The name of the queendom, Saromatia, is taken (one might say "ripped off") from historical Sauromatians, a nomadic people of the Eurasian steppes. Graves of women warriors have been found there, giving rise to speculation that these northern neighbors of the Greeks may have inspired myths about Amazons.

Triple goddesses, like Saromata in her Faces, can be found at least in Celtic and ancient Greek pantheons - if you look for them. I don't know if the ancients thought of their dieties in that way or not. But it is common neopagan practice to do so. And three is a sacred number for lots and lots of cultures - including one with a God who's got one nature and three Faces.

Most of Saromata's Aspects were drawn from Greco-Roman goddesses. Artemis/Diana, Athena, and Persephone/Kore/Prosperine are the Maiden Aspects. Demeter/Ceres, Hera/Juno, and Hestia/Vesta are the Mother Aspects. Hecate inspired the Sorceress. The Death Crone is the Celtoid member of the group, as she's reminiscent of the Morrigan from Irish mythology. The Vision Crone was my attempt to round out the third Crone Aspect, since I couldn't think of any more crone-archetypes. I suppose she might be the Fates or somesuch, but even I haven't fully determined the nature of the elusive Vision Crone yet.

The Elemental Lords are, of course, inspired by the Aristotelian notion of matter - to wit, it is all composed of fire, air, water and earth.

Fortuna is the Roman Fortuna.

The Dark Queen is directly inspired by In Nomine. She's Lilith as Queen of Hell. The Lilim are her in-betweens with humanity, with the other Bands being available to fulfil the desires of the mortals.

The rhacos riding birds were initially inspired by a joking comment from my Significant Other (he wanted a Giant Cybernetic Riding Chicken like from his college space campaign). I had just re-read Robert Asprin's "Myth Conceptions," which contained a passing reference to a messenger on a riding bird. The Saromatian light cavalry was then born. The rhacos is actually Phororhacos, a real live (now extinct) native of Earth. Diatryma was also under consideration as a mount, but the Phororhacos had a really cute little feathery crest that the GM liked. Game stats are the same, anyhow.

The Ideal Noblewoman and Nobleman are based on my dim recollections of descriptions of Ideal People from various medieval readings that I have done. Usually, far more ink is spent describing the mental virtues of the man and the physical virtues of the woman. So I turned it around.

Dwarves are pretty standard fantasy dwarves. They don't, as a rule, live as deeply underground - very few creatures do, and none of them are large. Life needs the sun. Other than that, they're sort of little Nordic theigns, each a freeman with his own plot of land who owes allegiance only to an overlord who can keep his loyalty. They raid less like Vikings and more like Celts performing a cattle raid, though.

Dwarven women became civil engineers because dwarven women needed something interesting to do. It's a standard that dwarven women are rarely seen outside of dwarven homes; this is usually transmuted to "dwarves honor and protect their women." Except that the bold dwarven warriors are out fighting! Left to do their own protecting, the dwarven ladies have become quite good at it. Plus, it would be a sin if I didn't have a group of women with some sort of exceptional technical skills. (I'm a mechanical/aerospace engineer, myself!)

Law and order is largely influenced by a class I took on English Crime and Punishment in the 1300s. There were indeed frankpledges, hue and cry, and so on. "Coven" is a word usually used to refer to a group of Wiccan worshippers; I use it here to refer to women gathered together for social and legal reasons. I mean no offense by it.

Government is feudal and more streamlined than the actual tangled web of loyalties that existed in the Middle Ages. Norman England is possibly closest to Saromatia, where everyone knew that William the Conqueror owned the island, and could parcel out bits as he wished.

Other bits of culture (particularly the arts) are influenced by medieval Occitania - southern France, essentially. This is where the troubadors were from. One of their poetic conventions was to refer to their ladies as "Midons," or "my lord." The lady was given all sorts of power over the poor love-sick poet, to grant him happiness or sorrow; he claimed that she essentially ruled his heart and life. What if, I thought, this were a reality instead of a poetic fancy? Why... it would look like Saromatia, at least in places. So the world of the troubadors is also influencing the setting.

Centaurs are loosely modeled after the native tribes of the American plains. My knowledge of that culture is spotty and probably more influenced by TV and movies than it ought to be. Centaur words are borrowed from the Tswana language.

The hymn to Fortuna is, of course, none other than Carmina Burana's "O Fortuna", as a quick glance at the linked site will show. The poem is an actual artifact of the Middle Ages; the famous music associated with it is not.

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