Originally posted on Cohost, archived in October 2024.
After my last post tinkering with ways to animate lots of lands, I was ready to set the idea aside for a while. But as often happens with creative projects, some stray thoughts from research cohered into something compelling, which brought me back to the idea. The result is an animated land creature type I'm calling the ashborn.
What's a small land creature?
One question we didn't address in the previous post: from a Magic design perspective, what does a 1/1 land creature look like? Often, animated lands in Magic represent huge masses of earth rising up as an elemental or something similar, and accordingly they tend to have better stats than 1/1. Filling white's sort of "army" role as pseudo-tokens, we'd expect 1/1 land creatures to be something more on a humanoid scale.
I spent a fair amount of time looking at mythological traditions on beings made from earth or clay; in the previous post I used "Enki" as a placeholder counter name, referring to the Sumerian creation myth for humanity. But the ancient myths I read didn't really strike me for inspiration, and I'm generally very hesitant to pull on other people's mythology or religion as wallpaper for my fantasy setting.
That's also a primary reason I've avoided the obvious choice of golems. Broadly I'm not sure how Jewish folks feel about the way "golem" gets used in fantasy, but I feel weird enough about it that I'd rather avoid it altogether. Also, golems introduce some assumptions that don't work for me. Namely that they're created to obey orders, making them either automatons or a very linear-narrative underclass. Specific to Magic, since they're constructed to serve, they're usually artifacts, not lands. Both of these are things I'd like to avoid with our creature lands.
Bone China in a China-less World
Since many of the creation myths I researched focus specifically on beings created from clay, I began to read about ceramics. Eventually this brought me to porcelain and "bone china." Apparently, porcelain is sort of a subjective category covering a few different materials. In the broadest sense, porcelain includes both pure-mineral ceramics (originally from China) as well as "bone china," which uses bone ash to supplement a different mineral makeup (and is English in origin, despite the name).
From a fantasy perspective, bone china is much more interesting than other ceramics, with an immediate question being "whose (or what's) bones?" Creatures of animate porcelain would have a striking glassy white appearance, which is great for art purposes. If that porcelain is bone china, they'd also have a historical material connection to the source of the bone ash suffusing them. I came up with the name "ashborn" to describe these creatures.
Megaplex of Bone
We know that the ashborn represent a secret magic of the people we're temporarily calling Savanna Nation, who have some connection to the "megaplex" in the desert. So far we haven't really nailed down that megaplex in any way, only that it's a moment of shared history (and implicitly falling-out) between Savanna Nation and Mountain Nation. But now that we have a question of "where does the ashborn's bone ash come from," an explanation presents itself.
The "megaplex" is the skeleton of an ancient, colossal god. If that's not constructed enough to earn the -plex, we can say that a city was carved into the massive bones, in addition to whatever mining happens there. Perhaps the scale is so large, or the form so alien, that it's hard to recognize it as a skeleton without significant cartography and study. A natural moment of schism between Savanna Nation and the religious Mountain Nation would be the revelation of the skeleton's nature.
The people of Mountain Nation still worship the god, maybe believing that it lives on incorporeally, and oppose continued mining of its skeleton for resources. In contrast, Savanna Nation are the descendants of those who chose to continue mining and working with the god's bone as a material.
Nature of the Ashborn
Taking the megaplex as the source of the bone for ashborn solves some problems neatly. Rather than simply being constructs, the ashborn represent a fusion of the inherent magic of the land (mana, in game terms) with the divine residue within the bone ash. From there, we can make some additional statements backed up by "the bone just does that:"
- Ashborn are all of identical form (maybe humanoid, maybe not) and power
- In fact, attempts to fire porcelain in a different form results in cracked, inert ceramic
- They are very durable and functionally immortal, and when destroyed or damaged can be re-fired
- Ashborn have agency and make decisions on their own
- The ashborn don't speak and rarely communicate except through gesture and action
- They may communicate with each other through some other means, though it's not well-understood
- Their motives and goals are often opaque, but they value their own autonomy, as well as being in control of the creation of new ashborn
Filling in Some History
We know that historically Savanna Nation had a strong class division, and that a struggle happened recently to subvert that. The ashborn have a complex relationship to that history. They're dependent on the system that harvests bone and produces porcelain in order to (re)produce themselves. With Mountain Nation opposing that system, and Savanna Nation having long left the desert, porcelain production is difficult and intensive.
So we can say that there was a small upper class of Savanna Nation who controlled the mining/stockpiles/kilns used to produce porcelain, and for a long time the ashborn were more or less held hostage by that class. Given their durability (and their Magic status as an "army" in green/white), we can assume they acted as military/policing. Only recently was a broad coalition of ashborn and humans (or some other fantasy "race" TBD) able to overthrow this aristocracy. Now the ashborn have significantly more control over the kilns, though it's still an intensive process to gather bone and clay for porcelain.
The rate of new ashborn creation has been very low, but it remains an open question whether the ashborn will change that. It's not clear how the labor would be organized, or what impact such production would have on the land being mined for clay and mana. But the ashborn last a long time, and they haven't seemed rushed to action in the generation since the rebellion. One rumor says there's internal disagreement between the ashborn, although how would an outsider know? For the time being, they till the land and build houses and work the kilns alongside everyone else.
What Next?
Having designed the ashborn from a story perspective, I'm now really motivated to make them work mechanically. I have some ideas, but I'm going to put them in another post. Knowing about the god's skeleton in the desert also gives me a nice intro to the Mountain Nation religion, which will probably be my next worldbuilding post.