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. 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.

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.

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.

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.