More on Latin American Adventures

 

The church at Macondo, an isolated frontier town, default starting location for PCs. (Squint and pretend the car isn't there. The bicycles can stay.) 

 

Instead of drawing spells from God directly, Catholic clerics adhere to particular saints. Popular saints include Santa Juana (left), a savant scholar, and Santa Rosa de Lima (right) who mercilessly tortured herself as part of her ascetic obsessions. Male saints include Saint Dominic, patron of astrologers and Hound of the Lord; Saint Francis, who commands the respect of all animals; and San Ignacio, the warrior-priest and founder of the Jesuits.

In this world, Europe does not seem to exist and white people are unknown. Everyone is varying shades of brown. Judaism & Christianity developed alongside Aztec and Mayan religions. Christ was born in Panama. If this doesn't make sense maybe you are thinking about it too hard!

 Some Moors and Africans have arrived from the east to trade or settle the islands. It is said the Muslims have a vast desert empire across the ocean.

Legends speak of people called 'The Pale Race' who existed before even the ancient Olmecs or Chavin. But few traces of them remain.

An example of an 'Elemental', a surreal monster composed of various unconnected elements. Some say they are a mobile breach in reality, others that they are another guise for demons.

 

Diego de Landa, foremost of the Inquisitors,  a sect of Catholicism that seeks to destroy the rival religions and purge the Catholic faith of syncretic influences. Landa is currently overseeing the invasion of the Yucatan Peninsula and the eradication of Mayan scriptures.

deceptively innocent-looking seamstresses hunt giant cockroaches on the pampas plains

syncretist priests deconstruct their own bodies to fuel their postmodern magics

a colony of serpent men lives high in the Mexican altiplano along with their mind-controlled human slaves

giant jellyfish disguise themselves as giant heads above the water. Although it is unclear what they are disguising themselves from since a giant head is itself not a common sight in the Caribbean.

known only as the labyrinth men, these individuals have strange powers and are probably not native to this dimension

Latin American Adventures

He explored every inch of the region, even the riverbed, dragging the two iron ingots along and reciting Melquíades' incantation aloud. The only thing he succeeded in doing was to unearth a suit of fifteenth-century armor which had all of its pieces soldered together with rust and inside of which there was the hollow resonance of an enormous stone-filled gourd. When José Arcadio Buendía and the four men of his expedition managed to take the armor apart, they found inside it a calcified skeleton with a copper locket containing a woman's hair around its neck.

- Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

My devil makes me dream like no other mortal dreams
With a blank eyed corner
The only way to see him in the tunnel where he slept
By the longest tusk of corridors, numb below the neck
In my heart
Where he keeps them in a vault of devil daughters

- The Mars Volta, 'With Twilight As My Guide'

Like all men of the Library, I have traveled in my youth; I have wandered in search of a book, perhaps the catalogue of catalogues; now that my eyes can hardly decipher what I write, I am preparing to die just a few leagues from the hexagon in which I was born. Once I am dead, there will be no lack of pious hands to throw me over the railing; my grave will be the fathomless air; my body will sink endlessly and decay and dissolve in the wind generated by the fall, which is infinite.

- Jorge  Luis Borges, The Library of Babel

The people of Cozumel had long experience of accommodating outsiders who came in peace, as the island was sacred to the Maya goddess Ix Chel, and her shrine was a place of pilgrimage for the mainland Maya. A peculiarly treacherous current running in the narrow sea between mainland and island was a further barrier to violent invasion. Certainly Naum Pat and his people enjoyed immunity from the endemic Indian warfare which constituted normal relations between the mainland provinces, and saw themselves as outside the Maya political arena.

- Inga Clendinnen, Ambivalent Conquests: Maya and Spaniard in Yucatan  1517-1570

The one called Ah Chable they crucified and they nailed him to a great cross made for the purpose, and they put him on the cross alive and nailed his hands with two nails and tied his feet... And after he was crucified they raised the cross on high and the said boy was crying out, and so they held it on high, and then they lowered it, ... [and] they took out his heart. And the ah-kines gave a sermon telling them that it was good what they must do, and that through adoring those gods they would be saved, and that they should not believe that which the friars used to say to them.

- Testimony of Pedro Huhul of Kanchunup, 17 August 1562

Terrified, exhausted by her fate, Visitación recognised in those eyes the symptoms of the sickness whose threat had obliged her and her brother to exile themselves forever from an age-old kingdom where they had been prince and princess. It was the insomnia plague.

- One Hundred Years of Solitude

La Tunda is a myth of the Colombian Pacific region, and particularly in the afro-American community, about a vampire-like monster woman that lures people into the forests and keeps them there. Sometimes it appears in the form of a loved one, as the likeness of a child's mother, who would lure him into the forest and feed its victim with shrimps she has farted upon (camarones peídos) to keep her victims docile in some kind of trance. 

Tezcatlipoca, Smoking Mirror, We are his Slaves, He by whom we live, Enemy of Both Sides, Lord of the Near and the Nigh, Night, Wind, Two Reed, Possessor of the Sky and Earth

The light was so weak at noon that when Pelayo was coming back to the house after throwing away the crabs, it was hard for him to see what it was that was moving and groaning in the rear of the courtyard. He had to go very close to see that it was an old man, a very old man, lying face down in the mud, who, in spite of his tremendous efforts, couldn't get up, impeded by his enormous wings.

- Gabriel Garcia Marquez, A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings