When I set out to create the world of Aromathus, some ideas were very high up on my list of priorities; I have talked about these things in previous articles here at Aromathus.com. In all honesty, though, neither of today’s two topics were very high on that list.

To those of you who read my writing today, that might seem a little odd, and were I just starting Aromathus today, I’d say the same thing. That is because, first and foremost, my interests in fantasy have changed over the years – and changed a lot. So, based upon a suggestion or two from various Aroathians (primarily Tiresias and RevPete), I’ll talk a little about the gods of Aromathus, how dragons fit in, and what they both mean… to the future.

When I started writing the background for Aromathus, I had recently finished reading the original Dragonlance trilogy by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman. While I loved those books, I wanted to make Aromathus very different from Krynn. Dragons in Krynn, while beasts of wonder, are common. In fact, everything about Krynn radiates dragons. To me, though, that made them loose a little bit of the wonder that a dragon should instill. So I quickly decided that while dragons had been in the world in the past, and had left lots of their knowledge and magic behind, they were gone from the present point in the time-line. Aromathus, at creation, was a world without dragons.

But that didn’t feel right to me, either. So when I made the shift from player to DM back in '94 or '95, I decided to bring the dragons back. How and why? Well, it was an epic campaign, but by the time it was finished, the players had visited many parts of the world, allowing me to create what became key parts of the “Aromathian mythos.” Mages were powerful, but rare – no one trusted them after the great wars, yet they were too powerful to ignore. Therefore I created the various mage guilds, magical academies, and archmagi. Further, the gods were beings not to be trifled with – far above mortals, yet involved with their lives. Also, they were involved not because they needed anything from mortals, but because the gods craved one thing – worshipers. This meant that all the gods had their own spheres of influence and their own followers – and their own plots to increase both.

Then, during the summer of 1995 (IIRC), I went to a local game convention and found “my” setting for D&D – Birthright. I broke a personal vow – to never buy a pre-generated campaign setting – and purchased everything I could for it as soon as it came out. Regrettably, it didn’t take off like I hoped (suffering from the end-of-TSR setting “bloat”), and I never got my group of friends and players to agree to a campaign set there, either What I did do, however, was borrow from it for Aromathus.

I’m not ashamed to admit it. And I’ll give credit where credit is due. The designers who created the Birthright setting came up with a brilliant piece of work. I do think it suffered from its own ambitions (a setting where the players played not adventures, but rulers), but as someone who was a much a wargamer as a roleplayer, it was awesome.

The first thing that I borrowed from there was their deities. Oh, there were changes; we’d already decided that Voluge was the dwarven god of war, for example, but the core concept – twelve deities with specific areas of interest, competing for followers and worshipers, is something that is the same today as it was then. Seldarine was the king. Voluge was his “good” brother and Grummish the “bad” one. Other deities were modeled on Birthright as well, for as a novice DM, I wanted a pantheon that felt “real.” I wanted something that would make clerics in my campaigns more than the cookie-cutter ones found in the old 2.0 PHB.

I also knew very little about how to create one, so I borrowed heavily, modifying it to what I wanted for Aromathus.

The next fall I took a basic course in classical mythology. I’d always had some interest there, and I figured it would be far more interesting than another art class (I absolutely SUCK at drawing / painting / et al), and as I’d had enough of band in junior high, I still needed to fulfill the fine arts requirement. After the first class, I was hooked. I had a great professor, and learned more in that class than just about any other class I took in 4.5 years of college. And while it wasn’t immediately useful to an aspiring education major, it certainly was interesting.

As you will quickly imagine, it changed my view on mythology a lot. Instead of making things up from minor fragments of stories, I was reading the Iliad and the Odyssey. I also saw just how much the “Great Gygax (RIP)” had borrowed from classical mythology when he created the original Greyhawk deities. And I knew changes had to be made to Aromathus.

For example, Relvith became based on Demeter, the old mythos showing me how a deity could be “neutral.” Hadar, while still the god of death, wasn’t chaotically, insanely evil – he became more like Hades. Those are just a couple of examples.

While there is no Mt. Olympus in Aromathus, the gods took on more of a Greco-Roman behavior as well – competing for worshipers and scheming. However, I did decide that unlike Zeus and friends, my deities would not be “mucking around” with mortals – no half-divine beings in MY world. Gods are gods, and mortals are mortals. If a god wants to influence the world, he does it through his followers; after all, I needed my player characters to have some reason to be involved with all these gods I’d spent time creating!

Now for the second half of the equation: dragons. I will say that RevPete has given me the idea for a wonderful short story on the origins of dragons in the world, so I don’t want to say too much; hopefully, I’ll get the story written over the next couple weeks. OTOH, I will say a few things about dragons to whet your appetite, if nothing else.

As I stated earlier, my first exposure to dragons left me with the belief that they should not be common in the world. I quickly decided that Aromathian dragons where an ancient race, vastly more powerful than anything else in the world. Mortals, when they encountered dragons, knew enough to leave them alone. In other words: the only reason an Aromathian dragon doesn’t rule a kingdom is because it doesn’t want too. Dragons are powerful, and not to be trifled with. Anything else lessened the impact of having the dragon in the plot. (For example, I once had a dragon polymorph annoying PC’s into newts because the players wouldn’t take the encounter seriously. They stayed newts until their paladin friend vouched for their good behavior after the dragon changed them back. And that was a good dragon.)

Over the years, as I’ve read more fantasy and run more fantasy RPG campaigns, my opinion on dragons has changed – but not in regards to their power. The campaign I am nearly finished with, for example, had a particularly powerful dragon as one of the major evil NPC’s. Or, in other words, dragons are cool to me now.

Yet one thought remained. Why would the gods create such a powerful race – a race whose magical abilities are such that they are responsible for the creation of entire new races? (Take a look at the timeline – Aromathian humans were made by dragons, originally.) A race, in other words, powerful enough to threaten those who created them?

And then it hit me: Dragons aren’t native to Aromathus, but come from somewhere else. Yes, they are powerful enough to threaten the gods – if they wanted too. Yes, they can create whole new races – if they want to. And, so, yes, the gods and the dragons don’t really like each other. Well, the gods don’t like the dragons. The dragons… don’t really seem to care. They know a war between them and the gods would be messy. They also know that the gods might actually suffer and die if they tried. And they know the gods know that too.

So the gods and the dragons have a kind of truce. OK, after the dragons unleashed the humans, ogres, and centaurs on the world, things were testy, but the dragons stuck to their part of the world, and the gods to theirs. And today, things are much the same. The gods quietly seethe about how they hate dragons, and the dragons… go hunting. After all, fire roasting a nice sheep with ones breath is much more fun than dealing with stuffy old gods.

At least for the dragons.