Why does anyone need to excavate the Forgotten Quarter when they could just travel to the Tomb-Colonies and visit the homes of people from the Third and Fourth Cities, and maybe even the Second? Talk to the "dead" who lived during the ages of those cities? Visit the Khanate and acquire all of the horse-head amulets one could desire?
I dunno, maybe because the Forgotten Quarter is right there in South London, whereas all those other places are across the Unterzee? A terrifying underwater ocean brimming with sea monsters, pirates and other horrors.
It’s kind of like saying to a real-life Londoner "Why would you want to look at all that Egyptian junk in the British Museum when you could just go to Egypt?" (Which while it may not be brimming with sea monsters, it is far away, and a lot less safe than it used to be.)
Well, I am not sure White and Gold will be extremely happy to see you in their domain, but for Tomb-Colonist - a good idea!
I wonder, how long to Tomb-Colonist survive before they fell into dust in Sanatorium…
Can Second City’s folks be found there?
Because memory is fallible? Because those Tomb Colonists may not wish to talk about the past? Because they might lie? The point of archaeology, IRL or in the Neath, is to gather additional information to permit a better reconstruction about life in the past, since no one source is sufficient to give a complete picture.
Yes… but talking to current day residents of a country about their legends isn’t quite the same activity as talking to the people who were contemporary to the legends in question. We don’t get to do that in the real world. In the Neath, if you want to learn about the Third City, the Tomb Colonies are lousy with people who lived in it. Look at the "cover photo" of the tomb colonist for this month’s Exceptional Story - Clearly, a Third City resident. Why would I go dig in the dirt and make guesses about the Third City when I could go talk to this guy?
If he’s not the only Third City or Fourth City resident hanging around in the Tomb Colonies with nothing to do other than slowly decay into dust, then the issue of "unreliable narration" becomes less and less of an issue with the more people you interview.
Even if most of them are catatonic in the Sanitorium, a few would still be "alive" and many of their homes would still be intact.
My point being that "serious scholarship" would go to the source. "Archaeology" in London seems more like a game of treasure hunt with the winner being the largest curio cabinet rather than a case of any actual "science" being conducted.
Because there are Tomb-Colonists milling about stopping you from looting all the shiny things and knowledge, duh!
On a more serious note, the big tomb-colonies tend to turn away people unless they are sufficiently old or in exile - the recent Exceptional Story mentioned people going to Venderbight to buy things, only to be turned away from the port.
[quote=SirKwint]Can Second City’s folks be found there?[/quote]The Tomb-Colonies were founded under the Third City. I can’t recall if that’s stated outright anywhere, but it’s very strongly hinted at in the Paranomastic Newshound’s card and the sidebar snippet which compares the Tomb-Colonies to Mictlan, an underworld in Aztec mythology.
Yes… but talking to current day residents of a country about their legends isn’t quite the same activity as talking to the people who were contemporary to the legends in question. We don’t get to do that in the real world. In the Neath, if you want to learn about the Third City, the Tomb Colonies are lousy with people who lived in it. Look at the "cover photo" of the tomb colonist for this month’s Exceptional Story - Clearly, a Third City resident. Why would I go dig in the dirt and make guesses about the Third City when I could go talk to this guy?
If he’s not the only Third City or Fourth City resident hanging around in the Tomb Colonies with nothing to do other than slowly decay into dust, then the issue of "unreliable narration" becomes less and less of an issue with the more people you interview.
Even if most of them are catatonic in the Sanitorium, a few would still be "alive" and many of their homes would still be intact.
My point being that "serious scholarship" would go to the source. "Archaeology" in London seems more like a game of treasure hunt with the winner being the largest curio cabinet rather than a case of any actual "science" being conducted.[/quote]
I see your point, but in my view serious Scholarship in the FL universe would go to both sources–the recollections of "live" Tomb Colonists, and the material culture remains to be found in the ground. To the extent that really old Tomb Colonists have current abodes, those may well be in London itself (consider the Duchess, for example)–and would not tell anything about the conditions of their lives thousands of years ago.
There are some other mentions of Venderbight’s security as well. When you visit Venderbight in Nemesis, you have to disguise yourself as a tomb colonist to get allowed in. Similarly, in Sunless Sea, there’s a "Skin Check" and a "Confirmation of Consolation" that the living cannot pass, to prevent anyone (except your captain) from enter Venderbight for a protracted period unless fully dead.
The tomb-colonies to which Londoners are banished seem to mostly house fifth city colonists, and the older ones, like Tanah Chook and Xibalba, present their own unique challenges.
So, as a Zee Captain, what I should be doing is traveling to the Khanate, buying a tonne of horsehead amulets, running them to London, having my Satisfied Magician help me scatter them all over The Forgotten Quarter, and selling maps to would-be archaeologists.
[li]
You’ve pretty much accurately described archaeology as practiced in much of the 19th century.
See also the "Bone Wars", an epic rivalry between paleontologists that bears some resemblance to the situation in the Forgotten Quarter:
What archeologist in their right mind would ask someone when they can dream up conjectures from artifacts they found? Why, if we did that, we wouldn’t be able to claim women were always housekeepers in every culture ever!
In Sunless Sea, one of the stores on the Venderbight shop tab is a temple takes stories as currency. It’s described as still having a "long-snouted reptile god", though now the building is used for gatherings by story tellers.
It suggests that the Third City might have chosen Venderbight based on it already being an established Second City colony, even if it wasn’t specifically a "tomb colony" for the Second City people.
In Sunless Sea, one of the stores on the Venderbight shop tab is a temple takes stories as currency. It’s described as still having a "long-snouted reptile god", though now the building is used for gatherings by story tellers.
It suggests that the Third City might have chosen Venderbight based on it already being an established Second City colony, even if it wasn’t specifically a "tomb colony" for the Second City people.[/quote]
Reptile-gods can be both 2nd city or 3d city in origin, though. The indigenous people of South-America had plenty of serpent-gods, while the Egyptian pantheon counted alligator-headed deities among its rank.
It’s left quite open whether the Hollow-Temple is 2nd or 3d city.
[quote=Infinity Simulacrum]
Reptile-gods can be both 2nd city or 3d city in origin, though. The indigenous people of South-America had plenty of serpent-gods, while the Egyptian pantheon counted alligator-headed deities among its rank.
It’s left quite open whether the Hollow-Temple is 2nd or 3d city.[/quote]
It would be foolish to argue that the description is any kind of specific, that’s true. Certainly, Failbetter has an investment in keeping descriptions as open to interpretation as possible, both to preserve the mystery and to offer the broadest canvas for players to paint their own imaginary vistas upon.
However - We do have to trust that people writing the stories are writing them from the point of view of an average person walking into the room and describing the most striking features of whatever he sees.
Serpents are reptiles. Squares are rectangles. Despite that, if you see one of them painted on a wall, you’re going to say, "I see a snake" or "I see a square". Not, "I see a reptile" or "I see a rectangle".
Additionally, there aren’t any "long-snouted" serpents that I’m aware of. Carvings of Kukulkan or Quetzlcoatl are stylistically done with a large head that could potentially qualify as "long-snouted" if you were inclined to be pedantic about describing them (particularly given carvings of Kukulkan that have to make room for his mouth to hold a human head). I feel that the average person who looked at a carving of Quetzlcoatl would find different words to describe it than "long-snouted reptile god".
A crocodile idol, on the other hand, fits that description exactly. If you were unsure if it represented a crocodile, or an alligator or an iguana then I feel that’s a case where most people would feel comfortable saying "long-snouted reptile god".
That’s not to say it’s impossible for the image in question to be Cipactli or some meso-American god I’ve never heard of and can’t find any Google results for; but if you have to stretch so very far to make it fit over the Third City while it fits over the Second City without any stretching at all, then I think I have to give the weight to the Second City. If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it’s probably not a platypus.
It’s double-edged, though. You could say I’m stretching the definition, while at the same time you’re using a single sentence as example for the Hollow Temple being 2nd city in origin and not 3d. We simply don’t know, but that doesn’t make it safe to assume that the idol in the Hollow Temple is automatically egyptian in origin; maybe the writers worded it confusingly, or maybe what they meant is not what we interpreted.
It just seems to me that using this one short snippet as a valid example is forcing it too much.
On an off-note, there’s plenty of mesoamerican stonework that could be interpreted as a long-snouted reptile while not immediately as a snake.
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edited by Infinity Simulacrum on 7/12/2017
If the second city is Akhetaten (aka Amarna), then I doubt there would be reptilian idols among the remnants of the second city in the Neath. Akhetaten was built under the direction of the pharaoh Akhenaten to be the center of his cult of Aten, in much the same way that Thebes regarded Amun as its patron. Statues of Aten were forbidden as idolatry, and images of Akhenaten and his family venerating the sun disk were used in place of anthropomorphic images of the deity. What’s more, the cult of Aten also regarded Aten as supreme above the other gods to the point of monotheism. Sites entirely devoted to other gods would have been all but nonexistent in Akhetaten.
In a more general sense, the folk of the second city were (or are, wink wink) very fond of cats, and cats are not very fond of snakes. Not very fond at all.
edit: The third city, however, seemed to have no qualms about reptiles. One of its priest-kings was known as the Serpent, and in Sunless Sea a visitor to Venderbight, a place with strong Third City ties, can have a very snakey encounter.
edited by Anchovies on 7/12/2017
[quote=Anchovies]If the second city is Akhetaten (aka Amarna), then I doubt there would be reptilian idols among the remnants of the second city in the Neath. Akhetaten was built under the direction of the pharaoh Akhenaten to be the center of his cult of Aten, in much the same way that Thebes regarded Amun as its patron. Statues of Aten were forbidden as idolatry, and images of Akhenaten and his family venerating the sun disk were used in place of anthropomorphic images of the deity. What’s more, the cult of Aten also regarded Aten as supreme above the other gods to the point of monotheism. Sites entirely devoted to other gods would have been all but nonexistent in Akhetaten.
In a more general sense, the folk of the second city were (or are, wink wink) very fond of cats, and cats are not very fond of snakes. Not very fond at all.
edit: The third city, however, seemed to have no qualms about reptiles. One of its priest-kings was known as the Serpent, and in Sunless Sea a visitor to Venderbight, a place with strong Third City ties, can have a very snakey encounter.
edited by Anchovies on 7/12/2017[/quote]
Not to mention the priest-king Snake, who rules with Red Bird and Cat.
What would the connection be between the fingerkings and mesoamerican culture? Did one inspire the other?
[quote=Infinity Simulacrum] maybe the writers worded it confusingly, or maybe what they meant is not what we interpreted.
[/quote]
Well, let’s be honest - they deliberately wrote it to be as vague as possible so that players can imagine it to be whatever they want it to be.
There’s no way to say what city it came from except that it’s possibly older than Venderbight, in the same way that Visage is older than the people who currently call it home. Maybe it’s from the First City. Maybe, like Varchas or Irem, it’s got nothing to do with ANY Fallen City. Maybe it’s a dinosaur and "god" is just the layman’s misinterpretation of the depiction in the face of ignorance of its true origins.
You can’t tell anything from the description. Only that it’s a depiction of a "god" with a long snout. You can’t even tell what sort of reptile, if it’s anthropomorphic or depicted as an animal, or how it is shown to be "godlike". About the only thing you can definitively say about it is that it’s not a monkey or an ocelot or a whale. In short, you can say some things about what it is not, but you can’t really say anything at all about what it is or where it came from.
I wouldn’t definitely classify it as anything at all, though I do find it SUGGESTIVE of a second city link; particularly with the whole "this was built by someone and taken over by someone else" vibe.