"There are good people, there are bad people, there
are very bad people and then there are all those damn
Iroquois."
-Attributed to anonymous non-Iroquois Native
American, circa 1776 AD. Veracity dubious.
Hey, strip the skin from a couple of missionaries and
stuff like this gets bandied about before too long.
Needless to say, it _is_ an exaggeration, but the some
of the various Native American ethereals still weren't
precisely nice. The Aztecs got the worst press - at
the direct connivance of some of their more thoughtful
peers - but more than one ethereal god got politely
but firmly ejected from the Happy Hunting Grounds and
told to go their merry way. And please, please,
please don't come back to visit, if you don't mind?
Well, the worst ended up working for Beleth - of
course - and some of the brighter ones of those
switched over to Nybbas fairly quickly. The Prince of
the Media loves Native American mythology. It's such
a useful flail with which to beat Westerners with a
taste for guilt (in other words, most of them):
besides, you can spice up any kind of pseudo-mystic
nonsense up with it. And, of course, there were
always bad 'cowboys and Indians' movies, dime novels,
television shows: oh, it was prime stuff while it
lasted. Such things have died down recently, of
course, but these things go in cycles. In the
meantime, the ethereal spirits are supposed to keep
themselves busy, right? Well, one of them has.
Bloody Eagle - which is not his 'real' name, by the
way. Nybbas found his real name to be without
artistic merit, and casually removed it from his brain
- anyway, Bloody Eagle hung out with Rex for a while
(Native Americans are Cool), and made a suggestion.
He's come up with The Next Big Thing: the deliberate
infliction of pain to show how tough you are. Rex
loves it: the scars alone are Cool. Nybbas loves it,
too: with a little tweaking, you could get people to
sport permanent corporate logos. The rest of Hell
loves it: aside from the sheer joy of getting humans
to stick knives into each other for fun, there's
always the useful aspects of encouraging sadism and
ritual torture.
Of course, Heaven is appalled - and guess who they're
looking at with narrowed eyes? That's right, the
Native American pantheons. Rather than trying to
explain away different cultural attitudes (and it's
not like Bloody Eagle invented the practices that he's
perverting, so to speak), the pantheon has decided
that things would be best served by just killing the
damn spirit. So, either the PCs will be working for
the pantheon, working for Jordi (who has been
persuaded to help out on this one), or just trying to
kill Bloody Eagle on their own.
If the latter, they'll be dealing with a bunch of
Native American spirits and/or pagan Soldiers, at
whatever competence level you choose. Try to avoid
the cliches on this one: this seed is skirting the
realm of bad taste as it is. However, some research
in the more unsavory (and lesser known) aspects of
certain theological and anthropological attitudes of
certain cultures might at least prove a bracing
corrective for any annoyingly smugly faux-hip players
that you might have. If that fails, just throw
Calabim of the Media at them. It'll make you feel
better, at least.
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EDG <edg@sjgames.com>
In Nomine Collection Curator