be able to suggest more - feel free to do so in the comment. As to which is the very worst kind (Spartan-klingon; 'Mourngul' horde; Robin Goodfellow; evil woodcutter; shapeshifting farie), you can make up your mind.

Satan Helps Elucidate Skywalker's Rescue Plot

To cut a long story short, I was recently on a long-haul flight and ended up watching The Empire Strike Back and part of Return of the Jedi on the in-flight entertainment screen.

I haven't watched a Star Wars film since The Force Awakens came out at the cinema and I don't believe I had seen any for some time before that either. But there was nothing else on that I wanted to watch (apart from the surprisingly good Everything Everywhere All At Once) and 13 hours is a long time to sit and read without a break. So I watched Empire, was reminded that it is actually a genuinely good and accomplished film, and was enthused enough by the experience that I decided to just get straight into Jedi next.

I loved Return of the Jedi as a kid and was, in a way, childishly looking forward to a rewatch - after what must be approaching twenty years. I know it is maligned in certain circles as the place where the rot set in - and at times it does have the feeling of the prequels, as it were, avant la lettre. But the Jedi I remember from my childhood remains a fun, action-packed roller-coaster ride filled with excitement but leavened by sweet and even moving moments, as when Luke reveals to Leia he is her brother, or when Yoda dies. Yes the ewoks were, in my memory, a bit of an embarrassing misstep. But I also remembered loving the Endor battle when I was a boy and feeling my heart lift every time those furry underdogs destroyed an ATAT walker with a well-placed spitball or made a Stormtrooper slip over on a banana skin or catch his toe in a mouse trap or whatever. So I was up for it, big time. 

What I discovered was that Jedi is just a dreadful film for its first half - almost execrably bad. So bad indeed that I found it practically unwatchable. It is all over the place, filled with ill-judged humour (like the droid being tortured) and weird vignettes that spoil the pacing (like the dance sequence, made unnecessarily longer by Lucas's CGI meddling). And the plot to rescue Han, I thought, doesn't just make little sense, but is also internally inconsistent: I kept asking myself why on earth would Luke send R2D2 and C3PO as gifts to Jabba given that everything we know about Luke previously has indicated a total loyalty to his comrades? Why would Leia be there if Luke has a plan already hatched to free Han? Why doesn't Luke just go in first to negotiate? What is Lando supposed to be doing? 

I got as far as the speeders-in-redwoods bit and gave up. Later, after landing (I don't want to suggest it was the first thing I did when getting off the plane, but it may have been in the first ten things) I sent a message to some friends on WhatsApp observing that the plot to liberate Han made no sense, and wondering why I hadn't realised this as a kid. 

One friend messaged me back the following sequence of messages:

The plot makes perfect sense. It was all about lulling Jabba into a false sense of security. Lando is undercover. Chewie, Leia and the droids go in in such a way as to make Jabba think he is winning or more crafty than our heroes. 

(admittedly C-3PO doesn’t know he is going in but that adds to making Jabba and his cronies believe the story and underestimate Luke) 

In pre-Disney takeover canon, Bib Fortuna and Luke were meeting secretly beforehand; Luke was negotiating for Han’s release and Bib was trying to see if Luke was in some way useful to overthrowing Jabba and installing himself as leader 

Bib Fortuna survived the explosion on the sail barge and then promptly had his brain removed by the spidery monks that live in various parts of the palace (who are weird Force monks that can only commune fully when their brain is in a spider-walker)

Now, one of my biggest pet peeves in life is when the plot of a film can only be made to make sense by retrospectively making it canon that ackshually it was weird Force monks, or whatever (JJ Abrams is always guilty of this type of thing in his film-making); if a film can't make sense in its own right then it is QED a film that makes no sense. But I was amused by the fact that a big exercise had evidently taken place to give a post hoc justification for the Solo rescue and today, recalling the exchange, I decided to ask Satan about it. Here's what Claude's Opus 4.8 with 'extra thinking' and tweaked by my default instructions not to be an obsequious arsehole, came up with:

Short version: there isn't a single authoritative, Lucas-stated breakdown of "the plan." What gets called the canonical explanation is mostly a charitable post-hoc reconstruction that fans and tie-in writers built to make the sequence cohere, plus what's inferable from the film and a few Legends/reference sources. The film deliberately withholds the plan so the audience is as much in the dark as Jabba. With that caveat, here's the reconstruction that's become the accepted reading: 

The operation is a series of escalating contingencies, each a fallback for the one before, with a direct assault ruled out (in Legends, because the Empire had blockaded Tatooine to catch incoming Rebels).

Phase one is diplomacy and bribery. The droids arrive alone carrying Luke's holographic message: he asks Jabba to release Han and offers C-3PO and R2-D2 as a "gift." The critical detail is that R2 is carrying Luke's lightsaber. If Jabba takes the deal, Han walks free with no violence. Jabba refuses. 

Phase two is stealth. Leia, disguised as the bounty hunter Boushh, uses Chewbacca-as-captive as cover to get inside and collect the bounty, then thaws Han at night and tries to slip him out. Lando is already embedded among the guards as the inside man. If this works, they exfiltrate quietly. Jabba was awake; they're caught. 

Phase three is Luke himself as last resort. He walks in, reveals he's a Jedi, tries the mind trick, and is prepared to escalate. The lightsaber stashed with R2 is the ace in the hole — when everyone is condemned to the Sarlacc and concentrated on the sail barge, R2 launches it to Luke and the heroes turn the tables.

The load-bearing claim in the charitable reading is that the "failures" aren't failures: each blown phase still advances the board, getting all the players inside and ultimately out at the Pit of Carkoon, away from the fortified palace, with the weapon present. Some readings push this further and argue Luke needed Leia's capture. The supporting textual evidence people cite is that R2 holds the lightsaber back during the rancor fight and only deploys it at the barge — implying that moment, not the rancor, was always the intended endgame. 

Where I'd push back on calling any of this "canonical": the rancor was plainly not planned (Luke is just surviving), the mind trick failing on a Hutt is a genuine setback rather than a feint, and the layered-intent version requires assuming Luke foresaw specific failures the film never shows him anticipating. The most defensible statement is that Lucas intended to portray a now-confident Jedi running a graduated infiltration with a weapon pre-positioned via the droids — the precise "he planned every capture" choreography is fan apologetics, not established canon.

Get that, anonymous friend, who I am sure is reading this? It is fan apologetics, not established canon.

Intrigued by the role of Bib Fortuna, I asked it about that too:

Mostly real, with two embellishments and one outright error. The core comes from a genuine Legends source: "Of the Day's Annoyances: Bib Fortuna's Tale" by M. Shayne Bell, in the 1995 anthology Tales from Jabba's Palace. Going through the claim piece by piece: 

Bib survived the barge and got disembrained by the monks — accurate, but not "promptly." In Legends he escapes the sail barge explosion on a private skiff and returns to the palace. He then tries to seize Jabba's empire and actually wins a scuffle over the remaining possessions — he's the apparent victor for a stretch. Then the B'omarr monks emerge from the cellars and forcibly remove his brain. So there's a takeover-and-battle phase first; it isn't immediate. (In the X-Wing comic Battleground: Tatooine, his disembodied brain later gets subordinated to a rival Twi'lek, Firith Olan, and eventually transplanted into a fresh body.) 

Luke negotiating with Bib for Han — partly real, "secret meetings beforehand" is a stretch. The story does have Bib dealing with Luke, who wants to arrange Han's return. So a Luke–Bib negotiation exists in Legends. But "secret meetings beforehand" oversells it; the summary frames it as the business surrounding Luke's approach, not a clandestine pre-arranged back-channel. The kernel is true, the cloak-and-dagger framing is your friend's gloss. 

Bib using Luke to overthrow Jabba — grounded but extrapolated. Bib's overthrow motive is dead-on for Legends: he's characterized as the man with more plots against Jabba than anyone, "somehow involved in every plot against Jabba," positioned to inherit the empire no matter who lands the killing blow. So "Bib wanted to overthrow Jabba and install himself" is solid. The specific claim that he was sizing up Luke as the instrument for that coup is a reasonable inference but not something the text establishes — that's your friend connecting dots. 

"Weird Force monks that can only commune fully when their brain is in a spider-walker" — this is wrong. The B'omarr Order isn't a Force tradition. They're an ascetic religious order pursuing enlightenment through total separation from the material world — they remove their own members' brains and put them in nutrient jars so the mind can contemplate the cosmos undistracted by the body and senses. Nothing Force-based about it. And the mechanism is backwards: the enlightened state is the disembodied brain in the jar. The spider-walker (a BT-16 perimeter droid) is just a chassis that lets a brain-in-a-jar move around the physical world when it needs to — it's mobility hardware, not a communion-enabler. If anything, leaving the jar to ride a walker is a concession to the material plane, not the path to fuller communion. 

So your friend has the right story and most of the beats, invented a "Force monk / commune via walker" cosmology that isn't there, and slightly novelized the Luke angle.

Pro tip: it really helps if you say 'The B'omarr Order isn't a Force tradition' using the voice of the fellow in the Simpsons who tells Marge that 'Some guys at MIT are sending us a list of reasons why Captain Picard is better than Captain Kirk'.

Why, why, why, Delilah?

I recently recorded a podcast episode for higher-level backers of the Yoon-Suin 2nd edition kickstarter, in which I was subjected to some tough questions about certain aspects of the book. I liked the line of questioning, as I think it made the conversation much more interesting than a series of underarm throws ('Tell us exactly what else is brilliant about Chapter Four?'). But I wanted to expand in written form about an aspect of one question that particularly interested me.

The question was about what the interviewer called 'magical misandry', namely a theme which apparently (I hadn't realised this) crops up a few times in the book, and which I will describe as the 'Delilah motif'. This is the succubus-style female monster who uses magical or surreptitious means to deprive an, implicitly male, PC of his strength and vitality, or to kill or enslave him.

I name this the Delilah motif after the biblical character Delilah, who as you will know deprived Samson of his strength by cutting his hair while he lay across her thighs - it being strongly implied that this was after a bit of good old rumpy-pumpy. I am sure there are earlier examples if it in human myth, but this is familiar enough to have resonance.

The important thing about the Delilah motif is that, while we may disapprove of it or look askance at what it says about male-female relations, it also speaks in what I think is a very interesting way to a stereotyped feature of those relations which you can think of almost as the inverse, or evil twin, of the story of Beauty and the Beast. Why does Beauty and the Beast have particular power, such that it is basically the plot of almost every romance novel that has ever been written (woman meets strong, virile, wild male figure - vampire, pirate, werewolf, sadomasochist billionaire, etc. - and civilises him with her femininity)? It is because it speaks to a desire that appears to be deep-rooted in a great many people. The mythically or semiotically feminine transforms the mythically or semiotically masculine into something which can be good and productive in human society. Female love transforms the bad boy into a good man. And both women and men respond to that concept in fiction, at least in very large numbers.

(The list of confirmations of this truth are so many it is barely worth even beginning to start - I suppose we could write down 'Han Solo' and start from there.)

The Delilah motif interestingly and powefully inverts that notion by playing on the male fear of being civilised. Here I am drinking mead, eating syrup from the corpses of lions, swinging my dick in the wilderness and killing a thousand Philistines with the jawbone of a donkey, and it's great. And she wants me to settle down? Here feminine power is not portrayed as the redemptive power of love ('I've been saved by a woman...'), but as something which saps a man of his strength and vitality and ultimately weakens him to the point of incapacity. This is the stereotyped fear, familiar to us from sitcoms, soap operas and Hollywood movies, in the heart of the irresponsible male of being tied to a particular woman (it being no accident of course that Samson ends up being tied with rope after his seduction and impromptu short-back-and-sides). 

The Beauty and the Beast story and the Delilah motif exist in a state of productive tension in almost every romcom that ever was created, with the female character functioning as both transformative saviour and threat, and the male character functioning as both magnificent untamed beast and irresponsible fly-by-night, with the tension being finally resolved in balance of the former in both instances. And this is part of their charm and what (to a great many people) is part of the joy of male-female courtship rituals in their traditional form.

What monsters such as the succubus (and those of its ilk in Yoon-Suin) really do is simply trade on the Delilah motif in a way that, while it may not sit right in contemporary mores, strikes at the heart of that tension and essentially resolves it in the opposite direction to a romcom. You might even say that this is what the great many horror films that trade on that motif also do (whether as a minor incident, as in the opening to Phantasm, or as the whole plot of the film, as in Audition). They just tip the balance from Beauty and the Beast to Delilah.

And in that regard I don't think there is anything wrong with exploring that motif in D&D monster form. No, it isn't a healthy way to imagine male-female relationhips. But since when did any monster succeed by being a healthy reflection of anything? The point of a good monster is to disturb. And one way to effectively disturb people is to take a trope with which they are familiar - and which is extremely deep-rooted across cultures - and exploit it. So why not? 

And In My Last Hour I'm a Slave to the Power of Death

Apropos of nothing, here are eight ideas for megadungeons, each inspired by the title and lyrical themes of  the Iron Maiden album Powerslave (1984):

Aces High - A storm giant's tower, seated on a cloud; it is reached by climbing to a high mountain peak and then casting off by glider, which limits how much treasure can be taken back or forth (and from which some loot may simply fall off). The giant's goblin servants maintain a fleet of dirigibles, and use these to wage war on the aaracokra and sylphs who inhabit the region. Within the tower itself the giant slumbers, under a curse, and guarded by his silver dragon wife. His other servants include lightning mephits, automata and giff mercenaries - but entire floors have been taken over by interlopers in the master's de facto absence.

Two Minutes to Midnight - Down in the roots of the mountains mighty forces once arrayed against one another in a confrontation that could have spelled the end of space and time - at least within a continent. One was a great demon, another a mighty archmage, another an undead lord, the fourth a dragon queen. But in order to stave off the apocalyptic conflict that was sure to ensue, a demigod placed these four protagonists in time-freeze, together with their servants, in half-mile diameter sphere of stasis. They are frozen down there still, waiting to be released - along with their servants and treasures - but the roots of the mountain are deep, and over the eons many other threats and powers have populated the tunnels and caverns which lead to the stasis-sphere. The other snag is that the only way to get at the treasure held by the four is to bring the stasis-sphere to an end...and thus release them.

Losfer Words (Big 'Orra) - A monastery of monks who cut out their tongues to approach a god that cannot be named. Their home was under a spell of permanent silence and remains so, but the monks all long ago went mad and their god with them. Now many intruders have made their homes in the Labyrinth of Absolute Quiet - but some of the monks wander still, as undead, demonic, or both.

Flash of the Blade - The greatest swordsman who ever lived, wielding a possible sword, created for himself a fortress which he populated with many varieties of servitors and guardians, and then became a recluse. Rumour has it that he has died, or gone away, and that his 3,000 year-old sword - perhaps the most puissant artefact that exists - lies abandoned somewhere inside it.

The Duellists - Two demigods are locked in eternal conflict in the lost city of Tyre. Once the two were worshipped equally and shared the city between them; then a rivalry developed and the two fought each other until no inhabitants remained - and beyond. They still haunt the streets, ambushing, stalking, each sworn that it may not rest until the other is slain. They are watched over by a ghost who referees their struggle judging from an obscure rulebook. But meanwhile in the old sewers and tunnels and catacombs beneath the city life - and unlife - thrives, boiling up from the Underdark below.

Back in the Village - A reversal, natch. The PCs are dungeon-dwellers. The village is where the danger lies. They try to raid the human world for gold and glory.

Powerslave - A ruined pyramid where the god-kings once were resident in the months before their great sacrifice and the mantle was passed to the next god-king. This was until it so happened that one such god-king declared that he would not be a slave to death but would make death a slave of his own, and that he would live forever. And sure enough, he has, though he has grown decrepit and senile in the thousand years since. His servants are smorgasbord of ancient Egyptian-style creatures (including scarab-men, jackal-headed assassins, and so on) and those desert beings (trolls, blue dragons, manscorpions and the like) who have made parts of the pyramid their own.

Rime of the Ancient Mariner - It has to be a dungeon carved into the phantasmagorical, many-coloured glaciers and icebergs of a near-frozen sea, doesn't it? 

How to Semiotically Sex Up Your Campaign Setting With Celestial Symbolism

It's funny how you go down rabbit holes. Last week I happened to be in Lund, in southern Sweden, where there is a very grand and beautiful cathedral which is rightly famous. It contains a famous astronomical clock, first constructed some time around 1425, and which calls to mind CS Lewis's observation that the defining characteristic of the medieval mind was 'intricacy':

This is the clock's 'perpetual calendar'. Some more detail:

What you will notice about the calendar is that it is divided into four quadrants, each of which has a defining symbol. Going clockwise from the top, there is an eagle, a lion, an ox, and a man. Curious about what these referred to, I did a little research and discovered that these symbols are associated with the four evangelists, Matthew (man), Mark (lion), Luke (ox) and John (eagle). The first person to come up with this correspondence was apparently Jerome, writing in the 4th century, who derived the symbols from the first line of each gospel (Matthew's begins with Christ's genealogy; Mark's begins with a voice crying in the wilderness; Luke's begins with a sacrifice; John's begins with the eternal logos as an eagle flies to the sun). These in turn are supposed to also reflect aspects of Christ's character: as man, king, sacrifice, and son of God. 

It turns out, though, that Jerome himself borrowed the symbols from a passage in Ezekiel in which the man, lion, ox and eagle are decpicted as accompanying the divine chariot-throne of God. And this is further thought to be derived from the Babylonian 'fixed' signs of the zodiac, with Aquarius the man, Leo the lion, Taurus the ox and Scorpio the eagle (which was apparently the more usual depiction in the ancient world) ruling each of the cardinal points of the heavens.

I was fascinated by the concentric layers of symbolism here, like a nested table, and I was immediately drawn to a comparison with the Chinese 'four symbols' (which I wrote about long ago): the Azure Dragon of the East, the Vermilion Bird of the South, the White Tiger of the West, and the Black Turtle-Snake of the North. Here, the symbolism is again multi-layered; the different colours are supposed to represent the different hues of soil in the different regions of China, but they also map to the four seasons, four time of day, and so on.

I am sure that the two sets of symbols are unrelated, but I was struck by the odd commonality of investing four quadrants of the heavens, or four cardinal points, with symbolic meaning in this way. And it got me thinking about what might be called 'semiotic geographies' in RPG campaign settings - that is to say, making the terrain of a campaign world reflect or make reference to symbolic (or even real) figures or beings of some kind.

At the most extreme and hyper-fantastical, you could imagine a world in which each corner is literally ruled at its outermost extreme by a giant beast; I am picturing here a flat earth, where if you travel far enough from the centre you eventually reach one of four semi-mystical kingdoms whose ruler is an eternal demigod of some kind (dragon/bird/tiger/turtle-snake obviously works very nicely for a pseudo-Asian setting). 

At a slightly less fantastical level, it could just be that the entire world is divided ito four quadrants, each of which has its own flavour, flora and fauna, and so on. So you could have one quadrant ruled by 'Man' (which contains human civiliations), one ruled by the lion (filled with dangerous, belligerent creatures), one ruled by the ox (hulking gargantua) and one ruled by the eagle (flying creatures, obviously).

Or, at a slightly less fantastical level still, the four symbols of your choice could simply reflect something important about the nature of the campaign setting. Maybe each is a particular school of magic. Or character type. Or even pseudo-aligment. 

Or it could even be that each symbol represents a season, with very distinctive moods, dangers, and effects. Azure Dragon season is spring; it is when the world blooms into verdant life, but is correspondingly filled with aggression and danger; Vermilion Bird is summer, when there is intense heat and drought; White Tiger is autumn, when things slip into a kind of bacchanalian decay - rutting and 'tomorrow we may die' feasting being the order of the day; Black Turtle-Snake is winter, when come the snow and ice. Different types of magic are more or less powerful in the corresponding seasons, and different monsters come and go. 

You get the drift. Thinking up one's own four cardinal animals would be fun. Layering different variants of symbolism on them would be even more fun. You probably wouldn't want to have it permeate everything (I think probably deploying it as a subtle thematic motif in the background may be the best usage, keeping it largely implicit or unstated) as it would be easy to go overboard. But it is a way of giving a setting much greater depth than simply at the level of 'the orcs of mshjahsja live in the jungles of Ffnnnar and the dwarves of Eggegegg inhabit the Blood Mountains'.