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Some of the northernmost regions of Spain, Asturias and Cantabria, nestle along the northern coastline, with an especially distinct mythology that offers a lot of possibilities for an interested game designer or writer. In this second entry in our Realms of Myth series, I'm taking a look at this region as a potential basis for a setting, and giving an initial showcase of some of its myths and legends.

These are the regions of Spain that were the furthest from Umayyad power centres when the Muslim caliphate captured most of the peninsula in the 710s, and Muslim rule was never fully established in the north. As the last Visigothic kings lost their territory, a Visigothic nobleman called Pelagius or Pelayo established a principality in the rugged Asturian mountains which ultimately became the progenitor polity of Castile, Leon, and eventually Spain as we know it.

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Landscape

Asturias and Cantabria are mountain regions: the steep valleys here proved notably inhospitable for Muslim invaders in the early medieval period, who were ultimately unable to control them. It's no accident that it was here that Pelayo was able to start his rebellion successfully, beating a force sent to put down the rebellion while heavily outnumbered at Covadonga by hurling rocks down on the enemies then having his forces emerge from hidden caves.

Using northern Spanish mythos in a fictional work I think does demand that you have a similar sort of mountainous terrain, and there's a few important things to remember about that and its effects. Mountains in fiction are often played as having primarily isolating effects, and this has a lot of utility: they can be areas where localities have very specific local traditions, where it's easy to be introducing characters or players to a new situation even if their general knowledge of the world as a whole is pretty good. However good someone's common knowledge is, the likelihood they'll know about a particular mountain village's festival giving flowers to the Xanas is pretty much nil, and the likelihood those villagers will practice their religion and ideals in the exact way characters have come to expect is also lowered.

Mountains can also intensify connections by funnelling trade and travel down mountain passes, and they do so in many parts of the world with thriving trade cities at the intersections of important routes. But there's a reason they don't do this much in Asturias – there's nothing on the other side. The open and famously choppy Bay of Biscay is as important as the mountains, a wild sea with relatively few major ports historically. This creates a situation where often all that's over the mountains is even more isolated fishing communities. As such, one should be really emphasising that remoteness.

A rugged mountain region can also be a great place of natural beauty: crags, hidden waterfalls and forest glades are good sorts of spaces that can bring nature and humanity closer. These sorts of prominent natural landmark features are good as ways to tie particular stories and creatures directly into a landscape, and tell your audience about a landscape in ways that are evocative but also immediately plot-relevant.

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Culture and plot points

An Asturian-style region in a fictional setting would be a good place for characters to resist or hide from figures of authority, full of caves and tight-lipped villages that are unlikely to trust the lowlander forces searching for your protagonist (or more problematically unlikely to trust a lowlander hero searching for a fugitive foe). Whole areas can get very hidden: the village of Cuevas del Agua for example to this day has its only access through a cave system.

The sense of remoteness and beauty can also be important in some religious contexts: monastic institutions often get founded in places far from the earthly world and temptations of larger cities, and treasures or relics from more vulnerable lowland places often end up in mountainous regions when the lowlands get invaded, finding security in the relative isolation. The converse part of this, as mentioned earlier, is the often very localised way that some religious practices can turn in isolation: they're a good place for forming and hiding mysterious local cults just as much as isolated bastions of true religion – and indeed those things might be exactly the same thing when viewed from different perspectives.

There's also a sense of ancientness about the cultural landscape in somewhere like Asturias: because herding is so core to the economy, more than arable, and because of the low population density, this means that the hilltops don't get ploughed over and old caves don't always get visited and repurposed. As such, it's a great area for presenting bits of past cultures, stone age paintings and old barrow-mounds for burials and so on. The most notable real example in Asturias is Altamira, the first cave to have seriously had a prehistoric theory advanced for its origin (which was contested at the time in the late 19th century: modern ideas of cave-men and cave art would have been alien to audiences as recently as the 1870s). It's an oddity of fantasy that it's actually surprisingly rare to come across a world's equivalent of a stone age, in part because Great Ancient Civilisations are such a core trope in many fantasy worlds that there's little room for the more real-world cave paintings and worked flints that show the most ancient parts of our past. This could be a good sort of setting to make use of that, and in a world with magic but a sense of low remoteness, cave art in a flickering fire and mysterious don't necessarily need to come with some far greater lost society to be meaningful.

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Monsters

It's fair to say that Geralt of Rivia would never be short of work in Asturias: the region has a very colourful array of creatures to draw upon. Many of them are quite small scale, as appropriate for a region of relatively isolated environments: folk horror and the sorts of creatures that frighten children are common. Examples include the wonderfully named Zamparrampa, an ogre-like creature which haunts poorly kept houses and brings them further misfortune, and the Guaxa, a vampiric creature which represents an old woman with owls' eyes and a single tooth that drains their blood. There's also the Loberu, who are really magical humans: they live among wolves and ultimately become their masters, gaining wolf-like qualities and the ability to command their pack. These all would be good foes in a somewhat mystery-focused narrative: they are not necessarily enormous physical threats to an armed adventurer, but are very dangerous to most other people, a good set-up for a monster-slaying plot.

A gentler fairytale is El Musgoso, a shepherd giant – perhaps literally a shepherd of shepherds, who watches over herdsmen in the woods and fields as a quiet protector spirit. The Anjana or Xana is another famous example of a good aligned fey creature from the region, one that may bewitch humans with her beauty but who can heal the sick and act as nature's guardian against some of the fouler monsters. The Ayalgas are another female spirit, loyal guardians of ancient treasure – although, in some tales, they may secretly hope someone does steal the treasure without killing them, thus freeing them by leaving them with nothing to guard.

There are some larger foes such as the draconic Cuélebre, a huge lizard with bat-wings that can in many tales only be fought at certain times of year, and which will eventually take itself away to an isle across the sea but for now guards treasure and maidens that it captures. There's also cyclopes, the Ojáncanu and the more specifically nautical/shipwreck themed Pataricu. One interesting feature of these is that that the Ojáncanu is brutally physically strong, able to defeat a bull or bear with ease, and indeed can only be defeated by the Xanas with their stronger magic – but the Xanas can be captured by the Cuelebre, thus creating a rather different staged requirement for defeating the cyclops. The requirement to fight the foe at specific times of year could be interesting to use, perhaps by creating a necessity to survive until the time at which the creature is vulnerable and avoid it destroying any preparations in the meantime.

The final category is creatures that work with the landscape and represent natural or cultural features. The Guestia, a procession of the dead that can be consulted for auguries, is a good specific localised sort of thing to include, as might more trickery-focused local spirits such as the mischevious faun/devil like Diañu Burlón or the Sumiciu, little folk who are responsible for things getting lost around the house. More nature-focused would be the Nuberu, a dwarf or group of dwarfs with ragged beards and huge hats that are a personification of the region's frequent storms. Their counterparts the Ventolins are meanwhile responsible for gentle breezes and pleasant dreams. These aren't necessarily creatures to be fought, but rather ways in which the landscape can be made to more directly communicate with human and sapient major characters in a tale. Characters might need to petition such forces, or find those who can keep them in balance, or simply gain vital information from them in some way – the Nuberu may have little love for humans, but they could be provoked into revealing information as a taunt for example.

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Conclusions

The remoteness and isolation of Asturias, and the ability of the mountains to hide settlements, fugitives, and artefacts alike, is the key force behind most of its myths. The specific way that the mountains back onto the sea, and the wooded, cave-riddled hillsides, give an environment that is especially well suited to connect closely to the mysterious and the sacred. Myths here tend to be tied to time, weather, space and in particularly localised ways.

This localisation also means a type of story that is suited to those sorts of environments. Monsters tend to be the sort that need specific rituals or the attention of other mythic beings rather than those that will be slain simply by a hero's great force of arms. Asturias is a land that resists power and hides what must be hidden, without regard to whether the seeker of refuge means good or ill. Whether the art of ancient worlds, the relics of a church, or the mysteries of the dead's processions and the cuelebre's hoard, there's much to be found in the hills – if the hills will tell you where to seek it.

I sourced the information for this piece largely from some booklets I had from a childhood visit to the region, though there are numerous Spanish-language sites online about the mythology and its background. Some of this folklore may be far more recent than other parts, and the sense of a unified 'regional' mythos may be particularly modern compared to a world where valleys and crags divided local settlements and their cultures so much. If anyone has more information about these creatures and this landscape, please do chime in below in the comments - and let us know if there's somewhere else you think our Realms of Myth series should go next.

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This article is part of a series. You can also read Part 1, on the myths of Somalia.

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It's the time of ghosts and ghasts and things that go bump in the night! To celebrate, or at least pass the terrors of the dark days onto you all to share, here's seven novel or less usual pitches for the sort of little folk-horror monstrosities that one might be unfortunate enough to encounter. Some of them have suggestions for dealing with them - for others, you're on your own. Read on, dear traveller of the dank and dark months. Read on - if you dare...

Eyewig

Rather smaller than an earwig, the eyewig burrows in underneath eyelids and into the corner of eyes, living at the back of the host creature's eye-socket. It latches onto the optical nerve, and can change the tone of what people see, manipulating its host into seeking the most lurid and exciting visions possible to feed its appetite for such stimuli. An eyewig host will, bloodshot-eyed, be found watching the most dangerous sports, the greatest firework displays, the most sultry or daring of entertainers, in an almost obsessive manner. After several months the eyewig will eventually have its larvae burst forth out of the eye, blinding its host, whereupon it will die, its grim life fulfilled.

Shrew of Shades

A tiny animal ghost that has forgotten anything except the terror of fleeing from whatever killed it. It passes through a world it never understood as fast as its little legs can run, always running, knowing nothing but running, spreading the little ends of its fear to those it passes by. Who has not felt, without warning, their hair standing on end, or jolts that wake a being up in the night and make them feel strangely small? Those are the marks of the shrew of shades as it runs. It cannot be reasoned with, and knows neither rest nor hope.

There is no known way to give the Shrew of Shades rest from its bleak little existence.

Pluck-fowl

This creature haunts coops where foxes take the hens, fields where a wolf took a lamb, and homes where a child or a cat died of neglect. It takes the form of a flightless bird, not large, but with ragged spines where there should be feathers, with sharp teeth on the inside of its beak and a gas-grey stare in its wild eyes. It especially attacks those who are asleep, demanding that all must be on watch in penance for the failure that brought it into being.

To be laid to rest, the pluck-fowl must be caught and bundled entirely in feathers and cloth, and then laid safely beside a burning hearth for a day and a night, always watched over. It will often cause calamities in the house where this happens, breaking pots or curdling milk, but some eye must be kept on it at all times or it will burst forth and be even stronger than before. Once this has been done, it will say the names of the gods watching that place three times, and can be placed into the fire where it will be burned, blessing the watchful home.

Toecurler

The toecurler burrows underneath a toenail to lay its egg. As the single larva grows, it pushes out between the toenail and the toe itself, using a numbing secretion to reduce the chance of the host killing it too soon, until the nail can eventually be freed: pulling it out, the adult creature can then use the toenail as a shell in its adult life, protecting it against predators and the elements. The sight of a single legged toenail scuttling across the floor is, needless to say, not ideal for the faint of heart.

The best way to kill a toecurler is with a large hammer.

The Alone

It is said that the alone can best be seen by those whose eyes adjust after hours upon hours of staring without hope that anything can change. Its form has many branches and roots that, unchecked, will wrap themselves around a room, slowly drawing the colour and warmth from everything around it.

Even if there are several people present, they will find themselves more distant from one another around it, less able to share their burdens. An error oft committed is to assume that the Alone can be defeated by mere distraction, its pursuit outrun: it is patient, if patience is even an attribute that such a creature can have. To be defeated it must be seen, and faced on its own terms. Not all can achieve such a feat, and the mighty have no more defense against it than the meek.

Greywater Frog

The largish greywater frog is remarkably resistant to disease and parasites: not in the sense that it has few, but in the sense that it can host many with few ill effects. It tends to eat rotting meat from larger animals, as a scavenger: to increase the supply of such, it behaves in ways that tend to clog up and infest water sources. This may include a certain primitive level of dam-building to help water stagnate, pushing animal corpses into the water, and communally depositing feces or other bodily fluids around commonly used drinking areas.

The Greywater Frog suffers in salt water especially, and barrels of it are sometimes hauled from the sea to places where they are known to lurk. Anchor symbols are sometimes inscribed near ponds that they once frequented, though whether this echo of the sea that defeated them has any true effect is unknown.

Shatterstone

The shatterstone is made from the fading memory of a grave which, abandoned, is left to crumble or, yet worse, destroyed. Clinging to existence, the fragments of the headstone, no longer able to fulfil their duty, form a lurching, shifting form without legs or head, but often with reaching, grasping rocky limbs, ready to be remembered for the damage they inflict if needs be, or to shatter other stones in envy of the memories they retain.

The shatterstones will reform pieces into themselves, so breaking them with hammers is laborious and requires separately burying each piece of the stone at some distance: but they cannot abide the light of candles in particular, and they will recoil from animals and children who have had no chance to remember. They can be fully turned back and calmed to dust with proof that the grave's original occupant is indeed remembered in some other way or place, with a document containing their name or the recitation of some deed the occupant performed in life.

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And there you have it, seven deeply unpleasant little creatures if ever you needed them - or if ever you needed just one more little fear to needle at the back of your mind. Or the back of your eye... happy Hallowe'en, one and all!

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In the first part of this article series, I looked at the history of apocalypses, and particularly at the difference between the historical idea of apocalypse and that used in modern fantasy. The most fundamental difference in these ideas is that religious and mythic apocalypse is usually fundamentally impossible to avert: it is a matter of fate rather than choice, and it is revelatory, both of the ultimate way that divine plans will unfold, and in revealing the flaws and problems that made the present world rotten to begin with.

Modern fantasy apocalypses, meanwhile, are very much possible to avert. They have more in common, as we saw last time, with older European fears of steppe conquerors than fears of religious apocalypses, and they often represent and reflect very modern anxieties about human-scale actors being able to achieve global destruction. This very feature is core to how we set up disasters that heroes can overcome – and therefore to modern fantasy as a whole.

Of course, not all fantasy operates on this sort of world-ending scale, but it's undeniable that quite a lot does, and in a lot of cases it's operating on this scale from the audience's perspective. For example, it's not made wholly clear in Baldur's Gate 3 to what extent there are still forces on Faerun who might be capable of resisting the villain (or a villainous player character) if they win and achieve god-like levels of psionic power. But from the perspective of the game-world, this is an irrelevant question: you and everything you might have cared about are definitely lost. The world that is ending, in short, doesn't need to be the multiverse to make something apocalyptic, it needs to be the world as an audience perceives it. A totality of destruction that leaves either nothing at all behind, or a world so changed that it's twisted out of recognition.

Modern fantasy also tends to rest on the premise that the world is under threat and that the role of heroes is to stop that threat. This is rooted in a sort of inherent small-c conservatism in the genre, derived in part from Tolkien's scepticism of machines and industrialisation: the status quo or past and its protection are the essential objective, and enemies are often seeking some form of darkly transformational 'progress'. Even where the world is rotten and is fundamentally changed by the heroes, this is often presented as a return to an older, more balanced or more free form of existence: Aragorn's fourth age Reunited Kingdom will not at least to begin with have the corrupt lethargy of Denethor's retreating Gondor, but this is a return to or echo of the Numenorean past rather than a move forward into a new and reimagined future.

That's not to say that fantasy needs to operate like that, or always does: something like NK Jemisin's Broken Earth books would be a prime example of questioning through fantasy whether worlds and their status quo situations do, in fact, need to be broken. Nor is it to say that there's anything wrong with an external threat as the core of a story. Tolkien wasn't wrong that the protection of the natural world, and of what we retain from the past, are things with real value, nor was he wrong that there's something that sits badly with the practice of breaking things for the sake of knowledge-seeking or avarice. The tendency to make the external threat the core of the genre, though, is one of the things that makes apocalypse so embedded in fantastical literature. It's also how moving such a world-ending event forwards becomes a necessary part of plot writing, and therefore is key to the birth of another feature of the apocalypses we know today - the modern villain.

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Think how many villains want to end or destroy the world in some significant way in modern media. It's probably a higher number than want to actually rule the world, which is curiously damning regarding how good we seem to think our own planet and its fictional counterparts are. Some of these want to destroy the world in order to replace its current inhabitants in some way, reflecting a lot of modern fears about obsolescence and change, whereas others want to destroy the world in service of some other goal.

This represents another shift in apocalypses: they are often now produced by much clearer, sharper villains than are the case in much premodern literature. Whilst yes, Loki is ultimately responsible for Ragnarok, he is far from consistently the scheming villain of Norse myth, and in a biblical apocalypse, Satan really has rather little agency in bringing it about. These figures might precipitate and symbolise apocalypse, but they don't have a fundamental motivation for it, in part because they don't have a motivation for very much. The devil is presumed to want to tempt mortals on account of being evil, but it's incredible just how rare it is that one actually sees him planning anything whatsoever: his role is to show and bring out the evil that was already within people through temptation, not to be a figure with true narratively described agency to create and cause evil. Few writers since perhaps CS Lewis have described apocalypses that have this sort of moralising character to them, and Lewis very explicitly was drawing on Christian models.

Consider that against Thanos, whose active quest to gain the infinity stones is a major driver of the plot, or Corypheus in Dragon Age, who actively seeks to use the breach in the veil to enter the Fade and claim the empty thrones of the gods. These characters, as apocalyptic villains, are oriented around particular plans and goals that the heroes must compete against. They are active characters in a way that really can be said of very few literary villains of past ages, and in many cases they, not the hero, are the driving force behind the plot. As we saw above, an active threat to the status quo gives something for the hero to come up against.

But why from the audience perspective are they used quite so much? What makes this particular formula work?

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The essential reason why apocalypses keep getting used in modern SFF is that they are a very efficient plot driver. The impending apocalypse is a quick and easy way to ensure that there is something bad going on that is relatively easy to telegraph to a viewer, reader or player. We have a well developed visual language for absolute villainy, rooted in a mixture of classical and biblical imagery combined with cultural memories of twentieth century fascism. Deploying that alongside a sense of immediate threat engages an audience fast, buying attention span that can then be used to develop the world later. It is normal that at the starting point the scale of the apocalypse isn't fully revealed, but this is to allow for a slowly escalating scale of threat as the media develops.

This is especially interesting for developers of role-playing games, because an apocalyptic system maximises possibility while minimising necessary buy-in for players. If the player's very survival relies on them facing down a threat, then there is no need to ensure that the player is otherwise bought into the values or necessity of protecting any other thing in particular. In a game context, where one wants to get the player involved in the game fast with minimal backstory dumping, this has very great utility. Unlike for a book character, who can immediately act according to an in-world perspective, players of a computer game don't immediately have mental access to all of the surrounding lore and how the world works. Short-cutting that with an immediate large threat is, therefore, extremely useful.

An opening threat can also be a good driver of secondary action, for example by creating scenes where the audience and point of view heroes are aware of how bad things are right at the start but where the rest of the in-setting world takes time to catch up. This helps set up a lot of potential interactions and persuasion to come together against a common threat (Dragon Age: Origins and Mass Effect both pull this one as examples, but indeed we get it in Tolkien as well in the tragedy of Boromir). This necessity of pulling together against a common threat also allows for a wider character cast.

In particular, that's especially important for players with evil outlooks or motivations. The apocalypse is the threat that allows someone who is essentially self-serving and venal, or even pledged to some other horrible goal that is at odds with the one being pursued by an apocalyptic villain, then they can still be part of the action. In a situation that's this bad, you might need all the help you can get, even if that help is pretty grim itself – or even if you're pretty grim yourself. You know things are bad when the world is calling on you of all people, and it's certainly true that a villain – where else are you going to steal, murder and pillage if you don't have a world left to do it in?

The adventuring party of unlikely or varied heroes as a stock trope therefore is significantly ease in its setup by having a common threat to unite against. That in turn allows for the kinds of writing that people often want in SFF and in stories in general, where we get contrasting characters from different walks of life. This is especially useful in stories with varied secondary-world settings, because it means we can have characters who understand different elements of the world taking part, and it's useful for creating a lively, diverse points of view core character group to begin with.

Having built up our heroes, we come to a third key point about apocalypses: apocalypse implies climax. Especially if there is a villain behind the apocalypse to confront, but even if confronting the apocalypse is a matter of turning back some non-human force, there must be a turning point or final confrontation where the apocalypse is defeated. That is, basically, the moment when a writer gets to let rip with their special effects budget: destroying bad things is fast and punchy and can be truly spectacular. An apocalyptic climax helps give the audience an immediate, visual sense of achievement: think the fall of Barad-dur, or Alduin the dragon crashing to earth, or all the big explosions at the end of Fallout 1.

One can have a big explosion without a strictly apocalyptic threat, of course, but if the threat is apocalyptic, it gives a much bigger scope for "problem solved" as an endgame situation. A merely human scale threat begs the question of why another, similarly human sized threat won't rise again in the near future: there will always be scheming viziers and cruel kings and ruthless generals. The very apocalyptic nature of a threat tends to make it something that genuinely is irreplaceable, such that at the very least the next apocalypse will need to look rather different. This amplifies the sense of achievement for a game player, or relief for a book reader, in imagining the world after the heroes' adventures.

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So there are some thoughts on why apocalypses are useful – and why we have quite so many of them knocking around SFF books, media, and games. We've seen how apocalypses are good for helping audiences rapidly enter a story-world, for explaining a story pulling together diverse character casts, and building strong narrative climaxes with a sense of achievement. We've also seen how that's often underpinned by driving, plot-defining villains that threaten a status quo that needs protecting.

There are, however, still some questions left to be answered, and in part 3 of this series I'm going to look at the problems with the apocalypse as a driving narrative force – when it shouldn't be used, whether it's over-used, and what creators could do to vary or change the format in what they write. Until then!

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This is the second part of a series. You can read part one, A Brief History of the End of the World, here.
 

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"Have I reached the Edge of the Edge of the World?" The thought crossed my mind as I looked across a wide beach to the Pacific Ocean. In the distance I could see great breakers throwing up spray against a cliff. Beyond the breakers was nothing but ocean – nothing until New Zealand, that is. It was 2017 and I had been backpacking in Chile for about two weeks. I had left my travelling companion (my brother) far behind and I was running out of food. I realised, nevertheless, that my assessment of the beach's remoteness owed more to my own point of view than to geography. The world does not have an "edge" but my understanding of it does, and in this article I hope to push that edge back just a little further.

Perspectives

As a child I was taught that Christopher Columbus "discovered" the Americas in 1492, ignoring the 50 to 100 million people who already called them home. I'm pleased to say that this narrative has changed over the past couple of decades, but as an Englishman I can't escape the fact that my country is, typically, printed centrally on world maps. To help recreate the eye-opening nature of my journey I'd like you to humour me by opening Google Maps. Go on, it's not that difficult, even if you're reading this on a phone. Type "Chiloe" into the search bar but don't panic if you misspell it – you'll probably still end up in Chile.

You should now be looking at Gran Chiloé, the second largest island in South America and the largest of the Chiloé archipelago (I'm going to be lazy in this article and refer to it as Chiloé, since I never made it onto the smaller islands). Zoom out a little and you will notice that Chile itself is an odd shape: 4300 km long but never more than 350 km wide. Its border with Argentina is defined by the Andes mountains, which I'd like you to follow south for a little while. You will find that "mainland Chile" almost ceases to exist, breaking up into a multitude of lakes, fjords and islands. You'll see very few settlements but a host of national parks. In fact, the region is so dominated by the sea and a few pesky glaciers that these last 1000 km lack a continuous road. Residents of Punta Arenas typically fly to visit other cities. This makes the island of Chiloé the end of what I'm going to call "easily-navigable Chile", and we'll return to that idea later.

To the east of Punta Arenas you'll see that South America's largest island, Tierra del Fuego (Land of Fire), is shared by Chile and Argentina. It was named, somewhat foolishly, by the Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan in 1520. While navigating between it and the mainland, through the strait which now bears his name, Magellan saw smoke which turned out to come from cooking fires (he, or at least his crew, went on to circumnavigate the globe). Trace your cursor along the strait from the Atlantic side – it's easy enough for us, but for Magellan it was 570 km of very choppy sailing. He was so relieved to find a calm ocean on the far side that he named it "Pacific" – one wonders if his ability to name things improved at all later on. Before we move on, try retracing your cursor through the strait in the opposite direction. While the Atlantic side had a very clear entry point, you'll notice the Pacific side is a labyrinth – one which has claimed the lives of many sailors.

For the next part of the tour, zoom out until you see a patch of white at the bottom of your screen. That's right: it's Antarctica, about 1000 km from South America. I'm told that a change in wind direction on Tierra del Fuego can bring about a dramatic change in temperature. Not far from Argentina you'll see another large archipelago: Las Malvinas, known to the British as the Falklands. For our last stop on this tour, scroll or drag yourself to the very top of South America, to the border between Colombia and Panama. What do you notice? That's right: there's no road linking the two. The wild "Darién Gap" has never been developed; this has been a boon for wildlife but a disaster for migrants attempting to cross it. It's physically impossible to drive from North America to South America, but this does not stop people travelling the Pan-American Highway.

Before I talk about the highway I'd like to mention the wider idea of Pan-Americanism. In hindsight, the abrupt end of colonial rule in the Americas in the last few centuries provided an unusual opportunity: a chance to re-define the term "country". Are countries, and their associated borders, even necessary? My understanding of Pan-Americanism is that it was a somewhat romantic (and very socialist) effort to unite all the former Spanish colonies of South America into a single entity as part of the re-organising process. I believe the former Portuguese colony of Brazil was excluded, perhaps because of the language barrier and perhaps because its population was already greater than that of all the other countries combined. Proponents of Pan-Americanism held talks (on a variety of subjects) with leaders of countries in the North and they agreed, in principle, to build a single road running the length of the two continents. The road never saw the light of day but the idea of it remains. Adventurers make a point of following it south from Alaska, though there are now many branches and possible end points. One of them is in the south of easily-navigable Chile: on Chiloé. So although the island is not the Edge of the World, it has a pretty strong claim to being the End of the Road.

An Island and its People

Let's now scroll or slide back to Chiloé, pausing to admire once again the sheer length of Chile (all the more impressive when you consider that the capital, Santiago, is home to one third of its population). Chiloé is rugged, wooded and sparsely populated – home to a little over 180,000 people according to recent projections. According to legend, it was formed during a mighty battle between two elemental serpents: Trentren Vilu (Land) and Caicai Vilu (Sea). Its air of mystery is enhanced by the mists and rains which often engulf it. Chiloé, like much of Chile, experiences colder weather in general than might be expected from its latitude. This is due to the cold air brought to it by the Pacific Humboldt Current – an effect comparable to that of the Gulf Stream in the British Isles. Chiloé is sufficiently removed from the mainland to have developed its own unique flora, fauna and cultures. British travellers sometimes compare Chiloé to Scotland's Outer Hebrides, but with penguins.

According to Wikipedia Chiloé has been inhabited for over 7000 years. By the time the Spanish arrived (there's my European lens again) there were broadly two cultures living there: the Huilliche, the southernmost people of the Mapuche macroethnic group, and the Chonos, a tribe of nomadic seafarers. Many indigenous traditions survive on Chiloé, including stone and wood representations of folkloric characters. These are a colourful bunch: in addition to the aforementioned elemental serpents there's La Pincoya, the mermaid; El Caleuche, the ghost ship and Voladora, the crow-shaped messenger of the witches. Perhaps spookiest of all is the Rumpelstiltskin-like troll El Trauco who lays ambushes for unsuspecting travellers in the forest. In so doing he performs a useful social function: he acts as a scapegoat for any unexplained pregnancies on the island.

You may have noticed some similarities between the above characters and those of European folklore. This is not a coincidence: "Chilote" culture is considered one of the most egalitarian fusions of indigenous and colonial cultures anywhere in the Americas. In addition to Spaniards, Chiloé was colonised by Germans and Czechs. The colonisers were very impressed by the natives' skill in crafting boats of larch and cypress. In combining these skills with European architectural ambitions, the people of Chiloé (under the influence of the Jesuits) built some extraordinary wooden churches. These churches vary across the island but have some features are common: arched porticos; towers which seem to change shape from base to top; and objects typically made of stone, such as pillars, reproduced faithfully in wood. Sixteen of them have been designated World Heritage Sites by UNESCO (the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation). This, for the benefit of British readers, puts them on a par with the likes of Stonehenge. One of them – I forget which – has a painting of Christ surrounded by the aforementioned folkloric characters.

My Ancud Adventures

My base for my week on Chiloé was Ancud, the island's second largest town. It is situated on a sheltered part of the north coast, close to the ferry port. It is a sleepy place of low wooden buildings, with a square full of stone statues of the local folkloric characters.. I enjoyed walking down to its rocky beach and visiting the weekend market, where some of the island's brightly coloured potato varieties were on display (it's possible the potato originated on Chiloé). During one of my walks I encountered a marching band of school-age children, and followed them, along with a growing crowd, to the town centre. We joined a number of other parades in the grounds of the former Convento de la Immaculada Concepción. It turned out to be the celebration of the life of a Chilota nun who had famously travelled to Germany; I was told she was a saint but, frustratingly, I've been unable to find anything about her online. The convent's museum is dedicated the island's wooden architecture, and I remember being impressed by the sheer variety of wooden joints on display.

With the help of the staff at my hostel I booked a place on a penguin-watching tour. We drove directly onto the beach at Puñihuil and boarded a small boat. The sand, sea, rocks and drizzle were all grey; the penguins' coats, I suppose, averaged to grey. The most striking animals, therefore, were the bright orange starfish, revealed on the rocks as each wave receded. Given that Chiloé is an important colony for both Humboldt and Magellanic (named after the explorer) penguins I was a little disappointed with how few we saw, but they were very cute. A second tour from Ancud took me into the forest to watch tough pangue leaves being collected for curanto. Our guide then took us back to the garden of his restaurant where this traditional dish was ready to be cooked. A number of white stones had been heating in a fire for some time, and these were placed in a pit. They were then covered first with shellfish, then chicken, pork, sausages, purple potatoes, dumplings, the pangue leaves and, finally, earth. The resulting mound steamed cheerfully for two hours, at which point it was gutted and the curanto served. The fresh shellfish, positioned at the bottom, seasoned the meal to perfection. Our host and his daughter then showed us some traditional salsa-like dancing.

The next day I set off early to hunt for wooden churches. I followed the Pan-American Highway for a bit then turned off for the town of Dalcahue. Before long I was picked up by another bus and arrived in the old port (the dalcas which lent their name to it were a type of ancient canoe.) I walked along the seafront and admired its handicraft stalls, in particular the woollen clothing. Striking inland (churches were often built on hills to serve as navigational aids) I soon found the beautiful Iglesia de Nuestra Señora de los Dolores, which was built at the end of the 19th Century on the site of a former Jesuit chapel. It was tastefully painted blue and white, with an elaborate pattern of archways at the front. The interior was calm, quiet and very much like the churches I was used to at home.

I went on to Castro, the capital and largest town of Chiloé. Facing its main plaza was the Iglesia de San Francisco, the largest wooden church on the island and the only one (as far as I'm aware) painted in vomit-inducing yellow and pink. It was closed for renovation during my visit so I took a walk to see Castro's famous palafitos. These wooden fisherman's houses were built on stilts to better withstand the island's extreme tidal ranges. Afterwards I caught one more bus to the nearby town of Chonchi, where I visited the Iglesia de Nuestra Señora del Rosario. This one was pretty but I was a little alarmed by the hefty pieces of wood leaning against one wall and apparently holding it up: the churches, it seems, need a lot of maintenance.

In the National Park

A series of national parks dominate the west coast of Chiloé; I left Ancud for Cucao, gateway to the Parque Nacional Chiloé. In true backpacker fashion I turned my nose up at the "luxury" hostel by the lake and headed towards the village in search of an alternative. I pushed open a gate and followed a long, sandy path to a series of wooden cabins by the river. Despite being equipped for large groups (each cabin was stuffed with triple bunk beds) the place seemed deserted and it took me a while to find someone to pay for a two night stay. With accommodation at last secured I crossed a bridge over the river to what passed for the village centre. The only shop had a sign in its window reading No Hay Pan (There Is No Bread). It looked like it had been there for a long time. I bought some crisps to complement my remaining pasta and lentils. I returned to my cabin and sat down under a weak electric bulb with my diary. "I feel a little lonely and unprepared," I wrote, "Here at the edge of the edge of the World."

I was not as alone as I had first assumed: in the morning I met Diego, a keen birdwatcher, and "Snorty", a sea lion who liked to chill in the river around breakfast time. My first stop of the day was a nature trail showcasing some of the endemic plants unique to Chiloé (the island is home to unusual "temperate rainforest" habitats). I found it quite disconcerting to approach a clump of vegetation which, from a distance, looked familiar, only to find every plant completely alien to me. After the nature trail I followed the beach north and, with a bit of unplanned paddling, located the start of a hike I had read about online. The sun was shining brightly on this occasion and I set off in high spirits along the bank of yet another lake. I passed a number of small wooden houses, all of which seemed to have some cute puppies, piglets or similar outside. When the path turned inland, and into the rainforest, the going became significantly harder. I was beginning to see why the website had recommended hiring a guide. I decided against trying to reach the viewpoint at the end of the hike; as I prepared to descend I was rewarded with the sight of a small brown object hanging in the air. Despite its darting into the trees I recognised it as a hummingbird – I had never seen one in the wild before.

My objective for the following day was to reach the village of Cole Cole, deep in the national park. I had to make several enquiries about getting there and found myself grumpily standing on the main road at 7:30 in the morning. I had been told to wait for a man to walk past then bring the bus around; I had already paid a rather large amount for a ride, so I hoped he would appear. Fortunately everything worked as promised, and I was soon bumping along dirt roads in a minibus. We didn't stop to pick up any other passengers, and after about half an hour we emerged onto a beach and continued driving north on it. We passed strange rock formations on either side; I couldn't see anything else because the rain was by now quite heavy. I had to admit to myself that spending all day around Cole Cole, getting rained on until the bus returned at 4pm, did not sound very appealing.

As we approached the village – I could only make out a few wooden houses – I prepared to say something to the driver in Spanish. One of the biggest parts of learning a language, especially when you're short on vocabulary, is working out how to twist the words you know into an understandable sentence. Telling the driver that I had changed my mind and, having fought so hard to reach Cole Cole, I wouldn't be getting off the bus was a new challenge for me. I managed to make myself understood but I think what I actually said translated as "I want to stay with you forever". Shortly after this resounding success we finally stopped and picked up a hoard of children. This shouldn't have come as a surprise: of course the bus serving a remote village twice a day would double as the school bus! The children had a lot more energy than I and, though they were speaking Spanish, from their appearance I guessed that they had very little Spanish ancestry (one shouldn't make judgements like this, of course, but it's hard to avoid). The children took no notice of me throughout our journey back to Cucao and I learnt an important lesson that day: no matter where you are in the world, kids on a school bus behave like kids on a school bus.

A few bus rides later I was back on the ferry to the mainland. I was sorry to be leaving Chiloé but I had a date with my brother at the "third most photogenic" volcano in the world. This, at least, was how it had been sold to us, but I still haven't worked out how "photogenicity" is actually measured (Japan's Mount Fuji apparently tops the list). On the ferry I was, ostensibly, looking out for whales, but my eye kept being drawn back to Chiloé. The island's hills rolled into the sea in a blur of grey and green; it was easy to imagine the two great serpents locked in battle for eternity. I thought of Diego, Snorty and my friends from the hostel in Ancud. I thought of curanto: once reserved for weddings and special occasions, now mostly cooked for tourists. I thought of the wooden churches and how easily they could succumb to rot, fire or earthquake. In this, at least, we can be grateful to UNESCO for supporting conservation efforts and raising awareness of "intangible cultural heritages" worldwide. It's thanks to organisations like them that we live in such an open and well-educated world; a world which goes on for ever and ever and has absolutely no "edge".

Thank you for reading this article; most names have been changed. I couldn't rely on my memory for this one so I'll include some of the websites (besides Wikipedia) I found useful below. There are likely to be a few factual inaccuracies in the text so please point them out if you see them!

Links

For Chilote folklore: https://www.chile.travel/en/blog-en-2/discover-the-fantastic-myths-and-legends-of-chiloe-a-place-full-of-mysteries/ and https://www.ancientpages.com/2022/07/10/trentren-and-caicai-the-battling-serpents-of-chilote-mythology/
For identifying penguins: https://www.americanoceans.org/facts/types-of-penguins/ (highly recommended!)
For the wooden churches: https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/971 and https://chiloepatrimoniomundial.gob.cl/las-iglesias/

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Editor's notes: Pan-Americanism is a topic complex enough for many historical dissertations, but some short notes for the interested reader follow. The early South American pan-Americanists to whom indiekid refers arguably pre-date socialism in its modern sense: Bolivar's Congress of Panama which aimed to unify all the former Spanish colonies in a supranational union happened when Karl Marx was still just eight years of age and a good twenty years short of writing his most notable works. Since then, pan-Americanism has shifted somewhat chimerically between a Bolivarian revolutionary ideal transcending statehood and, notably in the form of the Monroe Doctrine and its developments by men like James G. Blaine, a very grounded foreign policy tool often driven by the United States as the hemisphere's richest country. The concept of a Pan-American highway perhaps owes more to the latter than the former, being an idea pushed first in the form of a railroad in the 1880s and then, from the 1920s, as a road highway: construction eventually began in earnest from the late 1930s onwards, though large sections, as noted in the article, were never completed.

More of indiekid's travels in the Americas can be found in a two-part article with part one here and part two here.

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A while ago (longer now than I'd like to think) I wrote a piece called The Problem of Focus, in which I outlined the concept of high and low focus as separate from high and low fantasy as a way of categorising fantasy settings. To give a very short definition, in a high focus setting, cause and effect are consistent and recognisable, whereas in a low focus setting they are nebulous and mysterious. This especially applies to magic: a high focus magic user casts a spell with a defined cost and outcome, and it happens. A low focus magic user meanwhile performs something closer to miracle: a situation where the rules of the world are not utilised to do something, but set aside or broken in a moment of revelation or awe. Where high focus magic users are often experts with particular skills, low-focus magic users are often paragons whose virtue or connections to items or external powers enable them to produce magical outcomes.

Games tend to be high focus in how they deal with magic and the fantastical. But are there ways we could de-focus fantasy in games – and would there be advantages, or at least a different player experience, in doing so? That's what I want to try and answer in this article.

Why drop the focus?

To consider why and how we could use more low focus magic, we first need to re-examine why high focus is the norm. There are two connected but distinct key reasons for this. Firstly and perhaps most importantly, it assists gameplay from the player's perspective. If you want a game with any sort of strategic element to it, then knowing what you can or cannot do is very important. Low focus mystical moments are more often the stuff of cutscenes: it's harder for a player to use a singular, strange effect repeatedly and have it maintain its sense of mystery.

The second reason for having high focus fantasy in games is a matter of bounded creativity. Because low focus magic is in part defined by its being outside the usual cosmic rules, stopping it feeling like a cheap and unearned way to solve problems requires very careful handling. It's hard to write low focus as well when you have a strong protagonist, and games usually do: this is because people want to make a meaningful impact on the world around them. Low focus stories - often fairytales and folklore – often have very ordinary protagonists or point of view characters, for whom their interactions with magic feel numinous and special rather than being part of their every day lives. (Low focus in this sense can share more elements with some kinds of horror, though I want to focus here more on the folktales and mythic side of things).

So low focus, in contrast, can give us a different feel for the players of a game. One of the keys a lot of game try to aim for is senses of wonder and emotion, and those can end up disconnected from the fantastical when magic is turned into a specialist's toolbox rather than a wondrous discovery or revelation about the world.

Low focus in magic

Magic has been our starting point here – so how do we reduce its focus whilst still keeping it playable? It's a tricky problem: take for example wishing for things. This is a key sort of low focus magic: it's not bounded, the effects are often unpredictable, and it can be a singular grant of mystical power rather than something you wake up with every morning. But this creates problems: for a game we have to in some way bound the effects of a wish to avoid it being either an instant problem-fixer or accidental world destroyer. This can then box the player in, and make it feel like GM fiat (at the tabletop) or an annoying menu exercise if a computer game gives you a list of what you're allowed to wish for or not. D&D makes Wish quite a high level spell for this reason.

Making magical abilities more singular is probably a good way to start resolving this. High focus magic tends to have big toolkits of specific function spells: in a low focus world being The Guy Who Can Turn Into An Otter may well be enough in and of itself. If played right this sort of thing can also produce some interesting problem solving in games, where a smaller toolkit forces some innovation in the player's approach. Low focus magic needs to click into character and narrative much more closely than high focus magic, because its expression needs to feel earned by those things: it's not bounded by hard rules, so it needs to be effectively bounded by the plot or it will start feeling like a cheap and gimmicky deus ex machina rather than an earned numinous or emotional moment.

Magic in low-focus worlds is also best used in ways that are perpendicular to an immediate obvious function. By this I mean that rather than the player being given an ability to "tool up" for likely challenges ahead, they are given a skill or ability (like the aforementioned ability to turn into an otter, say) and encouraged to work out how it might help solve their problems. This makes magic more a rooted feature of the world that the player must deal with, rather than a focused tool in their hands, and so emphasises the sense that there's something special and mysterious about it.

Predictability may be another element to play with. In D&D terms, wild magic with its panoply of random side effects is less high focus than regular magic, because it leans much more heavily into the idea that magic is not something that plays by predictable rules. The downside of this approach is that unpredictability is frustrating for players, but sometimes the sense that you are genuinely channeling a power beyond your ken and that you're not fully in control is something worth giving to the player to support the sort of story that you want to tell.

What you tell the player also matters a lot. Whilst concealing aspects of the game can be frustrating, it can also be important in creating certain effects. For example, magical effects in a game could be tied to player decisions: if this is a world where piety and miracles are connected, pious acts might make it easier or more likely that they can. In this case, a lot of the difference in focus might be made by the exposure of that logic: you could give the player a visible piety score and they'll have a high focus system to work with. Alternatively, hide the score and make it a more narratively framed effect where the player gets an extra option at a key game moment, and the system will be much lower focus. (This does lead to a question about whether focus can be externally increased: in a computer game, someone is likely to ultimately produce a game guide for example, but that's a whole other area slightly beyond our scope here.)

A final thought is that low focus magic is often well placed with some external or physical element involved. Having a mysterious artefact or gift from nature or the gods helps remove the element of "but how does this work" from the picture as far as possible: we may be able to tell how this specific artefact works, allowing the player to work through the game, but we can avoid a wider detailing of exactly how magic as a whole works. Low focus means avoiding and rejecting systematisation and clear logic in favour of unique elements, mystery, and emotion as ways of building payoff.

Low Focus in stories

Fundamentally, in games, mechanics are there usually either as challenges, as aids to storytelling, or both. When thinking about low focus mechanics for our magic, we might therefore want to think about the impacts they could have on what the player can do and what sort of stories that fits or results in.

Emotion is something that I think is very key to low focus magic. Effects need to feel earned in games, and in a low focus game we're ditching the idea of earning them through pure skill. It's therefore very important that the payoff feels like it has been earned emotionally, precisely because the character will not have earned it through sheer power and ability. The fundamental difference between well written low focus magic and hand-wavy problem solving is that sense of pay-off: a sense that the character has earned the effect, even if they didn't consciously plan the effect.

Linked to the idea of emotion is the idea of virtue. What virtue means varies a lot between cultures historically, and types of virtue can differ. Virtue can be both affirmed by, and make viable, mysterious and magical interventions. The Greek concept of kleos for example could absolutely include help from deities: the original deus ex machina showed not that a hero was getting a free pass on solving a problem, but that the hero was worthy of being chosen by the gods. In some cultures virtue requires giving up thoughts of revenge, in others seeking righteous vengeance is treated as an obligation. Whatever the character's virtue system is, low focus magic should work in relation to it: this may be magic showing the character's worth, or alternatively magic as a darker representation of their willingness to depart from the virtue system. High focus, by systematising magic, tends to externalise it: low focus needs us to take magic back into a more social and natural context.

A further key idea we visited in the introduction to this piece is that we may want to make lower focus games also lower in the status of their protagonists. This doesn't necessarily need to be the case: mystery and magic can happen to high status characters too. However, given lower focus reducing conscious, direct control over magical effects, it can be a better tool for permitting a character who we might less expect to understand and manipulate the inner workings of the world to still have influence or impact. The greater sense of odds and struggle that a weaker or lower status character faces can make high focus magic feel stranger in their hands, but can make lower focus magic feel better earned.

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Conclusions

In this article we've covered a range of features that might help you implement a low focus magic system in a game or story, and help you decide what sort of story best suits this kind of magic. We've seen how the aim of low focus is to imbue magic with a stronger sense of mystery and awe, and how we need to focus on making that feel earned through emotion, virtue and story beats rather than through skill, power, and functional utility. Some sorts of characters and stories may be better suited to that kind of system, allowing us to re-evaluate who our ideal protagonists might be.

In terms of implementation, we've covered a number of key points. Using magical effects that are somewhat externalised through objects, or represent a singular grant of power not necessarily directly connected to a single functional task, can help emphasise the idea that magic is here as a strange form of power rather than a toolkit amenable to study. Not always making the cause-effect relationship of a game decision entirely clear, or making the outcomes of a magical action more random, can reduce the extent to which the player feels like magic is a simple, controllable effect. Tying such effects more closely into the plot can help make such impacts feel earned rather than frustratingly random.

That's all for this article: hopefully that was interesting, and I'm keen to hear about any instances of trying to implement this sort of magic in your stories and games! I'm not sure when or if a Problem of Focus part III is coming, but I may look more at how particular settings and games currently deal with the problem of focus, or perhaps give some ideas on how the gods and creatures of a setting could be aligned with high and low focus systems – let me know what you think. And, of course, thanks for reading!

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