I just wanted to drop a note here to say thank you to everyone who responded to my three Jman posts. This forum has always been a source of immense help in writing my levels and I hope my own posts have been at least entertaining. I would have liked to respond to every reply individually, but I don't want to clog up the forum with the finer points of some very fine points, so I figured I'd do it here with one message and save everyone some hassle.
All your input was useful, though as usual you've just got me asking more questions now, instead of settling anything. Oh well, I guess that's one of the reasons I love Myth so much--it's like a fractal, getting more complicated the deeper you look.
Okay, here are some things I had to say after reading your posts:
1) No, they aren't bird skulls... I was basing that on an erroneous memory of one of the pregame pics. When I checked again it really was made of stones and fangs.
My idea of invoking a group of "Cath Bruig Shamans" was completely a creation of my fevered imagination, based on the fact that the Jmen are obviously far more than just disgraced Heron Guards. They look and act far more like shamans from a less developed culture--I'm thinking of the Jman/Dwarf dialogue in "Through the Ermine" here, specifically--and so I wanted them to be drawing on an even older tradition. In my version of the facts (which is admittedly only half-based on evidence) they are merely rediscovering the religion they'd been half-practicing all along, one that has very little to do with Wyrd but which sees healing as a higher calling than warfare.
2) The Calendar is, of course, based on the Mayan Tzolkin, and I am very grateful for the very long post explaining how it works. However, when you have GURPS saying one thing, the flavor texts saying another, and erudite Asylumers saying a third, fourth and fifth--well, you see the source of my confusion. I've never really bought the idea that the number is the order of initiation; it looks to me like the names are pretty well distributed between one and fourteen (and there are no fifteens, which gave me my idea for the fortnight thing). The Mayan Calendar seems like the best fit, but it still has so many holes in it--what to do with all those terms which just aren't referred to in the Tzolkin? I had thought to include a short text essay with my download in how the calendar worked, but maybe I should just leave it ambiguous, the way Bungie did. I liked the idea of a calendar which would allow you to name certain years after important events, and "Eight Coyote Comet" comes from this--the HG in question was supposed to have been initiated while Connacht's comet was in the sky, a year which would have been burned into the memory of every resident of Muirthemne. This guy is the crucial figure in my campaign so I wanted to give him a name that would make him stand out.
For pointing out that the Guard is only twenty-five hundred years old I owe you all a drink. I was counting wrong, I think adding an age in there that didn't actually exist, and so ended up pushing the date back.
3) One of the things that I like most about the HG is that it isn't very hierarchical--there don't seem to be official ranks or anything. I wanted to suggest that the older guards would be more respected, so I named them Elders, but Masters will actually work well too (one thing I'm still trying to explain is why they're called Journeymen, which would suggest that they are in the second phase of their progression through a guild--having passed Apprentice, they are not yet Masters... hmm...).
Because the number 100 comes up pretty frequently in discussing how many guard were at such and such a place (well, frequently meaning as often as anything else is ever mentioned) I figured they would divide themselves into Centuries, like the ancient Roman army (Centurions, right?). The Bright Century came from an idea I had that Connacht's army was in pretty bad disarray during the Myrkridian campaigns, but if you could get a hundred HG in one place they would be almost unstoppable--bigger than any given pack of Myrks, in all likelihood--so that such a century would be excedingly useful to Connacht and they would become heroes of that war. It would have been a pretty big event in the history of the Guard and so, I figured, deserved a colorful name for the guys who actually fought there.
4) As for the shovels and robes, well... I've always thought it was kind of fishy that the Jmen would use shovels as their weapons. It seems kind of silly that they would carry around such a big implement just to occasionally dig something up, and if you're looking for a weapon of disgrace lots of other things come to mind--swords don't have to be fancy to be useful, and daggers would make you look like even more of a wimp. The explanation that it was "the weapon of the common man" just made me raise an eyebrow--the peasants don't carry the damn things and I don't know who would be more common than that. It struck me that the last thing the Guard would do officially as the Guard would be to bury their emperor. The original narration text which I had to trim down detailed the rather daring raid they made into the palace, just after Balor had moved on, when a bunch of Ghols were about to have a picnic and Ceiscoran was the main course. I had to cut that for space reasons (if a narration text is too long, it just gets cut off in mid-line!) but I think it makes a good plot point. That they would keep the shovels made a lot more sense to me than that they would stop off at a hardware store on their journey to redemption and buy a bunch of gardening implements. Anyway, if that is what they had done some of them would have hoes, and some would fight with rakes, or even trowels... I needed a reason for them to specifically be shovels, you see.
As far as the robes being ceremonial: it just made sense, in light of the shamanic connection. We know that they have rituals, and part of most rituals is special clothing. I'd suggest that they wanted a suitable replacement for their armor, but that would suggest they were thinking of something other than penance.
I decided that the Guard needed some place outside Muirthemne to do their secret stuff. There are a couple of reasons for this. One is that they wouldn't want random peasants wandering into their ritual space--sure, an unlikely event, but over 2500 years it would happen at least once. The second reason: it would be extremely useful to have some place to stash a given emperor while Muirthemne was getting kicked around as it does every so often. The third, most important reason: I wanted a level where they had to defend their ritual space and in the plot I was writing they were already, at this point, up in the mountains. I'm taking a lot of license here, but hey, it's my campaign, right? Anyway putting the initiation site far from Muirthemne adds mystery and pathos to the ceremony.
Okay, this is getting far too long as it is. If I've missed anything people felt I should have responded to, I apologize. The whole point here was to express how grateful I was for your input, and I'm afraid I've already gotten too long-winded to maintain that focus.
Thanks,
Wellington
