Truly Lovecraftian Beholders

(Alternate title: "Heyeward Peepers Lensscleraft's Cat")

Disclaimer: I do not unreservedly endorse using any of this in actual play. It's but a thought experiment, with certain downsides to it -- see the last section.

I have seen Beholders described as: Lovecraftian abominations with horrifyingly gibbous eldritch cyclopean* physical features as found in Lovecraft's oeuvre, but also with the horrifyingly racist mental features found in actual human HP Lovecraft.

*Fun fact: 'cyclopean', in English (probably, but not entirely necessarily, as Lovecraft uses it), only means 'large', specifically pertaining to large stone blocks. Similarly, 'cyclops' in the Greek doesn't even mean 'one-eye', it means 'wheel-eye' or 'round-eye'. The sort of multiple-entendre meaning here, because it is a much-favored Lovecraftian word and calls to mind creatures with one large eyeball, is but a fortuitous coincidence.

What would that look like if we took it very seriously? Why might we do it like that?

Beholders are traditionally, like, hate everyone who isn't themself. They just about tolerate other beholders who look and act exactly like themself; the set of {lesser organisms} starts at beholders who look even slightly different and goes on down to, like, earthworms.

A good thing about this is that racism is clearly villainous, and making horrific aberrations who are bad guys racist is clearly of value to reinforce that.

One downside to this is that it lends credence to the kind of person who says "I'm not racist, I hate everyone equally", which is dumb and bad in various ways and for various reasons.

Another is that beholders are cool, or at least look cool, so they run into the same problem as, say, Nazis in stylish uniforms.

An upside to leaning into Lovecraft's goofily over-the-top racism specifically is that it makes beholders less cool. Racism can be better tolerated by the audience when the racists are otherwise cool, but making it over-the-top gonzo stupid makes it harder to tolerate. In general, it is didactically powerful when villainy is not just evil, but also stupid and goofy.

Lovecraft's Cat and the Eigenslur

HP Lovecraft was so stupidly goofily racist that he named his cat the N-slur, with the hard R. Should, perhaps, beholders be so stupidly goofily racist that they keep pets named with the fantasy equivalent of the N-slur? Which raises the question: what's the fantasy equivalent of the N-slur?

Intuitively to me the N-slur (with the hard R, as used by non-Black people) is equivalent in power and malice to the R-slur for the mentally handicapped, the F-slur for gay persons, probably the C-slur for women and the K-slur for Jewish persons, etc. (Notwithstanding a dispute over the equivalence or non-equivalence of these terms recently culminating in the ouster of the governing body of a local high school**.)

Eigenvalue is a thing that I don't 100% understand, but, basically, the eigenvalue of a thing is its essence, that which remains unchanged when the thing is otherwise transformed. (I figured 'eigen' was some guy's name, but no, it's just a German word for 'own'.)

The eigenslur, I am told, is what we call what you have left when you subtract Blackness from the N-slur, mental handicap from the R-slur, homosexuality from the F-slur, etc. -- reflecting the fundamental similarity between these slurs. The eigenslur is the core essence of the most maliciously hateful fightin' words.

So, to do this properly, we may need to come up with words that take the eigenslur and add human-ness, orc-ness, elf-ness, etc.

My first instinct for orcs is vird, from 'viridis', meaning 'green'. But probably your higher-intensity slurs should come from Germanic, not Latin, because Germanic-origin words are typically seen as stronger and more emphatic in English, but 'vird' might strip out enough of the obvious Latin-ness as to be strong. Or we could just go straight for the German 'grün' -- my instinct then is grunk, but that might be a little too cutesy to be obviously a partaking of the eigenslur.

Elves: unfortunately, all the words for 'elf' are cognate, even between Romance and Germanic languages. 'Baumficker' would be 'tree-effer'; 'Pflanzenficker' would be 'plant-effer'. Drop some syllables, call it flacker or maybe placker (plakker?).

Perhaps every beholder has a pet cat or similar lifeform. Or perhaps some beholders have, like, pet sapient creatures? But whom they name with various instantiations of the eigenslur? But never actual applicable slurs -- Lovecraft of course didn't name his cat a slur for cat, he named his cat a slur for a disfavored race of human. So it'd be, like, a pet elf named Grunk or a pet orc named Plakker, never an elf named Plakker nor an orc named Grunk.

We could of course do a beholder with a pet tiefling, orc, or drow, or a pet something else named with the eigenslur-instantiation for one of those, or (best of all) a pet one of those named with the slur for another of those. And then compare and contrast the stupid goofy racism of the beholder with the more everyday racism facing those species from regular humanfolk!

**I have been told, by a local teacher, that the original impetus for the hullaballoo involved a Black student calling another student the R-slur, which a teacher informed them was equivalent to somebody else calling the Black student the N-slur, and the Black principal fired the teacher about it, and there was mass uproar and protests in support of the teacher, ultimately leading to the (forced?) resignation of the principal and most (all?) of the board of directors.

Why Maybe Not In Actual Play

I have encountered the claim that, just as sexual assault has no place in a D&D game, neither does racism or slavery. Melanistically-well-endowed persons deal with enough racism in their day-to-day lives, making the D&D villains racist too just risks triggering trauma. I can see why this position might be compelling -- mostly by analogy to how compelled I am by the argument that sexual assault is verboten.

That said, I don't actually fully 100% buy it. As long as racism (and slavery) is not good or well-tolerated in the D&D world, as long as it is clearly villainous and evil, I think it's fine -- especially if you only have white people at your table; this is something to ask any people of other races at your table during Session Zero. I think a white player experiencing annoying racism because they're playing a non-human (or even because they're playing human, but the campaign brings their character amongst other species) can be didactically powerful -- one of my favorite D&D experiences as a player was my Drow Paladin of Bahamut, in the Forgotten Realms, who kept getting racism'd at by everybody she encountered, which got old and tedious real fast and thereby enlightened me more than all the critical race books and articles in the world.

Having a beholder with a 'pet' sapient creature is of course slavery, and (even if we're okay with slavery in the game) do we want to be drawing analogy between pets and slavery? Cats domesticated themselves; dogs and humans co-domesticated each other, but for any other kind of domesticated pet/livestock/plant, the slavery comparison is more apt than we might be comfortable with. Of course, we don't want to say that slavery is fine because it compares to domestication/taming which is fine; the more accurate thing is that domestication/taming is unfine because it compares to slavery which is unfine, but drawing the comparison will still be seen by many to be unfairly diminishing the terribleness of slavery, unfairly embiggening the terribleness of domestication/taming, or both. Maybe we don't want to get into that discursive morass, even if the entity doing the enslavement/taming is explicitly an evil racist aberration.

Another concern, possibly one which only I might have, is that deploying the eigenslur might conceivably corrode the soul, even fictionally partaking of fictional instantiations of the eigenslur. I haven't even fully formed or explored this notion in my own head, let alone enough to convince anybody else that it's anything like a real concern, but it very slightly gives me pause.

Relatedly, there are maybe concerns that we might not want to minimize the eigenslur by partaking of fictional instantiations of it for the purpose of goofiness. About this I ask: why would we not want to weaken the impact of the eigenslur? Under what plausible non-evil circumstance would we want the eigenslur to remain maximally powerful?

A pretty good reason not to, on the other hand, is because beholders look cool, and we don't want racism to look cool by association, and moreover I like using beholder iconography in my personal life (I've got a beholder keychain, my laptop is festooned with googly eyes and is named Beholder, and so on), and I don't necessarily want it to become widely recognized that beholders are synonymous with stupid goofy racism, lest I find myself tied to stupid goofy racism.***

***I'm not about to get a beholder tattoo, of course. Especially if I were ever planning on running for public office. (Topical! Or should I say, totenkopfical?)

Random Regnal Nickname Table v3.0

So we have random regnal nickname tables v1 and v2. The first one creates very realistic, Crusader Kings/real history nicknames. Having now tried the second one, it turns out to create some very bizarre nicknames -- most rulers in real history don't have multiple nicknames, but this one generates mostly 2-3 nickname rulers. If you want a nice balance, consider:

Roll d20:

* 1-6 not noteworthy enough to have a nickname 

* 7-10 "the Noun" 

* 11-14 "the Verber" 

* 15-18 "the Adjective" 

* 19 Roll on Table 1 

* 20 Roll on Table 2

Random Regnal Nickname Table v2.0

If you'll recall, I last posted a table to help you fill your history books with regnal nicknames, based on real life and Crusader Kings II (which is in turn realistic, or at least verisimilitudinous). I have since rethought this table.

To be sure, it's a perfectly fine table, if you want realism/verisimilitude. But if you want a bit more high in your fantasy, just go to your dictionary/random any word picker and throw that spaghetti at the wall. To wit:

1-16	[not notable enough to have a nickname]
17-23	the Adjective
24	the Adjective Adverb Verb-er
25-27	the Adjective and Adjective
28	the Adjective and Adjective Noun
29	the Adjective and Adjective Verb-er
30-32	the Adjective Noun
33	the Adjective Noun Noun
34	the Adjective Noun Verb-er
35-37	the Adjective Verb-er
38	the Adjective Verb-ing Adjective
39	the Adjective Verb-ing Noun
40	the Adjective Verb-ing Verb-er
41	the Adjective, Adjective, and Adjective
42-44	the Adverb Adjective
45	the Adverb Adjective and Adjective
46	the Adverb Adjective Noun
47	the Adverb Adjective Verb-er
48	the Adverb and Adverb Adjective
49	the Adverb and Adverb Verb-er
50-52	the Adverb Verb-er
53	the Adverb Verb-ing Adjective
54	the Adverb Verb-ing Noun
55	the Adverb Verb-ing Verb-er
56-62	the Noun
63	the Noun Adverb Verb-er
64-66	the Noun Noun
67	the Noun Noun Noun
68	the Noun Noun Verb-er
69-71	the Noun Verb-er
72	The Noun Verb-ing Noun
73	the Noun Verb-ing Verb-er
74-80	the Verb-er
81-83	the Verb-ing Adjective
84	the Verb-ing Adjective and Adjective
85	the Verb-ing Adjective Noun
86	the Verb-ing Adjective Verb-er
87	the Verb-ing Adverb Adjective
88	the Verb-ing Adverb Verb-er
89	the Verb-ing and Verb-ing Adjective
90	the Verb-ing and Verb-ing Noun
91	the Verb-ing and Verb-ing Verber
92-94	the Verb-ing Noun
95	the Verb-ing Noun Noun
96	the Verb-ing Noun Verb-er
97-99	the Verb-ing Verb-er
100	the Verb-ing Verb-ing Verb-er

The Book of Perfectly Acceptable Latin

Much of the online D&D community refers to Libris Mortis as "The Book of Bad Latin". This is because they are not in the intersection between the set of people who know Latin and the set of people who have read the introduction to Libris Mortis -- an intersection that seems to consist solely of me.

The community assumes that the title is supposed to translate to "The Book of the Dead" -- a not entirely unreasonable assumption. If this were the intended title, then it's true, it should be Liber Mortis, not Libris Mortis. Nominative.

But it just isn't so. Open your copy of Libris Mortis to Page 4, the very first page with actual content. Look at the bottomof the page, where it says "This book takes its name from a set of tomes penned in a dialect of Celestial [...] Roughly translated, it means 'From the Books of Dead'". This is interesting for two reasons: 1.) the title isn't in Latin, it's in (possibly bastardized) Celestial -- which is to say, Celestial is Latin, which I've taken as canon for my games -- and 2.) it's intended to mean "From the Books of the Dead", not "The Book of the Dead".

Now, if I were to try to translate "from the books of the dead", I'd say something like "ex libris mortis". But the ablative form "libris" already implies "from", so the preposition "ex" isn't, strictly speaking, necessary. Of course, "mortis" is singular genitive of "mors", so it means something more like "of the corpse" or "of death", but that's still pretty close.

So the title Libris Mortis means just about exactly what it's intended to mean. It's the Book of Perfectly Acceptable Latin. It's the Book Of At Worst Slightly Idiosyncratic Latin. Now you can look down your nose and feel more educated than anybody who utters the phrase "Book of Bad Latin".

The "Race" Problem

So there's a language problem. The other day, I described this problem as "one of the oldest conundra of the fantasy genre". Which is, of course, hyperbole; the fantasy genre is older than any of the words involved, let alone the science involved.

The problem is this: in fantasy, we need a word for various groupings of individuals, e.g., elves, humans, orcs, dwarves, halflings, etc. "Race" is the usual one, though "species" sometimes gets used. But both have meanings in English, and neither meaning lines up very well with their usage in works of fantasy.

---

Once upon a time, not really very long ago at all, "race" meant the same thing in fantasy as it does in modern English, but the meanings have diverged.

Nowadays in English, "race" means something like "ethnicity" or "skin color". We've got the "black race" and the "white race" and so on, and the various races are almost entirely indistinguishable, genetically. Even phenotypically, most human races are hard to tell apart, and individuals from one race are usually within the expected range of variation for every other race.

An orc and an elf are much more dissimilar than a dark-skinned human and a light-skinned human, so "race" has become an inappropriate term for this distinction.

Moreover, we might want to keep "race" in case we want to distinguish between fantasy ethnicities -- e.g., Men of Gondor, Men of Rohan, the various Men of the East and South under Sauron's dominion. Or, for that matter: Orcs of Mordor, Orcs of Isengard, and Orcs of Moria. Or Mirkwood Elves and Lothlorien Elves. And so on. Tolkien's actually pretty good about ethnicities/subraces/whatever.

Or take my setting's distinction between Shell humans, Omorashi humans, and Romus humans. (Side note: I was horrified the other day when I realized that I had neglected to include dark-skinned humans in my campaign setting. Then I realized that no, many or most Omorashi humans have dark skin -- the one way in which the Omorashi Empire deviates from a bog-standard wutai.)

Though, really, "ethnicity" does just fine for this usage, and I'd be completely okay with discarding the word "race" from the language -- both mundane and fantastical English -- altogether.

---

"Species" is sometimes used as a backup, but it has an even more specific meaning than "race" does. Two individuals are members of the same species if they can breed and produce fertile offspring. The "half-dragon" template alone means that all living, corporeal creatures are the same species as True Dragons. Dragons and gelatinous cubes are the same species! This is of course a.) preposterous and b.) not useful.

Actually, there's another, slightly more technical meaning of "species". Basically, reckon how much DNA two individuals need to have in common in order to produce viable offspring. A species is any group that has that much DNA in common. This almost could work, if you use the percentage from our world (it's a very high percentage), but you then stipulate that D&D genetics works very differently and can produce viable offspring with a much lower percentage of DNA in common. So dragons and gelatinous cubes are different species but can interbreed.

But this hurts my head by how badly it misunderstands basic biology. Not least because D&D biology pretty clearly, if not quite explicitly, doesn't run on DNA at all. (See: Living Spells, elementals, and most or all Outsiders (created, not biologically, but from the very stuff of their native planes).) There's no way for DNA to do half the things that happen with genetics in D&D. Better to leave it out and say a wizard did it. And if we're leaving out Earth biology, we should leave out the jargon of Earth biology.

---

So what's left? There are lots of options, many of which have been used. But I'm partial to one that dates back roughly to the time period D&D attempts to emulate but which hasn't since acquired a technical meaning -- or, really, any meaning at all (which comes up when creationists try to use the word without realizing how meaningless it really is). The word is "kind".

Elves and humans are different kinds. Omorashi humans and Romus humans are the same kind. Mordor orcs and Isengard orcs are the same kind.

If you want to get really technical, you could also throw in superkinds and subkinds. Orcs, goblins, and hobgoblins are different kinds, but the same superkind. Arctic orcs and aquatic orcs are the same kind but different subkinds. Humans, elves, halflings, dwarves, and gnomes are the same superkind but different kinds. And so on.

---

We can even set up a fairly complete D&D taxonomy!

Kingdom: distinction between creatures and objects. A creature is anything with a wisdom and charisma score (other ability scores optional). An object is anything without a wisdom and charisma score.

Subkingdom: You can further differentiate between living and non-living objects, allowing you to be old-fashioned and make the distinction Animal, Vegetable, or Mineral. Normal, mundane plants and trees, as well as slimes, molds, and fungi, are living objects. Rocks and things are non-living objects. (Fun fact: disintegrate has no effect on living objects, only creatures and non-living objects.) You can also distinguish nonliving creatures (constructs, undead, deathless) and living creatures (all other creatures).

Supertype: One wants to put things like "canines" and "felines" in, but there are e.g. feliform Animals (cats, lions), Humanoids (catfolk, gnolls), Magical Beasts (displacer beasts, sea cats), Outsiders (rakshasas, hellcats), etc. So this is an example of a supertype. Since "Humanoid" is taken for a type, perhaps we shall use "anthropoid" as a Supertype to describe anything with two arms, two legs, a head, and a torso.

Type: Aberration, Animal, Construct, Dragon, Elemental, Fey, Giant, Humanoid, Magical Beast, Monstrous Humanoid, Ooze, Outsider, Plant, Undead, or Vermin. (Only creatures have Types.)

Superkind: Among Humanoids: reptilians, goblinoids, near-humans, gith-s, etc. Among Outsiders: demons, devils, archons, guardinals, etc. Among Elementals: fire, water, air, earth, etc. Among Constructs: golems, living constructs, etc. Among aberrations: Illithidae, beholderkin, etc.

Subtype: Some subtypes actually indicate kind (e.g. [human], [elf]). Some indicate superkind (e.g. [reptilian], [goblinoid].) Some are merely descriptive and can be possessed by any or many Types (e.g. [aquatic], [extraplanar], often the alignment and elemental subtypes). Some indicate relationship to some other Type (e.g. [dragonblood], [augmented]). Subtype, while useful, pertains to too many levels of the taxonomy to really be included. BUT, I want to include Tanar'ri, Obyrith, Baatezu, etc, and there's not really anywhere else to put them. So let's put them, probably bafflingly, below superkind.

Kind: Among near-humans: humans, elves, dwarves, etc. Among animals: horses, dogs, etc. Among tanar'ri: succubus, balor, etc.

Subkind: Arctic elves, fire elves, aquatic elves, etc. Ponies, war ponies, horses, war horses, etc. Dogs, riding dogs, etc.

This is incredibly messy, not even very useful, and unlike biological taxonomies (where there is a single correct taxonomy that can be derived from sufficient information), it's mostly a matter of opinion. It was just an exercise.

Metaphors Other People Live By

Okay, so there's this book, Metaphors We Live By (George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, 1980). I've got it as assigned reading for a philosophy of language class. It's excellent, filled with the kind of revelation that's stunningly obvious once somebody points them out, but which never would have occurred to you otherwise. Get it, read it, grok it, because I'm definitely not going to be able to do it justice in this post.

The basic gist is this: we talk in terms of metaphors. Not literary metaphors like "love is a flower", but much more basic ones. Every concept we talk about, and (it is convincingly asserted) every concept we think about, is expressed in terms of other concepts.

Consider two paragraphs ago, when I said the book is filled with revelations: this is not a literal claim. The metaphor in that case is that the book is a container and revelations are objects contained within it. I also said that I would not be able to do it justice: the book (is a person who) deserves justice, and explaining it poorly is a sort of miscarriage of justice.

One of the most common kinds of metaphors in our language, according to Lakoff and Johnson, are orientational metaphors, where concepts are described in terms of spatial orientation. Examples, direct from the book: Happy is up (that boosted my spirits), sad is down (I'm depressed); conscious is up (wake up), unconscious is down (he fell asleep); health and life are up (Lazarus rose from the dead), sickness and death are down (he fell ill); having control or force is up (I am on top of the situation), being subject to force or control is down (he is the low man on the totem pole); more is up (my income rose last year), less is down (If you're too hot, turn the heat down); prestigious status is up (he's at the peak of his career, or even how hard it was to phrase this without using the words "high status"), lack of status is down (he's at the bottom of the social hierarchy; low status); good is up (things are looking up), bad is down (he does high-quality work).

Lakoff and Johnson point out that all of these metaphors are consistent with one another: more is up, and up is good, and more is good. Sad is down, down is bad, and sad is bad. There are subcultures that use inconsistent metaphors (for example, members of an ascetic cult might think "more is up, up is good, but more is bad"), but these are only ever subcultures, these things are are in the broader language.

These things aren't just in the language, they're in the way we think. Consider: Where is Heaven? Where is Hell? If they existed, they obviously wouldn't be literally anywhere we can access, up and down would be meaningless with respect to the afterlife. But we still think of Heaven as being above us and Hell as being below us. Up is good, down is bad.

And the denizens of Heaven and Hell: ever hear of this dude they call God in the Highest? We call for "gloria in excelsis Deo". And of course all the angels serve under God, in some cases literally (some of them he sits on; they're called Thrones). At the other end of the spectrum, Satan is the lowest of the low. More on demons in the next section.

People are always trying to build the tallest skyscraper in the world. It's been a constant competition ever since skyscrapers were invented, because up is good (in mythology, too; the story of the Tower of Babel is a point of overlap between skyscrapers and heaven). But who cared when the Russians dug the deepest hole in the world at the time? Nobody! (Except the people who circulate the lies about it breaking into hell.) Nobody would even ever have bothered to dig deeper except that there's oil down there. Nobody cares about big holes because nobody cares about down, because down is bad.

--- So what does this have to do with D&D/writing?

One of my biggest complaints about most science fiction and fantasy, especially roleplaying (i.e., amateur storytelling), is that aliens (be they elves, Klingons, lichs, Sebaceans, Goa'uld, anthropomorphic animals, or whatever) are always just humans in non-human bodies. American humans, at that. (Some good tips for mitigating this effect can be found here.)

Some authors do better than others at this: the alien-ness of aliens is a plot point in the Ender's Game sequels, but even the Formics and Pequeninos are just humans with one or two bizarre concepts ("there's no such thing as an individual" and "one needs to be vivisected in order to advance to the next stage of life") pasted on. The House Elves of Harry Potter take utmost joy in slavery, something which is even more alien to we liberty-obsessed American humans.

But, and this is the important part, they always use all the same metaphors we use in English.

What I'm saying is this: alien minds will use alien metaphors. If you're writing aliens, be careful about the non-literal language they use. If they don't have a reason to use the same metaphorical constructions we do, then they shouldn't. But even more, if you don't want them to just read like humans in alien bodies, give them different metaphors for the sake of giving them different metaphors.

C.S. Lewis actually once did this at least half-competently: in The Screwtape Letters, the demons use words like "Lowerarchy", and speak proudly of being demoted to a more prestigious, lower rank. For demons, having control or force is down, more is down, prestigious status is down, good is down. (Or, put in a more C.S. Lewis-y way, bad is good, so just reverse everything we say about good and call it a day.) Satan, the big boss, the one with force and power and prestige, is at the bottom, and all his inferiors (I almost said "subordinates") are arrayed above him.

Lakoff and Johnson even provide guidelines for doing this, albeit accidentally. Make sure your alien metaphors are consistent with one another. If demons think good is down and more prestigious is down and more power is down, it won't do for it to suddenly turn out that they think more is up. That's inconsistent and will grate on the reader, even if they don't consciously notice it.

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Let us now, as an exercise, construct a culture by constructing its metaphors. Let's imagine that this culture is profoundly xenophobic, insular, and isolationist. Which is to say: out is bad; in is good. Let's just take the previous examples and plug "out" and "in" in place of "up" and "down". Most of these metaphors actually exist in English (container metaphors being another of the most common kinds of metaphors we use), and the only change will be that we're emphasizing them over vertical metaphors. Some of them will take all-new metaphors. So the metaphors, and the kinds of things these cultural xenophobes would say:

• happy is in: "I am in good spirits."
• sad is out: "I am out of good spirits." (not "I am in bad spirits")
• conscious is in: "I am in my body."
• unconscious is out: "I'm feeling out of it."
• health and life are in: "I'm in good health."
• sickness and death are out: "I am out of health."
• having control or force is in: "I have an in with the organization."
• being subject to force or control is out: "I'm outside his power." (This could get confusing: it means exactly the opposite of what we mean, where to be in someone's power is to be under their control. If one actually uses examples such as this in the text, one should be sure to add a note to clarify it, to avoid a Shaka, when the walls fell situation.)
• more is in: "I'm in great wealth."
• less is out: "I'm out of money."
• prestigious status is in: "The inner circle of the organization."
• lack of status is out: "He's an outside man on the ring."

Obviously, these people will think that heaven is within oneself, and hell is outside (be it outside the self, outside the home, outside the city, outside the civilization, outside the world, or what have you). Obviously they'll be big on meditation, focusing on the self, spending time inside oneself rather than thinking about the outside world. Perhaps good people, when they die, remain inside the body -- perhaps this culture approves of necromancy for allowing people to, in some way, remain inside their bodies. Or perhaps they believe that the soul simply remains inside the heaven of the body for as long as the body remains intact, so they practice mummification, to preserve the heaven of the body for as long as possible.

The world, of course, is the center of the universe. But it isn't spherical, it's flat. The city is the center of the country, the country is the center of the world, and the world is the center of the universe. If you go too far out, horizontally, you'll reach Hell. The sky and the ground are probably conceptually less important to this culture than they are to us. Demons literally live outside the world (but you must be sure not to say demons live in Hell; you might say instead that demons live at Hell, a more neutral non-metaphorical term); the people who live outside the country are actively demonic; the people who live outside the city are bad; the people who live outside the home are merely distasteful. A culture of xenophobes is also likely to be a culture of introverts. This is unlikely to be a very large country; more likely it is to be many city-states, each of which comes into belligerent conflict with one another despite (indeed, because of) their shared culture.

Notice how I have taken a one-concept description ("xenophobic/insular/isolationist"), derived the sort of metaphors they use, then derived additional details of their culture and religious beliefs that follow from the metaphors. Consider this as a world-building technique.

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But "in is good, out is bad" is still a pretty human metaphor. We can easily see the culture of xenophobes being a human culture. What about truly alien minds? Let's consider creatures who are not subject to the force of gravity at all. Perhaps they're celestial beings, or they live in space, or they're jellyfish-people who live in a gas giant (with an atmosphere so thick it would take a lifetime to float from bottom to top or vice versa) and are neutrally buoyant. Spatial metaphors may not be completely absent from their vocabulary, but they're likely to be much less important. Being radially symmetric, the aliens themselves won't have a front or back or sides, so they're unlikely to have many metaphors that hinge on front or back or sides. They might have concepts of up and down, or at least top and bottom, unless they're perfectly spherical jellyfish. But there's no difference between travelling up and travelling down, so vertical spatial metaphors will probably be mostly absent from their vocabulary. But we're trying to make truly alien-minded aliens, so let's just expunge all spatial metaphors entirely. Yes, container metaphors, too. No in/inside/out/outside.

So... what metaphors will they use, then? Let's suppose, for the sake of simplicity, that they see colours like we do. (Actually improbable, if they're gas-giant-dwellers; it's probably very dark inside a gas giant. Maybe we're talking outer space jellyfish, then.) Perhaps, then:

• happy is red: "I am red with joy."
• sad is violet: "I'm feeling blue."
• conscious is red: "I was orange and alert."
• unconscious is violet: "I'm going to go see purple [i.e., sleep] for awhile."
• health and life are red: "The redness flows in me."
• sickness and death are violet: "My breathing organs are tinged with violet."
• having control or force is red: "I oranged and he gave me all his money." (Exactly what sort of activity "oranging" is might need to be explained.)
• being subject to force or control is violet: "He is the violet man in the painting."
• more is red: "My boss reddened my pay today."
• less is violet: "My savings are so blue I can hardly feed my family."
• prestigious status is red:  "He reds [i.e., rules] the country." (Note that, in this culture, red, not purple, will be associated with royalty.)
• lack of status is violet: "He was purple with envy."

One advantage of color metaphors: it allows for somewhat more of a spectrum than spatial metaphors. Which of course implies that these aliens think in terms of continua where we think in terms of black or white. It'll be impossible to get a straight yes-or-no answer out of one of these guys; they'll always give you some shade of "maybe-leaning-towards-yes" or "almost-but-not-quite-no" -- which they'll have words for, probably the same words as they use for the colors. "Strong yes" is red, "strong no" is violet, "maybe/mu" is green or greenish-yellow. (They probably also use more of the color spectrum than the six or seven colors we choose to pick out as the most important ones.)

Similarly, what we call "middle management", these creatures would call "green management", a "middleman" would instead be a "green man". "But Ludus Carcerum," you say, "a middleman is literally in the middle between two people! That's not a metaphor at all!" Au contraire, I say: a greenman is green between a purpleman and a redman. Well, okay, maybe I'm making this particular concept more of a metaphor than it is in English, which is hardly a bad thing. (Interestingly, this may imply that, in this color-oriented culture, all transactions are considered inherently and explicitly unequal.)

Also: "infrared" and "ultraviolet" are likely to be roughly equivalent to our "110%" and "less than nothing", respectively.

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There are, of course, countless other ways you could do it.

Maybe all orcish metaphors are in terms of violence. Consider the situation: an orcish elder explains the plan to pillage and massacre the village of Aardham. A young upstart orc things they should pillage and massacre Beantown instead, and shouts out, metaphorically, "the elder is advocating peace!" Meaning the elder is saying bad things, not that he's literally advocating peace, which he obviously isn't. Or perhaps an orc eats the most delicious pie he's ever eaten, he might opine that "This pie really stabs me in the face!"

The above examples, of course, privilege happiness, consciousness, health and life, control and force, more, and status, which is itself an anthropocentric view. What if a culture doesn't care about control or status, but does care about, say, delicious flavor? Delicious is up, disgusting is down! Or whatever.

As long as you make sure your metaphors are consistent with each other and with the culture you're trying to get at, pretty much any variation is good.

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Or consider this: a culture that uses only metaphors. A culture that uses no metaphors at all.

Earlier, I linked in passing to TNG: Darmok, the episode where the Enterprise encounters a culture of aliens who speak exclusively in metaphor. It wound up being one of the most praised episodes of TNG; it was certainly one of the episodes that was most like traditional (e.g., Asimovian) science-fiction. They did it reasonably well, if a bit awkwardly. I wouldn't expect anybody to be able to do it without any awkwardness. But it's a very interesting concept to explore, and I'd love to see it explored by more people.

A culture with no metaphors at all, on the other hand, would be even more awkward to write. You wouldn't be able to use orientational or container metaphors. They would never speak of being in love. Indeed, they would probably become confused if you used the word or tried to describe love at all: love, at least according to Lakoff and Johnson, is not a literal thing. A metaphor-free culture would never reify. Emotions, colors, properties, actions, thoughts, etc., are only metaphorically things at all. A metaphor-free culture would have no concept of "concepts".

Metaphor-free language would be so difficult to think with, let alone communicate with, that I doubt such a culture would have anything like the focus on linguistic communication that we do.

It's sort of like a thought experiment I came up with years ago: a culture that, early on in their development of mathematics, discovered that you cannot divide by zero without entailing terrible nonsensical things, and on that basis concluded that all of mathematics is just incoherent, and thus threw out the whole discipline, so all of science and engineering in this culture is just purely trial-and-error, so they never get beyond the iron age.

A culture that never invented/discovered metaphors may have long since discarded language as almost entirely fruitless.

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But don't take my word for any of this! Read the book, it's excellent.

Naming Conventions of High Seas

I discovered a suggestion that I have recently been putting to good use. The suggestion is basically "take a real name and change one letter".

I named Prior Trakis and Abbot Waxter of the Monastery of Pelor on Perch Hill after a pair of friends I have. Viblet Kewne is from a random regular-person name generator (the last name was Keyne or possibly Keene, and I can't remember what the first name was -- I don't think it was Violet. That just goes to show how effective this method is, if even I can't tell what name I started with). Jov Sauart is another with that method. I think I'll mostly use this for humans from Shell and a minority of mongrelfolk.

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For Sahuagin, I use roughly the naming conventions from the third-party Slayer's Guide to the Sahuagin. The BBEG's dragon from my first campaign was a sahuagin cultist called Searches-the-blackest-depths-and-loves-what-she-finds-there, with other sahuagin going by such names as Reading-reading-hunt-with-book and Big-fella-kills-whales.

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Mind flayer names, based on precedents from all over WotC canon, tend to be all Xs and Cs and Qs in unpronounceable configurations. Thus, the ascended mind flayer BBEG of High Seas, Quasxthe. And the level 1 mind flayer PC, Kibstellischa. And the old oracle of Ilsensine, Absterbossk. And the latter two, now that I consider it, contain no Xs or Qs and only one C. Huh. I think I used a mind flayer name generator for Absterbossk.

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Omorashi humans, of course, have Japanese, Chinese, Korean, and other East Asian names.

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I was reading Libris Mortis, and in the introduction, I discovered that the name is intended to be (bastardized) Celestial for "From the Books of the Dead" (you may hear people refer to this book as the "Book of Bad Latin" - it's actually perfectly acceptable Latin for this meaning). The interesting thing about this is that it implies (bastardized) Celestial = Latin.

Interestingly, before I discovered that, I had decided that Romus, the fantasy counterpart culture of ancient Rome, was ruled by a descended movanic deva. Obviously, the reason why the cives Romi (Romo? Genitive or ablative? "Of Romus" or "from Romus"? I'm not actually entirely sure!) have Latin names is because they actually have Celestial names, because Celestial is the state language of Romus, because Vozdael Arkhigael says so. (The capital is still called "Landrise" instead of something in Celestial because hey look a firetruck!)

Incidentally, my naming custom for celestial creatures was to look up words that describe them on wiktionary, consult the Arabic, Aramaic, and Hebrew translations for those words, string them together, and stick -el or -iel or -ael on the end of them. I'll probably add Latin to this system now, if I don't just switch entirely to Latin for celestials and leave the arabic/aramaic/hebrew for fiends. But there's precedent for celestials having this naming convention, so I think I'll stick with it, and just say that angels, archons, devas, demons, and devils all have names that are mixtures of celestial, infernal, and abyssal.

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Mongrelfolk, going from Races of Destiny, have either weird or normal contemporary human first names, normal contemporary human surnames, and appended onto the beginning of the surname, a random three- or four-letter word. Peph Box-Cooper, Laurence Tepp-Stewart, Bob Har-Johnson.

Mongrelfolk place names, of course, are just silly, but generally bizarrely descriptive. The Disreputable City, the River Easy, the Don't Drink This River (aka the Poison River), Noodleton, Winkle Village, Stank Cave, Perch Hill, Mount Dis. Endeesy, of course, is a quick way of saying N.D.C., New Disreputable City.

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Engineers have names randomly selected from both the gnomish and dwarven languages in Races of Stone.

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Anything dragon or dragon-descended has a name selected from the draconic dictionary in Races of the Dragon. (Well, more specifically, this draconic translator, which includes the RotD list as the core of its dictionary.)