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.