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Welcome to Inatha

A (not so) brief explanation of this site

            Inatha is my fantasy world. I want to say I started creating it eight weeks ago, but I’m pretty sure it has been sitting in my head for a long time now. It was born sometime in that fuzzy period during which I would listen to my Appuppan tell me stories of Hindu heroes and would draw monsters with huge teeth and sharp horns in the margins of my notebooks. I owe a lot to my Appuppan. Yeah, he’s my grandpa so I owe him for some genes, but also in making me a writer. He is the first and greatest storyteller I ever met. No bias. His most recent gift was unintentional. He helped me break through the impossible task of naming a world that does not exist. His name is Gopinathan, and with some creative trimming of the ends you arrive at Inatha.

            This is how I went about naming almost everything in Inatha. You have to understand, I am not a creative person. Now you, as a visitor to a project-site that I created, may think otherwise. Let me explain. I’m not the kind of person that can make something from nothing. I can’t just speak into the void and let the light flood in. My creative process is centered around, in a word, theft. I like to steal things. Beautiful things. I take them from their rightful owners, wrest them from their original contexts, and I make them my own. Sometimes, I keep the original largely preserved. The Celtic goddess the Morrigan, a being with power over war, death, and fate, in Inatha is a deity of war, death, and you guessed it, fate. Other times the connections are a little less obvious. When I made the orcish god Bran, I stole his name from the Welsh giant Bran the Blessed. However, his status as a powerful warrior god with four-arms came from the Hindu deity Kali. One of Kali’s famous deeds was devouring a terrible demon. He was more terrible that other terrible demons due to his enchanted blood, each drop of which would become a clone of him should it hit the ground. That’s why orcs are born from Bran’s blood. It is also why I love the character; he is both the warrior-god and her victim at once; he is an entire myth wrapped up in one character, one idea, one name. That it really the reason why I created this project. I wanted to take all the myths and stories that I have consumed, not just the Hindu ones but Greek, Norse, Celtic, and others. I wanted to chew them up and spit out something both familiar and never before seen. Something that anyone could have come up with and that only I could have made.

            This project is a fantasy world and a tribute to my childhood and my passion for mythology, but it is also something even greater: it is Dungeons and Dragons. My Appuppan did not roll dice with me after bed, and I did not fill in character sheets in the margins of my notebooks. DnD is a much fresher entry into my personal history than mythology. And yet, it plays on the same themes, it feeds the same monster inside me. Yes, DnD involves die rolls and figurines and traversing through dungeons made on grid paper, but what is it about is storytelling. And not just personal storytelling in the confines of your own mind; Dungeons and Dragons is a communal experience. It is a ritual during which a group of friends come together and create something alive, something larger than any one of them. In that way, it is just like the myths of my childhood, because myths too are shared. One man cannot make a mythology (if I could I would be a very rich cult leader). A man can make a story, but it is a community that makes myth. DnD provides me that community, and gives me a chance to present a made-up world that is all the same very real to me. Please take your time to explore the site, read about the different facets of this world and how they came to be, and hopefully use this world (or just pieces of it) in your own adventures with your friends. Welcome to Inatha.

Welcome: Work

Check out the Guide

Visit the world of Inatha (and download if you'd like!)

Behind the Process

Get a peek into how I went about putting it all together

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