Saintly Saturday: St. Michael the Confessor

Today is the Feast of St. Michael the Confessor who was from Synnada in Phrygia in what is now modern day central Turkey. From a young age he wanted to become a monk, so he travelled to Constantinople. There he met another young man seeking the monastic life who would eventually become St. Theophylact (celebrated on March 8). The two received the blessing by Patriarch Tarasius and entered a monastery on the Black Sea, where both men distinguished themselves.

All of this happened during the era of iconoclasm. Patriarch Tarasius had convened the Seventh Ecumenical Council in defense of icons and was in need of iconodule bishops. Both Michael and Theophylact were persuaded to become such bishops. Michael went back home to become the Bishop of Synnada and Theophylact became the bishop of Nicomedia.

In A.D. 813 Emperor Leo V the Armenian came to power. Seeing recent defeats against both the Bulgars and the Arabs as a sign that the iconodules were wrong, Leo V adopted iconoclastic policies and began to persecute iconodules including both Sts. Michael and Theophylact. Both were exiled. Michael died while in exile about the year A.D. 821.

Given the fact that St. Michael was at a monastery on the Black Sea and his friend St. Theophylact became the bishop of Nicomedia, it seems that it is time for me to expand upon the Sea of Marmara campaign setting. The life of St. Michael seems to suggest a few interesting wrinkles to the immediate history of the campaign.

Leo V the Armenian came to power primarily because he was a good general. Being an iconoclast was as much of a political move as it was a theological one — it placated the iconoclastic Arab Muslims long enough for him to push back and make peace with the Bulgars. Although he seemed to be a good administrator and skilled on the battlefield, he was not as skilled in politics because he was brutally assassinated on Christmas day A.D. 820 by his own generals.

This suggests that the heresy being supported by the Lawful powers that be is a second wave of the heresy and that those powers have been very successful at protecting their territory from outside threats. In past posts, I’ve postulated that Nicomedia and Byzantium are two different political entities. The life and time of St. Michael suggest that one is actually pagan or humanoid. Given its relative isolation to other significant locations on the map, Byzantium seems to fit the pagan/humanoid bill better than Nicomedia. Thus, the Lawful ruler of Nicomedia, although a heretic, is tolerated by the average citizen because he has brought a relative peace and stability to the area.

The persecution of iconodules under Leo V was aimed primarily at monasteries, therefore this fits very nicely into the idea that the Mountain of Skulls was ransacked by the Lawful ruler of Nicomedia, making the evil being guarded there free to wreck havoc. Part of the background noise could very well be a plot to assassinate the ruler by his closest allies to either cover up or in retribution for the mistake of ransacking the monastery.

Finally, since St. Michael’s friend St. Theophylact was deposed as the bishop of Nicomedia by Leo V, it follows that the rebel monks who are fighting against the Lawful ruler of Nicomedia are led by the former bishop of Nicomedia who also happens to be a monk.

Saintly Saturday: St. Hilarion the New

Today is the Feast of St. Hilarion the New. He was a monastic saint who lived much of his life as a hermit. Eventually, he was ordained as a priest and became the abbot of the Pelekete monastery in Bithynia during the eighth century A.D. This places his life at the time of the first wave of iconoclasm.

On Holy Thursday in A.D. 754, soldiers stormed the monastery under the auspices of rooting out icon-venerators. They disrupted service, threw the Holy Gifts to the floor and put forty-two of the monks in chains. They were then sent to Edessa to be murdered. The remaining monks were horribly mutilated and tortured. Noses were cut off, beards set on fire. St. Hilarion died during this persecution and is today venerated as a martyr.

***

Given that several of my recent Saintly Saturdays have coincidentally been about various saints from around the Sea of Marmara and Bithyina, it seems as if this nascent campaign is going to get further developed.

The story of St. Hilarion and the Pelekete monastery suggests a background story for the center-piece dungeon of the campaign. In past posts, I have suggested a new take on the sample side-view dungeon in Holmes where Skull Mountain becomes the Mountain of Skulls. The monks originally built the monastery to protect the surrounding countryside from an ancient evil buried beneath.

I have also suggested that the monks therein were not wiped out by monsters, but by forces of Law. These forces would have been backed by an authority that is actively supporting a heresy that the monks at the Mountain of Skulls were opposed to (and might possibly be the original rebel monks also suggested by a previous post).

To that end, I’d like to gather some pictures from a few monasteries for the purposes of inspiration. Somewhere in here are the pieces necessary to bring this adventure location to life:

Especially interesting to me are the skulls with names, dates and even icons painted upon them. These are the skulls in question that need to be found and restored to make sure that the ancient evil is once more contained.

Saintly Saturday: St. Paul the Confessor

Today is the Feast of St. Paul the Confessor. The title Confessor refers to those Christians who were jailed and/or tortured for the faith but were not martyred. St. Paul live during the second phase of iconoclasm during the eighth and ninth centuries. He was bishop of the city Prusa in Bithynia. He was harassed, persecuted and exiled for his zealous defense of the icons. He died in A.D. 850.

In recent weeks, there have been several saints from Bithynia popping up here on Saturdays. This only adds another layer of detail to the slowly developing Sea of Mamara campaign setting. It seems that the rebel monks are fighting against heretical rulers. One now only needs to decide whether those rulers are in Nicomedia or Byzantium...

Having a despot who champions heresy, imprisoning bishops while rebel monks try to protect both the faith and the people or conversely, a group of heretical rebel monks wrecking havoc are both great backgrounds upon which to build a campaign. The question must be asked, however: what does heresy look like?

As St. Paul demonstrates, heresy can be as esoteric as whether or not icons should be used during worship. I suppose one could find a copy of the Panarion by St. Epiphanius which details eighty different heresies, but that is more of a scholarly exercise than I am willing to undertake at the moment.

Rather, I am going to try to boil down all of the various historical heresies into a few broad categories. I will then assign to each a general behavior pattern that follows from the internal logic of the heresy as well as the type of NPC most likely to adhere to those beliefs.

Man Saves Himself

These heresies remove God from the salvific equation in some way fashion or form. While atheism falls under this category, God doesn’t need to be completely ignored. Any heresy that minimized the divinity of Christ falls under this generalization.

The ultimate logical outcome of these heresies is Might Makes Right. Generally speaking, what is good and ethical derives from humanity, not from God. Thus, what is good and ethical is determined by those who are willing to use force to coerce everyone else into agreeing with them.

Those in power or those seeking power are the most likely to adhere to these kinds of heresies.

Dualism

These heresies attribute equal power to an evil entity or god that opposes the true god. Most commonly, this is found in the various gnostic heresies. Generally, the evil god is responsible for the creation of matter while the good god is responsible for the soul.

Thus, the material world is irredeemable. This leads to extreme forms of asceticism, where the fleshly body is seen as a foreign entity that needs to be conquered. Destruction of material things deemed too tempting or distracting would be understood as normal and beneficial.

Monastics, as well as intellectual and social elites are the most likely candidates for this kind of heresy.

Monarchianism

This is a fancy way of saying that god is one and only one. This includes those heresies that opposed to the Orthodox belief that God is not only one, but trinity. It also includes all of the various heresies which over-emphasize the divinity of Christ.

Chauvinism and fatalism are the two most common practical outcomes of these heresies. If god is one and he looks and talks like me, then he must not look and talk like them. If salvation is completely in the hands of god, then my fate has already been decided. Thus, violent acts towards outsiders are completely justifiable, as are suicide attacks.

The most likely adherents of these kinds of heresies are suppressed minorities, people with very strong ethnic or national identities or just those who are afraid of people different from them.

Thus, in the example above of the Sea of Mamara campaign, the heretical rulers are most likely adherents of Man Saves Himself although one could justify the rulers of Nicomedia believing in Monarchiamism...

Saintly Saturday: St. Timothy of Symbola

Today is the Feast of St. Timothy of Symbola, who was of Italian descent. He was attracted to the monastic life and was tonsured at a young age. After spending years of training in a monastery he received the gift to heal the sick and to cast out unclean spirits. He also spent many years as a hermit, wandering the wilderness offering up prayer both day and night. He died at what is only called “a great old age” in the year A.D. 795.

This date places him in the era of iconoclasm, an era when many monastics came into direct conflict with emperors over the use of icons in the Church. Indeed, St. Timothy may very well have taken to the hermetic life because of imperial pressure upon the monasteries.

St. Timothy gets his title “of Symbola” because he pursued his asceticism at a monastery called “Symbola.” This monastery was near Mount Olympus; however, if you think this means he lived his life in northern Greece, you would be mistaken, because the Symbola Monastery was in Asia Minor, near the Sea of Mamara on the southern edge of Bithynia. Yes, I did talk about these two places last week.

Although today it is called Uludağ or Keşiş Dağı (literally “Mountain of Monks”), this mountain was called Olympus in antiquity. It is not alone. In addition to the world-famous Mt. Olympus where the pagan Greeks imagined their gods lived, there are another five in Greece (at Lesbos, Euboea, East Attics, Skyros and Arcadia). Besides the “Mountain of Monks," there are three more in Turkey (at Bartin, Kemer and Aegean Turkey). Finally, the highest point in Cyprus is another Mt. Olympus.

Mt. Olympus in Macedonia

Mt. Olympus in Bithynia

I have two thoughts about how to inform a campaign using the story of St. Timothy:

Firstly, I’d further develop the campaign of the Sea of Mamara with a brewing conflict between a group of rebellious monks (based out of the Mountain of Monks) and one of the political powers in the area. This is not something isolated to this campaign or this particular era, either. Monastics of all stripes have come into conflict with political powers throughout history. The key is finding an issue intriguing enough to add a bit of fun to the campaign.

Secondly, the fact that there are eleven (!) mountains by the name of Olympus in the ancient world, reminds me of the value of having multiple names for various landmarks in a campaign, with some of those names referring to multiple places. This is especially true in a campaign where the PCs are interested in finding an artifact, a tomb, a person, etc. that is located at a “Mt. Olympus.” The players are then left with trying to decipher which is the “Mt. Olypmus” in question.

Over the years, various bloggers (which ones I cannot recall at the moment), have posited using The Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth or The Tomb of Horrors as goals for PCs introduced at the beginning of the campaign. Should players choose, the whole campaign could focus on getting information detailing the contents of these dungeons so that when they were ready, the players would have a fighting chance of success (especially in the case of the The Tomb of Horrors). This campaign would be especially interesting should the PCs not be the only ones interested in finding and conquering the dungeon.

In such a campaign, having several different versions of “Mt. Olympus” with multiple names would add a layer of complexity, forcing characters to choose which to focus on, or possibly use to mislead rival parties.

Saintly Saturday: St. Auxentius of the Mountain

Today is the Feast Day of Auxentius of the Mountain. Born in Syria, he enlisted as a soldier in A.D. 442, during the reign of Theodosius the Younger. He served in the Fourth Military Company of the Scholarii, also known as the Imperial Guard. He saw enough vanity in the world of high politics that he retreated into monasticism. He became a hermit on Mt. Oxia (which came to be known as Mt. Auxentius). This mountain was near Chalcedon, a city across the Bosporus from Constantinople, in the Roman Province of Bithynia.
As often happens with holy hermits, he began to attract other monastics and he became an Archmandrite (literally, “chief of a sheephold”) of the community there. He was asked to speak at the Fourth Ecumenical Council at Chalcedon in A.D. 451, which dealt with monophysitism (the belief that Christ only had a divine nature). He became well-known as a healer.

Chalcedon, Bithynia and Mt. Oxia/Auxentius are all on the northern coast of modern-day Turkey, just east of the Sea of Mamara. Bithynia was actually its own Kingdom prior to voluntarily becoming a part of the Roman Republic. Its capital was Nicomedia, which was on the eastern coast of the Sea of Mamara.
If the name Mamara rings any bells, it is because I mentioned it in a post about the Nine Martyrs of Cyzicus. At the time, I drew a map that might serve for an interesting campaign. Here is an updated version of that map:

I added a stand-in for Nicomedia, which could be the capital of a kingdom whose influence reaches east off the map. In addition, I included a "Mt. Auxia," which could serve as another option for a megadungeon (we could always use another abandoned monastery). Alternatively, there could be an active monastery where PCs might find an oracle, or the guardian of a key piece of information and/or object. Given that St. Auxentius was a healer, PCs might go to the mountain seeking the only person in the region able to heal a particular ailment. This, in turn, might have the PCs going on a mission at the request of the monks on Mt. Auxia.

Regardless, this proto-campaign, based around the Sea of Mamara continues to grow.

Saintly Saturday: St. Nicon the Hieromartyr

Today is the feast of St. Nicon the Hieromartyr. He was born in late 2nd or early 3rd century Naples to a pagan father and a mother who was secretly a Christian. Despite being exposed to the faith, he grew up pagan and became a soldier. It was during a particularly sticky situation as a soldier that he began his path towards becoming a saint.

His company was surrounded and, out of desperation, he started to pray to his mother's God. When he and many of his fellow soldiers survived, he began a quest to become baptized. This was no easy task in a time of persecution. Eventually, he ended up in a cave church where the bishop of Cyzicus was hiding with a group of monks. It was there that he became a monk and eventually succeeded the bishop who baptized him.

St. Nicon ended up in Sicily when barbarian incursions drove out he and his fellow monks. Upon his return to the West, several of the soldiers he served with sought him out. They, too, decided to become Christian. Eventually, they settled in a wilderness area called Gigia by the River Assinum in Sicily. After many years living in peace, they were arrested during a persecution by the governor Quintilian. When they refused to worship idols, the 199 monks that were with Nikon were beheaded. St. Nicon was tortured and eventually was also beheaded about the year A.D. 251.

Taking a quick look at a map of Sicily, the most likely place where St. Nicon and disciples were are in the mountains outside of the modern city of Noto, which sits at the headwaters of the River Asinaro. This suggests a very nice little area for an interesting variation on a couple of classic D&D campaign tropes — the ruined monastery and Skull Mountain.

Firstly, we have several very nice names: The ancient name for Noto was Neetum, the wilderness around evidently was known as Gigia, which are part of the Heraean Mountains in a valley of the river Asinaro/Assinum.

Secondly, there is a monastery, founded by St. Nicon and his disciples (some of whom are former soldiers, including Nicon himself) who are all killed by beheading. This suggests that in the mountains surrounding Noto/Neetum is a ruin that colloquially is known as the Monastery of Skulls.

Since there are 200 of these skulls, this suggests several different potential variations on what one might do with a ruined monastery:

• As with T1:The Village of Hommlet, the Church has recently come to power and are now interested in recovering the skulls as relics.
• The monks were guarding the valley from something truly heinous, which now uses the monastery as a home base. The only way to stop it is to return the 200 skulls to the monastery.
• There is a gate, behind which lies a powerful magic artifact that is needed in a conflict with some great evil. The keys to open this gate are the 200 skulls of the monks.

In addition to all of these, there are also the various armor and weapons of the soldiers numbered among the 200 monks...

Saintly Saturday: Nine Martyrs of Cyzicus

Today is the Feast Day of the Nine Martyrs of Cyzicus: Sts. Thaumasius, Theognes, Rufus, Antipater, Theostichus, Artemas, Magnus, Theodotus and Philemon. They were part of a small Christian community in the largely pagan city of Cyzicus, which was located on a peninsula on the southern shore of the Sea of Marmara in what is modern day Turkey. 

They were from all walks of life, and all ages and were arrested and tortured for boldly proclaiming Christ. At the end of the third century A.D. they were all beheaded and buried outside the city. When the Roman Empire became Christian, their relics were uncovered, a church was built in their honor and many miracles occurred through them.

The inspiration I get from these saints is not primarily from their lives, but rather from where they are from. Just the names of Cyzicus and the Sea of Marmara are evocative. In addition, the geography of the area is awesome. Take a look at this map I threw together based on the actual location: 

From very early on,  this hobby used maps of real places as the basis from which to build entire campaigns. My guess is that even without changing the names, most people would be unable to recognize this map as being a real place. Taking inspiration from real places adds to the realism of the campaign. If nothing else, the geography of a place makes sense because it is based on reality. From this firm foundation, it becomes very easy to create living, breathing campaigns.

For example, there are two historical realities from this area that could be immensely useful for a FRPG campaign:

1. There was an ancient megalithic culture in the area that has left plenty of ruins to explore. For an FRPG, this is the perfect excuse for dungeons, an explanation for the origin of arcane magic and lost magic and/or an excuse to drop science fantasy elements into a campaign.
2. The city at the top right of the map just south of the Black Sea is Byzantium. It is destined to become Constantinople, capital city of the Christian Roman Empire. Therefore, there is a built-in Civilization vs. Wilderness feel to this area with very serious end-game implications.

Finally, take a look at this video from 60 minutes. Though Cappadocia is south and east of Cyzicus and the Sea of Marmara, it is close enough that I don't think anyone would quibble if the otherworldly landscape inspired a few encounter areas on the above map.