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"A mundane, a magocrat and a mapmaker walk into a bar. ..." What's a culture without jokes? The Mar have a wicked sense of humor. Read about it in the book.

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Mundane, Magocrat and Mapmaker

This book of stories was written by Jonas Swift — a Kafthean writer of Mar ancestry. Jonas mostly wrote adventure stories for Kafthean audiences. In 5,828 I.D., he traveled to Domus Palus as a passenger on a Kafthean merchant ship. For the next several months, Jonas traveled throughout the Duxy of Domus in an effort to claim his birthright. He composed "Rices Wild" shortly after arriving in Marrishland, basing it on what he had heard from his grandfather and what little he had observed of the Mar of Domus Palus.

The stories in this book all play with the stereotypes of the mapmaker, the mundane, and the magocrat — stock characters of Mar comedy. Most of the events in the early stories are completely unbelieveable for anyone even remotely familiar with Mar history, being more like Mar jokes disguised as a stories by a Kafthean trying to be a native Mar.

Mundane, Magocrat, and Mapmaker arguably provides the best description of Mar culture ever written by an outsider. The stories at the beginning certainly betray the author's ignorance, but later tales almost sound like they were composed by a Mar. Jonas even reprises "Rices Wild" in the book's final story, but the second version has none of the wild misunderstandings of the first.

Posted by Matt on 2/6/06: I'm not going to lie to you. At the time I started these stories, when Eric still annotated stories, he commented on how good I was getting at writing within our history. This series became a reflection of how good he got at annotating my foibles. Unfortunately for you, in the site redesign, I nuked all the notes. But the copy above about Jonas pretty much sums it up. It was also Eric's idea to do the "tales," though they come nowhere close to Canterbury.

Posted by Eric on 2/11/2006: This series just about made me cry with how many things it had in it that were radically out of place in Marrishland. A bar? A Mar community that has never seen wild rice? A wizard named Duk? In the end, I figured the only way this would show up in Mar literature is if someone from outside of Marrishland was writing it. That being said, it really captures the stereotypes of mapmaker, mundane, and magocrat. We've actually written several jokes about these stereotypes, and everything in these stories fits those stereotypes.

Also, it's terribly fun to read.