RE: Oases of Prax & Lascerdans

From: Sandy Petersen <SPetersen_at_ensemblestudios.com>
Date: Mon, 20 Apr 1998 12:53:45 -0500


Sergio Mascarenhas
>Can someone explain me or provide me information on:
>1. The mythical and physical origin of the salt mines in Pavis?

        The physical origin is that the Dead Place is a dried-up lake much like the Bonneville Salt Flats of northwestern Utah.

        The magical origin is that all life was sucked out by the Earth goddesses to give to Storm Bull in his fight with the devil. The salt prevents any plant life from existing, which adds to the legend. No life exists on the Bonneville Salt Flats, which is probably the most sterile spot on Earth. Pretty cool to visit, though. (This despite the fact that at least one Senator tried to push through a bill to preserve the "unique life" of the Salt Flats. Perhaps he meant the race-car drivers who use it to break speed limits?)

>2. How do the oasis denizens look like? Are they Theyalan? Of nomad
stock? Something else?

        Technically, the animal nomads _are_ Theyalan, though obviously with some slight intermixture of eastern (Kralori/Teshnos/Pent) blood. My understanding is that the original Golden Age folk of Genert's Garden are supposed to have been dark-skinned (not as dark as Agimori) with pale hair (blonde?). This might be symbolic, not reality. In any case, they have had plenty of intermixture with other groups since then. They are also quite inbred, since folk from one oasis rarely or never travel to another. Probably their only source of genetic exchange is via the occasional nomad rape or seduction.

        I have always pictured them as being slight in stature and flabby-muscled, paler-skinned than the nomads (among both Amerinds & Arabs, nomad folk are swarthier than urban-dwellers, probably a feature of spending more time indoors rather than an actual genetic difference, but still distinctive enough to entered Arab colloquial conversation), with blonder hair. Their lives are hard, so no doubt they don't have too much body fat. They probably look more Western than the nomads, but if you took a group of them and put them next to a dozen Sartarites you could still clearly tell the difference. Because of the inbreeding, there are probably distinctive differences from one oasis to the next, and most well-traveled Praxians can doubtless tell from what oasis a person came from, should he be found wandering lost in the desert or captured as a slave by some non-Praxian group. It's considered bad form to take oasis folk from their oases by Praxians themselves.

3. Ronance (mentioned in ToRM special# on Prax)?

        He was once an important god of travel and communication and roads, but is now just a useful, if pacifistic, Earth Spirit.

Dave Dunham
>Im starting an Umathelan campaign, and when I mentioned the lascerdans,
a player wondered if they were slarges. I think
>they're separate (the lascerdans are extinct), but I'm not quite sure
what the distinction is. After all, both are sentient
>reptilians. Are slarges more carnivorous and lascerdans vegetarians? Is
it a desert/river distinction? (There's probably no hard
>info on this, but I'm looking for an easy distinction that won't make
biologists cringe.)

        When I created the Lascerdans, my theory was that they were not the same species as the Slarges. They are both sentient reptiles, but it takes more than this to make them identical; after all, morocanth, humans, jelmre, baboons, and (probably) trolls are all sentient mammals, but it's not hard to distinguish between them. It's known that the Lascerdans were carnivorous, because they farmed & fed on manatees. Anyway, here are some big differences between the two:

  1. Lascerdans were at least semi-aquatic, preferring river-bottoms and swamps. Slarges are plains-dwellers.
  2. Slarges have an extremely unusual reproductive cycle. The Lascerdan system of reproduction was presumably more conventional.
  3. Slarges are bipedal. IMO Lascerdans were not. That's kind of a nice distinction, easy for even humans to spot.
  4. Probably Lascerdans looked as different from Slarges as a skink looks different from a monitor lizard.
  5. Lascerdans were apparently wholly carnivorous. Slarges are not.

For what it's worth, my own mental image of a Lascerdan is that of a large basiliscus (the Neotropical reptile, not the mythical monster), also known as the Jesus Christ lizard. I see slarges as more iguana-like. There is a race of intelligent lizards in the East Isles that I picture as rather like a water monitor. They are confined to a single archipelago and are trying to make a comeback from near-extinction at the moment.


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