W is for WInkie Country

Winkie Country is the name of the Western quadrant of the map of Oz. The Wicked Witch of the West used to rule here, until she was melted by Dorothy. In the wake of her destruction, the Winkies decided to elevate Nick Chopper, the famous Tin Woodman of Oz to the status of Emperor. He lived in the Witch's Castle for a while, but found it too damp for his tin body, so he had a Tin Castle built to his specifications.

Other places to visit in the Winkie Country include:

Bear Center: A small forest clearing that is the home to several living stuffed bears.

Herku: The people here take a magical elixir called zosozo that makes them so strong that they have enslaved giants to do all of their work.

Oogaboo: This tiny kingdom is ruled by Queen Ann Soforth, who once went out on a mission to conquer Oz and got a lot more than she bargained for.

V is for Valley of Voe

Although not technically in Oz, the Valley of Voe does appear in an Oz book, so it counts. During the events of Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz, our heroes find themselves in an idyllic underground valley. There is a small village there, but no people to be seen. The people are actually there, but they are simply invisible.

This valley is the only place in the world where the dama-fruit grows. This fruit renders all who eat it invisible. All the people in the Valley of Voe eat it so that they are safe from the marauding bears that roam the valley floor. Of course, since the bears can't see the people to eat them, they eat the dama-fruit too. So the invisible people must be on the lookout for invisible bears, which makes for a rather bizarre stalemate.

Another curious plant grows in this valley that produces a sap which allows anything coated with it to stand on water as if it were solid.

U is for Utensia

Although Baum loved puns and wordplay, it is perhaps nowhere more prominent than in Utensia, a land of living kitchen utensils. The High Priest is a colander (because it is holy) and the lawyer is a corkscrew (because it is crooked and accustomed to appearing at the bar).

Utensia gained something of a reputation around my gaming table. During my playtest campaign, the players repeatedly asserted tat they were never going to Utensia. They felt it was too much of a silly place, sort of like Camelot. So when they were ready to end the campaign, they did so with the declaration, "We're going to Utensia," (Thankfully, they were very good sports about ending the campaign and let me give them a few adventures along the way)

To this day, whatever game we're playing, if one of us makes a particularly bad pun, we declare that person "banished to Utensia!" (It's usually me).

T is for TIn Woodman

The Tin Woodman started out as a normal Munchkin named Nick Chopper, until he fell in love with a girl named Nimmie Amee. Unfortunately, Nimmie Amee worked for a lazy old woman (in one version of the story, it's the Wicked Witch of the East herself) who did not want her to leave. So this woman caused Nick's ax to be cursed and start chopping limbs instead of trees. Every time this happened, he had a replacement limb made by the local tinsmith. Eventually, all his limbs had been removed and he was left with only his tin.

S is for Scarecrow

The Scarecrow is one of the smartest characters in the Oz stories. Second only to the Woggle-bug in raw intelligence, he is often the one with the clever solution.

He even got an Oz story with his name on it: The Scarecrow of Oz. It was adapted from a film made by Baum called His Majesty, The Scarecrow of Oz. More recently, there has been an attempt to make a computer-animated version of the story. It was on YouTube briefly, but all I can find now are teaser clips of partially finished animation.

(It may be that they're cleaning up the animation further, since Trot often got her eyes heavily shadowed which made her look odd. I'm crossing my fingers that they're recasting the Scarecrow voice. His voice was grating and sounded much like Snarf from the old Thundercats cartoon.)

R is for Role Playing Game

While most of my A to Z postings have been about various Oz things, there is another side to this blog (and me).

I have been playing Dungeons & Dragons and other tabletop RPGs for about 13 years and publishing my own for nearly 2 years. The only game I've managed to get out is Adventures in Oz: Fantasy Roleplaying Beyond the Yellow Brick Road, the first English-language RPG to use the land of Oz as a setting. (There was a French-language game that was released a number of years ago and I beat out Oz: Dark & Terrible by about 6 months.) But there are other ideas in the pipe, just waiting to be unclogged.

So if you've ever wanted to explore the land of Oz for yourself, check out some of those links over on the right and buy the game. If you've never played an RPG before, and don't quite know what all the fuss is about, check out my latest podcast to get a little taste.

Q is for Queer

Please note that I'm using "queer" as a generic term for all of those people who don't fit into the neat little box of heteronormality. And I just wanted to say that I've encountered a number of you guys (and gals and otherwise) as I've made my way through the Oz fandom and you've all been awesome.

Some people wonder if any queer characters made it into the Oz stories. There are those who point to the Scarecrow and the Tin Woodman as a gay male duet. Though I wonder how that would work because even though they have gender (they both identify as male and use the male pronouns) they do not have sex (biological or anatomical sexual characteristics). Unless there's something that Baum didn't tell us...

Though Baum did avoid even heterosexual romance for much of the series. He was writing mainly for children and you know how kids can be about "mushy stuff." Scarecrow of Oz is the first Oz story to feature romance as a plot point. A few books later, Baum gleefully skewered romantic tropes of his day in The Tin Woodman of Oz.

I've pointed to Tip/Ozma as a transgendered Oz character a few times. Although we meet him as a boy, the course of the story includes a sex change into his true form, that of Princess Ozma.