The Hattean Voodoo

Voodoo seems to have its origin on Hattea but, and the Hattean themselves know little more about it, beyond its aspects of regigious syncretism (understand a kind of salad haevy on the stomach…) with Christianism, very well informed is the one who can pretend to know who Baron Saturday, Daddoo Eshoo and the other Lwa - the gods of Voodoo to keep it simple - really are.

Before be go deeper in the meanders of the relationships between the Lwa and between those and their worshippers, let us describe briefly the roles which developped with and around the Voodoo on the island of Hattea; and please keep in mind that the Voodoo of the Known World cannot be taken for a trustworthy image of the Voodoo of our own world, it' far from that! Zebra Island RPG remains a game where funny fictional facts are many and we deviate from the religious and sociological reality… (The topics regarding the places of the Voodoo and the Ritual are described in the first sections from the right-hand side.)

The Hattean Voodoo is as well a sorcerers' as a priests' business: the former are called Bokor, the latter Hoongan (men) and Mambo (women). Bokor are often solitary and malicious. One does not usually like to pay them a visit and when one goes it is for quite bad a business because these men or women are the specialists of Maledictions. It must be mentioned that Bokor do not hesitate to force the dead wake up in the form of Zombies…

The practicioners of the Voodoo are otherwise a true melting pot: from the wrong-doing genial sorcerer to the charlatan, from the hermit to the Goverment employee. The Voodoo truly pervades all layers of the (small) Hattean society and there would also (of course!) be Voodoo Pirates, without forgetting their Zombie Crews…

Just like its place of worship, the Hoomfor, to which we dedicate a section thereafter, is a real caboodle, in the Voodoo magic – well maybe it should be much more spoken of cookery or even of a messy grub – the variety of rituals, generally strange and a bit disgusting for the uninitiated, is almost without an end. Everything is virtually possible, even the most absurd or zany things, mark well those words dear friend Game Master! We give in the following an overview of some of the most frequent possibilities, thus generally the best-known by the public, but do not feel limited by them in any sort of way!

We describe in that section as well the most remarkable members of this great family which are the Lwa of the Hattean Voodoo. We cannot however pretend to describe them all because they are an innumerable tribe and the « others » are maybe also distant cousins of them… Well, we clustered them in three « sub-families » which, though neither exhaustive nor completely adequate, will do to help us find our way out of that incredible complexity… By the way, dear friend reader, we beg you to never repeat some of the qualitficatives we used to talk about them because some of the concerned Lwa could take offence of it…