The Verdant & Scarlet Codices and Olman background material

The Verdant & Scarlet Codices and Olman background material
By Maria Deltorre

In the real world, much of what we know about the Mayan people comes from various "codices", such as the Dresden Codex. These are documents written by the Maya themselves that anthropologists and linguists have translated slowly and carefully, unlocking much information that was not preserved in the oral traditions of the people of Mexico and Guatemala.

Sages of the Flanaess rely on codices as well, but these differ in that they are texts penned by the explorers who have ventured into the Amedio jungle to learn about the Olman people. Many varied codices exist, but there are two worth mentioning here, the so called Verdant and Scarlet Codices.

The Verdant Codex, written by a little known mercenary captain, Rogar of Gradsul, in 585cy chronicles the discoveries of the expedition of Tibarian Matreyus to explore the Amedio jungle in the two years prior. Rogar was a participant in the expedition, and his translation of Olman language was aided by the very Olman guides hired by the expedition to lead them through the jungle, so the Verdant Codex is generally considered reliable and accurate by sages in the decades since copies began to circulate in the Flanaess.

The Scarlet Codex carries a slightly more dubious reputation. Penned around the same time as the Verdant Codex by one Skreyn of Kro Terlep, a sage and explorer commissioned by the elders of the Scarlet Brotherhood to document the geography and peoples of the Amedio and Hepmonaland regions. Lacking cooperative Olman guides to aid him, Skreyn relied on a set of tablets known as the Ipoza stones to translate material he had access to from the Brotherhood's archives of Olman relics.

The Ipoza stones are a set of tablets discovered in the jungle near the volcano the locals call Mt Ipoza, where it is reliably guessed that a community of foolhardy settlers from the Flanaess once existed in the then dormant caldera of the volcano. The community was utterly destroyed when Mt Ipoza roared back to life in the late 570s, but some relics of the community have been found in the jungle nearby.

In ancient times, the Olman of Tamoachan had extensive trade with the Dwarves of the Hellfurnace mountains. In order to aid their non-priest peers, the clerics of a now forgotten Dwarf hold in the area created this set of tablets, which painstakingly translate the ancient Olman language into the ancient Dwarvish language. How the tablets ended up in Ipoza is not clear, but Scarlet Brotherhood agents recovered all the known remaining tablets of the set in that area and have attempted to use them to gain some insight into the Olman culture.

Skreyn of Kro Terlep is not known to be a practitioner of arcane or divine magic, so he referenced the Ipoza stones to translate the materials he had access to, including a lengthy treatise on Olman religions recovered by Brotherhood agents in the ruins of Tamoachan.

The translation of the material into what became the Scarlet Codex was rough and tedious, but eager to please his Brotherhood patrons, Skreyn dutifully completed the work. In the passing decades, copies of the codex, whole and partial, have begun to appear around the Flanaess and be dissected by sages. Until quite recently, the Scarlet Codex was held in esteem equal to the Verdant Codex, being considered almost flawless in its account.

In 599 cy however, new facts about the Scarlet Codex were unveiled by the archmage Drawmij in a speech before the Sea Mages guild in Gradsul. Having access to a reliable copy of the original Olman religions treatise, Drawmij was eager to check Skreyn's translation against his own, performed using arcane magic.

Drawmij was utterly puzzled by the results of his research. Skreyn's codex was rife with errors, and entire tracts of the document seemed woven completely from the author's imagination, having no foundation in the original document. Drawmij tasked his agents with the dangerous journey into Kro Terlep to contact Skreyn and investigate, and was amused by their revelation.

While the Ipoza stones are considered as reliable as non-magical translations, they do not have an accompanying user's manual, and lacking a cooperative Olman guide to assist him, Skreyn failed to realize that ancient Olman texts are read bottom to top, instead of top to bottom as most modern languages. Thus, despite his best intentions, Skreyn's source material is invalid, and the credibility of the Scarlet Codex has been destroyed by Drawmij's revelation to the Sea Mages.


A note from Maria:
This post may at first seem like a mean spirited poke at Scarlet Brotherhood author Sean K Reynolds. In all honesty though, while it is a poke at SKR, there is no inherent malice.

You see, in looking into the attempts in the real world to decode the Quiche Mayan language, we come upon the amusing tale of Abbe Charles Etienne Brasseur de Bourboug, a nineteenth century french antiquarian attempting to link the origins of the Maya to the legendary stories of the lost continent of Atlantis.

Brasseur's theory came from his translation of the Madrid Codex, a precolumbian Mayan document, and was held as quite credible upon publication of his treatise, Quatre Lettres sur le Mexique (Four Letters on Mexico).

The problem, revealed a few years later, was not in the translation itself. Brasseur employed El Relacion (The Relation), a guide to translating Quiche Mayan pictoglyphs into spanish developed by Diego de Landa, a Franciscan friar, in 1549. Landa's Relacion is far from perfect, but provided later translators a framework to work from, and in Brasseur's time, was still considered the translation tool to depend on. In this regard Brasseur is to be commended for his efforts.

Like our fantasy world friend Skreyn, Brasseur made one simple but catastrophic error. He read the Madrid codex backwards, not realizing that Mayan pictoglyphs do not follow the standard of left to right, top to bottom used by modern latin derived languages.

So you see, while teasing Sean Reynolds, I'm also making a lighthearted commentary on the follies of real world anthropology. It's not my intent here to start a hate fest among fans and critics of Sean Reynolds. I'm just having a little fun, and presenting a possible explanation to justify the fan material created by those of us who were not impressed with Sean's Scarlet Brotherhood sourcebook.

Obviously, the Scarlet Codex is an in game reference to Wizards of the Coast's Scarlet Brotherhood product. In the same context, the Verdant Codex refers to an article by Roger Moore, who refered to himself as Rogar (of Mooria, I changed it to Gradsul to be relevant to the story) during his tenure as editor in chief of TSR's Dragon magazine. The fanzine Oerth Journal, Issue 4, presented an article Roger wrote called "The Green Nightmare, part 1", a treatise on the Amedio jungle, it's history and peoples. Though not hard and fast published canon, Roger's status as director of the Greyhawk product line at the time he wrote tGN, and lack of any egregious canon errors has given the article a sort of apocryphal canon status in the Greyhawk community.

Greyhawk canon is a messy thing sometimes, the face that launched a thousand flamewars, as it were.

Gygax himself made extensive use of anagrammatical homages to players and associates when naming people and places in the campaign, well beyond the obvious Zagyg, Xagig, Yrag, etc. Later, this tradition was carried on under the tenures of Roger Moore and Erik Mona, with myriad references to the movers and shakers of GH fandom in the 1990s in the names of NPCs in the various sourcebooks.

A few years back some posters on the Canonfire and Wizards Community fora began playing with the idea of assigning in setting personages to the various authors of GH material, allowing all the material to be treated as in character research, as Gygax presented the campaign (as the historical research of Pluffet Smedger).

To me, this grants DMs and fan material writers immense freedom in deciding what is actual canon truth, and what is simply the misinformed ramblings of confused NPCs, based on their individual taste in GH source material.

What does Chitza-Atlan's name mean?

What does Chitza-Atlan's name mean?
By Maria Deltorre

Chichen is alternatively spelled Chitza, meaning mouth or well, or more figuratively, gate.

Tlan is an Aztec word meaning 'place of'.

So, literally, Chitza Atlan means, roughly, 'Place of Mouths' or 'Place of Gates'

Given the description of C-A in C1 tho, I would twist the meaning a little and call him the 'Guardian of the Gates'. Make him a demigod servant of Camazotz, lord of the Mayan underworld, who is tasked with guarding the gateway between the underworld and the Oerth, as is implied in the module text.

Keep in mind tho, the mummified centaur is not the appearance of C-A, but merely a 'sacred offspring' of that entity. See C1 encounter area 49 for confirmation of this.

Corn, the Maya and the Olman

Corn, the Maya and the Olman
By Maria Deltorre

At the Canonfire forum, Sam Weiss wrote:

And relating to 2 above, no it wasn't grown in the slash-and-burn plots of the Maya, but it was grown in the floating garden plots of Tenochtitlan. The two ecosystems, however much they are both "Meso-American", are radically different.

This is not correct, regarding the Maya. Corn/Maize was the staple food in every known Mayan community. Evidence of corn cultivation has been found at Cival, Palenque, Tikal, Chichen Itza and Calakmul. In addition, all of the sites have yeilded religious artifacts related to Itzamna, the god of the moon and corn, who is said to have created Mayan culture by wrapping the earth in corn husks.

Corn was very important to the Mayans, and grew readily in their realms at that time. Since then, the climate of Central America has shifted a bit, and now favors the drastic diversity that Sam mentions, deserts in middle and northern Mexico, and jungles in southern Mexico, Guatemala and other ares south of that.

However, this is sort of a moot point, since the Amedio's climate is obviously based on that of central America today, not 600 to 1000 years ago. Large scale corn cultivation in the jungles of modern Guatemala and Mexico is difficult, even with modern technology. For the Olman to have corn as a staple of their diet, a major reworking of the description of the climate of the Amedio, or an alternate homeland would be required. Obviously, fans agree that the alternate homeland is the answer, but vary on the details.

One of these days I'll have to write up the real homeland of the Olman, which I believe to be, as Sam mentioned, the grasslands southwest of the Amedio where the Hellfurnaces finally end.

Camazotz, Zotz, and Zotzilaha

Camazotz, Zotz, and Zotzilaha
By Maria Deltorre

To understand the real meaning of these three words (they are real words!), one needs to review the Popol Vuh, the Mayan "creation myth" (and try to not to giggle during the part where the frying pans accost the Mayans).

Zotz (alternately Camalotz) is a sort of aloof death god, and one of the 4 animal demons who helped slay the evil proto-humans before the coming of this age and the arrival of the Mayans.

Zotzihila is a great dark cave, the underworld, where Zotz dwells, along with, as can be expected in central American caves, lots of bats. The Camazotz, the "Death Bat" or "Snatch Bat", believed to be the Mayan term for the Vampire Bat, and other large bats, were believed to inhabit this cavern with Zotz.

The confusion as to Zotzhila being the name of a god comes from the myths of the Quiche people of what is now Guatemala, who were a pre/proto-Mayan group that worshipped (among other things) a fire god called Zotzilaha Chamalcan. This god has little relation to Zotz/Camalotz, and the Popol Vuh is quite clear on the meaning of Zotzihila in Mayan myth.