Gamebook store

Tuesday 31 March 2015

Memories stolen by a dragon's breath

"Enter a world of magic, folklore and danger. Here, superstition covers people’s lives like autumn mists cover the moors, and terrifying monsters with bizarre powers lurk in the shadows. The king is a weakling, barons scheme against each other, and lordless knights, back from the Crusades without the honour or riches they were promised, roam the countryside in search of adventure, or prey. Ruined castles and burial mounds are the lairs of the supernatural, or newer, more sinister masters. Labyrinthine underworlds lie forgotten below ancient temples and city cellars. The dark places of the world hold riches for those who would search for them, and the keys to great power - or death"
My world, but not my words. That's James Wallis's evocative description of Legend, the setting for the Dragon Warriors RPG.Through his Magnum Opus imprint, James reintroduced the dank, gnarled, cobwebby, and generally eldritch landscapes of Legend to tabletops across the world.

Those Magnum Opus books were beautiful volumes and they have pride of place on the shelf beside my desk. Nowadays you can only get the game in PDF form, sadly - but hie yourself over to Lulu and you can print up a hard copy at a very reasonable price.

But I digress. Legend is characterized by its dark and downbeat tone. Adventurers here are more Gangs of New York than The Iliad. There is magic, but it's rare and capricious and nobody quite trusts it - not even the sorcerers. If you've ever seen Robin of Sherwood, you'll know what I'm talking about. So now try this:
"Icy fogs hung over rivers and marshes, serving all too well the ogres that were then still native to this land. The people who lived nearby... might well have feared these creatures, whose panting breaths could be heard long before their deformed figures emerged from the mist."
Legend? No, this is the undefined but vaguely Dark Ages environment created by Kazuo Ishiguro for his novel The Buried Giant. I bruised and battered it somewhat in my review on the Mirabilis blog, though no worse a drubbing than it got from Tim Martin in The Telegraph. Nonetheless, if you like your fantasy with a tang of melancholy then you should take a look. And the encounter with the pixies who seem like skinned rabbits and sound "like children playing in the distance" as they attack - now that's as sinister a scene as any I've encountered while role-playing in Legend.

13 comments:

  1. Yes. I'm actually a bit gutted I didn't buy the Magnum Opus books, and kidded myself that the old Corgi Paperbacks were tr00 kvlt 0ld-skool.

    Been meaning to ask you for a while now, was the game named after the N’lüss? Is there a connexion between the prehistory of the Empire of the Petal Throne and Legend?

    Nothing is ever forgotten ;-)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. You'd have to ask Oliver. He's the one who insisted on "dragon" in the title. (A good decision, I'm not complaining; I should've listened to him about only using d6 too.) Surprisingly, it never made me think of the Ancient N’lüss, maybe because our characters in Tsolyanu never credited those tales of dragons. I would happily have given up the chance to write DW if instead I could have worked on a definitive entry-level Tekumel RPG!

      Delete
    2. The Serpent King books ( which are the same as the Magnum Opus books) plus a few more recent releases are available here; http://www.drivethrurpg.com/browse/pub/3582/Serpent-King-Games

      Delete
    3. Also this may be of interest....

      http://www.libraryofhiabuor.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=99

      Delete
    4. Thanks for those links, Damian. DriveThruRPG isn't a particularly user-friendly site, I've found, and my dearest wish is that the books would be on sale on Amazon, since that's where most people buy books. With a PDF it's possible to set up a Createspace POD edition in about ten minutes, and that automatically appears on Amazon. Maybe my next birthday.

      Delete
    5. I don't really have any influence over that but I know there is a focus on getting all the books available in PoD. So maybe that will be the next step? :)

      Delete
    6. Maybe. Setting a PDF up on Createspace takes about as long as brewing a cuppa, though, so it's my frustration you can hear boiling, not the kettle ;)

      Delete
    7. After over 4 years of being promised the Players' Book, each of the promised dates for which having now been long darkened by time's passing shadow, frustration is something with which I think every stalwart Dragon Warriors fan can empathize.

      Delete
    8. I can understand the problems facing the guys who originally set up Serpent King Games. When James Wallis relinquished the DW licence, he told me it wasn't really turning out to be a viable business. There just aren't that many DW players out there and I don't suppose they're increasing in number, so it's hard to justify the cost of developing new material or even the small amount of time needed to get the existing PDFs set up for print on demand. It's a shame, but there's not much to be done about it.

      Delete
  2. It's the quiet, creeping dread with which the lands of Legend are laced that set Dragon Warriors apart from other old school FRPGs and have had me hooked me since the 1980s. It's not a setting of overt horrors, nor is it a setting where the fantastic is described in neat, clinical detail - the lands of Legend simmer in suspicion, shadow and melancholy, where doubts haunt the brave, and where blade and shield are little comfort to the hero lost in the cobwebbed forests far from their hearth.

    I get inspired to write just thinking about it! So anything that carries that same flavour gets my vote and will almost certainly end up added to my groaning bookshelves in the coming weeks.

    ReplyDelete
  3. "Legend? No, this is the undefined but vaguely Dark Ages environment created by Kazuo Ishiguro for his novel The Buried Giant."

    Huh. I was reading it and thinking... this is not good prose.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Ishiguro has adopted a slightly odd style for the book. The dialogue in particular is very stilted. As far as I can tell, he's trying to emulate the prose style of a translated classic - the Penguin edition of Egil's Saga, for example - whereby the text reads like an academic struggling to render an unfamiliar language into modern English. Does it work? Well, I found the dialogue torturous myself, but many reviewers seem to think it's a work of genius. For the record, I was the kind of kid who'd point out if the Emperor was naked too.

      Delete