Ohio

There are drawbacks to having the real world as a background, that emerge in strange ways.  For instance, as I calculate the price of cacao, sugar and spices for the Streetvendor's Guide, I'm reminded that these goods existed only because it was necessary to force slave labour to do work that paid labour resisted.  Life on a tropical plantation hung by a thread, and only those who could not escape did that work ... and died doing it.  And for that reason, the inclusion of sugarcane in a fictional world is suspect.  We might imagine some sort of creature that's designed to cut cane without having being made to do so ... but that was the solution Roald Dahl tried in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.  Which hasn't aged well.

I've been faced with another similar, and somewhat deeper problem today.  DM's Escritoire has requested a map of the Columbus city area of Ohio ... and the first question that arises, before anything can be done about making the map, is who lives there.

That's complicated.  In the real world, in the hundred years before my game takes place, 1650, the Iroquois had forced the Wyandot Hurons south into Ohio.  But a few centuries prior to that time, there'd been a peoples whose disappearance remains a mystery to this day.  This was the so-called Adena culture, that became progressively more advanced between 600 and 1200 AD, only to vanish.  By the time Europeans arrived, even the natives in the area could not explain the gigantic mounds the Adena built, or what happened to the Adena people.

Now, I've explained that in my game world (though I'll give more detail here), sometime about 6500 years ago, elvish tribes began to move south from Alaska until they settled in the area between the Missouri and Mississippi rivers.  They called the land there Beleriand.  They made friends with the human natives and began to share their technology, which dated as far back as before the last ice age, between 25 and 21 thousand years ago.   My elves arrived on earth from another plane of existence 2-3 thousand years before that.  But I digress.

This means the elves that exist in my world would have known the Mound peoples of Ohio.  They would have a complete history of these people, would know who they were and why they scattered into the wilderness ... but then, would they have scattered?  Would that have been necessary?  And if it wasn't, wouldn't those mound peoples still exist when the Europeans came?

It's a fictional world, so of course I can say that's how it is.  I can say the Mound peoples did not die of the plague (if that's what it was) or the destruction of their land ... instead, for another 400 years, they grew and became even more civilised, so that there's a sort of Edgar R. Burroughs culture of natives in the heart of Ohio and stretching outwards into Indiana, Illinois and Kentucky.  I could say the mounds have become great stone temples, that there are cities of a size to rival those of the Aztecs and Incas, with roads, great military might and ambassadors that have travelled all the way to Europe to speak with monarchs there.

But I could also say that the Mound peoples turned to evil and dark magic, that they were influenced by dark elvish envoys who sought to destroy the elvish Kingdom of Beleriand and that after an immense war that took place around 1200, hundreds of thousands of the Mound peoples were wiped out ... and that is why we know nothing about them.  And in the meantime, there are still drow elf shamans wandering the woods of Kentucky and Ohio, seeking to gather allies, to strengthen their will and to destroy the good elvish kingdoms upon the continent.

Either narrative would work pretty well.  In fact, a blend of both narratives could also work.  There still is a Mound culture, but it's been poisoned from within and Beleriand holds councils every season to decide if this is the year of the rooting out.  Of course, that year arrives when the player characters do.

In all this conjecture, however, I have a problem.  I have no legitimate name for these Mound peoples.  The name we use, Adena, was assigned by a white person whose property a mound was located.  There is an argument that "Adena" is a corruption of "Eden" ... and it's completely true that Victorian Englishmen were willing to slap a Biblical "Eden" label on just about every place with green grass.  It's not a native name.  We have no native name.

Moreover, any change of history, anywhere in the real world, is suspect from a political perspective, in this age where all peoples invest so much in their heritage and cultural background.  In making the people of Michigan's upper peninsula non-human, I risk offending thousands of Odawa and Ojibwe peoples.  If I invent a Mound people culture, giving it a name that I like, I risk offending Hurons and other peoples in Ohio and the other states mentioned.  None of this is an issue if I run a game world like Greyhawk ... but if I transform native Ohioan culture into something that's more Asian or European than legitimately North American, I'm easily in the dog house of dozens of politically-minded historians.

Which puzzles me, to be honest.  I'm not pretending to create actual, real history.  It's not like people are going to suddenly believe there were elves in Missouri in the 4th millennia B.C.  My creative ability just doesn't have that kind of reach.  I can hardly threaten anyone with my fiction, least of all a tribal culture getting government money in Michigan, Maine or Ohio.  Yet here we are.

But ... the first problem is making a map of Ohio and having a way to name things.  That's the real trouble here.  We have no proper name for the Mound peoples.  We could posit that they built some elaborate settlement where Columbus stands today, but what in hell did they call it?  Submuloc?  How bad a joke is that ... and yet it's not a bad, alien sounding name.  Suppose I do this with every midwest city and town, but in every case I replace u's with o's and reverse c's and b's.  That makes the town's name Socmolob.  Which is also not a bad, alien sounding name.

Oh, the troubles of creativity.

I was a fan of Burroughs as a kid.  Tarzan was always stumbling out of some jungle into a spectacular, implausible Oriental-like city, with spires covered with gold ... and there's a legitimate fantasy element there.  Putting such a place on the forested, rivered plain of Columbus sounds like a good idea ...