This week I dug my heels in to inspect the so-called "Savage Lands" of Rathe, continuing from where I left off.
While they are savage, and in spite of how much I love wild places and great fantasy art, the way the Savage Lands are presented in Welcome to Rathe is exhausting.
Barraging Brawnhide from Welcome to Rathe, art by Nathaniel Himawan.
One of the many savage creatures in the world of Rathe.
The Savage Lands - Where to Begin
"It remains untouched by the passage of time."
In some ways, this gives the region a mysterious and exotic feeling, and brings to mind dinosaurs, megaflora, and other prehistoric wonders. In other ways, this communicates how the region and its people do not change or develop, that the land and its people will always be savages because they do not try or are not even capable of making progress like the other people on the continent. In those ways, it feels gross again.
It also doesn't make sense to me from a worldbuilding point of view. The forests and jungles of the region are so sprawling and so dense, but they have wondrous things and booming, natural ecosystems more varied than anywhere else in Rathe, and should be constantly evolving and shifting at all levels. And, in order to survive in such a place, you would need to be strong, yes, but also extremely smart and either be very adaptive as a group or have a wide variety of specialists that are altogether knowledgeable about everything around you (or, better yet, both).
"Despite the dangers, foolhardy adventurers gather from all over Rathe, attracted by the stories of successful hunts and famed explorers."
Another issue is that it seems as if the only reason for people from outside the jungles to go there is for trophy hunting, or other kinds of bragging rights, in the same way that rich and bored people in the real world go to exotic (a relative term) places to hunt and kill animals with little to no sport or purpose than shallow trophies and bragging rights, or colonize territory to turn it into a hub for tourism and capitalism. In the world of Rathe, in spite of there being many more and much deadlier threats in these jungles, outsiders have still set to colonizing their borders to slowly choke and tame the land to make it easier for themselves to go on vacation. This is dated worldbuilding and storytelling rooted in Victorian and Colonial era fantasies, and is at the very least shallow.
The chapter mentions "hidden wonders" and "fortune" (i.e. wealth) several times, but never gives any details about fortune and hidden wonders that have actually been discovered. It also shows the region only from the point of view of the white human explorers, obviously similar to real-world white explorers and settlers with supremely British names (the featured explorer being named "Theodore Hamilton Scarborough").
If this was a small part of the chapter, I wouldn't mind it. But this continues throughout the entire chapter, going even further into old and racist tropes with information about how people horrifically died eating "jungle cuisine" and there is only one helpful plant (or one plant that didn't need processing to safely eat or use) mentioned once in the entirety of the massive library of work this explorer has published.
Frankly—and from a more personal angle—it's also boring to me. I expected to love this region and its wondrous things for the same reasons I love real-world forests and jungles, learning about real-world prehistoric ages like the Mesozoic and Proterozoic eras (and each geological period they are comprised of), and fantasy settings like Alara, Zendikar, Zerus, Kashyyyk, Felucia, the Broken Lands of Asunder, and the many worlds and regions of the Metroid and Metroid Prime series.
Instead, every wondrous aspect and fantastic piece of concept art and illustration is surrounded by a slew of tired tropes. Instead of seeing the people who actually live there, I am only allowed to see this part of the world from the perspective of ignorant, rich explorers. Even if the team was trying to make the book and the world easily digestible for young to middle-aged white people by using this perspective to tell their story, that would still be disappointing to me (likely more so).
Now, there are references here and there (maybe more, as I admit to skimming through halfheartedly out of disinterested boredom) to the explorer Scarborough's expeditions and notes being from a vague amount of time in the past, so it could be a dated phenomenon in-world. But the book also says multiple times that people go to the jungles seeking fame and fortune, which contradicts that theory.
One way I could choose to think of these expeditions is that they happened in the past, long ago but still in living memory (or just at the edge of it), and only remembered by people so far removed from them the true story has been entirely forgotten. Another way I could think of it is that Scarborough was a kind of celebrity and a fraud, a rich and bored person who convinced other wealthy people (such as a king) to invest in their expeditions based on fantastical, romantic tales almost entirely made up by their team of writers and retold by Scarborough and later bards who couldn't help but add embellishments and spin more and more exciting threads into the original stories. Perhaps they were supposed to be a joke all along, or a tiny, passing scheme to get food or coin, and before long the author-explorer got caught up in their own act. Eventually, a generation or two passed, leaders changing with it, and interest in the author's stories was reignited by older fans and publishers who retooled the stories for the younger generation, unintentionally leading to the later creation of more expeditions. Or, perhaps, Scarborough was never a real person, and was created by the king's scribes to increase interest in his own hateful obsession and excuse high taxes which fueled the war effort against the jungle itself and, perhaps, its people.
Regardless of those details, the information Solana and, possibly, Metrix have about the jungles (in my headcanon) are only from one section of one of the jungles, and a smaller one at that ("the depths of the Savage Lands" referred to in the stories being no more than a few hours' walk in reality). Altogether, I see this as a small anomaly rather than a part of any widespread and longstanding culture. It's a fragment of a splinter of a fabricated sub-culture that has died and regrown multiple times over a few generations, never lasting more than a few years in any of its incarnations.
The stories told outside the jungle are believed by most folk as little more than a few off-hand notes taken, most likely they say, by soldiers and fools patrolling an old road that led up to one of the groves—and you'd do best to stay at home, stick to your family's name (their profession) and to not spread lies and chase tall tales or you'll end up like the sorry fools in those same stories.
Yet other stories and information about certain plants and trees are only exotic to people living in cities like Solana, or close by. Elsewhere, most people know some of the trees because they grow everywhere around their homes, fields, and roads, much like how evergreens prominent in the mountains grow for hundreds to thousands of miles around into low plains, but all trees and plantlife gets destroyed to build larger and denser and taller cities in which all greenery becomes exotic to the people living in jungles of concrete and steel and glass (like Solana and Metrix).
As for the creatures and plants shown in the chapter, I think they're neat. Some are more interesting than others (with one being a poisonous purple dandelion), but I genuinely appreciate all of them.
One entry in particular, bloodroot moss, made me wonder if it forms a symbiotic relationship with the large creatures in the jungles, acting as a supplemental immune system or kind of hyper-tumor (a tumor that attacks cancerous growths, keeping the cancer in check or destroying it completely).
In the real world, there is a phenomenon in which very large animals do not get cancer even though evidence suggests that larger and older animals should have more cancer than smaller and younger ones. In this world, that phenomenon could exist because of this species of moss and other plants like it bonding with the bodies and immune systems of larger animals. It would be unable to live long enough on smaller, shorter-lived animals to have any effect other sapping their nutrients to sew its own seeds or be moved into the mouth of a larger animal attracted more easily to their prey by the vibrant color of the moss, and on larger animals its color darkens over time and gets covered by heavier fur or brushed off scales, settling in closer and more compact against the skin until it can't be seen by the naked eye (or the dark, nearly black color of some animal's skin, and maybe fur depending on both species, is actually the symbiotic moss).
Nothing but Beasts
After pages about creatures and plants, we finally get information about the sentient people living in the savage jungles. Except, somehow, they aren't even called people. The pale-skinned people are called "hecklers" by Scarborough, which I don't feel strongly one way or another about. However, the green-skinned people are called "brutes" and, literally, "beasts." Not in a quote by one of the characters (although they do use those terms), but the book itself refers to these people as "beasts" and "creatures" and discusses them in the same way as other monstrous creatures in the previous section.
"These massive beasts are vicious, bloodthirsty, and incredibly hostile."
"While sentient, they are slow and unintelligent, relying mainly on strength and brute force to decimate their prey. They often collect trophies from their fallen prey; from small skulls tied onto their armour, to locks of hair or ears attached to a belt, or armour decorated with hides and fur."
This is, to say the least, extremely problematic. For one, they are reduced down to trophy hunters, whether to excuse the trophy hunting of the white people or just to show how primitive they are—or only because dated tropes are being adhered to—I can't say, and either way would be a bad excuse for what comes down to bad, shallow, racist writing. If there was any indication that these are real people with any semblance of a culture (they don't even have a monoculture from what I can tell, nor a name besides "brute" or "beast"), it could have made this section less gross or offer a distraction. But there's nothing else here to look at besides an illustration of a green-skinned brute grappling with carnivorous vines while eating viscera from the neck of a freshly-killed wolf (and other similarly savage pieces, which are neat and well done but still shallow, playing the same one note each time).
Savage Feast from Welcome to Rathe, art by Vladimir Shatunov.
This fantastic illustration was unfortunately overshadowed by problematic writing.
It is here that we do finally get two reasons people have to explore the Savage Lands aside from trophy hunting.
One paragraph mentions Scarborough surviving an encounter with "a pack of great, hulking beasts" (referring to the green-skinned people) and subsequently returning home to pursue research and experiments that led to creation of an "invalesco serum" (based on his time in the Savage Lands) which would make him famous.
"Yet others arrive seeking fortune, pursuing the lucrative contracts offered by corporations, researchers, and those wishing to cull the beasts within." Here, I have to assume, the book is using the term "bests" to refer to the green-skinned people it just finished talking about in the last section, and that non-green-skinned people are happily committing genocide against them. I have to assume this because there is nothing else given to me by the book, and the following section would confirm this and go on to talk about the network of camps and towns created at the jungles' edges.
"Occasionally, one particularly reckless researcher may decide to employ a small team of hired hands and enter the jungle themselves. ... Other times, it is to conduct their experiments somewhere secluded, where nobody can hear the screaming..."
"Of course, not everyone who comes to the Savage Lands is a trader, researcher or fortune seeker. The knights of Solana are also a regular sight within the camps ... These knights pursue a nobler cause, hunting down the beasts within in order to protect the villages that lie beyond the outskirts of the Savage Lands."
Sigh.
It is these two final sections that force me to either throw out all of my headcanon, or disregard the entire chapter completely. And that make me deeply, strongly reconsider trying to create a story for this game and share its world with other people (let alone my friends).
I ended up skipping the section about Rhinar, the featured character and in-game hero from this region, as I did with Dorinthea, the hero from Solana. On one hand, I don't have much interest in these characters and don't plan on using them to tell or inspire any story. On the other, I'm tired of this chapter of the book.
At this point, I've also gotten tired of the book as a whole. I was very interested in the Savage Lands, Misteria, and Aria especially until I started reading and not only paying attention to the art.
What About the People
In my headcanon, made up before reading any lore, the brutes encountered so far have been the warriors of one faction of people in the Savage Lands—not just one faction, but one specific group within one faction. After reading Welcome to Rathe, I decided to lean in to this idea for my story.
Why is this faction seemingly so aggressive? In their living memory, and the more distant past just outside living memory, they have been scorned by their neighbors and forced to be ferocious against invaders threatening themselves and the environments they maintain. After too many failed attempts at coexistence leading to more and more catastrophic battles, attitudes of tribes in the region shifted dramatically. In the time since the current oldest generation was born, they have watched their families be torn apart and lived to see a dozen leaders fall from grace, all of them replaced by younger people with harsher fires in their veins stoked by too much death and not enough life. While the headhunters in living memory and old stories sought to slay corrupt ideals and correct the flaws of their leaders and societies, the ones living today seek to literally behead their enemies and have dedicated their lives to reaching that end.
But that is just one nation in the Savage Lands, and possibly one tribal warrior faction within that nation. All throughout the region, most families still tell stories and teach lessons about what it means to be a "headhunter" (whichever word they actually use for it being much more complex than the one I'm using as a simple placeholder term). Monstrous hydras (while they do exist in some corners of the many forests there) are not only a physical creature but also a social concept; while you can silence harmful individuals, their ideas will remain in other people until you get to the true heart of the problem and address it.
Headhunters, then, hunt for problems, cut off their heads to save some trouble for a moment, then untangle and follow their necks in search of the hydra's hearts so everyone can target them and slay the monstrosity together, for good, and clean up or collect its foul ichor to keep it from poisoning the land for miles around. While hunting the heads of harmful or abusive concepts is not as physically dangerous as the teeth and jaws of a hydra, it requires the same degree of dedication and skill, and often has just as many mental taxes and threats.
There is so much more I could tackle, and that I feel should be tackled, but I was not expecting to need to do so much work to adapt my ideas to align with the official lore. I certainly didn't expect there to be as many racist tropes in this section of the book (or at all), mostly because I hadn't seen anyone mention any problems like this when looking at other people talking about the game and the setting. Perhaps I should have expected more of this knowing that most of the players are white, and certainly most of the people making content around the game are such (including myself).
I am now considering throwing everything out, stopping the project and shifting back to writing simple tabletop adventures, or recycling all of these ideas for a WoWTCG campaign instead of FAB. I'll have to think about it.
I may attempt to contact someone at Legend Story Studios to ask if they have any comments on the matter, or if they have done any work to address and improve these aspects of their game since the creation of the book and the first card set. I may not, and just see if the community cares about some of the things I care about.
For now, I'll put the project on hold for a couple of days. Tomorrow I'll be going to my local game store again to see if anyone shows up to play Flesh and Blood, and instead of writing and designing for this project if it's slow I'll listen to an audiobook.
Sigh. If you have any strong feelings, I'd like to know them if you'd care to share.
Lastly, happy belated Indigenous Peoples' Day, which I acknowledged privately earlier this week and is very appropriate to acknowledge publicly with regards to this book and my critiques of it.
Thanks for reading. GLHF.
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