Santa Fe, New Mexico: the Hall of Final Ruin

The city at the end of everything

For all the posturing in earlier posts about cyberpunk, I do still love D&D - especially in its lower level, human versus weird monster, sword and sorcery incarnations. So lately I've been reading Hampton Sides' Blood and Thunder history of New Mexico (a book I brought purely because of a Michael Moorcock quote on the cover) and the 1840s Santa Fe vibe was so intensely Weird Fantasy that I just had to tell you about it. I can't think of a better place to set a Lamentations of the Flame Princess style game!

This post will cover the city of Santa Fe, the Navajo, Penitentes and Mountain Men, and end with some adventure locations. A campaign set here would probably revolve around American mountain men and explorers, who became prominent in the region during the 1840s, and possess the drive and skills (and real historical precedent) to act like adventurers. They might instead by representatives of the Mexican government or a Catholic outfit investigating the Penitentes. They might even be Navajo - in that case, i'd suggest further research into the spiritual background of that people; the lattice of superstitions surrounding death and raiding would make the game a unique D&D experience.

Navajo ceremonial mask, picture by Edward S. Curtis 1904

At the end of the Camino Real, at the end of the Santa Fe Trail, at the northern end of the desert, at the southern extreme of the Rockies, where New Spain gives way to "existential wilderness," there sits the city - town, really - of Santa Fe. Founded in 1607, by the 1840s it was a town of maybe 7000 inhabitants whose wealth - never high - had been squandered in continual warfare with the Navajo tribe who lived in the surrounding region. It was a city of narrow mud streets, low muddy houses and a muddy swollen river, looking like "an extensive brickyard" according to one American soldier. The most arresting feature of the city were the bells, ringing incessantly from six churches - each of them old and cracked, some of them having been forged in Seville, shipped across an ocean, and then dragged up the Camino Real ("Royal Road") from Mexico City. Each of them had endured bullets, brine and several centuries of desert heat.

The surrounding countryside had its own individual atmosphere. I can't possibly describe this better than Hampton Sides:
Navajo country has moved modern geologists, ordinarily a reserved lot, to adopt a vocabulary of doom: Paradox Basin, Defiance Uplift, the Great Unconformity. Geological maps of the Navajo lands are ominously annotated with "upwarps" and "cinder cones" and "structural disarrays." Not far from [Navajo war leader] Narbona's home lay enormous forests of petrified wood, which the Navajo believed were the bones of Yeitso, a terrible beast slain by the war god Monster Slayer and left to rot on the plains, the creature's blood congealing into lava flows. Throughout Navajo country could be found canyon walls embedded with the fossils of sea organisms--corals, bryozoa, trilobites--that had lived in the ocean more than 300 milion years ago.

And Shoggoths, no doubt.