The Other Regional Commanders

[Chernobyl Princess]

Hello y'all!

I'm running with a terrible idea I had for a Dresden game set in Afghanistan. Players are starting in Bagram and things only get worse from there. I've been looking about for references to Warden regional commanders for locations outside the US, but I haven't had much luck. My impulse is to say "The White Council Doesn't Care About Brown People," which is at least what Dresden, unreliable narrator that he is, tells us, and assume that there's only one Regional Commander for the entire Middle East. This works for my plot, but I'm not so sure how canon it is.

What do y'all think?

[Shaft]

Technically, Afghanistan isn't part of the Middle East, although it borders it. It would be part of Southern Asia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Asia  Iran would certainly have an influence on the region (as part of the Middle East), but so would Pakistan (which is also part of Southern Asia) and some of the former Soviet States in Central Asia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Asia

If you want to focus on the Middle East, here are some suggestions for the countries that are part of it:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_East

Rashid aka the Gatekeeper might have a more active presence in the Middle East.
http://dresdenfiles.wikia.com/wiki/Rashid

Also, the Middle East is a collection of diverse cultures. I think you can have a warden for North Africa (Morocco/Algeria/Libya), one for Persia (Iran), one for Egypt, one for the Saudi Peninsula, one for Greece/Turkey, and one for the Levant (Cyprus, Hatay, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine, and Syria)

Given that there are hundreds if not thousands of wizards at the Council meetings, and there are only 5 wardens in the USA, it's unlikely that the White Council is that Eurocentric.  But there is a disproportionate number of Westerners on the White Council.  Ancient Mai (Chinese) and Rashid (Middle Eastern) are the exception.  Simon Pietrovich could also be considered non-Western, though it seems that he's an old white guy.

[black omega]

Afghanistan is in Asia but obviously has drawn alot culturally from the Middle East.  It also has ancient ties to Buddhism and thousands of years of tribalism that has made ruling the area a challenge at best.  The description Alexander had for the area is not all that different than you see today, though I may be misremembering a source.  I've run a couple of adventures in this area, it was alot of fun.  A mix of locals, a few Afghans returned from other countries, the various armies fighting, and the ancient evil unleashed by the Taliban's destruction of the stone Buddha's of Bamiyan.

For all the conflict in Afghanistan, supernatural and mundane, it would be easy to say it has it's own Warden.  War and chaos have a way of stirring up the supernatural.  But depends on your story.  Easy to say there is not one or the Warden was killed and not replaced yet.  A lot of Warden's died in the war, so they may not have the same coverage they used to.

I can't quite embrace the 'White Council doesn't care about brown people' thing, since four of the seven in the council are not Caucasian. Martha Liberty would likely count as a westerner though.  Not sure about Simon, Russian was always a Euro-Asian power, fairly diverse population wise, and culturally distinct from Europe. There is a Western slant to the Council but I expect that in a book centered on the US. The original Merlin who founded the council was in England, so that where the Council HQ is, and likely why Latin is the universal language for the wizards.

I wonder if the Jade Court would be active in Central Asia.

[Haru]

It seems like the middle east with all its conflicts might be a place where new warlocks could emerge on a regular basis and do a lot of damage. If I were in charge, I would definitely see that I station some people there. A regional commander definitely, but maybe a second one as well so they can react quicker. A few wardens as a permanent strike troop would make sense as well.

Though it depends on your game. If you want to make the interactions with the wardens a priority, put plenty of them there. If you want your players to deal with the mess of a supernatural power vacuum, remove the wardens entirely.

[Chernobyl Princess]

Augh, I did know that Aghanistan is part of Asia and not the Middle East, that was a pre-coffee slip of the brain.

Thank you, Shaft, for the division of regions, that makes a lot of sense. I'm working with another GM who was stationed at Bagram on working out how the local supernatural powers interact with the local mundane powers. Luckily for me, I've got a few months before start of game to get the background research done.

Dresden focuses occasionally on the Eurocentricity of the white council, but as has been stated many times and places before, he's an unreliable narrator. He's just not around for meetings a lot, and really only interacts with a handful of other members routinely, many of whom aren't of European descent. So it's possible, even probable, that he's filtering his perceptions through a pretty basic "I don't like the white council, I also don't like racism, therefore the white council must be racist!" construct.

Either way, I think having more active Wardens running about complicating matters for the PCs probably will make for a more interesting game. And as Haru says, the potential in the area for warlocks causing chaos is super high, so it really makes sense. Thanks y'all!

[Sanctaphrax]

Harry might be biased, but I think it's likely that he's right about the Council being eurocentric. It's not hard for an international organization to become eurocentric.

And many wizards date back to a time when racism was much much worse than it is now. So there might well be a white supremacist faction on the Council...which should make you thankful for their "no messing with mundane politics" rule.

Even if we postulate that wizards are above mortal cultural indoctrination (which seems like a stretch to me), the simple fact that the Council was founded by Merlin and head-quartered in Europe will pull it towards eurocentrism.

[PirateJack]

The Council is pretty Eurocentric, to the point where when Aleron Lafortier died there was some outcry from non-Western Wizards about how their voice on the Senior Council had been silenced and that tradition should be ignored in favour of appointing someone who would push their points... Which is exactly what happened when Cristos became a member.

Warden wise, most of the Wardens we've seen have been of European descent, though that's mostly because we only see those who visit America. I don't see the White Council being willing to leave such a wartorn region to its own devices, so I suspect there are regional commanders for smaller areas than the entire Middle East. However, the Wardens did suffer a pretty major setback with the death of 3/4 of their number in Dead Beat, so there's a decent chance that some regions considered less important (do the Red Court have a large presence in these regions?) were merged into one rather to save on manpower.

[WadeL]

I can't quite embrace the 'White Council doesn't care about brown people' thing, since four of the seven in the council are not Caucasian.

I think the fact that three of the seven are white definitely does show a bias though, since proportionally there should only be one white member on the Council.

A proportional Council would probably look like:
1 White
1 Black
2 East Asian
1 South Asian
2 Between Central/South American, Middle Eastern, and Southeast Asian.

Asia has a world majority - if the White Council wasn't fairly Eurocentric, presumably you'd expect it to be mostly Asian (and probably draw about different Asian cultures a lot more). Presumably the original Merlin is a large part of why the Council is so Eurocentric, but it definitely is Eurocentric - both stated in fiction by Dresden, and it is also a fairly easy conclusion to come to just by looking at some of information we do actually have on them.

[vultur]

What I've never understood is how come the European Council ended up dominant. If wizards are roughly equally distributed as a proportion of population everywhere, there should have been more wizards in China, so why didn't the Chinese wizard organization absorb the European one rather than vice versa?

Also, the Middle East is a collection of diverse cultures. I think you can have a warden for North Africa (Morocco/Algeria/Libya), one for Persia (Iran), one for Egypt, one for the Saudi Peninsula, one for Greece/Turkey, and one for the Levant (Cyprus, Hatay, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine, and Syria)

I think that's too many. Harry is regional commander for like half the US right (and the most populated half)?

And there are only 300 Wardens in the world (and ~200 before the War... and the regional commander divisions were probably established a long time ago, when there were fewer).

I'd expect maybe 20-30 regional commanders for the planet, disproportionately in Europe.

Maybe something like...

5 for Europe
3-4 for US/Canada
3 for Latin America
5-6 for Asia
3 for Africa
1 for Australia
1 for Pacific islands

The Middle East would probably be split between the West Asia, North Africa, and maybe the Mediterranean Europe commanders, IMO.

[Haru]

What I've never understood is how come the European Council ended up dominant. If wizards are roughly equally distributed as a proportion of population everywhere, there should have been more wizards in China, so why didn't the Chinese wizard organization absorb the European one rather than vice versa?

I think it might be because magic might have been more accepted in Asia in general, in Europe not so much. Which means that while China might have a lot more practitioners, but a lot of them might be fairly low powered since they never had the need to develop more and their magic was woven into their everyday lives. In Europe they had to practice in secret, being caught meant death, so there would have been quite a few who might have gone "screw this, if they want me dead, I'll kill them first", so there was a sort of magical arms race between the wizards and warlocks in Europe, leading to some of the most potent wizards today.

[WadeL]

What I've never understood is how come the European Council ended up dominant. If wizards are roughly equally distributed as a proportion of population everywhere, there should have been more wizards in China, so why didn't the Chinese wizard organization absorb the European one rather than vice versa?

My theory is that although the White Council is skewed eurocentric, so is our view of Wizards in general. I think it entirely possible that perhaps Chinese wizards view the White Council sort of like the UN - big and important, but ultimately kind of hollow and meaningless unless you're dealing with really world-wide threats (and even then, those will get dealt more by individuals taking action the White Council approves only retroactively). It wouldn't surprise me were there other large organizations of Wizards in some non-Western countries that only occasionally let their internal politics bubble up to the level of the White Council. You might have hundreds of Wizard-level practitioners who never even bother with the White Council tests because they're more concerned with their regional organizations than the White Council.

Much like how I think most Americans would agree the UN has greater worldwide scope than the USA, but Americans are certainly generally more worried about what happens in the White House, House, and Senate than they are with what happens in the UN Security Council and the General Assembly. Or more worried about the FBI than INTERPOL (I know INTERPOL isn't a UN organization ).

[Shaft]

...I think it entirely possible that perhaps Chinese wizards view the White Council sort of like the UN... It wouldn't surprise me were there other large organizations of Wizards in some non-Western countries that only occasionally let their internal politics bubble up to the level of the White Council. You might have hundreds of Wizard-level practitioners who never even bother with the White Council tests because they're more concerned with their regional organizations than the White Council.

I kind of did this in a Hong Kong based game I'm running.  One of the players is an Earthbender (Avatar style with a modern twist).  We decided that in Asia, the White Council is respected, but the various elemental benders police themselves to enforce the seven laws (and the White Lotus oversees everything else).  The White Lotus and White Council are allies, but one does not answer to the other.  It's not that smooth though.  Occasionally for big threats, the White Council tries to but in.