An Introduction to the World of Vendetta

Vendetta is set in the American West during the time of westward expansion.  The Territories had been solidified, the Civil War had been fought, and the only thing left for the United States to do was settle the land it won, stole, conquered or bought in the previous half century.  During this time, the West was home to legendary names and embellished feats - like Wild Bill, Paul Bunyan, Calamity Jane, Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday, Billy the Kid, and Pecos Bill.  Lots of Bills out West - as it turns out.  Some of them existed, some of them were tall tales, and some of them had their stories embellished to the point of legend.  The West, among other things, was also the place where native and immigrant cultures collided to form what would be termed the melting pot during the 20th century.  The setting called to me and one of my friends (Elliot Bradshaw) while we were discussing story ideas for a game we might play with some friends.  We had both finished watching the third season of Deadwood on HBO and thought about making something similar - but I wanted a fantastic element to the story.  So, we threw in the gods of mythology using the game system for Scion.  We had friends make some characters, and then set off on the story.  The game started the Vendetta line - and because it was such a good RPG for my friends, I decided to write it as a story.  However, there were obvious changes I had to make.

I started thinking about the times of mythology when he and I had decided on the idea, and how tales of Jason, Hercules, Theseus and Perseus could have been embellished since the the main form of communication during their time was word of mouth.  We have all played the telephone game enough times to know that word of mouth stories end up getting changed by someone along the course of their retelling.  Maybe those people could have existed at some point, but had their name and deeds so entirely overblown that they became legends.  The West was similar, in that many heroes and villains had their names and numbers exaggerated.  Instead of trying to normalize the mythological tales, instead, I decided to turn the West into the setting of a new mythological adventure.  I took the characters my friends and I made and turned them into the main characters for the story of Vendetta.  But, there were some Western themes I had to resolve with the mythological.

In order to do so, I would have to explain religions - as the West was very superstitious when it came to Christianity and Judaism.  Islam had not yet spread to the Americas, and Buddhism was just a stranger from the East.  Hinduism was not a major religion, but the Spirit worship of the Natives encouraged the superstitions of the Christians heading west.  So, after much research, I decided to keep the major One God religions and put my own mythology in place to explain how the Polytheistic religions remained.

Without ruining the book - I basically say that the nine pantheons that survived the Titan Wars during the time before our current world formed a union.  In order to make sure they all got equal praise and could remain
alive, they formed a pact and established the worship of One God.  From that fountain of worship, each pantheon would receive a portion, and from each portion the praise would be distributed equally among the gods of the specific pantheon.  There is much more to that mythology in the book - but the gist is there.  In essence, the One God idea was a ruse created to ensure all nine pantheons could exist throughout time.  The religions that came from it were combinations of every mythological story and philosophy attributed to the deities.

So, after developing how they remained through all the centuries, I spent my time working on ways to insert avatars of these gods into the world so they could create offspring.  The Hindu religion believed that mortal vessels could be embodied by the gods, and these mortal bodies were called avatars.  However, to limit their power, I and my friend Elliot gave them a shorter life and less divine strength.  If I expanded this notion across the board and gave avatars to each of the different groups of gods, then I had my way of allowing the gods to create demigods without them actually appearing in all their might and glory.  The ruse would be safe, and the demigods would be created.

Thus, we developed a story about demigods in the American 'Wild West', and included several different sets of gods - including but not limited to: The Loa (Voodoo), The Dodekatheon (Greco-Roman), the Aesir (Norse), the Pesedjet (Egyptian), the Nahuatl (Aztec/Incan/Mayan), and the Great Spirits/Kami of the native tribes (Japanese in origin - because of the migration across the Ice bridge of Alaska and whatnot).  It took time for me to decide, so I took the characters of friends involved in the RPG to start, then moved from there.  So, what started as a small, weeks long game, became an epic story - a full trilogy of Gods and demigods in the American West.  I wrote my own story with their characters, and augmented the characters as needed to fit the timeline and adaption of the story.  What I ended up with was something I enjoyed very much - so I hope you, the reader, can also enjoy it.  
  

I used many resources as well for these ideas - Scion, White-Wolf's role-playing game that gave me a basic run down of gods and their divinity; Rick Riordan's Percy Jackson helped me put the relics into real life items; The History of God by Karen Armstrong helped me understand where I could insert my mythology and how; The Odyssey by Homer was an inspiration for the second and third books; Clash of the Titans helped me visualize some the creatures I could throw at the heroes; and Hercules the Legendary Journeys/Xena Warrior Princess - as cheesy as they were - gave me some ideas on how to merge the mythological stories with the real life West.

Here is a link to the first book - Vendetta: The Awakening, chronicling the story of each main character in the trilogy and joining them into the same Western Odyssey. Once the Vendetta Trilogy is finished, I plan on working a few more trilogies using the same mythology set in different times periods - Shintoism Japan circa 1645 (Samurai and ninja) as well as modern times (terrorists and mercenaries) and I may throw in a medieval story as well (knights, princesses and dragons).  Who knows?  The sky's the limit if Vendetta does well.

Thank you for your interest.  I plan on writing side stories on this blog - both before and after the publication of Vendetta: Awakening - the first book in the series.