"Minions of the King" (a scenario set in Legend)

A guest post today by Steve Foster, my co-umpire of the Tekumel campaigns that brought together many of the RPG and gamebook authors and editors of the 1980s and '90s. This scenario, though, was from our Legend campaign and has appeared previously in Annwn magazine.

I only included orcs in the original Dragon Warriors rules under sufferance. They were staple fantasy creatures back then, and I had to assume players coming cold to the game might want to include them. The world of Legend had yet to properly take shape, so the setting of early DW was not a lot different from other fantasy RPGs like D&D.

Later I ignored orcs entirely. They had no place in my Legend; neither faerie nor devil nor of any mortal nation, there was nowhere I could see to fit them in anyway. To me they were specific to Tolkien's world. But Steve found another take on the idea.

Minions of the King

by Steve Foster

I ran this scenario pretty much from these notes to give Tim Harford a break in his long stint as referee of our Legend campaign. The player-characters were staying at a minor castle between the lands of Montombre and Aldred. The castle’s lord was Eustace, one of Aldred’s men. A man named Gwylas had just turned up, an important aide to the local bishop. The adventure begins shortly after his arrival and would take the party west across Ellesland to the desolate moorland under the Shriven Hills.

Dramatis Personae

• Brother Theodoric -- a too-curious friar.
• Canon Gwylas -- an assistant to Bishop Daniford of Trewyn, and an honoured guest.
• Sir Hrognar -- companion and bodyguard to Gwylas.
• Father Damien (Damgharn) -- a spectacularly ugly, though equally holy, priest.
• Father Alric -- a missionary; still hale, even in his 70s.
• Sir Cerewyn (Kurwan) -- a pugnacious knight.
• Freydwina -- a distraught mother.
• Krazkul -- an aged orcish leader; grandfather of Damgharn.

Plus assorted men-at-arms, peasants, orcs and demons.

The history of Ogsmoor

Ogsmoor is a small village set on a small, high moor of the same name on the edge of the Bleaks. For many years, the moor was shunned for its evil reputation. Folk nearby said that it was the abode of devils and goblins. Strange lights and drums were seen and heard from its misty summit and the surrounding farms were often attacked or raided in the night. Yet, no one in those days talked of a village on the moor.

More than forty years ago, Herolaut, the grandfather of Montombre, put an end to the troubles by taking a sizeable troop and his sorcerer, Broden through Ogsmoor. His journals say that he fought more than one pitched battle, but his well-trained and well-armed troops were in little danger. He built a pyre from the bodies of the orcs that he massacred, and declared the area safe. A few years later, a young priest arrived at Herolaut’s court and asked permission to build a chapel on Ogsmoor. Herolaut, on his deathbed and fearing that his sinful life had doomed his soul, not only granted permission but also money and favours. A few years later, the tithes and taxes began to flow in. No one questioned the sudden springing up of a new village high in the moors, particularly one that paid its taxes.

An untimely death

It is early morning on the second day of Gwylas’s visit. A guard has seen a horse wandering on the edge of the forest. When it is brought in, the load it bears is seen to be the dead body of Brother Theodoric. The dead man has a massive head wound, caused by a stone axe, though it looks like he lived long enough to escape his attackers. There is no sign of the two men-at-arms who would have accompanied him. Perhaps they held off the attackers until Theodoric could flee?

Gwylas knows the unfortunate man. Theodoric had been charged by the bishop with maintenance of tithe records and travelled around various parts of the see. He was also a learned man who brought back records of interesting locations that he had found. A quick search indeed reveals a blood-stained parchment, stuck to his horses neck by the dried blood from his own wound. The parchment bears the words "The Stones at Ogsmoor" and has several marks arranged in part of a circle, a small numeral by each. Theodoric’s blood and brains obliterate the rest of the circle. A guard may have heard of Ogsmoor: "Ugly as an Ogsmoor wife, my dad used to say."

Unless the players react so first, Gwylas will be affronted by the death and request that Eustace dispatch a party to investigate.

An ugly priest

While on the road to Ogsmoor, the party encounter an unfortunate priest whose donkey has thrown a shoe (perhaps in protest at the absurdly heavy load of chests and boxes that it bears). The priest is a singularly ugly man -- jutting jaw, large nose, prominent brow ridges, small and deep-set eyes, greasy hair, bow legs, long arms, barrel torso -- though also well groomed and scrupulously clean. He introduces himself in a pleasant but slightly grating voice as Damien, a recently appointed priest.

Damien explains that he is on his way back to his home village, Ogsmoor, to see his mentor, Fr. Alric and his grandfather. Thanks to Alric’s influence, Damien has been able to study in Chaubrette at the famous Chaunterle Abbey. He has been absent from Ogsmoor for some fifteen years since the age of 10, though he has corresponded regularly with Alric. Damien is something of a scholar. As well as being fluent in several languages and having an excellent familiarity with religious books and doctrines he is also a trained healer. However, he has been away from Ogsmoor for a long time and is unfamiliar with recent events. In all but one aspect, Damien is the mild, pious, educated priest that he seems.

In Ogsmoor

Ogsmoor is set in the middle of the often misty moor. There is a fine chapel, but only a curiously small graveyard. The houses are small and rude but well-maintained. A circle of standing stones can be seen looming in the mist, a short distance off.

The people of Ogsmoor are of a similar appearance to Damien -- squat and ugly, yet exceedingly well groomed and clean. For the most part they are also mild-mannered and courteous. They are delighted to see Damien and greet him warmly and devoutly - they clearly are proud that he is now a priest -- yet they are shy and nervous in the presence of the strangers. One woman, less ugly than most, peers at them from a doorway. She is Freydwina.

While the greetings take place, Alric arrives. He is a lean, silver-haired priest. Clearly in his early seventies, he shows no signs of physical or mental frailty. He wears a crucifix around his neck and the observant will see that there is also a second chain carrying another sign -- a small oblong stone. Alric passes this off as a good-luck charm, a memento from his early days here.

Alric insists on a service of welcome and invites Damien to lead it. Alric steps in to lead some of the prayers, which seem familiar until one additional proclamation and response is added. "Give unto God that which is God’s," says Alric. "And to the King that which is the King’s" respond the congregation. Moreover, a small child begins to say, "For the minions of the King are countless…" but is quickly silenced by those around him. Alric seems unconcerned but Damien’s brow is furrowed.

As the party leave the church, they see the woman Freydwina talking to a knight some distance off. The knight pushes her roughly to the ground and storms off. He is Sir Cerewyn, and he has several men-at-arms with him.

Freydwina says of this incident only that she sought help to find her missing child and that Cerewyn refused. Cerewyn, a short-tempered and brutish man, will only say that the brat was forever running off and could "damn well find himself".

Asking about Theodoric

Alric says that Theodoric and his men left before dawn a few days ago. He is saddened to hear of their disappearance.

Cerewyn says that he doesn’t care what happened and that the men-at-arms probably slew Theodoric for his gold and then fled.

Freydwina will get very upset at the question. She will give several different stories, then just say, "The Minions of the King are Countless," and "They will render unto the King! Oh Sweet God, How could you take my child away!"

Damien’s grandfather

At some point, a player may observe Damien and Alric heading off into the moor. If followed, they will come to a cave, in a low, bramble covered cliff. There is the light of a fire deep in the cave and smoke. On entering, the players will see Damien, Alric and a woman from the village around a litter on the floor. Surrounding the litter are various orcish totems: skulls and animal skins. On the litter lies an ancient orc, Krazkul, too old and near death to be any trouble. It is clear from his features what the secret of the village is. Damien, Freydwina, Cerewyn, all except Alric have the characteristic features of orcs which, cleaned and groomed, can almost pass for human. Alric is clearly respectful of the aged orc. If the players stop to overhear, they may catch something along these lines:

"Pah! It is bad enough that I let a priest overrun my tribe, now my own grandson is a shaven-headed shaman too! Changed your name too, eh, boy! What’s wrong with Damgharn? A good orcish name!"

"Grandfather, you must not talk like that. I’ve come to show you that we can change. I am accepted by men. I am a priest of their god -- no, of my God. You will be accepted too if only you will convert to the True Faith."

"Pah! Though shalt not kill! Thou shalt not steal! Thou shalt bathe! What sort of life is that for an orc? Damn you Alric! You have destroyed my tribe."

"And if I had not, Herolaut would have done the job forty years ago. Save my people, you said, and I have done, in more ways than one. They are God-fearing folk, now, for the most part, and have souls for the saving. Your own could be saved too if you’d agree to the baptism."

"Kurwan. Now there’s a good orcish name too."

"Perhaps too good. I believe that he still worships the King. I cannot prove it, but I believe he killed the friar for breaking the taboo, for counting the minions. I believe he has taken Freydwina’s child and will sacrifice him. I believe he is trying to revive the old orcish ways, and if he does then Montombre’s men will raze Ogsmoor to the ground."

From these conversations, it should not be too difficult to fathom what has happened. Alric came here shortly after Herolaut’s massacres. He found a beaten, demoralised people in fear of their lives. Moreover, he realised that these orcs were somehow very similar to men. He educated them and cleaned them up so that they’d pass for men then, bit by bit, converted them to the True Faith. However, he has had to make a few compromises by allowing some of the pieces of the orcs’ old religion to remain -- the worship of the King. Kurwan wants to bring back the old religion and the old orcish ways, and he plans to do so by sacrificing Freydwina’s child to the King.

The King and his Minions

The players will discover Kurwan and his henchmen at the stones. No doubt a fight will ensue and blood will be spilt on the stones, be that the child’s or Kurwan’s. This blood sacrifice is enough to call up the King and his Minions -- a number of stone-skinned orcish ghosts. They are terrible opponents whose skin is almost impermeable. However, their strength depends upon the belief of the people. If only Krazkul, the last unbaptised orc, could be converted to the True Faith before he dies…

How it played

I ran this scenario back in early 1997. I created the blood-stained map as a prop, and people soon wanted to go to Ogsmoor without much prompting. However, we were a bit short of players that week so Hrognar became a useful NPC. Things pretty much followed the route here, though no one attempted to get Krazkul to convert. This was a shame, as I’d planned that the Minions would actually be impervious to normal weapons until that happened. In the end, to avoid a massacre I just gave them a very high armour rating that halved when Krazkul "spontaneously" converted. Of course, a little party blood had to be spilt before this happened.

Steve was inspired to run the scenario by thinking about what happened to Neanderthals. There's no place for multiple hominin species in the history of Legend, of course, where mortals fell from grace after being created by God and where there's no principle of evolution or genetics, but the point is that orcs in this telling became a brutish offshoot of mortal men who could be saved by faith. Steve brilliantly wove them into the world of Dragon Warriors where I'd treated them like a fart not to be acknowledged. Perhaps it helped that, like Tolkien, Steve was raised under Catholicism, and so gnarly questions of belief and salvation are at least familiar to him as concepts to be considered, whereas I have no priors for that kind of thinking outside of fantasy fiction.

Tolkien supposedly derived the word "orc" from a few lines in Beowulf:

þanon untydras ealle onwocon
eotenas ond ylfe ond orcneas
swylce gigantas þa wið gode wunnon
lange þrage he him ðæs lean forgeald

There is nothing in the Beowulf poem to say that Grendel and his mother are "orcs" (which seems to mean something like draugr) but we are told that they are descendants of Cain, along with those other creatures mentioned (eotenas = ettins, ylfe = elf). Tolkien couldn't use Cain's lineage as explanation of his orcs as there had been no Old Testament in the Midgard of The Lord of the Rings. But then, we are happy to use words like ettin and elf in our own fantasies -- the elves of Dragon Warriors are not descendants of Cain, for example. Tolkien was merely upholding the honourable tradition of authors as coiners.

Just to prove I've made my peace with orcs in DW, here is the description from Book One:

Orcs are the archetypal henchthings of evil, and have been found in service to many masters: Sorcerers mad and mighty, undead knights, dark demons, priests of chaos. Orcs care not what or who they fight, so long as they are given ample opportunity to indulge their violent ways. The harsh brutality of orcs gives them a slight edge over the average human fighter, but they are too ill-disciplined to properly hone their combat skills. Some orc warriors and chieftains may have the combat abilities of a Barbarian, but they never rise beyond 4th rank.

Orcs see well in darkness, but they hate and fear bright light. If forced to fight in sunlight, an orc must subtract 1 from his ATTACK and DEFENCE scores. Orcs often live below ground, so dwarves are particularly hated enemies. The stats for a typical orc-at-arms are as follows: 

ATTACK 12     Damage depends on weapon used
DEFENCE 5     Armour Factor depends on type worn
MAGICAL DEFENCE 3    Movement: 10m(20m) 
EVASION 3
Health Points 1d6 + 3         Rank-equivalent: 1st

The picture at the top is from the Natural History Museum and is  licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.

Gamebooks: a lightning tour

I've just heard about a great resource for gamebook fans: thirty-one themes in the medium, from horror to SF to modern to non-fantasy. Duncan Thomson's (no relation to Jamie as far as I know) in-depth post covers hundreds of different gamebook series both classic and modern. Check it out on Rand Roll here.

And if you want to write your own gamebook, Stuart Lloyd has compiled an invaluable reading list to get you started. And trawling through some old posts here (such as this one) might also prove inspiring. I also find it useful to listen to Hieronymus J Doom's perceptive analyses of gamebooks on the Haunted Phonograph and Ed Jolley's Adventure Gameblog.

Talking of gamebooks, have you been keeping up with Prime Games' development reports on the CRPG version of Blood Sword? The latest concerns my favourite character class to write, the Trickster:

"The Warrior holds the line. The Enchanter bends the arcane. The Sage unveils hidden truths. The Trickster thrives where no one else dares -- in shadows, in whispers, in the thin places between honour and survival. Assassin, Knave, Hunter, or something in between, the Trickster proves that guile can be sharper than steel."

Read more about the Blood Sword CRPG and add it to your Steam wishlist here.

Victorian-era D&D

Towards the end of my second year at college, I got a hankering to run a Victorian occult investigators campaign. This was 1978. There wasn’t yet GURPS or Cthulhu by Gaslight, so I used white box D&D rules only with spells capped at 2nd level. 3rd level spells were possible too, but only if found on scrolls. That way it wouldn’t all get too munchkin.

That was the idea. It didn’t stop the PCs slapping charm spells on suspects and just asking if they committed the crime, so investigation took a back seat to the usual OSR donnybrook with demons. If I were running it today I'd use a variant of the Dagon Warriors rules with sorcerers as well as psionics but spell-casting capped at maybe 3rd rank (4th rank from scrolls).

We had three player-characters. Father Simon Arkayne (Steve Foster) was a Catholic priest. A.X.E. Knolsbet (Andy Booth) was a gentleman detective and magic-user. And Tufton Beamish, Lord Beauchamp (Chris Elston) was a nobleman with a penchant for derring-do.

In the absence of a lot of spell-casting, there was much use of revolvers (there were few legal restrictions on those in 1890s Britain), sword-sticks and fisticuffs. The characters investigated murder cases, usually with a cult connection like this, often embroiling them in battles with mummies, werewolves or Babylonian demons. Sexton Blake and the Demon God was on TV and I had been a devotee of Sherlock Holmes in my teens. Blend those influences with Doctor Strange's interdimensional forays and a dash of Carnacki and John Silence (and, though I hate to admit it, Jules de Grandin) and you have a sense of what the games were like.

In fact, talking of Jules de Grandin...

That scene is taken straight from one of our adventures -- which, since it spilled over into the summer vacation, we had to complete by post. Paper letters with stamps, I mean, email not being a thing in those benighted times. Here's part of the very write-up I sent to the players:

The following term we even recorded a session in Steve's college rooms. That was long before actual play was a thing, and I have no idea if the cassette tape (1978, remember) still exists, but if I should come across it in a box in the attic, I'll digitize it and put it online.

Casket of Fays #17

There's a new Casket of Fays just out with the usual blend of high-quality writing and art, this time with some gorgeous full-colour pieces by Inigo Hartas for Jewelspider. 

I won't list all the good stuff on offer, but among the articles I liked were Alistair Smith's thoughts on how to cut the "Gallows Wood" scenario from The Elven Crystals down to a single session's gaming. Alistair makes some good points, and I should have done it forty years ago on our DW promotional tour when I had to run the adventure every evening for sales reps and book buyers -- and invariably ran out of time.

Casket of Fays issue 17 is now available on DriveThruRPG.

Doomed Ones (a sorcerous subclass for Dragon Warriors)

Doomed Ones were originally a magic-using character class that I created in 1980 for Adventure, a roleplaying game that Games Workshop commissioned me to write. (The title was their idea.) A Doomed One permanently burnt a point of Constitution to unlock about twenty quite powerful spells. The character got one use of each spell and at any time could sacrifice another Constitution point to get another use of the twenty. Since Constitution both set the basis for the character’s hit points and limited the number of times they could be resurrected, it was a death sentence with a lot of power to use up on your way to the grave.

Even if Adventure (did I mention that was GW’s idea?) had ever been published, I’m not sure Doomed Ones would have made the final cut. They were kind of boring. A player would cross off a couple of Constitution points, then stingily husband their forty spells in any encounter while letting other characters do the heavy lifting. Not that that couldn’t make for an interesting dynamic, just that there was only one story to tell there and it didn’t bear repeating dozens of times.

There’s a certain logic to revisiting the idea using Dragon Warriors, seeing as how DW evolved out of my notes for Adventure (huh, that title…). So here they are.

Doomed Ones

A Doomed One is a Sorcerer who has bound themselves under ominous stars in the pursuit of magical power to the exclusion of all else. The Doomed One is treated like a normal Sorcerer except as follows:

Attack, Defence, Stealth, Evasion and Health Points do not increase with rank. Magic Points increase faster than for regular Sorcerers.

Because Doomed Ones are half in love with easeful death, they are unaffected by fright attacks caused by ghosts and the undead.

Every Doomed One has a fate in the form of a death that has been prophesied for them -- their doom. When creating the character, the player specifies a time of day (night, morning, afternoon or evening) and a cause of death. Causes of death should be reasonably general, not “belladonna mixed into warm milk” or "bitten in the ankle by an adder", say. Pick from this list or (with the GM’s discretion) something similar:

A blunt weapon, a cat, a dog, an edged weapon, fire, a fish, a fungus, a horse, an insect, a lake or pond, a moat, an ox, a pig, a plant, a rat, a river, rope, sand, the sea, a serpent, a tree, wine.

In any situation in which the character is exposed to the fated element, object, or thing at the fated time of day, they are subject to a Magical Attack of 2d6 + (d6 x rank/2). If that overcomes the character’s Magical Defence they are slain, if necessary by a freak accident. Conversely, if they survive, the close brush with death immediately restores their full Magic Points and Health Points scores.

The GM should bear in mind that dying because of a fish could include choking on a fish bone, for example. Further inspiration is available by looking at unusual demises in antiquity, in medieval times, and in the Renaissance. Or even these bizarre 17th century deaths. However, a character who is careful to guard against their fate should not be arbitrarily imperilled. Don’t say, “A horse bolts towards you out of nowhere and knocks you down.” In that example, the character should only risk their doom if they have voluntarily approached a horse or a stable at the preordained time, or if the situation makes an encounter with a horse reasonably likely.

The prophecy doesn't entirely protect the Doomed One from death by other means. If reduced to –3 Health Points in circumstances where their prophesied fate doesn’t apply, they are incapacitated but remain alive. The character can be healed and will recover consciousness when at positive health points but thereafter is a parolee of fate, having cheated death because of their prophecy, and recovers only 50% of their Magic Points each day until such time as they are faced with the preordained circumstances, whereupon they are challenged by the Magical Attack described above; if they survive that then their full sorcerous abilities are restored.

If reduced to –3 Health Points when the foretold cause (but not necessarily time) of death is present, the Doomed One is slain in a way that ensures the fulfilment of the prophecy. (‘She might have dodged that fatal blow if that darned cat hadn’t distracted her at the crucial moment.’) In those circumstances no Magical Attack resolution is needed.

If the Doomed One is slain in a manner that leaves no possibility of doubt – for example, incinerated in a furnace or sliced into small pieces – and the ordained cause is not involved, it is left to the GM’s ingenuity to contrive some way for the cause to take post-mortem effect. For example, the character’s coffin might be dropped in a river on the way to the churchyard, or the funeral procession might be held up by a runaway horse.

It goes without saying that a Doomed One should be careful to keep their prophesied fate a secret. The GM should not reveal it in front of other players until the circumstances apply, and even then conceal the precise details. If our example character is foolishly riding a horse in the afternoon, and the horse stumbles and throws him or her to the ground, the other player-characters won’t necessarily know if it was the tree root in the road or an insect bite on the horse’s rump or the horse itself that was to blame.

OK, look, if you really insist -- and don't say I didn't warn you -- here is part of the original manuscript of Adventure from 1980 in which Doomed Ones first appeared. It's mostly interesting for the glimpse of the Assassins rules, which I used when writing Out of the Shadows (DW book 4), but both Doomed Ones and Shamans (also in the excerpt) would probably have been dropped, at least in that form, if Adventure had ever come out.

Wide open worlds

Over the next ten years, artificial intelligence looks set to radically transform almost every field you can think of. Astrophysics. Materials science. Medicine and health. Education. Communications. Particle physics. Energy production, storage and transmission. Space exploration. And, um, war.

Entertainment is low on the list of priorities, but of course I'm interested in the possibilities for games, and I'm delighted to see that Sir Demis Hassabis (my former employer at Elixir Studios) is still excited by that stuff too -- and that he's talking about open world games.

The most revolutionary thing about open world games is not the ability to go in any direction or to make persistent changes to the world. As in real life, what we most care about interacting with aren't things but people. Stories are compelling, at their heart, because of character, not because of plot. 

AI opens up a host of new opportunities there. When I'm running a roleplaying game, I conjure up NPCs as needed. Some NPCs turn out to be more than walk-on parts. They can become as important to the story as the player-characters, which means I need to remember their background and goals. I need to keep them as personae that I can slip on at any time. AI can do that. You leave a magic sword at a farm, say. The farmer's lad you regaled with tales of adventure finds the sword. Much later, you might run across him -- now a renowned adventurer in his own right, jealousy guarding that sword that he really hopes you won't ask him to give back.

But the AI can do more than keep track of NPCs and their relationship to you. It can function as the game referee, judging when you need clues to steer you on the right track or when a lull in the action calls for a random encounter. This is what Jamie and I called the "god AI" when we compiled our design wishlist for the Fabled Lands MMO we hoped to develop at Eidos in the late 1990s. It only took thirty years, but now it's finally within our grasp.

Canaries in a lunar mine

At one point in Cthulhu 2050: Whispers Beyond The Stars, the protagonist (that's you) might need to travel to the Moon. There are extensive lunar colonies with about ten thousand people living there, but they’re almost all working in highly specialized technical jobs and a ticket to the Moon isn’t cheap. So how are you going to get up there?

My process of collaboration with Paweł Dziemski was that I wrote the first draft, comprising about half the sections, and Paweł then expanded that and in doing so he had to fix all the loose ends and plot holes that I’d blithely left in my wake. (See how sneaky I am?) So I pondered what skills the protagonist could offer to convince a corporation to pay for them to go to the Moon – assuming that by that point in the game you haven’t saved enough credits to buy your own ticket and aren’t stealthy enough to stow away. One possibility was this:

I’d been focusing on how to make colonies in space credible. In short, if you have super-intelligent robots, why send humans at all, other than maybe a few supervisors? One job I figured that robots couldn’t do to everyone’s satisfaction was sex work*. Most humans will probably continue to prefer screwing a partner with no nuts and bolts. Well, with no bolts, anyway.

I was thinking of the SF I read back in the early 1970s, when the Western world was a lot less prudish than today. But Paweł gave me a reality check, pointing out that a digital gamebook might be played by children, and (again, unlike the ‘70s) parents get very prissy about controlling what their kids see and read.

I hadn’t thought of that. On an episode of his Cautionary Tales podcast, Tim Harford talks about Alvin Roth’s theory of repugnant markets. Repugnant markets include trade in kidneys and (in many countries) prostitution. Roth solved the kidney transplant problem with the concept of an exchange – if two people in need of the service (a transplant) both had a willing donor (say a relative) whose tissue type was incompatible with them but would work for the stranger, the market could put them in touch with each other. The equivalent trade in a society that regards prostitution as a repugnant market would be partner-swapping parties or orgies – effectively an exchange in sexual services.

“A profession that is always violent at its core,” is one common view of prostitution. That’s similar to the argument that used to be heard in the 1960s that homosexual politicians were more likely to fall prey to foreign spies. Such politicians were more at risk of blackmail, but not because of their innate character and sexual preferences; it was because society at the time marginalized and even outlawed those preferences. It was a self-fulfilling prophecy.

I’d anticipated a future in which prostitution was legal, regulated, and therefore no longer controlled by human traffickers and violent criminals. But that’s a 20th century liberal view of the future, not the thinking of a culture now dominated by American puritanism. Paweł was quite right. We didn’t want irate parents and fundamentalist religious groups creating a fuss, so we quietly shelved the sex-work option and went for this instead:

That’s way better. When you have to abandon your first idea, the second thought is usually a big improvement. Murder your darlings, as Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch said. My version was merely satirical: the best job an underskilled human can hope for in a fully automated future is hiring out their body for sex. Paweł’s revised version is genuinely chilling: humans are used for dangerous work because they are cheaper to replace than the top-quality robot models. We got there by a process of collaboration, which proves that two heads are better than one – and not just in bed.

* Nick Bostrom suggests two other professions he thinks people won't want robots/AIs to do: priest and politician. He could be right. I find it hard to believe there are still priests in the 21st century, but then it's not the 21st century I signed up for. As for politicians -- if AI couldn't do that job better, it really isn't worth bothering with.

Looking forward and looking back

2025 is the fortieth anniversary of Dragon Warriors and, although not much has been done to mark that, it's also the fortieth anniversary of the world of Legend, the setting for both DW and the Blood Sword gamebooks. And Blood Sword is undergoing an exciting metamorphosis into a stunning-looking CRPG by Prime Games, developers of the Fabled Lands game.

Meticulous care is going into this new incarnation of Blood Sword. A living map with wind, snow, rain, glowing fires, chimney smoke. Unfolding story notes with a stream-of-consciousness effect. Skill trees including a spell progession system with clear and impactful choices, drawing inspiration from the sorcerer and elementalist professions in Dragon Warriors. Vividly realized characters.

You can read all about it on the game's page on Steam. (Make sure to wishlist it so you don't miss out on all the fascinating development updates by creative lead Victor Atanasov.)

Completely unrelated to the official Blood Sword CRPG, this fan-built version has a charming retro look that wouldn't have been out of place 40 years ago. It's a lot less developed in terms of gameplay, being essentially just the original books but on a screen, but I like the old-school restyling of the tactical maps. If we were back in 1985, this is the version I'd have liked to release then.

And more gamebook news: Heart of Ice is just out in a new digital edition on Steam, PlayStation, Xbox and Nintendo Switch. It's published by Infinite Zone and you can find all the links on the game's landing page. You can also buy the book on DriveThruRPG and Amazon.

Echoes from outer voids

H P Lovecraft would have been 135 years old today -- though, let's be honest, that's just an excuse to do something with the pun* on Dragon Warriors, celebrating only its 40th anniversary. (Incidentally, this is an abbreviated version of a post that appeared on my Jewelspider Patreon page; go there for more lively awfulness.)

Dagon Warriors uses a variant of the Dragon Warriors rules for Prohibition-era adventures. Characters are categorized into types depending on how they deal with adversaries. These are not descriptive of the character’s role in the game; a character could be a private eye, a cop, a war veteran, a gangster, a librarian, a scientist, a reporter, a sculptor, or whatever they like – and still be of any type.

• The Boxer (corresponds to DW Knight) fights scientifically.
• The Brawler (like the DW Barbarian) flings themselves into the fray with fists and feet.
• The Psionic (DW Mystic) has recourse to paranormal abilities.
• The Scout (DW Assassin) relies on stealth and observation.

The world of the Cthulhu Mythos is science fiction, not fantasy – at least, it is in this version. So there is no sorcery, even though the powers of the mind might sometimes seem uncanny. MAGICAL ATTACK and MAGICAL DEFENCE are renamed PSYCHIC ATTACK and PSYCHIC DEFENCE in these rules. We also recommend capping character progression at 10th rank to prevent the game turning into HPL-meets-the-MCU.

Boxers get the following special skills:

• Disarm (applies to any weapon, not just swords)
• Two-handed fighting (fists, improvised weapons or handguns)
• Marksman (equivalent to Master Bowman in DW)
• Quick Draw
• Haymaker (equivalent to DW Swordmaster but applies to a punch)

Brawlers get the special skill See Red (equivalent to DW Bloodrage)

Psionic powers (equivalent to Mystic spells) are:

Level One

• Invigorate
• Suspended Animation

Level Two

• Darksight
• Might
• Pursuit

Level Three

• Allseeing Eye
• Mind Cloak
• Nourish
• Telekinesis

Level Four

• Clairvoyance
• Hidden Target
• Telepathy

Level Five

• Force Field
• Truthsense

Level Six

• Purification
• Survival

Psionics also get the abilities of Premonition, ESP and Awakening (corresponding to DW Adepthood).

Scouts do not have the alchemical or special combat abilities (throwing spikes, shock attack, etc) of a DW Assassin. Unlike DW Assassins, their ATTACK and DEFENCE scores increase by 1 every other rank (at 3rd, 5th, 7th rank, etc) and their Health Points increase by 1 at 2nd, 4th, 6th rank, etc. Their special skills are limited to:

• Stealth
• Inner Sense
• Meditation techniques up to Void Trance (8th rank)
• Climbing
• Disguise
• Pilfer
• Picklock
• Track
• Memorize

Firearms

Player-characters do not wear armour. We have to be prescriptive about that otherwise you will end up with players like the guy in our Wild West campaign who insisted on tooling around town in a Conquistador breastplate. They may cite the gunfighter James Miller, but – no. Just no.

You could wear a bullet-proof vest. It’s encumbering (reduce ATTACK by 2 and STEALTH by 5) and when hit you first roll to see if the bullet struck the torso (indicated by 4-6 on d6) and if it does the AF is 8. The vest won’t stop you getting hurt – you’ll still take damage, and you’ll feel like you’ve been kicked by a Pierson's Puppeteer, but if the shooter didn’t make their armour bypass roll then you won’t be killed.

Revolver (d10+1, 5 points)

• Range (S/M/L): 20m/50m/75m
• Fires every round for six shots. Takes 6 rounds to reload completely.

Rifle (d12, 9 points)

• Range: 50m/100m/200m
• Bolt-action: requires 1 CR to load a single round or 5 CRs to reload a full magazine (5 rounds).

Firearms jam on an ATTACK roll of 20, requiring 1-3 rounds to fix.

Creatures

Some examples of Mythos creatures are given below. It’s not anticipated that player-characters will go toe-to-tentacle with such beings, however. If they did, their adventuring careers would not be long. Adversaries will usually be cultists (deluded humans who imagine their prayers are noticed by powerful otherworldly entities) and servants who have been forced or hypnotized into doing the bidding of an alien creature – as in the scenario "Abnormal Growth" which accompanies these rules in the original Patreon post, and the title of this post gives a hint as to what that scenario is about.

* The suggestion was originally John Hagan's, it just took me nearly a decade to get around to it.

Let's be serious

Broadly speaking there are two approaches to literature and drama. One view is that it’s entertainment, it should be fun, and it shouldn’t challenge you or make you feel uncomfortable. That’s a strain that’s developed in Britain and America particularly and used to be known as the Young Lady Standard. The term is particularly unfair seeing as Emily Bronte wrote one of the most uncompromising novels of all time. Nowadays we’re hopefully less sexist and young ladies get the same educational benefits as young gentlemen, so let’s instead call it the Cosy Standard. In TV broadcasting it’s the equivalent of pre-watershed content.

On the other hand, fiction can take you right into the depths of the human soul to confront both the marvellous and the terrible. It can shake you up. Read Chekhov’s short story “In the Ravine” or Flaubert’s Madame Bovary or Nabokov’s – oh, well almost anything by Nabokov, in fact. You’ll face some profound truths. Like all great art, these works can change you. But you’d never say of them, “Oh, it’s entertainment, it’s just a bit of fun.”

That’s even more true of games, where the very name of the medium leads people into assuming it has to be frivolous and jolly. When Profile Books published my interactive version of Frankenstein, one reviewer complained that she didn’t want to be complicit in the creature’s murder of 6-year-old William Frankenstein. Too bad. Every reader of the novel who finds themselves sympathizing with the creature is going to have to face that moment. The game version just really rubs your nose in it. There are games like Papers, Please and This War of Mine that are trying to be L'Armée des Ombres rather than a boys'-own romp like Kelly's Heroes.

This is the point Jim Desborough was making with his widely (and often deliberately) misrepresented article “In Defence of Rape”. If you’re a grown-up, you look to fiction (including games) to tell the truth, not wrap the world up in a comforting nursery blanket.

This exact point came up recently in the case of a motion capture performer who refused to act out a rape scene for a game. That is their right, no question about that. And I have no idea what the game was, so I don’t know if the performer was correctly judging it when they said, "It was just purely gratuitous in my opinion." But it wouldn’t have to be gratuitous. Suppose this is a WW2 game. You’re sneaking into a Nazi-occupied village to plant some explosives or steal the attack plans or whatever. Stealth is the watchword. But you pass a window where you see an enemy soldier raping a villager. (Or torturing a villager. Or even in the act of murdering them, since this isn’t Victorian times and we don’t buy into “the fate worse than death”.)

Now here’s the question. Do I shoot the Nazi soldier? In doing so I’ll save the villager but I’ll give away my presence in the village, jeopardising the mission. Or do I pass by, hardening my heart to the villager’s screams because many lives hinge on the success of the mission and so it’s more important than one innocent person? It’s the Trolley Problem but not presented in the dispassionate context of a philosophy lecture. The decision is brutal and I’m going to have to live with it. The choices that confront you with challenges to your most fundamental moral principles are the ones that fuel the most powerful stories, because they make us think hard about who we really are.

As I said, I don’t know if that’s what the game’s designers were trying to do. But you would expect good literature or cinema to confront you with raw and disturbing situations like that. Games are an art form no less capable than literature or drama of addressing difficult moral questions. Games can be simple uncomplicated fun, of course, and many are. But that’s not all they can be.

Theatre of the artificial mind

Picking up from last time, another entertainment use for AI will be in staging plays that we otherwise wouldn't get to see. Ben Jonson's The Alchemist, for instance, which Coleridge regarded as one of the three "most perfect" plots in all of fiction. (If you're anything like me you'll immediately need to know that the others were Fielding's Tom Jones and Sophocles's Oedipus Tyrannus.) You can find amateur versions online like the one above, but no fully staged production. Likewise for many plays of Aeschylus, Aristophanes, Euripides, Ibsen, Chekhov, Pinter, Stoppard, Coward... The list is endless. 

To illustrate: lately I've had a hankering for the plays of Martin McDonagh, but just reading them isn't enough. I want to see them performed. Until now, if all you had was a script or audio file, the only way you could see a performance was if somebody went to the trouble of animating the whole thing by hand, the way the BBC did with "The Power of the Daleks" having (curse them) wiped the original videotapes.

With AI, animation of a play no longer need take a dozen-strong team working for months on end. It can be improvised on the fly using the script. With a little set-up the AI could even base the performances on digital twins of famous actors from history. It could also help to make movies that are considered too niche or too expensive for traditional production.

If the last couple of posts haven't exhausted your interest in AI, it's one of the topics I recently discussed with Riccardo Scaringi on his podcast. We also talked about Blood Sword, Fabled Lands, Dragon Warriors, Elon Musk, Vulcanverse, Cthulhu 2050, Shadow King, Jewelspider and the films of Woody Allen, so there's plenty there for the non-AI buffs:

I appreciate that using AI for entertainment is mere frippery compared to the applications in healthcare, environmental measures, materials science, energy technology, and pure science. And beyond that, and far more important, is the eventual role of strong AI not merely as a new human tool but a whole new companion species. But on the way there a little digital alchemy won't hurt.

An audience of one

There's Matthew Berman reminding us that future is coming up faster than you think. He's talking about videogaming, but the same principles apply to movies, comics, and literature.

The novel – at least, the genre novel – may well go the way of the epic poem, to be replaced by something more like an RPG session which an AI will run for the reader. (Or, more likely, the listener or viewer.) The top authors will devise the elements of the story, the characters and timeline (perhaps more like creative directors than old-style authors) and the AI will use that to tell a story that gives prominence to the bits that interest the individual reader. Did your parents make up stories to tell you when you were little? Like that. Or maybe like this.

You'll still discuss the story with friends (an important feature of most entertainment) but the specific events in your version may vary from theirs. Initially such on-the-fly stories will be trite because roleplaying has been infected by a lot of Hollywood pablum about act structure and story tropes, and that’s what the AI models will learn from. But eventually it may shake that off and become a new independent art form. "Not a line, but a bolt of lightning," as C W Longbottom puts it:

In the meantime, a market will remain – small, though, and shrinking – for grown-up fiction that doesn’t pander to YA tastes. Genre fiction falls in predictable patterns involving plot, and so is easily copied by novice writers and neural nets, whereas literary fiction is harder to fit to a formula because it usually concerns itself with the unique outlook and choices of the characters. But don't assume that because the AI hasn't experienced human emotions it won't eventually be able to write Lolita or War & Peace. Conrad didn't personally have to hack his way through an African jungle to learn how to write Heart of Darkness. It's only a matter of time before those more complex story patterns are learned and replicated by AI, just the same way that most authors do it. And then we'll be in a whole new world of entertainment.

An old soul reborn

We'll have an in-depth report on this in a month or so in the form of a guest post by author Paul Gresty, but I couldn't let the summer pass without letting you know that The Castle of Lost Souls has been completely reworked as a Fabled Lands Quest.

I'm sure I don't have to tell you that it was originally published in four parts in White Dwarf magazine from April to July 1984. I revised it for the Golden Dragon series the following year, but those changes were nothing beside the transformation that Mr Gresty has wrought. The book is now more than twice as big at 700 sections, the action takes place in Golnir in the Fabled Lands, and you have the option of dropping in and out of the adventure at several points.

To quote from the blurb, this edition of The Castle of Lost Souls sports "a huge amount of original content, including resurrection rules, the ability to travel back and forth between this book and others in the Fabled Lands series, a range of completely new magical items for the Fabled Lands setting, and much more." And that's without mentioning all the scrumptious Leo Hartas illustrations, which haven't been seen since the original 1980s edition.

The bells, the bells!

Chime Born characters are those whose time of birth marks them out from others. In the north-western parts of the world of Legend (especially Ellesland, Chaubrette and Kurland) this is believed to confer special abilities. Roll 5d6 during character creation and consult the table:

Technically the character must have been born within the sound of church bells, not merely at those times of day, which implies they were born in or near a town, monastery or large village where the bells would be rung at regular times.

Given the rolls required, characters like this will obviously be very rare, but I agree with Damien Walter that the value of role-playing rulebooks is not only in deciding what happens in a specific game, but to tantalize with all the possibilities that might occur. Glimpses of other possibilities or future games; the hint of the bulk of the iceberg floating darkly below you. So there will be some folkloric touches like this that may never apply to your PCs personally, but will nonetheless colour how players see the world.

I originally considered the Chime Born feature for the Jewelspider RPG but it ended up on the cutting-room floor, at least as an overt game mechanic. It smacks too much of 18(00) strength in the old days of D&D -- a footling detail that isn't worth including if players are really just going to accept the vagaries of statistical chance. But I expect the Chime Born to get mentioned somewhere (perhaps in a scenario or in the magic section of the rulebook) even if they're not a PC option, and they could work very well in Dragon Warriors if not in the lower-fantasy version of Legend that is the setting of Jewelspider.

A firestorm of fear

HUSK by Stanley R Barnes is a roleplaying game in a unique post-apocalyptic setting. Eons ago, a worldwide pestilence in the form of giant wasps consumed nearly everything. The resulting ecological collapse left behind a largely barren landscape plagued by powerful windstorms, toxic rain, and scorching heat. Humanity survived by finding shelter within the desiccated remains of the colossal insects, converting the husks’ innards into habitable (and sometimes mobile) habitats.

The player-characters are small crews and families struggling to survive not only the unforgiving elements but also the machinations of rivals and the constant threat of the living dead that emerge at night. The game emphasizes that humanity may never resolve its dire situation, but must endure the consequences of past generations. The primary currency is water, with bronze, silver, gold, and gems valued in terms of gallons of water.

HUSK uses a dice-based attribute system. Attributes are compared to a target number or opposed dice rolls to determine success. Characters are defined by six attributes: Might, Endurance, Nimbleness, Deftness, Fortitude, and Reasoning. Character creation involves assigning dice types (1d4, 1d6, 1d8) to these attributes, with no more than two of the same die type. Success is determined by rolling the appropriate attribute die against a target number which ranges from 1 (no effort) to 10 (Herculean). Modifiers from Guild Affiliations, Mastery Levels, or Special Abilities can influence the roll.

The game features various guilds such as Raiders, Roamers, Bounty Hunters, Tinkerers, Explorers, and Families, each granting a +1 modifier to a specific attribute. Mastery levels (Unskilled, Apprentice, Journeyman, Master) are gained through experience and training.

Combat is procedural and deadly, with attacks involving rolls that factor in attributes, weapon modifiers, and armour. The mechanics include Armour Bypass Rolls and Armour/Weapon Durability Rolls, simulating the wear and tear of conflict.

But the thing that most distinguishes HUSK is its setting, a far future that at the same time has resonances of ancient times. It’s far from being yet another twist on a familiar trope. The unsettling, hallucinatory atmosphere draws inspiration from multiple sources and takes its substance from various features of the world:

• The emphasis on a gritty, survivalist approach , dangerous combat, and the importance of resource management (eg water as a medium of exchange).
• The focus on deep world-building and a desire to provide a truly novel experience rather than relying on familiar tropes.
• The constant threat from merciless elements, ravenous night creatures, and the aftershocks of a catastrophic past, combined with the grim outlook that humanity may never resolve its situation, positions the game firmly within the survival horror subgenre.
• The barren wasteland, the struggle for survival against nature and other human factions, and the use of scavenged or repurposed structures (giant wasp husks as homes ) strongly evoke works like the Mad Max film series – and, for me, the unsentimental travails of the characters in Survivors.
• The game abounds in mystery and discovery, exploring the grotesque and the wondrous in the tradition of weird fiction authors like H.P. Lovecraft or Jeff VanderMeer (Annihilation, etc), where the horror comes from the unknown and environments that defy conventional understanding.
• Beyond the broad post-apocalyptic genre, specific elements like the constant need for water, the threat of disease, and the emphasis on resourcefulness are reminiscent of stories where characters must meticulously manage supplies and face persistent environmental threats.

HUSK presents a bleak yet intriguing world that eschews conventional fantasy/SF tropes for a unique blend of post-apocalyptic survival, weird horror, and a gritty, old-school roleplaying sensibility. An old friend of mine borrowed one of my copies of HUSK and got back to me that very night to supply a rave review, containing amongst other sentiments that he was powerfully reminded of quality RPGs of the Golden Age -- exercises in classic imaginative world building that hooked him into gaming since the '70s and ever since. If that sounds appealing, you can get the game now on DriveThruRPG or Amazon.