Down in the valley

It was on a dreary night of November, that I beheld the accomplishment of my toils. With an anxiety that almost amounted to agony, I collected the instruments of life around me, that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet. It was already one in the morning; the rain pattered dismally against the panes, and my candle was nearly burnt out, when, by the glimmer of the half-extinguished light, I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open; it breathed hard, and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs.

How can I describe my emotions at this catastrophe, or how delineate the wretch whom with such infinite pains and care I had endeavoured to form? His limbs were in proportion, and I had selected his features as beautiful. Beautiful!—Great God! His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath; his hair was of a lustrous black, and flowing; his teeth of a pearly whiteness; but these luxuriances only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes, that seemed almost of the same colour as the dun white sockets in which they were set, his shrivelled complexion, and straight black lips.

The different accidents of life are not so changeable as the feelings of human nature. I had worked hard for nearly two years, for the sole purpose of infusing life into an inanimate body. For this I had deprived myself of rest and health. I had desired it with an ardour that far exceeded moderation; but now that I had finished, the beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart.

With those words, and not "It's alive!", Victor Frankenstein describes the bringing to life of his creature. When I wrote an interactive version of Frankenstein I gave the creature transparent skin -- the écorché look. But in doing so I was giving it a science fictional spin. Victor says, when asked why the skin is transparent: "Originally that was an accident of the skin-culturing technique I have been using. I tried for some time to fix it, until I realized that this translucence will make it easier for physiologists to study the functioning of the creature’s muscles and arteries."

Writing before SF existed as a genre, Mary Shelley was more interested in character and motivation than in the technical details. She also wanted the creature to be alarming to look at, to explain why he is shunned by everyone he meets and so ends up homicidally resentful, but she does it more subtly. Consider that description: the features "selected as beautiful" that become horrifying when they start to animate. It's easy to imagine a yellow-hued statue with lean, chiselled features. That could be a thing of great beauty -- unless it came to life, in which case it would suddenly slip from being an aesthetically pleasing artwork into the Uncanny Valley. Shelley had recognized the effect a century and a half before Masahiro Mori gave it a name.

In Frankenstein (the proper 1818 version) Victor flees to his bedroom, but the creature follows him there:

By the dim and yellow light of the moon, as it forced its way through the window-shutters, I beheld the wretch—the miserable monster whom I had created. He held up the curtain of the bed; and his eyes, if eyes they may be called, were fixed on me. His jaws opened, and he muttered some inarticulate sounds, while a grin wrinkled his cheeks. He might have spoken, but I did not hear; one hand was stretched out, seemingly to detain me, but I escaped, and rushed down stairs. I took refuge in the court-yard belonging to the house which I inhabited; where I remained during the rest of the night, walking up and down in the greatest agitation, listening attentively, catching and fearing each sound as if it were to announce the approach of the demoniacal corpse to which I had so miserably given life.

Oh! no mortal could support the horror of that countenance. A mummy again endued with animation could not be so hideous as that wretch. I had gazed on him while unfinished; he was ugly then; but when those muscles and joints were rendered capable of motion, it became a thing such as even Dante could not have conceived.

In rejecting his creation, Victor sets off a chain of events that will spell tragedy for both of them. It's by no means as simplistic as the internet meme about "knowing that Frankenstein is the monster". Victor shirks responsibility; the creature murders a whole string of people, with possible rapes too. But neither of them is a hero or a villain. Shelley didn't write that kind of dumbed-down fiction. Her work has been woefully overshadowed over the years by the many movies and, fun as some of them are, none can hold a candle to the original novel. If you want a real Halloween treat, that's where to look.

A second resurrection for Lord Mortis

As the season brings the haunting howls of spooks, spectres and the restless dead, it might be a good time to pick up the new edition of The Keep of the Lich-Lord. Or maybe I should say the old edition, because this is not the Fabled Lands Quests version from 2014 but an almost-exact reprint of the Fighting Fantasy book from 1990. Apart from a few place-names that we've changed because the story can't be set in Titan, this is as near as possible the original text. The new rules are designed to replicate the probabilities of the FF system, so the adventure is exactly as difficult as it was four decades ago. And there's even a ghoul-green spine to satisfy the most demanding gamebook aficionado. Happy Halloween.

Time lapse

"A Town Through Time" was the working title of a book project I developed with Russ Nicholson in the 1990s. I thought of it when my wife and I saw some 19th century maps of the part of London where we live. In the 1870s it was all fields. The only landmarks we recognized were the main road, some churches, and a coaching inn that is now our local pub. Thirty years later everything had changed. All the familiar roads were there and where there had been fields were now hundreds of houses.

What happened to so radically transform the outskirts of London? The underground railway, that's what. Overnight it made sense for people to live a few miles from the city centre and commute to work each day. To give you a sense of the difference: I used to work in Camden, a district in the north of London. To walk there from south-west London, where I live, would take two and a half hours. On the Tube it used to take me less than an hour door to door.

I was interested in how the landscape could show a changing world. We talked about each spread showing the same few roads, and each time you turned the page there'd be a new snapshot ten years on. So on one page there might be a carrot-topped kid doing a paper round. On the next spread we'd see a wounded soldier with red hair back from the Western Front, and we'd realize that was the boy grown up.

Here's how I described it in a letter to Russ:

I think the book should focus on a street in a southern English town, showing how it has changed over the period from the 1850 to the present day. The gimmick would be to show the street each decade, so the book could be called Ten Years On.

I've sketched a vague idea of how the street could look. This is an area which would have been parkland adjoining a major coaching route up until the mid-19th century. The original buildings were just the church, manor and coaching inn. As the suburbs grew, more buildings were put up. By the 1900s it is a suburban street with a fruit-&-veg shop at the end and the coaching inn has become the local pub. By the 1950s the manor will have been partially bombed and rebuilt as a school.

I'm going to do some research at the local library, which has a good historical reference section. I'll photocopy anything you might find useful. To sell the book, I think we'll need to do at least one spread, and I suggest the one set in the 1900s. Queen Victoria has died and people wear black armbands. In one of the houses a woman scolds her maid. Her husband is coming back from work in the city, tipping his top hat to the lady next door as he comes in his front gate. The son plays with a stick-and-hoop in the street. The cutaway of the house next door shows an upstairs room where a man lies sick in bed with a doctor listening to his breathing.

On the main road at the end of the street, people are coming and going on foot, horseback or penny farthing. The road is still more like a hard-packed earthen track than a modern tarmac surface, of course. A man could be driving a couple of pigs down the street, taking them to the common. (That actually happened in the area where we live when people first started to move into the newly-built houses in the 1890s. A banker was astonished to come out of his front door and see farmers with their animals coming up the road.)

All the spreads will show the street from the same angle, as if viewed from 45° above the ground. The cutaways will be X--ray vision views into the houses that can vary from spread to spread -- ie in some cases we might look into the attic of one house, the ground floor of the one next door, and in the following spread we might not look into either.

The idea will be to show the way lifestyles, fashions and the appearance of the street change over the years. Also to be a kind of 'soap opera' where you can see a man courting a girl down the street, married to her ten years on, their son playing, off to war ten years on... etc. Put in any amusing little visual stories you think of, as this is one of the aspects that the editors at Pan Macmillan liked. Call me once you've had a think about it. I think this project could be a real winner - one of those books that stays in print for thirty years.

The publishers liked the idea -- unsurprisingly, as picture books like that can sell to dozens of countries without the expense of a lot of translation. I don't know why we never went ahead with it. Maybe the publishers didn't like the sketch Russ did. Or maybe we got so busy on the Fabled Lands books that we forgot about this project.

I was reminded of it recently by the release of Robert Zemeckis's film Here, which uses a fixed camera and a series of time jumps to tell its stories. I obviously like the idea of telling a story with a fixed camera because I even dreamt about it twenty years after Russ and I first discussed Ten Years On. Maybe it's just the passage of time that fascinates me. Funny thing is, I told Russ this could be "one of those books that stays in print for thirty years". Well, it's been thirty years now, and while the book never made it into print, the concept has stayed with me just as long. 

The sound of the Heart

Think you know Heart of Ice? Guess again. Playnook Games have released the 30-year-old gamebook in brand new form as an audio game. Back in the days when Jamie and I worked at Eidos I used to bend the ear of anyone who'd listen about how audio adventure was a medium ripe for development. And lo, a mere quarter-century later, here it is. Check out the video above (or this one) for a promo code.

Wonderful things

One of my favourite books is Anthony Trollope's The Eustace Diamonds. The main character, Lizzie Greystock (later Lady Eustace) is one of fiction's standout characters a breathtakingly unabashed chancer, a kind of Victorian-era Donald Trump if Trump were quick-witted, beautiful, charismatic, young and female. It's not a spoiler if I reveal that Lizzie ends up with a diamond necklace, worth upwards of five million dollars in modern terms, that she claims her husband gave her as her personal property a few days after they were married and a few months before he died.

The concern of the Eustace family and their lawyer is that, if they can't prove the diamonds are an heirloom that should be held in trust for Lizzie's infant son, she'll sell them for cash. That means they'll be broken up and lose about half their value.

The fun of the novel lies in the increasingly chaotic repercussions that ripple out from Lizzie's lies to affect everyone around her, but it also got me thinking of how much value must have been lost in the course of plunder through the ages. Conquistadors seized Aztec treasures and melted them down for shipping home to Spain. At the time they only cared about the gold, but to us today those artifacts would be of immeasurably greater value if they could be restored. It's in the artistry and the history where the value lies.

In traditional dungeon bashes, adventurers rush into ancient buried temples, prise jewelled eyes out of idols, break gold statues up for easier carrying, and load their mules with bags full of ancient coins that will be sold for smelting, not to adorn a numismatist's collection. Imagine Howard Carter had done that to Tutankhamun's treasures. The value in gold ingots would only be in the tens of millions, but as a complete set of 18th Dynasty artifacts they've been insured for one billion dollars.

Heists are popular in roleplaying these days, it seems. If the player-characters steal treasure from a private collection, they may not be able to sell the items at their true value. Crown jewels, for example, can't easily find a buyer. In that case there may be no choice but to break the jewels up and melt down the precious metals. The loot may thereby lose 90% of its value, but the difference is that the remaining 10% now goes to the thieves, so what do they care about the vandalism involved?

For treasure to be worth anything as art, you need to have a society in which aesthetics feature as well as commerce. In Tekumel gaming, for example, coins bearing the head of Queen Nayari, founder of the Bednalljan dynasty, would be worth far more intact than if melted down into silver or gold ingots -- in theory, that is, though first you'd have to find a wealthy numismatist to buy the coins. In contrast, D&D was styled more on the Wild West, where one sack of loot was much the same as another.

Does treasure play a role in any of your games, and if so is it in the form of mere plunder or artworks of unique value?

Casket treasures

I don't have words enough to properly praise Casket of Fays and all the other fine Red Ruin publications. Red Ruin Publishing itself is the brainchild of Simon Barns, tireless champion of Dragon Warriors and Legend generally. Andrew Girdwood at Geek Native has just published this interview with Simon with lots of tantalizing glimpses at what Red Ruin has in the pipeline.

Come back tomorrow for more about treasure and the part it plays in roleplaying games.

"The Best Laid Plans" (a RuneQuest tactical battle scenario for Questworld)

This was a scenario I wrote in 1983 to accompany a boxed set of metal miniatures that were based on the lesser demons from my "Dealing with Demons" series of articles in White Dwarf. The articles and the scenario used RuneQuest 2 rules. When Lee Barklam put "The Best Laid Plans" on the Cobwebbed Forest site (a storehouse of fabulous treasures, by the way; go take a look), he converted it to Dragon Warriors, but just in case you're an obsessive completist like me, here is the RQ version too.

A SPECIAL RUNEQUEST SCENARIO

SETTING UP

This adventure is really intended to give players a crash course in how to deal with the Questworld demons. It should be fairly light-hearted, but that doesn't mean that survival chances are high. Players are recommended to roll up special characters for this adventure only, unless they particularly want to use suitable regular characters.

Characters generated for the adventure will have two skills at 55% including natural bonuses, two at 45% including natural bonuses, three at 40% including natural bonuses, and three at 30% plus natural bonuses. They can be any skills the player wants. All characters with POW below 14 get it increased to 14. Characters can trade POW for one-use Rune spells if they wish. Each character also has 6000L to spend on spells and equipment.

Basically, the scenario involves N characters in a fight with N+2 demons. If there are fewer than four players in the group, each should take two characters, If there is a surplus of players, get some of them to help run the demons.

PLAYERS’ INTRO

You are seasoned adventurers who have come from all over the known world (i.e. the mapped territories of Theelar) to the Tower Built of Night, having heard that the great demonologist Master Hajpool the Supreme is hiring men at very good rates of pay. You stand in one of the chambers of the Tower and listen to Master Hajpool explain the deal:

“Attend, and I will simplify matters for your meagre intellects to comprehend. Tonight I summon the Lord Kastyrion, overseer of Gambits, Demon of Risk. Not in five centuries has terrible Kastyrion been evoked, for he is mightily feared, having extraordinary power and a predisposition to summarily slay any summoner who does not please him greatly. But I have determined that, since Kastyrion above all things values a gamble, by the very act of summoning him I take considerable risk and thus ensure his goodwill towards me. So the ‘gamble’ is really a dead certainty.” Hajpool titters slightly, a curious sound from one so powerful. He continues, “When he appears he will doubtless expect same sort of competition with me. | intend to suggest pitting you against some enchanted beasts of Kastyrion's, and then the demon-lord and I can bet on the outcome. You needn't worry too much about the danger, because the battle will have to be evenly matched or even slightly in your favour to gratify Kastyrion’s desire to gamble. Payment will be 8000L each plus a free healing 6 for any— I mean everyone who survives. All of you who are interested, come to the topmost chamber before midnight tonight.”

So it is that you find yourself standing armed and armoured in a chamber at the top of the Tower Built of Night, shivering against the wind howling through the open windows and watching Master Hajpool as he waits for the light of the full moon to throw the proper patterns on the stone floor. It’s alarming that you should be outside the pentacle he's drawn for himself, but perhaps that's the proper summoning etiquette?

Hajpool begins his gestures and intonations as the moment arrives. Much of the ritual seems dubious or even totally comical, and as the minutes drag on you find it more and more difficult to accept that anything is going to happen. Then, quite suddenly, Hajpool claps his hands together and stands perfectly still. The lines of the pentacle brighten with a reddish glow. The wind drops momentarily and then starts to build up, rapidly becoming an icy gale which screeches through the chamber like a thing alive. Hajpool starts to smile, then throws open two chests beside him. One is full of blood and the other is full of gold dust. The contents of each chest seems to stir and then rise up, mingling and forming a single scarlet and-gold stream, a flux which passes out through the window and up towards the stars.

Hajpool watches the offerings from the chests flow to the demon-lord's realms for a few moments, Something seems to distract him , because he swallows hard a couple of times, then cranes his back and gingerly fingers his throat. A moment later his head explodes, scattering an unmentionable gore over the ceiling of the chamber.

There follows a moment of preternatural calm. Hands seem to reach almost lazily for sword hilts. Each of you watches the demonologist’s headless form begin to crumple within the pentacle. Then, with a noise like a dozen thunderclaps, the topmost chamber of the impregnable Tower Built of Night bursts apart.

A moment of complete disorientation. You feel the rushing wind and realise you are falling. Not far off, the thread of blood and gold flows up into the crystal night. Then you see the lights of Deliverance far below, and the moonlight shimmering on the Issaries river, and with sudden panic you realise that you are now thousands of feet above the ground, plummeting to your doom.

Each of you hears a voice in your mind, a voice like the rustling of leaves in the breeze: “Unlucky Hajpool. I despise someone who tries to fix the odds. Now, through your greed, you miserable creatures have come into my clutches and it seems I must get my entertainment from you.”

You fall into a light cloud, and for a moment the ground rushing up to meet you is obscured. As the veil of cloud parts, you are aware that you are falling much slower now. You land with a jarring thud on a floor of polished black marble. You are in a large, vaulted chamber. It seems to be about thirty metres across, and each of you is lying in one of the alcoves around the wall.

Kastyrion’s challenge echoes around the room: “Welcome to my combat arena. Thirty of your seconds from now I shall introduce you to my gladiators, who will seek to slay you. If any of you are still alive after one hour, I will return them to your own plane. Remuneration is also offered, for the survivors to divide amongst themselves: a magical crystal for each gladiator slain.” As you step from your alcoves, a reddish glow appears within each. “These alcoves fare havens from the battle to come. You will find that they protect you from my gladiators if you need to retire for healing purposes. Be warned that the protective energies are of strictly limited duration.”

REFEREE’S NOTES

The procedure for this arena combat follows Michael Cule's classic “Rumble at the Tin Inn” in White Dwarf #35. (Go listen to Michael and Roger Bell-West on the Improvised Radio Theatre - With Dice podcast every month.)

1. Each hex equals 1 metre. Every three hexes (or part of three) moved through costs one Strike Rank. A shift in facing by one or two hex-sides is equivalent to one metre's movement for purposes of determining SR.

2. During each Melee Round the four phases laid out in Runequest should be strictly and systematically adhered to. Characters make their Statements of Intent in inverse order of DEX and then conduct Movement of Non-Engaged Characters in order of DEX. A list of all the characters (including demons) in order of DEX will therefore be useful.

3. Back-steps cost the character one SR.

4. Each alcove contains red glow – a force field which activates whenever a character steps into the alcove, preventing anyone else from entering that alcove until the first character leaves It. After each alcove has been occupied for a total of four MR during the scenario its force field ceases to function, so keep track of how often each alcove is used. Demons cannot enter alcoves. Missiles cannot be shot into or out of an active (occupied) alcove, although spells can.

5. The natural lighting in the room is equivalent to twilight. There are three large iron braziers in the room. Once ignited (they are unlit at the start) these will burn for the duration of the scenario. To the left of each alcove there is a lit torch in a bracket. The braziers are immovable, but the torches can be taken down and carried.

6. The pool in the centre of the room is one metre deep. The water detects as strongly magical. A character standing in the pool will be at a height disadvantage if meleed by someone standing at the pool's edge, so their attacks will be at −10% and attacks made on them will be at +10%. However, the pool's magic protects them as long as they stand in it: they get +2 points of armour protection, +05% chance of resisting spells, and are not subject to critical hits. Demons can enter the pool if they wish; they are aware of its properties.

7. A group of N characters will be pitted against N demons plus the two gremlins. The demons involved are chosen by the referee. Lord Kastyrion stops the combat after 60 minutes (300 MR). Any character alive at that time will be returned to Questworld, materialising on the lawn beside Hajpool's tower just as the sun rises. The promised crystals(selected at random) lie on the ebony tables beside them.

THE DEMONS' STRATEGY

The demons will co-operate with one another as much as possible, but since they do not speak each other's languages there will not be much in the way of a coherent battle plan. One demon's healing spell will not work on another demon if they are of different species. Gremlin 1 can and will use his xenohealing on any of the demons that seem to need it. Gremlin 2 will cast his concealment on either the storm demon or the nightmare, and other demons might follow his lead and cast their defensive spells an one another.

The other point to remember is that the demons are unlikely to settle for convenient one-on-one melee. A character fighting the sraim could find in the next instant that they’ve been hit by a lightning bolt from the storm demon meleeing someone else and that the rult is teleporting in beside them to deliver a couple of claw attacks.

Special notes on the demons

B’krath: Within 2 hexes of a lit brazier, the b’krath’s Defence will be down to 25%. It will of course avoid such a situation if at all possible.

Porphyr: Torches could be used as clubs against the porphyr, the advantage being that any damage it takes from the fire cannot be regenerated in this combat. Any time the porphyr is struck by a burning torch its flowing robes might catch fire (roll POWx5 of less to avoid this) and it then takes 1d2 damage per MR until the fire is out. To put the fire out, the porphyr must disengage and then roll DEXx5 or less; this roll is attempted each MR until successful. Death Rune cultists may have other attacks to use against the porphyr.

Stalker: The stalker can make itself intangible to anything except metals and magical materials, but it is unlikely to find this power very useful during the combat because the arena walls and floor are magical. When the stalker wounds a character it makes a POW vs POW attack with a view to draining the character's STR by 2. Every fifth round it can hurl white energy bolts (85% accuracy; SR3; 1d20 damage; 10 hexes range).

Pazuru: Remember that a pazuzu can fly, cast image creation for no cost, and is immune to one-point battle magic. It can breathe flame up to 10 hexes.

Rult: The rult’s breath vapour has a range of 1 hex. Damage done by the vapour cannot be healed magically. When in a hex adjacent to a character, the rult has the power to teleport to any hex adjacent to any other character it has previously meleed, so keep track of who the rult fights.

Amorph: The amorph will stay towards the middle of the room if possible, so as to take on anyone who tries to make use of the pool.

Nightmare: The nightmare would actually be dispelled by the Yelmalio cult spelt sunbright, if anyone has it. When this demon wounds a character it makes an immediate POW vs POW attack which will discorporate the character if successful. The character's spirit remains active until the body ls killed (which the nightmare will try to do straight away).

Sraim: The sraim can spit its acidic venom up to 10 hexes. The venom does 5 points damage to the location it touches; armour will protect until eaten away. Remember to add the venom damage if the sraim bites an opponent. It usually prefers to stand off from melee and spit, however.

Storm Demon: The storm demon can hurl lightning up to 20 hexes. A victim takes four 1d8 wounds from the lightning, with armour providing only half normal protection. It prefers to grapple for heatshock (like a fire elemental). It will not cross the copper rods fencing off the north part of the room as to do so would cost it 4d6 hit points. Lightning bolts discharged across the rods are halved in accuracy.

Gremlins: Gremlins have 85% camouflage. Once successfully camouflaged they don't have to reroll unless they move. Anyone within 8 hexes of a gremlin suffers bad luck in the form of a 5%-15% penalty (1d3x5%) to all rolls. This power applies to the other demons as well, so the gremlins will try to manoeuvre so as to bring bad luck only on the players; non-engaged spellcasters or missile-users are especially likely targets. Gremlins’ power is not cumulative, so the two together don't cause twice as much bad luck. Gremlins are immune to the bad luck power.