Satyrs are a problem. We wanted them for Magonomia., because they turn up in the folklore. They are, however, really rapey. That’s also considered a bit humorous in some period work. So, we wanted satyrs, but without any of the baggage. I took it three ways to get there.
Satyrs change form over time. The earliest ones are ipotanes: horse headed humans with huge generative members. These become the modern goat satyrs well before period. That’s why we have an older and a younger form in the story, and why we have space to generate a third general form. There’s an idea in alchemy that you can grow artificial humans, which are sometimes called homunculi. I drew on that, because it lets me cut all the rapes out.
The idea that they are generated in wine, and that wine is not common in Britain, let me bring in interesting changes in technology, like fortified wine. I also wanted to bring in folklore about beer, but a lot of it was removed because I was showing too much of my research, and not pitching directly to people’s play experience. I’ve discussed Thirteenth Century brewing in episode 47 but fortified wines hit Britain later than this period. I needed a fortified beverage, so I deliberately used some ortolan folklore from a episode 63. That brings us to beer.
Most of the origin folklore for beer comes from Germany. I had a heap of it, and then looking at it thought “There are a heap of people, ages away from the player characters, doing irrelevant stuff, here” so I cut it out. It’s about King Gambrinus, and I thought I’d be dragging him into Britain through the Dutch immigrants fleeing the Spanish in the Netherlands. What I didn’t know, and do now, is that some British people had claimed him, the inventor of beer, as a mythical English king.
I’m not quite sure how a drinking song can have 59 stanzas. Australian drinking songs tend to be far simpler. I mention this because that’s the stanza of “The Ex-ale-tation of Ale” that mentions him. Time for a quote – I won’t sing because life is hard enough.
To the praise of Gambrivius, that good British king
That devis’d for the nation by the Welshmen’s tale
Seventeen hundred years before Christ did spring
The happy invention of a pot of good ale.
This goes back to a history of Bavaria which was released in 1523, which mixed the folktale that a German king invented ale with the known fact that the Egyptians had beer, by suggesting he was Isis’s lover. There are several potential kings that people associate with Gambrivius, and the one I chose to use was John I, Duke of Brabant. He was a folk hero of the area which later becames the Spanish Netherlands, so his people coming across the Channel worked out for me. He loved drinking, jousts and fathering illegitimate children. His heraldic symbol is the lion. Brewing has been a feminised profession for some time, so I went with lionesses.
Did I accidentally invent catgirls from scratch? Yes, I did. Sorry.
Games From Folktales 