Retrospective: 超時空要塞マクロス (Super Dimension Fortress MACROSS). Part One.

Introduction.
Part Two.

The Macross

Let's begin an analysis of Super Dimension Fortress Macross in earnest, beginning with a broad overview of the plot.

Fair warning.  In this analysis THERE WILL BE SPOILERS.  If you haven't yet seen the series, you have been warned and this analysis is written with the assumption that the reader will proceed upon his or her own discretion.  If you have seen the series, by all means, please continue reading.

PLOT OVERVIEW
The series opens with the crash-landing of an alien warship on South Ataria Island in a remote part of the western Pacific Ocean.  Earth is in the midst of a world war but the appearance f this alien vessel quickly unites mankind under the auspices of a powerful United Nations, which forms the U.N. Spacy.  Over ten years, the ship is rebuilt and remodeled, its technologies reverse-engineered, and is christened the Macross.  To support the massive undertaking of repairing and examining the ship and its technologies (including a spacefolding FTL drive), an enormous city springs into existence surrounding the vessel and occupying most of the island.

The story begins in earnest with the celebrations to launch the vessel.  It is here that we are introduced to most of the characters that will dominate the narrative.  Captain Bruno J. Global, an Italian submarine captain who had fought for the United Nations during the unification wars and whose appearance exemplifies the "Mustache Pete" stereotype.  His first officer is First Lieutenant Hayase Misa, a Japanese woman whose father, Admiral Hayase Takashi, was Global's superior during the wars.  Her coworker, companion and close confidante is Claudia LaSalle, an African American bridge officer.  The leader of the Skull Squadron, Roy Focker, is a heavily drinking, smoking, womanizing, American cowboy who started out as a stunt pilot before joining the United Nations forces during the U.N. Wars.  He is in a romantic relationship with LaSalle and hosts his young friend Ichijyo Hikaru, the son of the air circus owner for whom Roy flew before the wars.  Ichijyo Hikaru is introduced as an energetic, brash Japanese pilot of age 16 with a record of seven championship awards for stunt piloting.  Finally, Lynn Minmay is a 15-year-old, half-Chinese, half-Japanese girl from Yokohama who moved to South Ataria Island with dreams of becoming a star.

Britai's flagship

The celebrations and launch preparations are interrupted by the arrival of the Zentraedi, an alien race of giants who are searching for the crashed vessel since it is identified as belonging to the Supervision Army, an enemy force with whom the Zentraedi are at war.  Their commander, Britai Kridanik, orders an assault to capture the vessel, brushing aside all orbital defense platforms encircling the earth and bombarding the island before launching ground and air attacks.  Hikaru and Minmay are immediately swept up into the events and find themselves, along with many of the survivors, as refugees aboard the Macross when a space-fold operation goes wrong.  The Macross, with its precious cargo of civilian refugees, then battles its way across the solar system back to Earth.  Once it arrives, the crew and refugees alike must navigate the complexities of government policy and military command that wants to mitigate the impact of the alien attacks on Earth and use the vessel to distract the Zentraedi away from the home planet.

Left-to-right: Lynn Minmay, Ichijyo Hikaru, and Hayase Misa.

Throughout the story, interpersonal drama unfolds in the form of a love triangle between Hikaru, Minmay, and Misa.  Hikaru is initially attracted to Minmay who, although she finds herself drawn to Hikaru, is ultimately career driven and extremely capricious due to her youth.  However, the 19-year-old Misa and 16-year-old Hikaru, despite the intense dislike the two have for one-another, gradually find solace in companionship.  As the series progresses, years pass and they grow older and more experienced and mature.  As they age, Hikaru gradually detaches himself from Minmay and finds in Misa a more sophisticated and meaningful relationship.

THEMATIC DEPTH
What sets Macross apart from other "real robot" anime?  Mobile Suit Gundam arguably has a sophisticated plot full of intrigue and illustrative of the horror of war (especially involving advanced robotic technology and futuristic weaponry).  There are a great deal of similarities between the two, as well.  Hikaru appears to be much like Amro--both are excellent pilots who become leaders.  Both the Macross and the White Base are iconic vessels that serve as major targets for the enemy to capture or destroy.

Mobile Suit Gundam

The similarities are mostly surface.  Macross actually subverts many of the elements that are prominent in Mobile Suit Gundam.  In addition, Macross isn't as unambiguous about war.  Where Mobile Suit Gundam simply depicts war as bad, Macross demonstrates how war can often be unavoidable.  Nevertheless, Macross still tries to provide a positive message by exploring how misunderstanding and lack of communication can create military conflict and give methods by which negotiation can lead to peace.  Mobile Suit Gundam is far more pessimistic in its outlook.

The characters in Macross are multifaceted.  It is difficult not to care about them and find oneself deeply engaged by the narrative.  Actions have consequences.  People live, love and die.  They are beautifully, wonderfully flawed in the most human and believable ways.  Characters have real motivations that go beyond simply winning the war.  Unlike Mobile Suit Gundam, the characters of Macross have lives outside of the conflict.

The war against the Zentraedi is a catalyst for much of the drama but it is by no means a mere situational MacGuffin.  It forces characters to analyze themselves and become more introspective.  It provides a vehicle for experience.  They change, grow, and develop as people.  Kawamori Shoji invested a great deal of time and effort into creating these characters, their needs, desires, hopes, and motivations.

The narrative of the series is also challenging to the viewer.  There is no clear-cut good-guy/bad-guy dynamic.  Kawamori refuses to spoon-feed the viewer with a morality.  Instead, he uses the themes to make the viewer think.  One may not agree with the choices certain characters make.  They mess up, fail, fall down and occasionally some don't climb back up.  There is heroism and sacrifice, tragedy, foolishness and tunnel vision, blind ignorance, love, appreciation for beauty, loss, and triumph.

THE HERO
Ichijyo Hikaru is the hero of the tale.  He starts out as a kid.  Although he is an experienced air-show pilot he is unready to deal with the realities of air-combat and warfare.  Nor is he prepared to pilot a transforming mech.  He stands out as a protagonist because he, like us, is thrown into this conflict.  The viewer can identify with him very quickly.  He's not "the One," a Newtype, or the Kwizatz Haderach.  He's just a kid who gets swept up by events far beyond his control.  Hikaru is forced to adapt and grow in order to survive.  His journey becomes our journey through the series and we experience the story, the love, the loss, and the lessons vicariously through him.

He stands in direct contrast to Amro in Mobile Suit Gundam.  Amro is a Newtype, a sort of psychic whiz-kid at piloting robots.  Amro's alter-ego is Char Aznable and the two engaged in one of the most legendary feuds in all of anime.  Enraged at the destruction the Zeon forces are wreaking, he jumps into the cockpit of a Gundam, barely glances at the instructions and immediately starts piloting in a combat situation.  He is entirely untrained and untested, yet he successfully defeats the enemy Zacks.

View the scene here.

Hikaru's first experience is quite the opposite.  In fact, it's terrifying.  Hikaru is absolutely overwhelmed.  He ended up piloting a Valkyrie fighter entirely by accident and ends up escorted to safety by his mentor, Roy Focker.  Even this escort barely rescues him and he is instructed to transform in order to avoid colliding with the Macross.  He may have the skills and training to fly a plane but he is entirely incapable of piloting a bipedal robot, crashing into buildings and causing a lot of damage.

Amro is special by having an innate talent.  Hikaru isn't special.  He's entirely mundane.  He's a human.  The fact that he becomes an ace fighter pilot is not through virtue of being a Newtype like Amro but a result of hard work, training, courage, and willpower.

Next time, we'll take a look at the circumstances of war and its impact on Macross as a major theme.

Retrospective: 超時空要塞マクロス (Super Dimension Fortress MACROSS). Introduction.

Part One
Part Two.

Several years ago, I wrote this post, discussion the value of 超時空要塞マクロス(Choujikuu Yousai Makurosu = Super Dimension Fortress Macross) as a science-fiction drama.  If you've already read that post, please bear with me because I'm going to cover some similar ground.

My discussion of Macross inevitably begins with Robotech.  For many Generation X'ers who were children during the 1980s, including myself, our introduction to Japanese アニメ (anime = "animation") was through the various work of Carl Macek (who passed away in 2010).  Macek is either a hero or a villain depending on to whom you speak.  While Macek did a lot to bring アニメ to North America and other Anglophonic countries, this often required mash-ups, heavy editing, and sometimes even complete and total rewrites of entire series.  The most notorious (and, indeed, his first big) project was Robotech for Harmony Gold, which took three unrelated anime, 超時空要塞マクロス (Super Dimension Fortress Macross), 超時空騎団サザンクロス (Super Dimension Cavalry Southern Cross), and 機甲創世記モスピーダ (Genesis Climber Mospeada), combined them into three consecutive generations and changed names, dialogue, and even edited out certain scenes in order to make the show more palatable to an audience primarily composed of American and Canadian children (and possibly their parents).

Carl Macek

Interestingly enough, Robotech was not the only program to receive this treatment.  Captain Harlock and the Queen of a Thousand Years was a mash-up of two separate anime, 宇宙海賊キャプテンハーロック (Space Pirate Captain Harlock) and 新竹取物語 1000年女王 (Queen Millennia).  Both were taken from manga series written by 松本 零士 (Matsumoto Leiji), the genius behind 宇宙戦艦ヤマト (Space Battleship Yamato) and 銀河鉄道999 (Galaxy Express 999).  The reason for these mash-ups revolved around syndication regulations in the United States--in order to air a weekday television series, there needed to be at least 65 episodes (essentially a minimum-length run of five episodes per week over the course of thirteen weeks). マクロス (Macross) had 36 episodes, サザンクロス (Southern Cross) had 24, and モスピーダ (Mospeada) had 25.  Individually, they didn't have enough--combined they had 85 episodes, well above the minimum requirement for U.S. syndication.

The purpose behind the heavy editing was two-fold.  First, Macek had to rewrite names and dialogue enough to explain the progressive generations and put them into a narrative framework that would make sense.  Thus, for example, the Zor in サザンクロス (Southern Cross) were rewritten as the Robotech Masters, the overlords of the Zentraedi from マクロス (Macross).  In addition, dialogue and visual content had to be edited to make the show fit for children, since in the 1980s it was assumed that cartoons were strictly for kids.  Thus, dialogue that related to mature themes (such as sex or suicide) had to be sanitized for American child audiences.  The brief and occasional nudity also had to be excised.

What was shocking, however, to me as a kid, were the abundance of mature themes and ideas that persisted.  Characters died and the price of war was high.  There was a continuous narrative that flowed from episode-to-episode.  This was during a time when G.I. Joe and The Transformers were self-contained, independent stories and it mattered little if you missed a few episodes.  Robotech was the first show that I made certain I watched daily as a child.  If I missed episode 13 of G.I. Joe, I could still pick up and watch episode 14 the next day because Cobra Commander would be hatching a completely new and unrelated plan.  Missing an episode of Robotech meant that I missed out on character and plot development.

In addition, when a plane was shot down in Robotech, there wasn't always a parachute to let the censors know the pilot escaped.  People died, good and bad.  Robotech was about war and the cost of war.  Robotech challenged me far more than the other television cartoons that I viewed and it inspired me to a wider and more complex world of stories and storytelling.

I'm not writing this series of blog entries, however, to discuss Robotech.  I'm writing a retrospective that will analyze and review 超時空要塞マクロス (Super Dimension Fortress Macross).  To that end, I want to discuss first how Macross came about and then, in subsequent posts, explore the narrative elements and themes of the series.

Kawamori Shoji

The Genesis of Macross
Macross was the brainchild of 河森 正治 (Kawamori Shoji), an animator, designer, and conceptual artist who began working in the Japanese animation industry during the late 1970s.  His influence as a designer is extremely heavy--he's done designs for Matsumoto Leiji's Space Battleship Yamato and even had a hand in creating a number of Generation 1 Transformers.  If you've seen Eureka 7, the Patlabor movies, the Ghost in the Shell film, Mobile Suit Gundam 0083: Stardust Memory, Outlaw Star, or Vision of Escaflowne, you've seen mechanical designs by Kawamori.  Kawamori got his big start working as an intern and assistant artist at スタジオぬえ (Studio Nue), which produced Matsumoto's Space Battleship Yamato in 1974.  Kawamori would eventually come to helm 1996's 天空のエスカフローネ (Vision of Escaflowne) at Studio Nue before branching off to create many science-fiction and fantasy anime that would come out during the new century, particularly 2001's 地球少女アルジュナ (Earth Maiden Arjuna), 2005's 創聖のアクエリオン (Genesis of Aquarion), and 2012's AKB∞48.  However, he always seems to return to the universe of Macross from time-to-time, revisiting it with Macross Plus, Macross 7, Macross Zero, and most recently, Macross Frontier.

Macross is a foray into what is known as the リアルロボット ("real robot") genre in Japan.  The basic idea of this genre centers on somewhat explainable scientific and technological advances that make possible the construction and piloting of giant robots.  The first true real robot series is usually considered to be Mobile Suit Gundam, and Kawamori’s Choujikuu Yousai Makurosu helped to better define the tropes and characteristics of the genre.  This genre is noteworthy for its departure from other giant robot shows like Voltron because the core concepts are more realistic, don’t rely upon gimmicks like “blazing swords” and “monsters of the week,” focus on weapons that are known to be technologically possible, don’t have special attacks that are activated by voice-command, and so on.

What first inspired Kawamori to create his own "real robot" series was the immense success of 機動戦士ガンダム (Mobile Suit Gundam) during the late 1970s.  Combined with his experience working on Space Battleship Yamato and the immense success such space-opera programs had, Kawamori drew up plans for a space-opera of his own.  This time, he would incorporate a great number of themes absent from those series.  He would use the backdrop of interstellar war to galvanize the action but the real drama would always be interpersonal.  Thus, Kawamori teamed up with Studio Nue colleague Kazutaka Miyatake for mech design and Artland’s Haruhiko Mikimoto for character design.  By 1982 the result was an epic story of the power of music and love amidst the tragedy of futuristic space-war.

In Part One, I will give a brief overview of the plot for 超時空要塞マクロス (Super Dimension Fortress Macross) and initiate discussion of its more salient themes as well as occasionally compare it to other popular "real robot" anime, especially Mobile Suit Gundam.

Sic Semper Tyrannis?

My good friend, Kevin W. Boyd, wrote this and mailed it off to a number of Senators, Congressmen, and organizations (I hope also newspapers).  Although I almost never blog anymore (and probably won't have the time to do so until summer rolls along) I felt it important to post this and give it some circulation.  Whether you agree with Kevin or not, I believe that his essay has some definite merit.

Philadelphia, PA

14 Apr, 2013/5 Iyar, 5773

Sic semper tyrannis?

Just this week, Senator Cruz reiterated his vow to “protect our 2^nd Amendment rights” by opposing, among other things, a national gun registry (which of course is a misnomer, it is the owners that would be “registered”).  His words were a clarion, clearing the fog of battle rather than summoning one; American citizens have been crafting tactics in the fight over gun control while adhering to a faulty strategy.  While it is commendable that the skirmishes over hunting have been won, and gun grabbers seem to be conducting a rear guard action over self-defense, without recognizing the true threat to popular sovereignty which inspires the many demands to more rigorously regulate possession of firearms, the rights defended by the Constitution will eventually be lost, or more precisely, stolen.

            “Unarmed citizen” is, if not a personal choice, an oxymoron.  If government officials, elected or not, mandate a defenseless polity, then the people are no longer citizens, they are subjects.  This idea is foreign to an increasing number of Americans.  But our libraries are full of evidence that the people who rejected their status as subjects of George III thought this way.  Those same stacks show that the originators of democratic civilization, the Greeks and Romans, thought this way as well.  The 20^th Century alone provides evidence enough of the wisdom of such philosophies.  And it is this conception of independence that motivated the inclusion of the right to bear arms in the Bill of Rights.

            Despite the Heller decision, many still argue, or simply believe, that the 2^nd Amendment is a corporate right, intended to maintain militias as a check of Federal power.   I shall dispense with this silly argument briefly, by pointing out that the principal grievance of those at the South in antebellum America was founded on a false understanding of the Bill of Rights.

            The Civil War resolved the issue of states’ rights; they are inferior to those of the Federal government.  This anyway is what we are typically taught.  But there is a deeper lesson.  The 10^th Amendment says nothing of states’ rights in the first place.  The 9^th Amendment explains that the people have other rights which have not been put in writing.  But the 10^th explains that there are many powers which the states retain.  A power is not a right.  The 10^th is not a protection of corporate rights, it is a final check on Federal power.  This raises an implication about the 2^nd.

            The proof resides in the Declaration of Independence.  People are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights; governments are instituted among them, for the single purpose of securing those rights.  This alone demonstrates that the American system is predicated on the idea that governments do not grant rights to people; in fact they possess no rights to grant or exercise.

            The Bill of Rights protects individual rights from government tyranny, exclusively.

            As a philosophic refresher, this is all well and good.  I should hope the argument clear enough to sway some honest thinkers.  My higher aim though, is to upend the debate over gun control. 

            It is a sad irony that the greatest moral battle of 20^th Century America has led to an electorate convinced that they have no need for all of their rights.  The civil rights movement successfully persuaded Americans and their elected representatives that it was wrong, based on nothing more than the color of one’s skin, to prevent millions of their neighbors from equal participation in governing this country.  This is not the place to detail the countless victories and failures over the last few decades.  The point is that the two principal conflicts, voting rights and education, made Federal issues out of topics barely addressed by the Constitution; education was such a local issue the word isn’t even in the Constitution, and control of elections was explicitly reserved to the states.

            This is not to suggest that civil rights are not Federal issues; clearly when representative government fails at lower levels, redress must be sought from a higher authority.  This is the purpose of the 14^th Amendment.  Indeed, this is why so many wish for Congress to “do something” about guns; they believe that lower governments are failing to contain nuts with guns. 

            The shift I am pursuing is the recognition that the bearing of arms is a civil right.  We are given rights, equally, by God; it is a disingenuous oversimplification to claim that the majority of colonists thought of Jefferson's god when hearing the Declaration. The Founders were particularly sensitive to having their liberty dangling at the end of a thread tied to the king’s finger; their government was to have explicit limits to its power.  Its acceptance hung finally on the inclusion of the Bill of Rights.  Since we agree that the ability to vote, like the freedom to be educated, are vital to our health as a nation, we should also be able to agree that each of the rights, enumerated in the Bill of Rights, including those of both pen and sword, are equally fundamental.

            American citizens (those who support the erosion of the 2^nd Amendment are in fact not citizens but rather subjects) need to reconsider its importance.  We also need to seize control of the narrative.  It was largely Democrats who opposed the original civil rights acts in the 1860s.  It was Democrats who built Jim Crow, instituted poll taxes, and fought integration.  It is Democrats who are, once again, maneuvering to eviscerate the Bill of Rights, through speech codes and gun registries.  One need not imagine how all that might end.  Conservatives, Libertarians, and Republicans must demonstrate, rhetorically and legislatively, that the citizen, free to live and worship as he sees fit, is the only reason this country exists.  The final expression of that is the defiance, and destruction, of tyrants.  And on this Yom Ha’Atzmaut, Israel’s Day of Independence, we would all do well to remember this struggle is that of all mankind.

Kevin W Boyd

intrcptr2@yahoo.com

Defining "Achievement" in Schools

In my Learning and Cognition course, I've been assigned to read Engaging Schools by the Committee on Increasing High School Students' Engagement and Motivation to Learn and the National Research Council.

The following consists of my preliminary reaction to the first two or three chapters and executive summary of the book.

As I've been going through the readings, I'm struck by a number of social problems with the book that most people probably haven't noticed.  They have nothing to do with class or race.  Instead, they have to do with what we consider standards and how we define achievement.

The fact is that there aren't enough jobs for the number of people graduating college.  Entire fields are overburdened with hopefuls in the unemployment line, bearing their degrees that their teachers promised would make them wealthy and give them a better life.  Indeed, I have to ask, is the implementation of these reforms contained in Engaging Schools producing false hopes in students that academic achievement and college are tickets to a meaningful life?

Indeed, it goes beyond standards and strikes to the core of why we teach.  What is our mission?  To see the students succeed, one would assume, especially while reading Engaging Schools.  However, there is a subtle subtext running throughout the book that seems to interpret academic achievement as providing a way to be successful in life.  The constant need to motivate students is countered by the bevy of assessments with which teachers inundate their students.

I'm reminded of Shamus Young's online "Autoblography" where he writes: 

“Just make sure to do all the work, and you will pass my class.”

"My heart sinks. I hate when teachers say this. It means the bulk of our grade will come from doing things, not from knowing things. It’s the first day of tenth grade, I’m sixteen years old, and I’m hearing this a lot today. Some teachers even go so far as to grade the notes we take in class. This is infuriating to me. In the past I saw school as this perfectly arbitrary trial of mysterious activities. Now I see it as a house of incompetents. Our goal is ostensibly to learn things, but the system of rewards and incentives is often completely divorced from this idea, and sometimes even runs counter to it. 

"If we think of grades as “pay”, then we aren’t being paid to learn. We’re being paid to turn out volumes of worthless forgettable busy work."

Indeed, I fear that the attempts to engage students actually fail because our consistent reliance upon assessment and its equation to achievement and success.

We've already set up a generation of people who have been lied to by their teachers about good grades and success.  The more I speak with many of my fellow Gen X'ers in fields outside of academia, the more I am inundated with statements like, "I didn't learn anything in school," "School was worthless and a waste of time," "School was bullshit," or "Yeah, I learned how to be a student, that's all."  Those who went to college felt as though that was the first time they were able to actually learn something and the point was driven home by the fact that during a single semester, they had two or three assessments and nothing more.  They either passed or failed.  It was actually liberating for some of them.

So what do we have?  A book written by a committee.  The product of bureaucracy and reads as such.  I have little faith in it thus far--Marc Bloch was wrong when he said the bureaucratic mind was the highest form of intelligence.  This committee begins its book with a report on findings and a list of recommendations.  To what end?  What is achievement to produce?  The committee's language in the "Executive Summary" is vague and full of Orwellian doublespeak.

In my interpretation, we are to compete with the Asian schools that are producing competitive workers, scientists, engineers, businesspeople.  It is no secret that schools are pushing math and science to the detriment of the humanities.  History and English teachers aren't nearly as sought-after as math or science teachers.  Meanwhile, we forget that those students are also taught to read and write effectively in their schools.  We are not.

And so we pump out graduates who go to college as if it is the entire goal of education.  This is the teachers' greatest failure.  Education is not, never was, and should never be, simply a vehicle for success.  The fruits of our labor have resulted in apathy among those who know they aren't college material and the unemployment line coupled with staggering debt for those who are.  Why should our students thank us?

A recent article in the Atlantic Monthly describes how a single principal overhauled one of the worst schools in Staten Island and made it a success story by teaching analytical writing to students.  Math and science scores improved substantially--a rising tide floats all boats and our disinterest in the humanities have led to student engagement and achievement at a low ebb.

The ability to write effectively means these kids can think effectively.  Engagement in New Dorp High School increased because the students realized that they were capable of achievement, comprehended material better, and therefore had a greater stake in what they were learning.  It started to matter.

The ability to write effectively also means that adults can think effectively.  And this should be the goal of education--a populace that is aware, knowledgeable, and able to think analytically, critically, and creatively.  Sadly, rubrics don't leave room for kids who can think outside the box--rubrics are, themselves, a box.  Furthermore, the goal of education should not be to enrich students' wallets but their lives.  A student who gets straight Cs can still grow up to be a happy, healthy, productive member of society be he a manager at a store, a car mechanic, or owns his own plumbing business.  Somewhere along the line, we gave our kids this idea that hard work and an honest living were inferior to a college degree and

I don't want to engage my students because I think it will help them score high on tests and get them into college.  Indeed, I honestly couldn't care less about any tests, assessments, or colleges.  I care that they learn because I believe what I have to teach them will enrich their minds, help make them better decision-makers, informed voters, and give them a stake in their society and community.  I believe that a car mechanic can be just as important a pillar of his community as a CEO.

Work, work, work...

I am getting slammed by work right now and don't have time to update, really.  Which is a shame because I really, really want to talk about the Epic 6.  It is a modified version of D&D in which the maximum level is 6.  Period.

This makes the game a lot more gritty.  Your characters are mortal.  Very mortal.  This means that almost no one in the game world can cast spells above 3rd level.  Well, no mortal, anyway.  And not without powerful rituals, sacrifices, ley line nexuses and other house-ruled stuff.

The benefits are that it is rules light and makes for a much more realistic game.  Many times I've complained that a 25-year-old knight who has years of combat experience, when faced with a T-Rex, will probably die, horribly, in real life.  Yet somehow, paladins are constantly slaying dragons, which are much worse than a T-Rex.  Wits, preparation, a solid plan... these things can overcome a dragon (if you are lucky) in Epic 6.  Straight up combat won't.

There's a lot I want to talk about with regards to Epic 6.  Frankly, I think it is awesome.  If you're interested, there are some forum discussions on Epic 6 here and here.

Religion in D&D: Faith in the Forgotten Realm's Shadowdale

It's late and I'm musing on some of the things I did to deepen religion and illustrate faith-in-practice in the Dales.  I was heavily influenced by Walter Burkert's Religion in Ancient Greece and Mircea Eliade's The Sacred and the Profane.

Let me zero in on one specific area of the Dalelands--Shadowdale.  It has three temples, one to Tymora (goddess of luck), one to Lathander (the god of mornings and light), and one to Chauntea (the earth goddess).  Each one is a cultic center and each has its own rites, rituals, and means of currying favor with the gods.  In addition, there's a shrine to Mystra (goddess of magic) and Tyr (god of justice) in the village environs.

Let's start with Chauntea, the earth goddess.  This temple is vitally important to the village, as it's surrounded by farms and therefore very rural and agriculturally oriented.  The priests of Chauntea are keepers of agricultural lore and as such, they are called upon by the people to perform ritual cleansing ceremonies and blessings of the soil before it is tilled.  The details are simple in my head, but if the characters investigate, I can make them more complex.  Perhaps a procession around the boundaries of the field is conducted and holy water is sprinkled along the border to ward off evil or blight.  Songs and chants are sung during this procession and incense is burned.  Then, maybe, an offering of last year's harvest is given to Chauntea and burned at the center of the field.  The officiating priest plows the first furrow and sows the ashes into the ground.

Simple.  And yet it creates a deep and powerful meaning for the players.  The gods are real, their favor is curried.  They are called upon to aid the works of their devotees.  Although each NPC and player may have a patron deity, the inhabitants of the world will seek the benevolence of the gods.  Rituals in which sacred time is experienced and sacred events are reenacted may be crucial to the cults of each temple, bringing the celebrants and the god in closer communion.  For example, at the dawning of the sun during the winter solstice, the first rays shine upon a golden disc in the Temple of Lathander.  Before that, the priests may intone drearily that all is primordial darkness and chaos rules.  Once the sun breaches the horizon, the priests will praise Lathander with song, crying out that light is born and order is generated--the sacred reenactment of the first dawn in which the sun is reborn and begins its journey from the southern to the northern skies brings the priests and the people of Shadowdale into closer communion with Lathander.

Each town may have their own traditions and rituals.  In Shadowdale, during the midsummer festival, the children will make small paper or wooden boats, each with a wafer, berry, copper coin, or other minor offering, and set it into the River Ashaba as an offering to the water wizard who died there and gave the river its name centuries ago.  In Mistledale, they throw flowers into the river in the wizard's memory during the festival and ask the wizard to protect the village.  These offerings may, indeed, bear fruit for if Zhentil Keep sends forces to conquer the settlements, the river may remember these deeds and rise up against the Zhentarim and protect those who made the offerings.

Thus, the wizard Ashaba is a saint to the people of both Shadowdale and Mistledale.  Sylune, the Witch of Shadowdale, who fell defending the settlement from a dragon, may also be worshiped and honored as a saint, with offerings of flowers, coins, incense, food, or candles at her grave and shrine beneath the village citadel.  The remains of her hut where she died may be the site of an annual gathering of all the women in the village, who perform a ceremony that reenacts her brave death and commemorates her sacrifice.

When my players enter my worlds, I do endeavor to make those worlds real and breathing, even if I didn't create those worlds myself.  I still want the players to feel that these worlds are alive.  I want them to know that clerics and paladins aren't just character classes with duties demanded by role-playing mechanics.   They are a part of a religious continuum and have social and religious roles to play in the party and the world at large.

Random "I'm Alive" Update

The past month-and-a-half have been completely consumed by lecture notes for HIST 315 and HIST 316 (writing, organizing, preparing slides, etc.) and my papers/presentations for Education in a Global Context.  Between all these things, a lot of what I have to say about literature, current goings-on, gaming, reading, etc. just seems trivial.  But I like doing so anyway.  So, I'm going to make a point of finding time to getting back to blogging about that stuff.