amazon profile

At last, at long last, I present to you the profile for the Amazons of Vistallah! To help give a fuller background to the many, many drawings of Amazons in my gallery...





Origins—Lets preface this with a brief overview of the deities of Vistallah. In the beginning, all the gods and goddesses lived on the Vistallahn version of Mount Olympus. Unfortunately for them, the Vistallahn Mount Olympus also happened to be the Vistallahn Mount Vesuvius. Only much bigger and much more explosive.

So, after their home was blown into a thin layer of ash, and their original bodies along with it, the gods and goddesses were forced live amongst the mortals, in the guise of mortals. They are born, grow up, grow old, die, and are promptly reincarnated anew. Since the cataclysm, they have lived countless lives, each time growing into the guise that they are known for.

Though they still possess their supernatural power, they rarely use it directly. The gods tend to go through life in a daze—in the back of their mind, they hear the prayers of their followers, and divvy out intercessions and miracles as they see fit. But the other half of their mind is focused on their immediate life, eating sleeping, and all the rest usual mundane tasks. Their physical life will determine the attitude with which they approach their supernatural life—ie, they may pay closer attention to prayers from the kingdom where they currently reside, while scorning those from rival kingdoms—but only in the most dire of circumstances will their full divine power be brought to bear by their physical selves.

It was one such dire circumstance that created the Amazons.

The patron goddess of the Amazons is Sappher. When born as a Human, she tends to end up as a tavern wench. She is invariably a strikingly beautiful redhead, smart and capable, but with a self-destructive, bitter, and mistrustful attitude that drives away potential friends and leaves her in the most miserable of circumstances. She has a love/hate relationship with men. She craves their attention and yearns to have one devote himself to her, but her attitude and her actions tend to attract only the most disreputable of men. In the face of such company, she usually ends up exploiting their bad tendencies for her own survival. She only confides other women—though always mistrusting them as potential rivals and enemies—but her world still revolves around men. Such is how the sad lives of Sappher always play out…

It was during one such life that Sappher created the Amazons. She was living in a bad tavern, in a bad town, and then things got worse. Rampant and systematic cruelty of the sort that I don’t even want to think about, much less describe. And in one instance when such cruelty was focused on her, Sappher lost her temper. The full force of her divine power was unleashed, and she led the women of the town into open rebellion. Every man in town was murdered, and on Sappher’s command, every daughter of the village was doused in the blood of her father. Thus, Sappher declared, those daughters would never suffer as their mothers had!

Those daughters became the first generation of Amazons. They became universally red-haired and green-eyed, and as beautiful as their patron. They also grew to be cunning and agile, and most importantly, larger and stronger than any man.

Sappher led her new Amazons for a time, guiding the adults, instructing the children, establishing her Covenant, and laying down the rules which would guide her people’s lives. They would live entirely apart from men, and forsake all they could of man’s world. They would become nomads—in no small part to save themselves from the reprisals from the nearby towns—and would survive as hunter-gathers. Nevermore would they be tied down to a single location by the menial drudgery of daily existence…

…And every woman of them would be a warrior.

However, Sappher and the other mothers soon passed on, leaving the first Amazons to decide their own fate. And at this point, Amazon tradition became confusing. The Amazons had taken Sappher’s Covenant to heart, but it left them feeling incomplete. Many of them yearned to be mothers themselves, to raise thier daughters as Amazons just as they had been raised. Yet while Sappher had spoke often about the importance of passing the Covenant from mother to daughter, she had left no instructions on how those daughters were to be had. Most of these same individuals—who had little or no memory of the mistreatment their mothers had faced, and thus no instinctive bitterness towards their former oppressors—also felt a more basic desire to feel a man’s touch.

Some Amazons held firm to the parts of the Covenant that forbade any contact with men. Others focused on Sappher's emphasis on continuing the Covenant, and developed interpretations that would allow the conception of new daughters. These amazons produced a second generation of Amazons. Those that spurned men did not. Over time, the surviving Amazons spread out through the wilderness of Vistallah. Although some individuals do take up ‘fundamentalist’ interpretations of the Covenant, basic natural selection has ensured that most Amazons are the breeding kind.

Physical Traits—Amazons are Humans. Always. The Covenant holds no power on any other race. However, Amazon Humans are quite different than normal Humans. Amazons are always women, obviously, and can only give birth to daughters. They are red-headed, green-eyed, buxom, and generally well-muscled. They are also tall, standing as high as twelve feet high.

While most Humans of Vistallah produce large amounts of excess magic, this is not the case for Amazons. Thus Amazons are unable to use the magic swords or other weaponry common to Humans warriors. Indeed, Amazons are incapable of casting any spells at all. Instead, all the magic they produce is used by their own body—to counteract the effects of their sheer size. Amazons, though heavy, do not weigh nearly as much as they should, given their size. They consume only slightly more than an average sized Human. And their agility and endurance is far beyond that of other Humans. Also, they are generally immune to reality-warping magic. Sure, they can be killed by a magically generated fireball just like anyone else, but they won’t be shrunk, nor have their minds casually altered.

One last effect of the Covenant is that Amazons have a sixth sense—often confused with or functioning through their sense of smell—that allows them to track down any man that has had sex with them. The strength of this ability is directly tied to the strength of the emotions—either good or bad—associated with the encounter. This trait was clearly given to allow Amazons to seek vengeance on men who have wronged them, but is most often used to track down fathers—because very few people are able to ‘wrong’ an full grown Amazon! Fathers are either sought for the required blood sacrifice, or so that another child may be successfully sired.

The Covenant—All Amazons must live by the Covenant. Failure to do so does, over time, lead to physical deterioration, as the magic that sustains their oversized bodies fails to do its job. Would-be Amazons who are not properly initiated will similarly grow up to be less than prime specimens.

Because of this, the core tenants of Amazon life are universal. These include living in a purely Amazon society, being at least semi-nomadic (perhaps making seasonal rounds across a home territory) and eschewing gardens or domesticated animals in favor of a purely hunter-gatherer lifestyle.

The blood sacrifice is another universal part of the covenant. All Amazons must be anointed with the spilled blood of their father. This applies to children of existing Amazons just as much as it does to the first-generation Amazons. Failure to receive this anointment will cause the daughter to grow up only half-developed, and Amazon traits will fade entirely within a few generations. Similarly, it will take several generations for new initiates to develop into fully-fledged Amazons. The earlier a daughter receives the anointment, the better off she is, though no ill effect will be felt unless she initiated after toddlerhood. As for the sacrifice itself, the blood must come from the girl’s father. The man must be restrained, and the blood must be taken by an Amazon—or a sponsoring woman of some sort—by cutting the man’s face or neck.

It is worth pointing out—and even emphasizing—that the sacrifice need not be lethal. In fact, most modern Amazons will murder any Amazon suspected of taking a lethal sacrifice, and will wipe out any bands who sanction such activities. This is both an act of moral indignation as well as of self-preservation, as lethal sacrifices would give all Amazons a bad name….

But beyond those universalities, actual details of Amazons behavior vary from one group to another.

Societal Structure—Amazons primarily live in bands, groups of family units that never number more than 100 individuals. Bands are loosely organized, and often led by a single matriarch entrusted with ensuring the band’s compliance with the Covenant. There is no set limit to the size of a band, but once they become too numerous it becomes too hard to feed the band while keeping it together, and other would-be leaders tend to speak up about their own particular vision of how the band should live. When such situations arise, bickering often drives the band to split into two or more separate bands, each heading their own separate ways.

Individual family structure is complicated, and varies with the particular traditions of each band. The basic family consists of two adult Amazons, or companions, and their children. The companions join together for emotional support, as well as to help share the burden of day-to-day tasks—just as families did before the Covenant. An Amazon’s children may each come from different fathers—or ‘rams’ as they are sometimes called—or she may choose a single farther to sire all her children. Sometimes each companion has her own ram, and sometimes the two share the same ram. The treatment of the ram likewise varies by band. Sometimes he is brought along with the band (for as long as the mother is pregnant) while other times parents will temporarily break away from the main body of Amazons to stay near the father. Some Amazons will even go so far as to join the ram’s family for the necessary time.

Because the father’s blood is required for the initiation of the Covenant, his survival is paramount. Pregnant Amazons, and their companions, go to great lengths—and bend or break any Covenant rules—to keep the father safe. For the sake of their daughter, nearly any action is considered acceptable by the parents or by other members of the band.

Swords—Amazons have an obsession with swords. It is one of the few items from the world of men that they have taken with them into their Covenant lifestyle. Practically every adult Amazon keeps a sword by her side. It is her primary weapon, and also her primary tool. (Perhaps a little bit of the magic produced by an Amazon’s is absorbed by her sword to make it more durable in the uses it was not designed for.) However, since Amazons cannot forge steel while hunting and gathering, their swords invariably come from the men in their lives. Often from their father, or from the man they choose to father their child. How this fact is interpreted—as a connection the world of men or as an assumption of the power of men—varies from band to band, and from woman to woman…