Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1066832Myths are wildly diverse. Fantasy monsters are one-note. If people want to adhere to the original myths, they first need to learn that. Until it is possible for fantasy monsters to be more than just duplication of the same short block of text, showing people how to adhere more closely to myths is pointless because they have been trained to falsely believe that everything fits into neat tiny boxes. Myths do not fit into neat tiny boxes like monster manual entries do.

We're not playing a game of storytelling myths around a fire. We're playing roleplaying games. Either this matters for the purposes of playing in an RPG or it doesn't. This is your thread talking about the Wendigo and your concerns about their presentation. I have yet to see an example that makes me WANT to use a different conception of the Wendigo that is more useful/interesting than what I currently use (which is nothing - I've never used a Wendigo for anything except the Marvel comics one). I've never seen a game where the players expected the RPG to teach them something about a real culture as a means to actually enjoy the game.

I've considered using the Wendigo in Deadlands. But frankly he's too powerful.

So therefore - you're asking the question for something only you think is an issue. What ARE your alternatives? Post them.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1066832I am honestly quite sick of the entire concept behind monster manuals and bestiaries. I would prefer to organize monsters by archetypes in order to cut down on the huge problem with filler and redundancy afflicting the books.

Then take a page out of Fantasy Craft and create a bunch of scalable tables for attributes and abilities - and you can call that pile of numbers *anything* you want. And make them as culturally relevant as you want. Problem solved.

Quote from: Ratman_tf;1066833Out of curiosity, which culture are you referring to?

American. I know it is a hodgepodge but it is mine.

Quote from: tenbones;1066835We're not playing a game of storytelling myths around a fire. We're playing roleplaying games. Either this matters for the purposes of playing in an RPG or it doesn't. This is your thread talking about the Wendigo and your concerns about their presentation. I have yet to see an example that makes me WANT to use a different conception of the Wendigo that is more useful/interesting than what I currently use (which is nothing - I've never used a Wendigo for anything except the Marvel comics one). I've never seen a game where the players expected the RPG to teach them something about a real culture as a means to actually enjoy the game.

I've considered using the Wendigo in Deadlands. But frankly he's too powerful.

So therefore - you're asking the question for something only you think is an issue. What ARE your alternatives? Post them.

It depends on what I want to present to the adventurers.

I've categorized the various American depictions of the windy go as separate monsters.

Blackwood's monster I call the "punisher of lust." It lives in the wilderness and likes to torment people by gouging their eyes and sanding their legs off.

Roosevelt's monster is just the sasquatch.

Marvel's monster is essentially a lycanthrope.

King's monster is an evil necromancer trapped in one spot.

Hannibal's is a peryton.

Typing on phone

QuoteThen take a page out of Fantasy Craft and create a bunch of scalable tables for attributes and abilities - and you can call that pile of numbers *anything* you want. And make them as culturally relevant as you want. Problem solved.

Okie dokie. Best d20 game ever made. Sad that more people don't like that.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1066846American. I know it is a hodgepodge but it is mine.

Quite a bit ethnocentric too. There are plenty of rich, evil people in all cultures to draw inspiration from.

Algernon Blackwood's original story is fascinating on its own. There is a detailed review at tor.com for those who want to save time.

The monster therein bears no resemblance to the wendigo and doesn't need to. It stands on its own as a gothic fairytale. It represents the Call of Nature... horrible, seductive, vicious...

I thought of conflating it with the monster from The Ritual to add more depth for game adventures. The creature design therein is way cooler than the zombie weredeer meme. The vicious nature god that gouges eyes is a shared motif too!

I've created a new monster? It might need more work, I don't know?

I fell in love with D&D as a young man due to, after spending my formative years devouring every book of mythology and folk-lore I could get my hands on, the contents of the Monstrous Compendium on my brother's bookshelf. Familiar creatures from all the legends I loved with different ideas and details swapped at seemingly random, mixed in with creatures I'd never heard of that had sprung from the imaginations of Gygax and a hundred other writers. This kind of synthesis - almost a syncretism - was exactly what my own imagination had been looking for, to grow out of any hidebound notions of all the legendarium my mind had collected having to be just-so, and start spinning my own ideas out of the cloth of the old.

I was lucky - I started my journey before the American tendency to take what we found interesting, useful, profitable or cool and make them our own became branded as cultural-appropriation and denounced as a grievous sin instead of a cultural touchstone (only just, though - I can remember a school assembly where they tried to tell us the idea of the melting-pot nation was outdated and harmful and we should instead strive for a cultural "salad bowl", but I was old enough already to call it stupid). Without D&D, I probably would have never been able to get myself to start writing - and even if I had, I doubt it would be in its current form, filled with both literal and metaphorical cultural tomb-raiding.

The myth of the Wendigo's roots, or those of anything else used in fiction or gaming, only matter as much as a given author decides they matter. Every story has evolved almost unrecognizably from their roots, and should continue to do so as each of us tells our own stories. To lock everything into some kind of stasis based on how the story is currently told by one set of tellers (or how they told it 100 years ago, or 50 or 2000) is both ultimately impossible, and creative suicide.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1066791That is just it. The wendigo myth has nothing in common with the horned hunter god meme. That is entirely the result of an image published in a 1950s magazine in which the artist depicted Blackwood's monster as a variation of the old Wild Hunt meme.

Which illustrates that we outsiders never really understood the wendigo. We got a name and a very basic description from the Algonquin, but all the rest we made up on our own.

Without being a communist I cannot really understand the cultural significance of the wendigo's greed. The closest that I can come is Satan and his legions, but that's almost the exact opposite because the Christian God is pretty malevolent already.

Ah, I thought you were coming at this from the point of view of an Algonquin or someone who has studied them, lives in the area or has Algonquin relatives. I didn't realise that this is just something you have taken offence over.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1066791That is my personal tragedy as a creative content creator. Even if I wanted to capture the significance of the wendigo, all I can ever do is just remix elements of my own cultural myths. I can more or less easily understand Greek and Ancient Egyptian cultural memes because my own culture descends from them. The Greek gods are omnipotent psychopaths, so is the Abrahamic God. The Ancient Egyptians gave offerings to their dead to help them in the afterlife, I visit graves to present flowers. Even the symbolism that the heart is the seat of emotion comes from Ancient Egyptian beliefs.

So, if you want to make a more realistic monster, then study it. Check online to see if there are any Native American sites that describe creatures. Buy books about them, written by people who know about them, do research.

Wikipedia is a great tool for surface level research and I use it all the time, but if you want to get a deeper understanding of something then you have to do a lot more research. Whether that is something that is worthwhile really depends on how important it is to you. Do you want to spend a couple of years properly researching a Wendigo, to write a one page Monster writeup that some people will use now and again as an opponent?

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1066812There's a book that articulates how modern indigenous cultures tell stories about the Wendigo. Here's a quote:

QuoteIn contemporary Indigenous traditions, the windigo has become associated with the danger of greed, capitalism, and Western excess, while in European and Canadian imagery, it is the symbol of evil, wilderness, and madness....
In Euro-Canadian novels and films, the windigo is largely separate from Aboriginal culture, in that there is little meaningful discussion of Native beliefs. Instead, Aboriginal peoples are often associated with a simplified version of the past, in which discussions of colonialism are avoided. In contrast, Native works focus on the traumas associated with colonialism, such as residential schools, sexual abuse, and cultural loss, which are equated with the windigo spirit. Indigenous books, plays, and films draw on a vision of the windigo articulated by Ojibwa scholar Basil Johnston, who described it as being the spirit of selfishness, as epitomized by the Euro-Canadian culture of extraction and environmental destruction: 'These new weendigoes are no different from their forebears. In fact, they are even more omnivorous than their old ancestors. The only difference is that the modern Weendigoes wear elegant clothes and comport themselves with an air of cultured and dignified respectability.'

That's a good quote. What it says to me is that each generation interprets its own stories in a way that makes sense to that generation. This has always happened, forever.

Homer interpreted Greek Myth to satisfy the people of his generation, as did the writer of the Aeneid, as have many people over the years. There is nothing wrong with that and it just freshens the stories and makes them more relevant. TV Shows interpret monsters and myths in their own way, to fit the way the TV shows work, as do films, as do novels, as do web articles.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1066812What does that last part remind you of?

The closest analogue I can think of in my culture would be the "vampire counts" that sometimes appear, being an exaggeration of the metaphorically blood-sucking nobility and rich folks in the past and present. This is not a direct correspondence.

In a way, yes, but both are about blending into normal society, so both are really aspects of a deeper, underlying thing. This is similar to your objection to Wendigos being likened to Celtic Hunter Gods. The same objection coukld be made to likening Wendigos to Vampires. Both objections are valid and not valid, because on the one hand they identify mythic traits that are in common and, on the other hand they identify those too closely.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1066812The indigenous tribes were communist and thus the conflict was greed versus the community, whereas in my capitalist culture the conflict is between the haves and have-nots.

As other have pointed out, shared ownership and shared resource management is not being communist. They both share traits in common, but are not the same ideology. Also, not all indigenous tribes had the same political makeup.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1066812It seems to me like we never needed wendigos since all the baggage we use them to represent are already present in copious amounts already. At this point we are just co-opting the name and basic description to give a false veneer of foreignness, originality and generally magical Indian woo-woo.

Sure we need them. If I have a game set in fur-trapping America, then a lone trapper in Algonquin territory may well meet a Wendigo. If I have an urban fantasy or urban horror game, then I might need a Wendigo as a monster opponent. If I have a SciFi game set on a galaxy faraway then I might not need a Wendigo.

I am not offended by the continued distortion of the windy-go in the urban myths of Euro-American peoples. Many people believe these modern myths are true and there are reports of sighting windy-goes to the present day. What exactly it looks like varies, but most recently people think of it as a goat-headed monster similar to the Jersey devil and similar figures taken from European myth. Not only that, but misinformation keeps spreading and people start imagining First Nations myths as a homogeneous morass and treat skin-walker, windy-go and goat-man as being synonymous. The words steadily lose their meaning.

Ultimately this comes down to me being an etymology nazi. The Euro-American windy-go and so forth is a repackaging of ancient European myth memes, like the Satanic goat and the Wild Hunt, with a false veneer of Indian woo-woo. People who don't know better and aren't interested in educating themselves then mistakenly think this Euro-American monster is accurate to First Nations beliefs.

It is the Wild Hunt, a distinctly European folklore motif. An ogre. A murderous satyr. The Minotaur of Crete. Any number of other European myth memes. I cannot stress that enough. The level of misinformation has gotten to the point where I have seen people online refer to the monster from the UK horror movie The Ritual, which takes place in rural Sweden, as a "wendigo" simply because it has generic horned god symbolism.

I'm a simple grammar nazi who feels calling a murderous satyr of American urban legend as a "wendigo" clearly promotes a false impression of foreign belief systems. That's assuming that people who hear about it ever learn that the word is of Algonquin origin, which isn't necessarily the case. I'm sure most people who know the word think it is a misspelling of "windy-go" or something. Folk etymologies are always fun like that.

Sure, there are indeed First Nations activists who state that foreigners should stop referencing their myths entirely and generally promote a form of cultural isolationism. I do think that sounds insane, really insane, but I'm totally fine with respecting those wishes. European cultures have a rich history of myths that need more love than they currently get, and any monsters loaned from First Nations myths were butchered anyway. I have no problem sanitizing Pathfinder's "wendigo" of all Algonquin cultural references by something as simple as changing the name. Let's be honest here: this deer-headed stump-footed freak isn't remotely related to Algonquin culture aside from shoehorned references to "wendigo psychosis" that were absent from the original Blackwood story.

On the other hand, I'm more than happy to pilfer foreign cultures for myth memes in this vein. Both Europe and East Asia have stories of trickster (and cannibal) foxes, such as Reynard, huli jing, gumiho and kitsune. I'm more than happy to put these in a blender and refer to the blood-drenched result as a culturally non-specific "fox fairy" that does things as diverse as trick people, eat human organs, possess people, control the elements, and so forth. The benefit of this is that I can avoid accusations of getting the original myth wrong, as I love to level at others who get the myths wrong, because I am only inspired by the myth rather than adapting it.

One Hollywood example of this is in the Tales from the Crypt movie. The third story was an adaptation of a Japanese story about a "snow woman bride," but the Japanese cultural elements were completely sanitized. I didn't know that until after I watched, and I still thought the movie was good. I'm pretty sure the plot outline is listed as a fairy tale motif in the academic listing of them, but I don't know which exactly.

For anyone who read the "Short & Shivery" books in the 90s (now available on itunes), those tales are adaptations of cultural myths from around the world and they are neat. However, in many cases the names may be changed to English ones that are better understood by children while still making it clear that the story takes place in wherever it did. IIRC, one story about an African girl referred to the monster as an ogre although when I looked up the story elsewhere I got an African word I don't remember (which translated as ogre). That was one weird ogre though.

To anybody who thinks I am SJW: I am deeply sorry for offending you and I hope you have fun using windy-goes in your adventures. I hope you have a happy holiday. Thank you and have a nice day.

Passive Aggression is sooooooo unattractive.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1066846American. I know it is a hodgepodge but it is mine.

It depends on what I want to present to the adventurers.

I've categorized the various American depictions of the windy go as separate monsters.

Blackwood's monster I call the "punisher of lust." It lives in the wilderness and likes to torment people by gouging their eyes and sanding their legs off.

Roosevelt's monster is just the sasquatch.

Marvel's monster is essentially a lycanthrope.

King's monster is an evil necromancer trapped in one spot.

Hannibal's is a peryton.

Typing on phone
Okie dokie. Best d20 game ever made. Sad that more people don't like that.

Since we're being reductionist - what precisely is the value of your opinion without actually offering something?

Marvel's Wendigo is an awesome character (or he used to be in the Byrne/Shooter era). He was/is tied directly to the Inuit pantheon of gods that are extant in the Marvel Universe. They didn't shy away from it - in fact it's a HUGE part of the Alpha Flight storyline considering TWO of their members are actual members of the Inuit pantheon (Sasquatch and Snowbird) and Shaman is an actual indigenous medicine man of considerable power not to mention influence on the team (as is his daughter).

I'll assume your reductionist claims are equal in scale for your other citations. Wtf are you actually arguing about?

Quote from: tenbones;1067282Passive Aggression is sooooooo unattractive.

My apologies. I didn't get a lot of good sleep last night. Recent studies have confirmed that a lack of even one or two hours of sleep causes aggression during the day.

Quote from: tenbones;1067284Since we're being reductionist - what precisely is the value of your opinion without actually offering something?

Marvel's Wendigo is an awesome character (or he used to be in the Byrne/Shooter era). He was/is tied directly to the Inuit pantheon of gods that are extant in the Marvel Universe. They didn't shy away from it - in fact it's a HUGE part of the Alpha Flight storyline considering TWO of their members are actual members of the Inuit pantheon (Sasquatch and Snowbird) and Shaman is an actual indigenous medicine man of considerable power not to mention influence on the team (as is his daughter).

I'll assume your reductionist claims are equal in scale for your other citations. Wtf are you actually arguing about?

I honestly don't know anymore. I haven't been sleeping well the past few weeks. Seasonal affectation disorder or something like that. As a result my arguments are jumbled and nonsensical.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1067302My apologies. I didn't get a lot of good sleep last night. Recent studies have confirmed that a lack of even one or two hours of sleep causes aggression during the day.

Causes or correlates with? I'd like to see your sources (honestly).

Quote from: HappyDaze;1067303Causes or correlates with? I'd like to see your sources (honestly).

https://www.timeslive.co.za/sunday-times/lifestyle/health-and-sex/2018-11-29-could-your-anger-be-linked-to-lack-of-sleep/

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1067304https://www.timeslive.co.za/sunday-times/lifestyle/health-and-sex/2018-11-29-could-your-anger-be-linked-to-lack-of-sleep/

I read the full article; not just the boiled-down version on the webpage. The actual article it references from Krizan & Hisler (2018) specifies that sleep deprivation can be causal to anger, but it doesn't necessarily equate to increased aggression (although they suggest it might). An earlier study by Cote et al. (2013) actually looked at aggression linked to sleep deprivation and noted that while anger might increase, emotional blunting from exhaustion and hormonal effects actually seems to decrease aggression.

Cote, K. A., McCormick, C. M., Geniole, S. N., Renn, R. P., & MacAulay, S. D. (2013). Sleep deprivation lowers reactive aggression and testosterone in men. Biological Psychology, 92(2), 249–256.

Krizan, Z., & Hisler, G. (2018). Sleepy anger: Restricted sleep amplifies angry feelings. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1067302My apologies. I didn't get a lot of good sleep last night. Recent studies have confirmed that a lack of even one or two hours of sleep causes aggression during the day.

I honestly don't know anymore. I haven't been sleeping well the past few weeks. Seasonal affectation disorder or something like that. As a result my arguments are jumbled and nonsensical.

Get a HappyLight (i.e. full spectrum lamp) and put it in your peripheral vision for 20-30 minutes a day. You'll feel loads better.