> The Brithini were extremely powerful in the first meetings between the two > cultures. With their magics and war skills (now seriously outdated but then > very good) they probably killed Vadeli by the cart load. Any race driven to > near extinction will clutch at straws to survive and I think this is what the > Vadeli did. The warped their own fertility and souls to give themselves power > to fight back. Plainly the castes must have evolved over a considerableperiod
Not my own assumptions. I have always thought that the Brithini warred with the
Vadeli largely *because* the Vadeli used these obscene, evil rituals; also, that
the Godtime Brithini and Vadeli were fairly evenly matched (with the Vadeli, if
anything, having the upper hand until the Grand Finale). Saying that the
Brithini tried their best to wipe out the Vadeli as a race, and that since then
(and unbeknownst to the Brithini) the Vadeli have developed obscene, evil
rituals begs the question: where did the universally bad reputation of the
Vadeli come from? And why did the Brithini seek to wipe them out? And what does
the rest of the West have against them? (Or are you positing *two*
near-extinctions for the Vadeli at the hands of the Brithini -- this would seem
rather unnecessary).
I prefer to think that Vadel instituted his vile practices, whatever they were
(incest, sodomy, infanticide, necrophilia, eating shellfish, etc.) as a survival
mechanism in the Great Darkness; that they received a very bad press from the
Brithini and Malkioni, who added Leviticus-like prohibitions against Vadelish
behaviour to their corpus of Scripture; that Zzabur subsequently destroyed most
of the Vadeli race, leaving only a few Brown Vadeli survivors, isolated on their
islands.
Inside Time, nobody wanted to "let the Vadeli out" -- in the First Age, the Waertagi (bastard siblings to the Brithini) dominated the Oceans; in the Second Age, the Jrusteli (Scriptural hardliners) exterminated the Waertagi but hated the Vadeli just as much (if not more). Only now, in the Third Age, have the Brown Vadeli gained the secrets of naval power (from Dormal's sojourn among them), without there being a countervailing Western-aligned power on the Oceans able to put the cork back in their bottle. And on their earliest voyages they discovered that their Red cousins (against all expectations) had reappeared in force... while the Brithini had gone for good.
NB: it needn't make any difference to how you treat them IYG, but Greg and Sandy are both firmly of the opinion that the Vadeli are absolutely, irredeemably EVIL. I used to think otherwise, but now think this is more fun.
OTOH, if you want some "good" Vadeli (alongside the Evil ones), why not assume
that the Prophet Hrestol converted (some of?) the Brown Vadeli inhabitants of
(let's say) the New Vadeli Isles to a more *wholesome* way of life. Perhaps they
think that: "As a little bit of us lives on in all our children, we ought to be
*nice* to our kids, and have lots of them! Then when we die and go to Solace
like good Prince Hrestol taught us, our descendants will still be living in this
world." Doing something like this would take off the stigma of the Vadeli being
an Evil Race, if that's what you want to do (always fun to have some moral
ambiguity, I agree). So *most* Vadeli would still be stomach-churningly vile and
depraved, but some of them would be wrongly-persecuted good guys, to give your
players pause.
PC: "Excuse me, are you a nice Vadeli, or one of the evil ones?" EV: "I'm one of the nice ones. Would you like to buy my shellfish?" PC: "Oh, that's all right, then. Are they fresh?..."
Just a passing thought...
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