Notes on a Sword (Patreon)

Today I decided I would work on a small project: a little zine to collect items made for the Helena Celle/cdbunker dungeoncrawler project as well as for a fantasy setting I started thinking up while recuperating. It's going to be the first of what will be a series of zines to collect lore and images in the manner of old game booklets and TTRPG stuff. 

I have been possessed with a weird enthusiasm for this shit lately which I feel powerless to subdue, with this "essay" the inexplicable effluvia of thinking about swords and stuff. 

A part of this fantasy world I've been daydreaming about these last few weeks is a sort of pseudo-Africa, specifically a pseudo-Benin and Nigeria, a stew of Dahomey with its slave chasing Amazons and walled city-state and books like "My Life in the Bush of Ghosts" and "Palm Wine Drinkard" though also with a little sprinkling of East Africa, the Ethiopia described in James Bruce's accounts of traveling in search of the Nile. Bruce found knights in Ethiopia who wore chain mail, jousted, and ate raw meat as a sign of their station. 

The sum of these brutal, strange stories I call Ile-Ibinu, the name swiped from a myth of Benin, where before the gods intervened it was the "Ile-Ibinu", the land of anger. Tilt the continent so Benin is across the strait of Gibraltr, and the pseudo-Europe that provides the standard DnD style hijinks is in easy reach. One of the primary enablers of those hijinks are swords. 

The sword here is a weapon used for sacrifices that are also executions, punishments for some form of spiritual/magical transgression that requires the death of the transgressors body and the capture of their soul.

The Ida is a sword still made across West Africa. I saw a number of incredible decorative swords with scenes depicted on their blades and wanted to do something along those lines and also have a reason for whatever imagery appeared on the sword.

I made a very quick and ugly "kitbash", just picking what sword shape I wanted to emulate and then adding on details which I'll later trace with the knife tool, the same technique that made this breastplate: 

Human sacrifice was a regular practice in real life Dahomey, and human sacrifice is a big part of this setting in general, with the buying, selling, and accumulation of souls a kind of metaphysic-economy running through the endless, 30 Years Wars-esque conflicts of the pseudo-Europe and the perpetual war against the lizard things that cluster around the red, Near Sun, a colossal false sun that hovers in the sky above the hottest core of Ile-Ibinu's desert. 

In the mythology of the walled continent, this Near Sun is the bad son of a father god who cut his thumb on the thorns of one of the great, barbed trees of woe that pteranodons drop their victims on, where they let the tree drink up the unfortunate being's death agonies before they alight on a forearm-sized thorn and feast. 

From this cut thumb sprang the fat little monster boy, already speaking and screaming and fighting, Zurrjir. This being is swiped wholesale from a chapter in the "Palm Wine Drinkard" 

When I was looking up stuff about religion in Benin I encountered this wonderful thing which reminded me of this famous statue:

Coincidentally, he fat dwarf statue in Italy which appears as a character briefly in Suheiro Maruo's adaption of Panorama Island --the swipes and citations, the characters pulled from art, advertising, movies, etc. all redeployed by Maruo, that collagist impulse that seems inherently near to cinema or theater, the casting of actors, re-use of costumes...

The lines behind the captured fat dwarf/Near Sun/Bad Son come from an Igbo string figure meaning "trap" -- the little fat man is Zurrjir, that appears as a frightening monster who emerges from the thumb of the god-drinkard protagonist and wrecks havoc until his father burns him alive for the benefit of the people.

The bat and snake are swiped from a book cover, the usual gothic imagery but snakes vs. flying things is a running thing in this fantasy setting (largely due to me flipping through the Monster Manual and seeing a lot of fun snake and bird-ish monsters--the mythological resonances are a side effect of what monsters I think are cool.

The bat is a symbol of sacrifice, with the blood drinking bat doing as gods and certain sorcerers do, while the bat that eats insects or fruit are symbolically cast as doing the same, with certain insects said to be escaping souls, unruly captives slipping free from the god's sacred prisons and sacrifice pits. This bat god appears in the myths of multiple people in this world, with there being some truth to a Xibalba-like afterlife of courtly death gods as seen in various Mesoamerican myths.

Butterflies or moths, swiped from an Odilon Redon piece, as other symbols of transformation and food for the bat which represents another deity, a deputized neighbor of the friendly god who sent the great bat.

The handle is a bound figure, a captive for sacrifice who is also a spiritual double of the swords wielder who is bound to fulfill their duty as executioner or else end up a transgressor and sacrifice as well. 

Ogun, a patron god of irl Dahomey was syncretized (according to wikipedia) as St. James (also called St. James the Moor-Killer, which would add a humor if the sword was a symbol of the reverse, an Iberian-killer) who saw the Virgin Mary appear atop a pillar of jasper, so I might go for some Virgin Mary imagery for the handle. 

All of this symbolism came from skimming around for a few hours and combining things I was already reading, and there's a fun, collage-y immediacy to this sort of worldbuilding that's immensely pleasurable and has some of the free association and layers of imagery that makes myths and (good) fantasy lit worth reading. 

Science fiction is definitely my usual genre, but fantasy at its best is a way to mire around in the inexplicable, the nocturnal and irrational eidolons that wiggle and stir at the idea of a world that operates according to the laws and passions of gods and not a totally impersonal, disenchanted universe of "hard" science. 

I'm going to try and write down more of these little design brainstorming sessions for the things I make, so you can get a behind the scenes of what thoughts go into making this stuff.