Dungeons and Dragons, "The Church of the Trinity"

Gods of Dungeons and Dragons

            I have over the years put out several entries on the topic of fictional religions.  I never really went anywhere with my discussion of Religion as an aspect of settings that I wrote about years before that, but since then I have tried to come at the topic in ways that would make it interesting for someone who had been playing Dungeons and Dragons for a while or someone new.

            In each instance I have tried to either go in an entirely new direction like with my unique take on Orcs a while back.  I then did a short follow up to that with a pair of orc characters in that context.  There was also a more traditional pantheon of deities that act in concert with one another, "The Five".  I did a follow up to that one in which I created a team of characters that each serve as an exemplar of the various members of The Five.  Then there was “The Preserver” which was my attempt to graft a messianic style belief system onto environmentalism-oriented religion. My last entry was the “High Arcana” a religion based on Tarot Cards.

                This will be the first blog entry for me in quite a while, and the first on DnD in even longer… But I wrote most of this material back when 3.5 Edition was still the primary edition, so there might still be some language in there that suits that type of setting better.

 

This is an excellent rendition of the Triforce, which manages to include additional imagery from the games in each part, further illustrating the use of 3 in each sub-symbol.

The Trinity

Holy Symbol: Triangle (sometimes a Key or Doorway)

Divine Domains:

Gaia: Forge, Life; Isis: Knowledge, Tempest; Ishtar: Nature, Peace

Favored Weapon:

Gaia: Mace; Isis: Spear; Ishtar: Bow

 World View & Mythos: In ages past before the world had formed three goddesses came from the void and created the world.  Gaia, created the earth, rolling the lava, sand, soil, stone, clay, and metal that upon all else would be built.  Isis, poured from the heavens the rains which filled the open chasms to make the seas and oceans, and cut fine lines thru the earth to form the rivers and ponds.  Last came Ishtar, who breathed out the wind which carried with it the seeds of life.  It was then, as the spirits of life took hold that the trinity returned to the heavens never to return.

 Beliefs: It is most often believed than when creating the world the goddess imbued the world with a set of natural laws which favor strength, contemplation, and tenacity.  It is the role of the living to use these virtuous qualities to tame the wilds, dream of grand designs, and build great works.  Large cathedrals, gilded and lit with the light of gloriously ornate windows define the great architectural vision that the followers of the Trinity believe to be the natural order of things.

                There are 3 primary holy books, each devoted to the study and philosophy that each god supposedly represents.  The first book is the Tenants of Gaia, and emphasizes how to live a stable life and emphasizes strength and the harvesting of natural world.  The second is the Wisdom of Isis, which speaks of the flow of time and the changing world and changing self, it teaches about meditation and contemplation.  The last is the Teachings of Ishtar, which speaks about the importance of growth, that growing as a person thru new experiences, growing one’s community thru procreation, and growing the wealth and bounty of the world thru constructive action.

It is not uncommon for a cleric to emphasize the teaching of one goddess and seek to emulate that particular goddess’ role, picking for their domains the favored element.

 Practices: Those who follow the Trinity favor matriarchal social orders, with women taking the role of teacher, religious leader, and administrators, these roles seen as a natural extension of their position as mothers who create and cultivate life.  Men are seen as laborers and soldiers whose strength constructs and protects the homes and fields of the people.

 Superstitions and Taboos: Followers of the Trinity take Hospitality very seriously, to the point of having numerous inns and shelters founded in their name.  To harm a guest or host is one of the direst of sins.  They are very much in favor of civilized life and are the favored faith in many major cities lending a study of architecture to the cities defenses in the form of walls and gates.

 Churches and Denominations: the Trinity is worshiped in numerous communities and nations and is often recognized as being a de facto state church.  However it is a polyglot of a religion.  Originally there was a single church which still exists, it split into two denominations based on the role the church would have in the politics of nation states.  It fissured again over the role of the church hierarchy itself, and has subsequently fractured numerous times based on several prophets that have followed after.

 1) The Inclusionists are considered the original church, it was their practice to assimilate religious practices from those they converted and incorporate the local folk heroes and gods into the myths and legends of the church as a whole.  Their art is exceptionally varied and it looks at the world in a global context, doing its best to not involve itself in the political affairs of nations except to offer aid to those in need.

 2) The Politicos were the first group to break from the Inclusionists 1300 years ago.  They saw it as not only excusable but necessary to align themselves with various governments and political groups within nations to exert change, seeing politics as a reality that must be dealt with in the pursuit of spiritual truth.  This group has fractured and has separate but related churches in each of the nation states on the continent and holds varying levels of influence within each.

 3) The Exclusionists broke from the Inclusionists 500 years ago.  They wished to return to a purer form of the original faith and began destroying and excising rituals, saints, and practices that were not a part of the original texts from the church’s founding.  They too take a global view of the faith, and aside from taking combative stances against the other churches as quasi-heretics, they mostly do not involve themselves in the political affairs of the world.

 4) The New Dogmatists is an umbrella term that captures all small churches that have fractured off from the Exclusionists since their founding.  These groups followed one particular prophet or guru to create a new church with a new holy text to annotate the original holy texts.  The three largest were the Wanderers, who believed that the Goddesses are still in the world, wandering among us either guiding or judging our behavior and meeting out lessons; then there were the Exiles who believe that the Goddesses created this world to house evil spirits and only thru self-purification could one cleanse their would and float up to the heavens to join the Goddesses in paradise; and the Lamp Lighters, a group that believed in the claims of four prophets that they were sent by the Goddesses to found a new church in the world, this movement was the first and only group to dogmatize a crusade for the faith, all previous crusades for the Trinity are seen more as state action on behalf of the various churches; the Lamp Lighters nearly swept the continent before devolving into infighting and eventually being put down, they currently exist in very small groups that “keep the lamps lit” for the return of their now vanished prophets.

Social Organization: Traditionally there was no martial tradition in the faith, and holy war is not a concept backed by dogma or faith in any of the churches. There have been instances in history where a “Liberator of the Throne” position has been created to protect the faith via force of arms especially in the context of a Politico denomination’s efforts within a nation. Otherwise there are two major groups within the religion. 

1) The Builders/Laborers, men who devote their lives to the Trinity further the cause thru the construction of buildings, the production of food and goods, and the tilling of fields.  Men are rarely seen in positions that require extensive academic study, instead vocational training is taught to them from a young age in communities where the Trinity is the primary religion.  Architecture and engineering are the rare examples of tasks that require much greater study.

2) The Scholars, devout women by contrast are taught art, literature, history, and music.  They are seen as the cultural and spiritual heads of a community.  They contribute to the intellectual pursuit of such communities, with the only labor intensive practices taught to them being sculpture or ornate metal work.

Cults & Heretics: There exists two offshoots of this faith that stand in direct conflict with it.

1) The Church of the Creator Above believes that the Trinity are secondary agents to a greater more powerful being, that this being is the true font of creative energy that allowed for the formation of the world and life.  They see the worship of the Trinity as heresy and seek to appeal to a deeper and more true alliance with this greater being they call Ptah.  That there is no archeological record to support some more ancient form of the religion that had a singular creator at work has done nothing to deter them.  Often they are seen less as a danger and more as a contrary and strange group that exists as a harmless counter culture.

2) The Trinity of Kings is a dangerous cult.  They believe that the goddesses were actually gods, and that the myth that women as the wiser sex is a lie spread by the insidious conspiracy that is the Matriarchy.  While some defend them as having legitimate points that gender should not exclude a person from a life of vocational or scholarly pursuits, the truth runs much darker. The Trinity of Kings cult believes in the violent subjugation of women, that they should be confined to the role of slaves and sexual toys.  Women have been kidnapped, raped, and ritualistically murdered by this group.  Their violence is not limited to women, as many men who work for the faith have had their hands cut off or been blinded.  The gods’ names are Cronus, Set, and Anu.

Heretical Symbol:

                Ptah: Circle; Trinity of Kings: Phallus

I enjoy this 2e rendition of Ptah, the 3e version looks, sad, tired and confused.

Heretical Domains:

                Ptah: Creation (Forge); Trinity of Kings: Life, Order, War

Heretical Favored Weapon:

                Ptah: Warhammer; Trinity of Kings: Longspear

 Inspirations

            This is going to be pretty obvious, but the big inspiration here are the Three Goddesses of “The Legend of Zelda” and the concept of the Trinity in Western Religion, primarily Christianity.  I highly recommend this video which discusses with real sincerity the religion of Hyrule, and there are other videos I will link that talk about the trinity and other concepts as I feel they can be interesting.

                As for the heretics, the primary concept there is a gender flipped version of the Early Mother Goddess concept.  The name Ptah is an obscure Egyptian creation deity whose name fits the renaming scheme I used, replacing the three goddesses of Hyrule with real life goddesses that I felt fit well enough.

                The Trinity of Kings is a parody of the fascist/misogynistic group/movement of “Return of Kings” and by extension the online communities of Pick Up Artists and other creepy dipshits. This is taking their crap and drawing it out to a medieval/dark age style monstrous level of behavior beyond even the sad and dangerous material of today.

                Aside from those factors the idea that a religion incorporates material from the various cultures and communities it attempts to convert is a well-known history in Europe, as the source of numerous rewrites of mythology into folklore-history, this is especially the case with Celtic Mythology. Beyond that a big part of Protestantism was a departure from a perceived idolatry of the Catholic practice of adopting those pagan symbols and traditions.

                As always I wanted to create prompts to allow someone using this material to shape it into their own world, so the various splits of Politico and New Dogmatists could allow for logical permutations within the world while keeping this vague outline as a referential core that can be reinterpreted by the players, “I want to be the Joseph Smith of this world” as a character motivation could be useful.

                Remember, the goal is to have fun while learning about and exploring ideas from the real world with fun permutations. Just like with all fiction.

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Dungeons and Dragons, "The High Arcana"

Gods of Dungeons and Dragons

            I have over the years put out several entries on the topic of fictional religions.  I never really went anywhere with my discussion of Religion as an aspect of settings that I wrote about years before that, but since then I have tried to come at the topic in ways that would make it interesting for someone who had been playing for a while or someone new.

            In each instance I have tried to either go in an entirely new direction like with my unique take on Orcs a while back.  I then did a short follow up to that with a pair of orc characters in that context.  There was also a more traditional pantheon of deities that act in concert with one another, "The Five".  I did a follow up to that one in which I created a team of characters that each serve as an exemplar of the various members of The Five.  My last entry was “The Preserver” which was my attempt to graft a messianic style belief system onto environmentalism oriented religion.

           To continue with this I am going to write up more of my stranger and off the beaten path religious aspects of my own campaign world and see what people think.  This will kind of be a series, much like my attempts to write characters for all the class and background combinations it is something that is informal and rarely done… I am a surprisingly busy person…

It is important when making a symbol for a fictional religion, to keep the iconography simple enough for people to draw.

The High Arcana

Holy Symbol:

            Lines on either side of a pentacle above a curve, the “Wand, Sword, Pentacle, and Cup”

Cleric Domain:

            Arcana (Sword Coast Adventurer’s Guide) or Knowledge (PHB).

            There are also some sects that ascribe different domains based on how they worship.

World View & Mythos:

            The universe is chaos.  From that chaos emerged the Arcana.  The Arcana is the living energy that empowers all things.  It is knowledge and imagination.

            The arcana is a concept beyond mortal reason and cannot be perceived or understood by mortals and instead is perceived in various facets.  22 “gods” form a sort of pantheon, when acolytes seek to understand the arcana or see the future they evoke these gods and attempt to divine the answer to their questions via which gods appear and in which order those gods make those appearances.

            Linked below are the 5 blog entries that give names and identities to all 22 of these “gods”.  This is more an overview to see the religion from more of a birds’ eye view and the idea of them being gods in the traditional sense of a pantheon of beings with genders, goals, and personality.  (COMING SOON; turns out writing 22 of these things takes more time and creative energy than I realized, and I stalled out in the middle of the pack).

            Part 1: The Leaders: Empress, Emperor, High Priestess, Hierophant, and Magician.

            Part 2: The Adversaries: Fool, Hanged Man, Death, Devil, and Wheel of Fortune.

            Part 3: The Virtuous: Strength, Temperance, Justice, and Judgement.

            Part 4: The Cosmos: Star, Moon, Sun, and World.

            Part 5: The Others: Lovers, Charioteer, Hermit, and Tower.

 

For those who don't know what this is a reference too from this opening, here is an additional clue.

Beliefs:

            The High Arcana does not listen to prayers.  They are not a “they” but simply many different faces of a higher form of knowledge and energy that exists beyond the mortal ability to perceive time and space.  It is mercurial, uncaring, random, and often capricious… from the point of view of mortals.  Followers seek foreknowledge and truth by channeling the arcana, but the replies come in such a cryptic manner that divining what they mean is often an exercise in futility.

            As a religion they are (at best) something a “worshiper” tries to listen intently to and decipher in hopes of gaining some kind of edge on the tumultuous circumstances that constantly assault people’s lives.  They might reveal the key to casting a spell, a coming storm, or simply hint at the mood and focus that will be needed in the coming days.

Practices:

            To the world at large the most common practice associated with the High Arcana is prominence of oracles and divination utilizing cartomancy, the use of cards to predict the future.  Each of the 22 images of High Arcana are dealt out and the meaning associated with each of the images is interpreted based on where it falls in the chain.

            As the cards never deal out the same way twice, a common criticism of this practice is, “if I were to ask the same question twice in a row, why would I receive different readings?”  This question has created the main schism with currently divides the religion based on how they answer this question discussed in “Churches and Denominations”.

            The Holy symbol represents the Lesser Arcana, the meaning varies depending on who you ask within the faith.  The most common answers to tend be some variation of, “They represent positive actions taken in the material world based on the guidance of the High Arcana.”  That is to say, attack, cast, heal, or learn… But even that varies and some people in larger churches think that the symbols should be discarded.

 

Thank you to Lucas Pezeta for the free stock photo from Pexels.

Superstitions and Taboos:

            The faith has a 22-month calendar, 9 of months having 16 days, the other 13 having 17 days.  They do not have weeks or weekends and see the calendar strictly as a means to keep track of holidays.  Each of the months is associated with 1 of the gods and it serves as a zodiac.  There is division in the faith between those who believe that one’s birthday can influence one’s persona or one’s relation with the arcana, some holding so true as to not associate with people who are born in certain months because they assume those individuals have conflicting personality traits.

Social Organization:

            Generally speaking there is no prescribed social order in the belief systems of the High Arcana.  Implicit in the belief system are certain virtues and social roles, but they are descriptive rather than prescriptive, that is to say, the reason one of the gods is “The God of Emperors” is not because there should be emperors, but because the word “emperor” best describes his role within the pantheon.

Churches and Denominations:

            The two largest groups were split over the question, “if I were to ask the same question twice in a row, why would I receive different readings?”  The first group are called Refractory Readers, they have the easiest explanation to understand and as such are the more widely understood.  Their explanation is, “The first reading was the ‘correct’ reading, and as it has not resolved itself another reading cannot be taken yet.  The second time you asked the question you were just getting psychic noise from the High Arcana.”

            The Second group is more esoteric and are called Infinite Readers.  Their explanation is as follows, “whenever you ask a question you are only seeing a small amount of an answer, the first few cards, in reality the answer is not cards but an unknowable glimpse into the High Arcana.  You could ask the question an infinite number of times and you would get a different answer each time, but they are all the same answer, one long stream of information that is simply too much for you to take in and interpret.”

            Essentially they are giving the same answer, “too much information for the person to process” but there is a nuance to each’s explanation that has spawned their own canon to be explored and contrasted by the various followers.

            As for formal organizations, there are two exceptionally large churches that have formed, and they are in tension with one another.  The first is the Order of the Oracles, which focus on trying to see the future of the material world and provide such services to communities.  The Oracles have their own missionaries and often study other forms of divination in addition to cartomancy.  The Oracles ascribe to the Refractory Readers explanation and are more generally accepted by the public at large.

            The other group is the Church of the Highest Arcane and prescribe more to the Infinite Readers explanation.  They do not feel the material world is of interest and spend most of their time seeking out a greater understanding of the higher dimensions.  The Astral Plane, the Ethereal Plane, and the Dream Plane take special interest them.  They are favored by Wizards, Warlocks, and others that value Knowledge perceived to be beyond ‘typical’ people.  They are seen as elitist, aloof, and as unproductive intellectuals.

            There exists a third group which is growing in size and influence called the Pantheists.  They believe that the High Arcana should be seen and worshiped as a traditional pantheon of gods with temples to each, pilgrimages, holidays, and each having their own holy symbols.  This group tends toward traditional cleric practices of picking one god to follow with a domain suited to that god, these clerics are often call themselves “Embodiments”.

Cults & Heretics:

            The “Literalists” are a small faction of the faith do believe that these concepts should be applied more literally to the world and have tried in small utopian communities to create a social order based around the various symbols, appointing people to fill each role which can be seen as a person, codifying ideas like Temperance and Judgement into the law, and creating actual Wheels of Fortune that people may gamble upon.

            These groups are viewed by the larger faith as missing the forest for the trees to a comical degree and derided as misrepresenting the faith to the outside world.

            Another group are the “Charlatans” which is a term used for anyone who pretends to practice the art of divination with a set of High Arcana cards but does so without faith or purpose.  They are seen as false prophets and are shockingly common because the cards are often sold or given away as tokens of the faith.

 

And thank you to Scott Rodgerson on unsplash.

Heretical Symbol:

            The Literalists use the same symbol, the “Wand, Sword, Pentacle, and Cup” and see themselves as the true faith.

            The Charlatans also use the “Wand, Sword, Pentacle, and Cup”, it would dispel their ruse if they used a different symbol.

Heretical Domain:

            The Literalists tend toward Order (Guildmaster’s Guide to Ravnica) or Knowledge (PHB) while Charlatans use the Trickery (PHB) domain.

Heretical Texts:

            Often these small groups will be founded by a leader or group of leaders who wish to set themselves up as the Emperor of their own community.  They will frequently write their own holy text which serves as a supreme and final word on how the high arcana should be interpreted.

            Often times they will rename the gods, create dozens of new gods, or make themselves the 23^rd god.  Ironically, none of this behavior can be called “heretical” in any meaningful sense.  The existing names of the gods are placeholders for larger inscrutable concepts.  More gods are just as likely and 22 that exist currently were part of previous generational efforts to codify various ideas, the last to be added was the Charioteer, and there are still debates on whether that god should be split off to a 23^rd in the form of the Paladin, to say nothing of splitting the “Devil” into multiple devils representing sins as they are commonly understood.

            Even the idea of adding one’s self as another god is strange, as that is what the card “World” is often interpreted as.  Not the literal world, but the world as a person perceives it. 

            The larger religion is flexible and contains no supreme “Evil” that can be called to as exists in many other faiths, the closest being those who wish to worship the Devil as a means to gain power thru misdeeds, but even that is atypical, because the Devil is rarely seen in those terms by others within the faith, instead seeing him as a source of knowledge (often forbidden) or the embodiment of personal drive (often leading to self-destructive ends).

Inspirations

            This is going to be pretty obvious, but the big inspiration here is Tarot Cards and their presence in the pop culture as a form of divination.  I find them somewhat entertaining in the same way I find all real-life expressions of the occult to be entertaining.

            This was also inspired in Dungeons and Dragons by two things the first is obviously The Deck of Many Things, an iconic magic item which… inexplicably is not just a Tarot deck in spite of it having 22 cards in it.

Love this art style for the third party publisher trying to release this as a game supplement.

            Seriously, if you look at the list of tarot cards they suggest using for the various Many Things they suggest using numbers from the cups, swords, pentacles, and wands.  That is just weird.  Why not just make the Deck of Many Things the Tarot cards?  Just straight up make them the same things.  It is all nonsense anyway…. What is really weird is one of the suggestions they use is for the “Idiot” in the Many Things deck should align with the “Juggler” in a normal tarot deck…. There is no “Juggler” in a typical tarot deck!  It is the Magus or Magician, both things that belong in DnD more than a Juggler.

            Also, why does the Deck of Many Things need an Idiot, a Fool, and a Jester?  Those are too close together.  It is dumb.

            The other inspiration was the Tarokka Cards which were an add on to the recent Ravenloft “Curse of Strahd” adventure for 5e Dungeons and Dragons.  Having looked thru the cards I found a lot of their theming to be off and weird.  They are clearly ordered with the basic fighter, rogue, cleric, wizard arrangement in mind, but aside from the wizard I think that the archetypes on the others were not entirely right.

            This is another instance in which they could have just used a Tarot Deck and published a Dungeons and Dragons themed deck.  It would have been much more accessible and sold to people who don’t play DnD, instead it was so niche as to be a waste of money.  I will say that I LOVED the art in the Tarokka deck, as the black and white portrayals are cool enough that it could have easily served as a sort of Gothic/retro style for some kind of collector’s edition of the Player’s Handbook.  And I will say, that if they were to do some kind of “Ravenloft Player’s Handbook” with this style of art thru out, and adding a half dozen new options for players (maybe just a beefed up version of the Innistrad options they put on the internet), I could imagine the thing selling a lot better than the decks.

Seriously now, the art looks moody and great.
Check out each.

            In regard to the church denominations, the Order of Oracles was inspired by the Oracle of Delphi, the most famous organized practitioners of divination in Western history, and there were many other oracles both in Greek myth and in the real Greece, to say nothing of all the shamans and oracles that exist in nearly all cultures.

            The other, Church of the Highest Arcane is a sort of parody of any religion that keeps secret knowledge for the highest of their members.  In general I am not a believer in any supernatural power, but I find those groups which deliberately keep information hidden from worshipers to be particularly insulting.  If you think your mythology is too silly or strange for a layman to just not “get it” you may have to rethink whether you believe in it at all.

            The idea of utopian cults forming is pretty easy to find in real life, but they are most often centered on doomsday, this video by Jack Rackam explores one such group, and this video by Crash Course European History discusses one such “utopia” founded on Calvinism.  I am sure that you reader can conjure in your memory any number of groups and communities that have been created by an exceptionally literal or particularly esoteric interpretation of religious text.

            Charlatans really require no great explanation.  There are any number of false prophets back thru history and in the modern world.  Those who perform a religion for profit to bilk the trusting of their money and futures.  And those who turn such performances into industries unto themselves, when they are not scheming people in other ways.

            There is always a danger in pulling inspiration too directly from real world sources, and I have talked about that before in my creation of the “Wild Elves” which I based on the Sioux Indians, and specifically looked at via the lens of racial bias.  However… there really is no other way to make things.

            We exist in the real world and our personal perceptions of the world, what we learn, and how we learn it, limit our ability to understand greater concepts.  The best we can do is take those elements we “know” and remix them into something that feels familiar but is still original.  Dungeons and Dragons, and genre fiction in general allows us to explore concepts like this and I feel allows us to understand something better via such distortions, by shuffling disparate elements together we see their similarities and contrasts all the better.

            Maybe, when I finally finish this series of entries it will ultimately be seen as entertaining, and even something a person might want to include in their own game.  Regardless, I hope it was entertaining to read.  Have fun.

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Audio Book Review, "The Scribbly Man"

TLDR: It Sucks

Prologue

            To start off this discussion I want to first talk about another book that is more interesting than this one, “Sheepfarmer's Daughter” by Elizabeth Moon, in her fantasy saga, “The Deed of Paksenarrion”.  I read that book ages ago and for all that time I was trying to get my thoughts about it down on paper.  I would start, get bogged down, start talking about the Hero’s Journey and how character arcs are supposed to work… Then I would stop and throw it all out.

            There was too much to talk about with “Sheepfarmer's Daughter”.  I wrote other massive book reviews for the other murderer’s row “Worst books I have managed to finish”, a strange subgenre of things I tell people to stay away from.  There was my review of “Year One” which I again mention “Sheepfarmer's Daughter”.  And my review of the boring as fuck “Genesis”, a review that I am kind of proud of.  But I was still not able to hammer out all the things I wanted to get into with the first “Deed of Paksenarrion” book.

            There are other things that I feel almost obligated to write about one day to explain in excruciating detail why I dislike them so much, but I don’t feel so bad about Elizabeth Moon’s book now, because something new has taken the laurel as the worst book I have ever managed to finish, Terry Goodkind’s “The Scribbly Man”.

Introduction

I came into reading this aware of Terry Goodkind's status as a prolific writer who helped define the fantasy genre over the decades... I expected this to be good.

Let me start with the first of many complaints, this is not a "Book 1" it is the direct continuation of an earlier series, events from that previous series define the main view point characters, the world, and serve as the inciting action for this story.  I got this assuming it was the author building a new series from the ground up, it is not, and the lack of clear upfront explanation of things makes the material surprisingly obtuse.  What is more, and this only matters to fans of his work (and there is a horde, this thing is intensely well reviewed) the book is comically short, it would be a quarter of a typical fantasy novel, even one meant to start a series.

 

For reference, this book (which I still hate) is 15 hours and 48 minutes.
"Scribbly Man" is 3 hours and 50 minutes.

The Plot

            The King and his wife who is sort of the Pope of a fantasy world are confronted by someone telling them that a “Golden Goddess” is coming to conquer their planet.  This guy is carted off for interrogation and a Witch shows up to be a new character (her presence should be a big red flag to everyone else… and somehow they treat her like they’ve known her for years).

            Turns out the guy in the interrogation tried to kill the Pope with the help of the titular “Scribbly Man” a monster from another world as a herald of the Golden Goddess.  The Pope lives, and together with the other characters they later resolve to fight the bad guy… And that is it.  Shockingly short book, I would not have stuck it out if it were longer.

Some Complaints

My initial and core complaints about this title have to do with the comically bad writing.  Dialogue is so stilted that the voice actor seems to have no idea how to deliver the lines, halting, flat, and repetitive.  I swear to god, the number of times the word "Gift" or "Witch Woman" show up in some chapters the words start to lose all meaning.  And of course "Scribbly Man" and "Golden Goddess" which are repeated dozens of times to the point where you just want to shake them and say, call one of them "They" or "Gary" or something else so that I can stop rolling my eyes at how overly formal you are all being.

And everything has such boring nomenclature.  "War Wizard" "Sword of Truth" "Confessor" "Witch Woman", they all feel like place holders that you put into the script until you can think of something distinct or punchy to give the world flavor like "Fremen" in Dune, “Istari” in Lord of the Rings, or “Jedi” in Star Wars.  “Scribbly” lacks sophistication with the writing terminology and that makes it feel flat.  I don’t need a whole fictional language or whatever, but come up with something more interesting sounding that “War Wizard”.

 

Tank Mage would have at least been a cool visual.
But he is just the 10,000th fantasy jerk off with a sword.

Some More Complaints

The plotting makes little sense too, there is a part where the heroes all decide to interrogate a villain, so they walk into a cell and then they stop and have a 10-minute private conversation that they all could have had in another room.  It is like the chapter is in the wrong place.  Same goes for lots of cuts to the action.  A chapter ends with the Confessor in complete control of a situation, zero tension, and then when we come back the villain has stabbed her, and an unseen monster has viciously attacked her.  What?  You were fine?  Why didn’t the last chapter we saw you in end with a violent attack?

There is also just a lack of characters.  There are 2 main, 2 supporting, and 3 minor in a book about a fantasy kingdom being invaded by incorporeal mind controlling ghost monsters from the stars.  Where is the war council?  Where are prominent heroes, intellectuals, and advisers outside of the two heroes and the random "Witch Woman" who happens to show up the same day as the evil ghosts... and for some reason no one treats that as massively suspicious.

There is the real twist that needed to happen, the “Witch Woman” should have been concocting the whole alien invasion thing to put her in a position to harm the two main heroes… She even has motivation to do so… not that it makes any sense because it was the conclusion to the last series of books, but the Witch doesn’t seem to take, “Sorry I screwed up the source of one of your many super powers… But I literally was thwarting the end of life on this planet.  You should probably just get over it.”

"Sure, the dead would have walked the earth...
But you would have gotten to keep your ability to tell people's fortunes.  Idiot."

Some More Complaints

Also, the heroes are assholes.  One of them uses magic to completely enslave the will of a person who is already brainwashed by the villain and she is so pissed of at him for telling her that the bad guys are coming she kills him… Like he was a victim of the monsters.  And what is more that scene has another hero brutally and casually mutilate the guy to break the villain’s control over him, it is unpleasant and shocking… and the main heroes are just like, “Ha!  I’m starting to like her!”  Which is gross.

Another small thing, the title is stupid.  This is the start of the series and while “Scribbly Man” is said to the point where the words boarder on meaningless it is not technically the main threat, the “Golden Goddess” is.  And what is more there is some asinine argument between the two main characters about how one promised the other a “Golden Age” and she is mad at him because she is now conflating “Golden Age” and “Golden Goddess” in a train of logic I could not follow.  The book, which takes place as a SEQUEL to the past series should have been called “The Golden Age” to show the contrast between the promise of the main hero and the looming threat of the villain, you know, the parallel he was trying to establish and failed to.

A Backhanded Compliment

To switch gears, I will give it one credit.  The idea of the shimmering ghost like entity, the titular Scribbly Man is a good image.  The way its tracks are described, the idea that it has claws and venom, that it is especially alien and sees causing fear and killing akin to sexual pleasure.  They are a fitting threat to the protagonists who are the undisputed supreme monarchs of an entire planet with magic powers and seemingly limitless resources… Yeesh… way to write identifiable characters am I right?  Guess that isn’t a lot of credit there…

This is from the show... Which is... Shockingly bad.
Also, gotta love that old trope of superior bloodlines making them magically awesome

Conclusion

Note: I did not pay full price for this, I got it for $1.99 and still thought about returning it.  Overall, this is garbage.  The sort of flat clunky mess that I would expect as the first fantasy novel hacked out by a 15-year-old.  Made all the more disappointing because it is apparently the work of a rock star in the genre.  Baffling.

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