[Animayhem]

I was thinking where in the real world would some of Forgotten Realms gods and infamous people live.

These are my thoughts. I am sure others may have different ideas.

Loth/Valsharess - Australia. Land of a large variety of spiders including some of the deadliest.

Silvanus- Black Forest in Germany

Chauntea- The beautiful gardens in Japan

Mielikki- Sherwood Forest in England

Moander- the bayous of Lousiana or the Florida Everglades

Kossuth- the islands of Hawaii with their active volcanos

Auril- Norway or Alps

[Wids]

Lolth and the Valsharess aren't one in the same, dude. :P

And have you ever driven the highways of Louisiana? There's kudzu all over the place, growing and proliferating like wildfire and killing off all the local flora despite the state's ongoing efforts to burn all the kudzu down to the roots, all because some idiot thought that it would be totally awesome to cultivate this Japanese weed in the United States. So you might not be too far off the mark with Moander there.

And don't forget: The seas and oceans are territory too. ;)

Istishia - The Challenger Deep, the deepest watery depth on Earth at 35,994 feet (10,971 meters).

Umberlee - The Bermuda Triangle, a frequent crossing zone for hurricanes, waterspouts and other sea storms. The island Bermuda (which marks one corner of the Triangle) has been laid to waste by hurricanes a whopping 35 times since 1871; the other two corners of the Triangle -- Miami, Florida and San Juan, Puerto Rico -- are favorite targets for Caribbean hurricanes as well. The Triangle's sea storms are also notorious for manifesting very quickly and without warning, a phenomenon which is likely responsible for the Triangle's legendary number of mysteriously vanished naval vessels and aircraft.

Valkur - The Mediterranean Sea, the mother basin of sailships, warships, naval trade routes and fair sailing weather since ancient times.

Sekolah - The Caribbean Sea. The largest Great White Shark on Earth was caught off the shores of Cuba in 1945; it measured 21 feet (6.4 meters) in length and weighed roughly 7,328 pounds (3,324 kilograms). The Caribbean Sea has also been ill-reputed for unprovoked shark attacks against humans since the Age of Sail.

Ulutiu - The Northern Polar Ice Cap. Unfortunately, an estimated 20% to 40% of the ice cap has melted since 1979, so Ulutiu might not stay asleep for too much longer....

Gond - Lorraine, France, the birthplace of Nicolas-Joseph Cugnot, the inventor of the world's actual first automobile in 1769.

Kelemvor and/or Jergal - The Sedlec Ossuary, Sedlec, the Czech Republic. In 1278, a monastic abbot returned from his pilgrimage to the Holy Land bearing a bottle of topsoil which he'd collected from Golgotha, the ancient hill where Jesus of Nazareth (the cornerstone of Christianity and the Christ of that faith) had been crucified. The abbot then sprinkled the Golgothan soil over the chapel's cemetery, making the cemetery so desirable as hallowed ground that people from all over Europe began transporting their dead to Sedlec for burial there. The cemetery was greatly expanded to meet the rising demand brought on by the Black Death of 1346 and the Hussite Wars, and so numerous were the dead that the cemetery became home to unmarked graves and mass graves, hastily dug, filled and covered. So when a new church was built on the cemetery in the 15th Century, the excavators unearthed a great surprise: scores of unidentifiable human skeletons. For many years after, the skeletons lay stacked all willy-nilly wherever the priests could find room inside the church, until House Schwarzenberg hired a woodcarver named Frantisek Rint to do something with all the bones. And as you can see from the article's photographs, he did so in the only way a professional woodcarver would. Thus, human bones as decoration have made the Sedlec Ossuary a world-famously popular tourist attraction -- both fantastic and fascinatingly macabre -- for those passing through Eastern Europe.

Leira - Tevfikiye, Turkey...formerly Troy, Asia Minor, the ancient city besieged by the Greeks who, upon realizing that their ten-year siege against the Trojans had proven ineffective, resorted to trickery in the form of Epeios' now-legendary Trojan Horse. As the Greeks knew, the horse was held in high esteem by the Trojans and was honored as the Trojan emblem, so under pretenses of giving the giant wooden horse to the Trojans as a peace offering in order to end the war without further bloodshed, the Trojans gladly accepted the gift and wheeled it into their city. And as we all know, Greek soldiers emerged from inside the Trojan Horse after nightfall, opened the gates for their buddies and slaughtered the sleeping Trojans in their beds, thus ending the war in a far different manner than the Trojans had anticipated.

Hilarity ensued. :D

Tyr - Babylon, Iraq, ancient birthplace of the Babylonian king Hammurabi, author and establisher of Hammurabi's Code, the first set of written laws in the history of human civilization (and with it, the world's first legal system). King Hammurabi lived from around 1810 BC to 1750 BC.

Tempus - Stamford Bridge, East Riding, England. The invading Vikings under King Harald Hardrada of Norway had landed from their latest naval attack against English shores and, once joined by Norse reinforcements in Orkney, had made considerable headway into England. They set up camp in Battle Flats and were resting before their final push into York when suddenly, the English army appeared beyond the far end of Stamford Bridge and charged to attack. As legend has it, one very large Viking, armed with a Danish greataxe, took a stand on the center of Stamford Bridge and held his ground, stalling the entire English army while his comrades hastily girded and armed themselves. After the giant Norseman had felled as many as 40 Englishmen singlehandedly, a lethally cunning English spearman set a barrel in the river, straddled it, paddled it under the bridge and thrust his spear upward between the bridge planks, stabbing the defending Norse giant from below and killing him. The Englishmen then crossed the bridge unimpeded and soundly routed the Norsemen in the ensuing battle, but the account of the lone, nameless Norseman who valiantly stood alone against an entire army has made the Battle of Stamford Bridge something of a legend in modern times.

Malar - Lycosura, Greece. Lycosura was the dominion of King Lycaon, who, according to Greek myth, dared to kill his own son, cook his son's flesh and serve the questionable roast to an esteemed visitor to his court. The visitor turned out to be Zeus himself, who then punished King Lycaon for his horrid deed by transforming him into a wolf. Though it's debatable whether or not King Lycaon ever actually lived, his myth painted King Lycaon as the world's first werewolf and thus founded the folklore of the lycanthropes forever after.

Talos - Mount Vesuvius, Italy, the site of what is quite likely the deadliest and most destructive volcanic eruption in history, which completely eradicated the Roman city of Pompeii in 79 AD. Vesuvius heaped an estimated 13 to 20 feet (4 to 6 meters) of scorching volcanic ash onto the doomed city, and archaeologists are still digging skeletons out of the volcanic ash to this day.

And I have to disagree with you on Auril, my dear. :P

Auril - Pick one:

• Vostok Station, Antarctica, the Russian (and formerly Soviet) research station where the coldest recorded temperature on Earth took place: −128.6° Fahrenheit, or −89.2° Celsius, on July 23, 1983. The research station sits on roughly 13,000 feet (4,000 meters) of solid ice over Lake Vostok, the largest known subglacial lake in Antarctica.

• Observation Hill, the Ross Ice Shelf, Antarctica, where Captain Robert Falcon Scott and his party, having failed to beat Roald Amundsen in their race to the South Pole, marched back to the sea but succumbed to hypothermia in the November of 1912, dying to the last man well before they could reach the Antarctic shores for extraction. The Scott Party's final camp became their tomb as later explorers built a cairn of snow over the entire campsite and topped it with a simple Christian memorial cross, and a century's worth of ice and snow have sculpted the cairn into the face of Observation Hill as we know it today.

• Mount Everest, Nepal, site of the Mount Everest Disaster of 1996, in which an unexpected snowstorm swiftly closed in and trapped four parties of climbers on the mountain overnight, resulting in twelve deaths from hypothermia and many more injuries from frostbite. As most of these deaths occurred in the extreme altitudes of Everest's Death Zone (26,000 feet/8,000 meters and upward), mountaineers have thus far proven too weak from oxygen starvation to remove the corpses from Everest's slopes, and so climbers have simply been using the cold-preserved human corpses as grim landmarks on their routes to the summit ever since. Many other climbers and sherpas have perished to Everest's extreme cold and frequent avalanches since the British Mount Everest Expedition of 1922.


Back to you. :)

[Animayhem]

I am aware Lolth and Valsharess not the same. Still the Valsharess thought herself a goddess and still could have come from Australia. :)

[Wids]

Yeah, I'll just bet. :P

While I'm busy correcting you, remember: Iceland's the temperate one, Greenland's the cold one. That was basically the Vikings' way of keeping Iceland for themselves and tricking everyone else into going to Greenland (and freezing their nads off) instead. ;)

So which deities have we missed?

And how 'bout that crazy Sedlec Ossuary, huh?

[Animayhem]

Yeah, I'll just bet. :P

While I'm busy correcting you, remember: Iceland's the temperate one, Greenland's the cold one. That was basically the Vikings' way of keeping Iceland for themselves and tricking everyone else into going to Greenland (and freezing their nads off) instead. ;)

So which deities have we missed?

And how 'bout that crazy Sedlec Ossuary, huh?

There are no absolutely correct or wrong answers here. Just random thoughts. :)

[Wids]

The Vikings would likely disagree with you on that one. :P

Oh, hey, there's more!


Bane - Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina (formerly Austria-Hungary). Though there were a variety of factors leading up to the first World War, the double assassinations of the Archduke of Austria and the Duchess of Hohenberg during their visit to Sarajevo became the pebble that triggered the rockslide. The Bosnian assassin, Gavrilo Princip, had tried to stalk Archduke Franz Ferdinand and Duchess Sophie earlier that day but was foiled when, due to an earlier assassination attempt, the Archduke's chauffeur chose a different route than Princip had expected. But by wild coincidence, while Princip was mulling over his failure and eating lunch at a streetside café, the noble couple's motor carriage and escort came by and stopped on the adjacent street. Seizing the moment, Princip drew his pistol, ran at the car and fired two shots into the back seat, killing both the archduke and the duchess.

The double assassination led to Austria-Hungary delivering an ultimatum to the Kingdom of Serbia, which the Serbians rejected, which led to Austria declaring war on Serbia, which led to Russia jumping in to protect Serbia, which led to Germany seizing the moment and invading Belgium and Luxembourg, which led to the UK declaring war on Germany, which led to everyone and his brother jumping in and taking sides, which became the first World War, which led to a bunch of battles, which led to the end of World War I, which led to France imposing the unfair, heavy-handed and opportunistically predatory Treaty of Versailles on Germany, which led to widespread poverty and discontentment among the German populace, which led to a certain Austrian-born German war hero establishing the National Socialist party and promising Germany's return to pride and prosperity if the Germans would simply elect him to be their Chancellor....

And from there, the second World War wasn't too far behind. If one malcontent dude choosing to stop at a certain café snowballing into the deaths of 77 million people worldwide over the course of two humungous wars isn't a truly bizarre recipe for global strife, atrocity and dictatorship, I don't know what is.

Cyric - Braunau am Inn, Austria, the birthplace of one failed artist turned soldier named Adolf Schicklgruber, a bastard who would later be legitimized as the rightful son of Alois Hitler and would change his surname accordingly. Enough said, right?


Talona - Hmmm...toughie. I'm getting kind of tired of this World War string, so let's go ahead and finish it off with the first one:

• Oswiecim, Poland, the location of the most atrocious of WWII's concentration camps, Auschwitz-Birkenau. Over the course of four years and eight months, approximately 1,100,000 people were killed at Auschwitz, many of them from the camp's forced starvation, poor sanitation, squalor and lack of medical care, all of which contributed to frequent outbreaks of diseases among the captives; many others were ushered into the gas chambers and exterminated with Zyklon-B and other poison gases. Summary executions and other homicides (including captives quite literally worked to death) accounted for almost all the rest. If any place on Earth could be considered a temple consecrated to the Gods of Evil, this is probably it.

• Pisa, Italy, which in 1346 AD became the reported origin of an outbreak of bubonic plague in Europe, ballooning into a pandemic which came to be known as the Black Death. The Eurasian death toll from the Black Death is estimated to be anywhere between 75-million and 200-million people (which, by the way, would most likely mean a greater death toll than that of both World Wars combined). A plague pit is a very particular kind of mass grave in which the countless victims of the Black Death were buried en masse, and scores -- if not hundreds -- of plague pits throughout Europe lurk unviolated and forgotten to this day (which leads to the occasional round of "plague hysteria" whenever some phone company guy with a backhoe goes to dig a trench, starts pulling up skeletons and inadvertently prompts a bunch of stupid people to commence their wailing about the Black Death's imminent return, doom for all mankind and yadda yadda...).

• Oyster Bay, New York, USA. This one's more about quality over quantity -- a reminder of how one pestilent person can infect so many others -- as it was the city where Mary Mallon worked a long string of kitchen jobs after immigrating from Ireland to the United States. Unbeknownst to herself and to everyone else (at first), Mallon had somehow become a carrier of typhoid fever, spreading the disease without falling victim to it herself. But then, after she started working as a cook in 1900, people started noticing that people who ate her food were coming down with typhoid fever, and they added two and two together. Despite public health authorities forcing her into quarantine twice, Mallon insisted on breaking quarantine, returning to work and infecting more people. She also stubbornly refused to let surgeons remove her typhus-infested gallbladder, which would have ended her contagion. All in all, "Typhoid Mary" managed to infect numerous diners with typhoid fever -- and kill anywhere between a confirmed 3 and an estimated 50 of them -- before she was finally locked away in isolation for the rest of her life at Riverside Hospital, where she finally died from pneumonia in 1938.


The Red Knight - The densely forested Ardennes region in Belgium, France and Luxembourg, which is where the Battle of the Bulge took place. On December 16th of 1944, the German forces mustered 100,000 soldiers and launched a major offensive into the Ardennes, where they met fierce resistance from the combined Allied forces (initially 83,000 men, but continuous reinforcements from the West swelled the combined American, British and Free French forces well beyond that). Over the next forty days of the battle, control of the Ardennes swayed wildly between the Allied forces and the Axis forces as each side attacked, counterattacked, defended, withdrew, strategized, and counterstrategized in response to the enemy's ever-changing tactics. Finally, on January 25th, the spent and weary German forces quit the field and withdrew eastward, leaving the Ardennes to the Allies. Though the Allies were initially outnumbered by the Germans, the final tally of casualties numbered 19,000 Americans, 200 British, 3,000 noncombatant civilians and 67,200 Germans, with over 800 German Panzer tanks destroyed and hundreds of Luftwaffe aircraft shot down over the course of the Battle of the Bulge; had the Allied generals' tactics not ultimately bested those of the Axis generals, the Allied death toll could have been much higher than that.

(Okay, now I'm done yammering about the World Wars. Honest.)

Helm - The Alamo, present-day San Antonio, Texas, USA. The Alamo began its history as a humble mission built by Spanish Roman Catholics in 1716, but it would instead be remembered for its crucial role in the Texas Revolution (October 1835 - April 1836), which was sparked when Texas (then a province of Mexico populated by settlers and Native Americans of all stripes) declared independence and rebelled against Mexico. In response, Mexico's President -- General Antonio López de Santa Anna -- personally led the Mexican army into Texas, hellbent on reclaiming the territory for Mexico. The Texian and Tejano forces under Sam Houston retreated into Louisiana in order to train, arm themselves and gather supplies (which meant raids on several Mexican ports along the Gulf of Mexico) before taking the fight to Santa Anna. But in order for that to happen, someone would have to buy them some time. That "someone" turned out to be the fighting men entrenched at the Alamo Mission in an old Spanish town named San Antonio de Béxar, which lay in the middle of Santa Anna's pathway into Texas. From February 23rd to March 6th (in 1836), the 260 combined Texian and Tejano defenders held their improvised fort against Santa Anna's 1,800 Mexican invaders. Though the Mexicans eventually overran the Alamo and killed all but three of the defenders, the Alamo's defenders had taken as many as 600 Mexicans with them to the grave.

But most importantly, the Alamo's sacrifice gave Sam Houston what time he needed to prepare his army; a month and a half after the Alamo fell, Houston led 910 Texian rebels -- with war cries of "Remember the Alamo!" on their lips -- against Santa Anna's 1,360 soldiers at San Jacinto. The Battle of San Jacinto lasted only 18 minutes before the Mexican army suffered a crushing defeat, with 650 Mexican fatalities to a mere 11 Texian fatalities. Santa Anna himself was captured by the Texians the next day while he was disguised as a mere Mexican dragoon and hiding in the marsh where he had fled after his rout at San Jacinto; in exchange for his surrender, his joint signature on the Treaties of Velasco and Mexico's official recognition of Texas as an independent republic, the Government of Texas allowed Santa Anna a safe return to Veracruz. Thereafter, the Republic of Texas was an independent nation for nine years until Sam Houston and Anson Jones (the President of Texas) agreed to US President John Tyler's bill of annexation. And thus did Texas become the only state to enter the United States by treaty.

(Fun fact: Citizens of Texas who can trace their ancestry all the way back to the Texas Revolution still prefer to be called "Texians" rather than "Texans". As my own family didn't move from Alabama to Texas until after my many-times-great-grandfather apparently got tired of patching up wounded Confederate soldiers during the American Civil War, I don't quite have that privilege. But hey, "Texan" is good enough for me. The more you know, right?)

(I'll try to keep it brief from here on. Promise.)

Ilmater - The island of Kos, Greece. Kos was the birthplace of Hippocrates, the ancient Greek physician who became the grandfather of modern medicine. His Hippocratic Oath is still recited by medical school graduates to this day.

Loviatar - Another toughie. Pick one, I guess:

• Bran Castle, Brasov, Romania (former Transylvania). Bran Castle was the historical residence of the Dracula noble family, the most famous (or infamous) of whom was the Voivode of Wallachia during the Ottoman Wars, Vlad III Dracula (aka. Vlad Tepes, or Vlad the Impaler). Along with his mass impalings of Turkish prisoners, he is also known for striking dread into the hearts of enemies and countrymen alike with his proliferous use of torture, dismemberment and the crueler forms of execution, such as disemboweling, flaying and boiling alive.

• Selestat, present-day France, the birthplace of Heinrich Kramer in 1430. In 1484, Kramer, then a German clergyman and Inquisitor under the Roman Catholic Church, was instrumental in convincing Pope Innocent VIII to sign the Summis Desiderantes Affectibus, the papal bull which officially declared witchcraft to be a crime punishable by death. From then until a time well into the 18th Century (a time period which modern Neo-Pagans often refer to as "The Burning Times"), torture was all too commonly used to extract confessions of witchcraft and heresy from countless Europeans, an estimated 40,000 to 60,000 of whom were executed for these supposed crimes. Numerous torture devices and techniques -- such as strappado, the thumbscrew and the Judas cradle -- were invented and devised during this time. Kramer also authored the Malleus Maleficarum, a book prescribing methods for identifying witches and instructing in various forms of torture by which to extract confessions from them.


Okay, I'm hungry and I need to continue my job hunt now. Back to you guys.

[TheShadowEntity]

Jubliex & Moander - Holds a timeshare inside Shars (My) sinuses every spring

Shar - I happen to live on the east coast of North America.

[Animayhem]

Cyric- Tower of London

Jubliex- Seattle as we are known for slugs amongst other things.

Red Knight - Notre Dame "The bells, the bells!"( Paladins with deafening clang)

Gond- Detroit ,Michigan

Sharess- Bangkok

Sune - Paris
Venice

Tymora - Las Vegas
Monte Carlo

[LooseWilly]

Gargauth - Washington DC

The seat of approval of so many "Indian Treaties", "Peace Treaty" with Mexico, ratification of Versailles Treaty, lobbyists negotiating IMF funding for predatory "development" loans, "charitable spending" on CIA-front USAID operations, approvals of bombings for peace (Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Libya, Iraq, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen, Syria, Libya, etc.), Patriot Act/NSA surveillance approval, etc...

[Animayhem]

Gargauth - Washington DC

The seat of approval of so many "Indian Treaties", "Peace Treaty" with Mexico, ratification of Versailles Treaty, lobbyists negotiating IMF funding for predatory "development" loans, "charitable spending" on CIA-front USAID operations, approvals of bombings for peace (Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Libya, Iraq, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen, Syria, Libya, etc.), Patriot Act/NSA surveillance approval, etc...

Good one.