Here's a Legend scenario that originally appeared on my Patreon page. Sign up there (you don't have to pay anything) if you want to get these goodies early. We keep hearing these days about fantasy roleplaying being 'colonial'; here's an adventure where the colonials get their comeuppance!
The characters are in Outremer when they learn of the siege of Asun, a city on the coast of the Sea of Lament. It has been blockaded for months by a mercenary fleet financed by trading houses of Ferromaine, and now a Crusader army is closing in on it by land with the intention of wresting it from Zhenir at least long enough to sack the place.
The characters have heard of the wizard Zakhar (his name is actually Zakariya) whose magnificent House of Wonders stands in the Old Quarter of Asun. ‘Too many treasures there for Zakhar to salvage them all,’ reckons one authority on the subject. ‘He’ll escape with the choicest items, but there’s a chance his library will still have a few works not seen in the West for centuries. That’s if the Capellars don’t torch all the books as soon as they get into the city.’
It doesn’t matter whether or not the characters join in the capture of Asun, though it will be more effective if they do, especially if they have to circumvent some magical trap left by Zakhar to protect his home. At any rate, they either find or are subsequently offered a curio found behind a brick in the House of Wonders: a double-shelled bottle with an outer surface of swirling turquoise glass with gaps that reveal a secretive shell of black crystal beneath. The stopper is a gold plug stamped with a sigil unfamiliar to the most learned Coradian scholars. (Or even Ta'ashim scholars, come to that.)
If the stopper is removed, time stands still for all but the characters around the bottle. They become aware that their company now includes one who was not there before, though they have no memory of him joining them.
If they insist on giving him a name, he suggests they could call him Samum. ‘At this hour, when you gather, think on the wish of your hearts. Three wishes I will grant, but only when you speak together, and the wish shall be as the words you speak.’
They awake, realizing they had all dozed off, and the other is no longer with them. Nor can they remember his face.
The jinni will come each day at the same hour, but only if they are all gathered together. They can make one wish each time, and when all three wishes have been spoken the jinni will then bring about the exact opposite, one wish at a time on each of the next three days, the jinni manifesting now beside the bottle at the appointed hour whether or not all the characters assemble there.
Why the reversed wishes? Because the situation was not as it seemed. They did not free the jinni because it was never really trapped in the bottle in the first place. The stopper was a fake – that’s why no one can identify the sigil. The Ta’ashim wizard Zakariya, knowing his city was going to fall to the Coradians, left the jinni as a booby trap. He commanded it (using the last of his own three wishes) to pretend to be imprisoned until the stopper was removed, then to learn the three desires of the Coradians and do the opposite to what they want.
(Was this not a way of Zakariya effectively using his last wish to obtain three more wishes? Jinn are usually alert to such wiles, but in this case the jinni approves so greatly of the malice and ingenuity involved that it's prepared to overlook that.)
If the characters can find the original stopper with Suleiman’s seal (they would know him as 'Salamin', if at all) they might be able to fix things. Zakariya left it with a servant who was supposed to throw it in the well, but instead he sold it to a trader in curiosities in Asun market.
Armed with the genuine stopper, they could trick the jinni into returning to the bottle using the old ploy of ‘I can’t believe you could fit inside this…’ The jinni appears each day at the same hour, even after hearing the three wishes and then conjuring their opposite, in order to relish their misery. Naturally the jinni is just as aware of old myths as they are, but will happily enter the bottle because it thinks they have only the fake stopper, which has no power to seal it inside.
If they succeed in trapping the jinni and then release it for real, it is obliged to grant three wishes – this time playing it straight and doing exactly as they ask, not the reverse. It’s quite likely they’ll need at least one of those true wishes to fix the trouble the bad wishes caused, and of course if a wish is not phrased just right it can cause fresh problems of its own, even when granted properly.
How should the jinni look? You may have quite a job reclaiming the terrifying majesty of the concept from the creaky stage and screen versions we’re all used to. In movies jinn are almost never depicted as native to the region where they were originally minor deities. In Pasolini’s Il Fiore Delle Mille e una Note, the jinni has red hair. My favourite screen jinn are both played by John Leguizamo in Peter Barnes’s Arabian Nights miniseries, but Leguizamo is Spanish-Columbian. The Thief of Bagdad began a long tradition of having African-Americans play jinn (the magnificent Rex Ingram in this case) and I shudder to think that’s perhaps because Hollywood producers associate commanding a jinni with having a slave though, to be fair, later Arabic folktales also often portray a jinni’s natural form as black-skinned.
But how about if we look back to the original myths? Jinn there are creatures of smokeless fire (which is possibly how ancient Arabs described light) so maybe the jinni could manifest as a dazzling glow with a flickering face inside. Trouble is, that’s getting too FX-ish, which is the very opposite of magical. So in the end I opted to just make this one the classic shape changer, so protean that it was like an ambiguous figure met in a dream. And the jinn freely change their appearance in The Thousand and One Nights, so who could hope to pin them down any more than we can know how many quarks are dancing on the head of a proton?
"Samum" incidentally is a desert wind that brings sickness. A player might look that up and suspect a trap, but after all isn’t it exactly the kind of thing you’d expect a jinni to be called?
How likely is the Jinn to answer questions if asked?
ReplyDeleteI'm also curious how much leeway a Jinn has to interpret the instructions given. For example, what might the Jinn do if the characters wish for something of which there is no effective opposite, or of which the opposite ambiguous or debatable?
Finally what if the characters take an altruistic approach and wish for the Jinn to be freed? Would it be bound to enslave itself once more? Potentially that is a route to then getting it to grant real wishes, as though the true stopper has been found?
If The Arabian Nights is any guide, conversations with jinni are fraught with snares. They are as deliberately misleading as any Western faerie or devil.
DeleteThe jinn is bound to do the opposite of what the PCs want, rather than simply reverse each wish, which ought to deal with ambiguities. If the characters happen on a wish that cannot be twisted to work against their desired outcome, that will be interesting. Saying, "We wish that you be free" could one such. Technically the opposite (which is what it's actually constrained to do) is like wishing for more wishes, which is an illegal move in magic wishing -- so that might actually break the spell, though a thousand stories suggest the jinni wouldn't react with anything resembling mortal gratitude.
Alternatively, how about this for a particularly evil-minded way of interpreting such a wish... What's the opposite of granting a jinni his freedom? Binding the person attempting that command into eternal servitude!