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Click on the pic for a link to the photographer's site. A bit of real world history, and other pics of the abandoned structure are available. You ought to check it out--plenty of awesome creep factor, and it allows vaguely voyeuristic glimpes into someone else's forgotten memories. |
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Until I can find/make a better one, below is a picture of a jaguar for reference. The Cheshire's mouth is slightly more closed, and has a great deal more teeth in a toothy grin - the smile is more human looking, as well, although the canines are as prominent as they are here. The Cheshire is roughly six feet long, and probably weighs about 350-425 pounds. The Cheshire's eyes are actually dark blue. |
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Looking like sisters (including the Jester), with model looks and pale blue eyes, all of the servants have shaved heads, powdered pale skin, and attractive bodies. They are dressed all the same, in tasteful white dresses. |
Although all of the White Queen's servants have model looks, the Jester is particularly well formed. Platinum blonde curls hang below her shoulders, and a handsome face of high cheekbones and playful eyes, set with features so regular you could likely measure by them. Her body is athletic and endowed, with just enough musculature to make a try at gymnastics. Her eyes are light blue, her skin powdered pale.
When she was encountered at the orphanage door, she was wearing a white leather corset, white bikini bottom, knee high white boots, and a diamond choker necklace. All of the clothing was finely made.
Called "The Shining Knight" by the Queen of Diamonds, he is apparently an unwilling servant of the White Queen, both her considerable foe and ally. He is a very short Chinese man, perhaps 5'2", but has all of the bulk of a power lifter or thick gymnast. He is friendly, reasonably straight forward, and as helpful as he can be, given his forced allegiances.
He has been seen dressed in varied attire: a white business powersuit, white-enamelled samurai armor, and a silvered suit of germanic plate mail. He does not seem to notice the attire, himself, always moving with grace and surety regardless of what he's been dressed in that day.
He can speak in Chinese. The White Queen seems unable to.
A spidery-fingered, wan shadow of a man (and not "technically a male" by his admission), the Bishop is a disturbing individual, instantly generating mistrust in any who see him. He is usually seen in the robes of a Catholic Bishop, cradling the top of a human skull in one arm (as one might a bowl), with a sceptre that looks suspiciously like a salt shaker hanging from his side. His face and hands, the only visible parts of his flesh, are almost skeletal in their thinness.
He tends to stare a lot, speaks with a soft, ugly whisper and a lisp, and bears the look of one who is studying your power base... and figuring out how to steal it.
He ate breakfast with the White Queen, attempted to betray Christina to the White King (who has... appetites), and has done little to endear himself to anyone. Why the White Queen values him is unknown, and likely sinister.
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Rose Red: Defense of the Innocent. Just Causes. Retribution...
Rose Red is not as simple an archetype as she initially seems. Innocence is uneasily defined, and just causes rarely black and white. Too often this Role must walk a middle path between black and white... usually the path of most resistance, and the one which results, eventually, in the least loss of innocence. Unfortunately, unsubtle character is the hallmark of those who have taken up her mantle, and the result has been poor longterm results and an overall weakening of the archetype. In the standard fairy tale, Rose Red was the wilder of the two children, Snow White and Rose Red. Of the two, it was her who would dash about the woods, while Snow White stayed home with her mother. In some ways, Rose Red and Snow White of the deadlands hold similar roles, in that one is active (defense, vengeance) while the other is passive (healing, succor). Both, however, hail from older tales, separately, and are not as related as some might wish them. Where Snow White comes from the Celtic Maiden and Crone, Rose Red comes from the Roman Venus Verticordia (protector of feminine chastity), associated with roses, blood, and venom. |
Numerologically, she's associated wth performance, sensitivity and carefree aspects, but in a reading of cards (3 Heart), she's overabundance and (more mundanely) triangulation. In practice, she is also the middle of the set of three's: Ace, Three, Nine; with Ace being the primal aspect of Hearts, and Nine being the magician (the three threes), and Thrace being something with traces of both but possessing neither. Three of Hearts is sometimes a Dance card, tying it back to performance.
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Dark, short hair, a not-unfriendly demeanor, and a regular, not unattractive face, the Ace of Spades is not quite a raging beauty like Rose Red, but is still rather more attractive than the average. She has a killer's lean build, athletic but without any wasted muscle or mass. When she visited Christina in the dungeon cell, she was derssed in a quilted black catsuit of part leather, part silk, and an upside down, white spades symbol covering the center of her torso. Her hands were gloved in silk, her feet in polished leather dress boots. |
When Rose Red was brutally murdered, the Ace of Spades (sometimes nicknamed Rose Black or Peregrine) took on her role. Or at least tried to. She's not very good at it, for she has not yet mastered the intuitive aspects of the archetype, and lacks the ability to ferret out motivations that her predecessor had.
Which means she's doing the Black Queen's bidding, against the better judgement of her peers.
As part of her new role, thorny, ebony rose vines twist constantly in twin spirals up her body and then out along her arms. The black roses along them are mere buds, still dewy, and her lips have become deep red.
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No, I didn't draw this. (I wish!) Thomas found it on some other board, done by some other talented person. But this is the tower from which I fell in cat form. I wasn't kidding when I said longass drop. ^_^ |
He is more than he seems. At every level, he is tangled in the skeins of archetypes, a confused and bumbling Fool who manages to put his foot into each and every pie as he tries to get out the door.
He is Epithemeus. He is the Fool. He is a Lost Cause, and the Absent King. He is the worst of incompetence and bad luck, a critical failure of reason and wisdom... and he seems like such a nice guy.
By way of example, Dr. Michael Ostrog.
The good doctor, by way of a series of fiendish coincidences, managed to be the right person to suspect of the Jack the Ripper murders, without actually being that person. And, indeed, he was a murderer of sorts - he'd stumbled across a coven of vampires, the Adelaide family, and killed a number of them before being stopped... but they left no traces when they died, and had nothing to do with the Ripper murders he was consequently investigated (and found innocent) for.
You might note that stumbling across the Adelaide family was not exactly a fortune from heaven, either.
While the investigation was occuring, and he was still in the process of removing vampires from the blood pool, he acquired a patient who was suffering from multiple puncture wounds and slight head trauma. Dr. Ostrog managed to poison the man with blood thickeners (in an attempt to prevent loss of life from a reduced blood supply), and the true Jack the Ripper died, anonymously, on Ostrog's table.
Jack the Ripper was the original Black King, and Ostrog's tale of woe truly began.
The Adelaides, now with the help of the current Black Queen, put Dr. Ostrog to sleep for a very long time, and erected a temporary Black King in his place, and then began arranging for a convincing loss of the temp king, to switch out Adelaide and the current Black Queen.
The purpose of all of this is as yet unclear... and it is certain that Ostrog will manage to muddle it further.
Possibly the first monotheist in history, Akh Ken Aten declared Aten (the sun disc) to be the only true god, renamed many monuments seemingly at random, moving the capital city (to the newly founded Amaran), and dashed the priest caste's political structure to bits. His father was a politically savvy pharoah who disliked the power of the priests, and it is possible that Akhenaten took this to an extreme.
The (brief) reign of Akhenaten, before his wife Nefertiti was killed (possibly along with three daughters) and Akhenaten himself fled Egypt (or was killed anonymously), was punctuated by the flowering of a radically different art style (including displays of affection), a resurgence of philosophy, and several political upheavals.
Some believe that Akhenaten was the father of Tutankhamen, but this is heavily disputed.
This brief bump of change and inspiration was swiftly flattened and paved over by the eternal river of Egypt's development. It is said that when Akhenaten left Egypt, the sun dimmed, but such nonsense is generally ignored.
Thought I'd forgotten, dintcha?
When I designed the deck of cards, I wanted them to provide symbolism for human motivations. Thus, spades were symbolic of death (and fear of it), clubs were pain (the most basic motivator), hearts were passion and lust, and diamonds were greed and want. When you start letting them have relationships, it gets incestuous, but hey, the setting wasn't supposed to be nice.
I started with spades, because the whole campaign centered around the Black Queen (in her chess and card guises) and Christina, so I needed to have her developed first. I decided on the royals first: king was the narcissist, queen was the centrist figure, jack was the supplicant and ace was the executive. For death, that translated into suicide (aka the dying king), bloody tyrant, prisoner and executioner (aka death incarnate).
(You'll notice that I never worked the jacks in, except as comments to the side - the lesbian fantasy aspect of the story pretty much excluded them)
Clubs quickly followed that: the masochist (or martyr), the sadist, the beaten dog, and the dominatrix. Although the Black Queen of the story focused on her role in chess, and used her role of Spades more thoroughly, it was her role as Queen of Clubs (and her servant the Ace of Clubs) that really caught Christina. As the Black Queen would have agreed, use the right tool for the right job.
Diamonds, of course, resulted almost inevitably in the miser, the shrewish wife, the doted upon son, and the scheming financier. When I started on the character design for the shrewish wife, the murderous Red Queen from Tales of Alice was also resonating in my head. I was shooting for some Lewis Carroll aspects, and it was at this point that I decided on the Bloody Queen and Bloody King as archetypes that had melded with the Red Cards.
The Bloody King is the devouring tyrant, the rapist and murderer and user who takes and takes and takes from the lands given into his care. In the Epic of Gilgamesh, Gilgamesh was a Bloody King until Enkidhu tamed him, but the archetype did not die then... it simply waited for the next Bloody King to arise (and we've certainly had enough of them in history). It seemed a fairly perfect match for the King of Desire and Greed and Want.
The Bloody Queen is the murderous woman, jealous of men's power, who takes it into her own hands and abuses it with the lives of others. Bloody Mary is a fairly famous example, of course, but tales of the Bloody Queen go all the way back to the greeks. While this may seem a fairly patriarchal archetype, it is really more about the beaten underdog who, when finally given over to power, uses it in terrible ways as a means to vengeance, but also because it doesn't know better. Some of the more modern stories of Toad and Magneto have put Toad in the role of the Bloody Queen. Although not a perfect match in most cases, the Red Queen I finally decided on was, well, well suited at the least to both roles.
For hearts, I decided on a slightly different story approach, since I was shooting for some aspects of Victorian sensibility. Passion (and all of its court) were to be hidden beneath the surface, seemingly bound, but still there and somewhat wild. The king became the narcissist, the queen became irrationality, the jack became the willing slave, and the ace became the seductress, but none of them were seen very much... unless you watched closely the behaviors of the Red Royals.
(I did allow the Queen of Hearts to be seen, briefly, as a fey presence that hinted at the borders of things but was too confused by reality to properly frame it)
The Bloody King, interestingly enough, led me to the Absent King. Archetypes rarely stand alone, and they usually suggest still more archetypes that "fit" with them. Coming up with the abstract concepts that resulted in the living, breathing archetypes, was possibly the most fun I've had in world creation in some time. In this case, the abstract concept was "bad rulers".
Not the most suggestive name, of course, but coming up with the core kinds of bad rulers was fun. A tyrant who consumes his own people's resources is one, of course, and the downtrodden person who is suddenly given too much power is another... so I looked for similarly broad cases. The Absent King (the first one I ever knew of was Richard the Lion-Hearted, but President Calvin Coolidge was another) was the case of a king who neglects his kingdom, and absence being what it is, I immediately latched it to the Black King.
I'd come up with two others that never made it into the story: the King of Whimsy (who I'd thought to tie to the White King, and which is what Dumbledore pretends to be) and the Fearful King (who is active in his kingdom, unlike the Absent King, and who conserves the kingdom's resources, unlike the Bloody King, but whose decisions are based in too-fearful conservatism). The Fearful King was going to be an Oz reference, but I ultimately didn't get to work much from the Emerald City into the campaign.
The Numbers: A Quickie Outline
multiples of 3: magic & artistry1/Ace: defined almost entirely by acuteness/precision, this is the Ace, perfectly competent but too often literal. However, as a square, it is also well balanced (and so lacks the monomaniacal focus that some of the other cards have). Most Queens attempt to get a highly skilled person meshed with the archetype, to help counterbalance some of the overwhelming literalness.
2: defined purely by brilliant literacy/creativity, the Deuce is often frighteningly incompetent at even basic tasks, but can provide much in the way of new ideas (though not art as such). Deuces are rarely seen outside of this providence.
3: A literal and brilliant artist, the Three is useful primarily for massive tasks of uncreative artistry. Reproducing a building to scale, producing perfect meeting minutes, and so on. Threes are also somewhat magical, and are often used as the foundation for powerful spells.
4: A well balanced (and less brilliant) version of the Deuce, the Four is the advisor or brainstormer whom you can bring to parties, and expect to not be embarassed.
5: A brilliant and precise intellect with no sense of balance whatsoever, the Five is the one often tasked to mundane but immense tasks of the intellect, such as maintaining a library or knowledge of heraldry.
6: Creative and magical, the true artistes of a Court are the Sixes.
7: Sevens are special in a peculiar way - they bring luck, good and bad, to those they serve. They are similar to Fives, but are better at managing chaotic events than things which remain largely the same from day to day.
8: Lacking brilliance, balance or anything other than their ability to be creative and accept metaphorical statements, the Eight is most often relegated to the role of servant. They make excellent butlers, maids, and other staff.
9: Much the same as a Three, but well balanced and sociable, and not as brilliant. Some Nines pose as Threes for their Queen, pretending to be dumbly literal while secretly spying.
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