Oooh, okay, I finished looking through it and a lot of the stuff I thought hadn't been used is actually still in there (in a different section) so I can talk a bit more about it! https://twitter.com/Delafina777/status/1302110388721528833

(If they'd decided not to go with it, I didn't want to be like, "hey I came up with all this cool stuff and they axed it" but it is still there--I'd just forgotten that each god has two sections, and only looked at the first)

So anyway, the really interesting thing about doing this book is that TTRPGs like D&D and Pathfinder tend to be very wordy about setting material, but for Theros, you're working from Magic cards, which are the opposite.

So in a lot of ways, it was the opposite of working on Pathfinder, where the challenge is that there are tens of thousands of pages of published material that you have to make the new stuff you're designing work with, which can be a needle-in-a-haystack search.

When you're translating Magic stuff into D&D, instead you have some very evocative art, and some suggestive *mechanics,* but not much in the way of written material to start from.

So that may make it sound like it's just blue-sky brainstorming, do whatever you want, but it's actually a lot more nerve-wracking than expanding material for which there's a lot of preexisting content, because you're trying to *anticipate* all the other parts of the book...

...and what niche your part needs to fill. Or, put another way, you're being asked to shape a puzzle piece with only a vague idea of what the pieces it fits with are shaped like.

It could have been a *lot* worse, but Wes is one of the best in the business when it comes to the process of outlining and producing a book written by disparate freelancers, so I had some good guidance.

At the end of the day, though, it was still, take this god who's about:

-maternity
-family
-orphans
-domestication
-agriculture
-defense of home
-harvest
-hearth
-home

and make her interesting.

My first thought was that described that way, she sounds like a RNC speaker.

And obviously the biggest challenge is how do you make her not just Demeter with the serial numbers filed off? Because that's what she looks like at first blush.

So I backed up and thought about how all Greek goddesses have been fertility goddesses at one point or another.

Even the ones for whom that didn't make a lot of sense, like Artemis and Athena. And it's tempting to see that as sexism, as a reduction of the feminine to nothing *but* reproduction.

At the same time, there's something there that I think transcends any ideas about gender, which is that if you want to get reductive about it, fertility is possibly the most primal divine characteristic.

That's the deal, right? I worship, you make sure I eat.

And look, I will be the first to argue that human spirituality has *anything* that's universal about it, but as far as I can tell, fertility is the most *common* concern in ancient world religious practices.

So ok, right there, we have the kernel of something that's potentially interesting. Because if you look at most fertility goddesses, they've got a bit of wildness to them.

Like Ishtar/Inanna is a *handful.* Demeter is not particularly nice. Aphrodite *definitely* is not very nice.

Because even after they got relatively civilized, there still was that shadow lurking behind them, when you gave life for life and blood made the crops grow.

But Karametra isn't a Mother Nature, bounteous but violent, goddess. She's specifically the goddess of *domestication.*

So that's potentially interesting.

But the direction that ends up going is that she's this serene, wise, kindly goddess--which again, not that interesting.

So then I was like, okay, what if she's basically a Stepford Wife.

And that's when the dominos began falling, because it suggests this inverted horror story:

Once upon a time, humankind lived close to the edge. A bad harvest season or a long winter could spell death for entire communities.

So communities traded life for life, watered the fields with blood, offered up the choicest of their number for bounteous harvests and healthy flocks. They did this in hope, rather than in certainty, because nature is capricious and can't be held to any bargains.

But eventually they realized the power of mass belief, and that the goddess they prayed to for help with domesticating nature could herself be domesticated.

So essentially their belief changes this nature goddess, who's the bounteous mother but also the devouring mother, who's *nature*, not your rigidly maintained little kitchen garden, into that rigidly maintained kitchen garden, or maybe a topiary.

Always smiling, always serene, always pulling a freshly baked pie from the oven.

But maybe, just maybe, that serene smile is just a *little* bit creepy because it never changes, and maybe inside that forcibly manicured exterior there's a bound blood goddess screaming silently.

Which, well, welcome to being a woman.

But it makes what's a success story for humanity--agriculture! we tamed nature! we made our fields produce reliably!--a horror story for the gods, because it's possible for human belief to coercively remake them into something that serves humanity, rather than vice versa.

And to me it speaks to what human spirituality can become in its most reductive form--sacrifice or prayer or what-have-you become the coins you put in the divine vending machine to get out what you want.

In most of the ancient Near Eastern epics Greek myth drew from, there's a flood narrative, and the theme is that the earth was crying out for release from human exploitation so a god or gods try to destroy humanity.

And that's a horror story from the human perspective, although the happy ending is that some Final Girl, whether it's Noah or Utnapishtim or Atrahasis, manages to escape that destruction.

So Karametra, for me, is representative of that story averted. She doesn't get to cry out and trigger divine retribution. She's been domesticated to provide and do it with a smile on her face.

Maybe she's cool with it now. Or maybe she's screaming behind the smile. We'll never know.

And neither the people who worship her as the bounteous, kindly mother of domestication nor the ones who worship her as something more primal will know if they're right.

So, you know, if you want to play her as Gentle Farming Goddess, you can, and ignore that backstory (most of which is in the Adventures rather than Gods chapter).

But if you want to play with this stuff, it makes her a potential powder keg for epic adventures.

(I also just mostly love the idea that the other gods are always kind of uncomfortable when Karametra shows up at god cocktail parties wearing an apron, with like 11 pies, smiling that serene smile because they're like "do humans KNOW they can Stepford us?")