The Conclave: unreliable narrators

For the third session of our Earthsea-adjacent campaign The Conclave, here are three write-ups of what happened, one from the point of view of my character Surma, another by Frazer Payne's character Idhelruin, and a third version by Tim Savin's character, an inquisitor called Eli. (I didn't actually know what inquisitors are in Earthsea, not having read the books, and even after the campaign wrapped I wasn't much wiser.) The rest of the Conclave were: Wax of Ear (Oliver Johnson), Farris "Ironside" Mundir (Inigo Hartas), Hurstyk the Whisperer (Paul Gilham), and Aareth "Wolf"/"Rabbit" (Aaron Fortune).

SESSION THREE

As we sailed east, I walked the ship familiarizing myself with the true names of the strakes and timbers, sheets and sails. Hurstyk took note. ‘Why are you doing that?’ he asked.

‘Wait and you will see.’ I had forgotten that the minds of mortals are bound by Time.

In due course we spied a ship athwart our course, its sails furled and barely stirring in what had been until now a brisk breeze. Its flag hung limp, yet we could make out the design of a pale moon on a white field. It was the ship of the nameless man, Jude.

‘A trap?’ was Ironside’s judgement.

‘We could go round,’ suggested Hurstyk.

At sea Aareth was once again a wolf, not a rabbit. ‘My crew are well trained. Let’s go alongside and board it.’

‘I’ll sink it, shall I?’ called Wax from the back of his turtle.

‘But there might be innocents aboard,’ protested Eli. ‘Women and small children, or slaves.’ He pinched the bridge of his nose and looked with other senses. ‘No, it’s just our enemies.’

Sprugel the turtle submerged, but soon returned. ‘Around the ship is dead water,’ said Wax. ‘Fish writhe and die as they approach. I did not like to go closer.’

By now the vessel had begun rowing towards us. There came a sense of taint on the wind, and with it a dulling of magic. I called for a hurricane I know of and it came in a rush. No hurricane is of temperate manner, but this one was in a foul mood. It swept down on us and on the other ship. The masts bent. Rigging snapped. The sails strained and were torn away.

‘Mercy on us!’ cried a chorus of terrified voices. ‘We split! We split!’

But I knew every name of every part of the vessel. Even as it lurched and spun before the wind, I remade it. The mast, twice as stout, sprouted in a strong spiral like the tree that holds the world. The hull reshaped itself, sleeker and stronger than ever. Vast sails spread like dragons’ wings, catching the full fury of the storm and bearing us swiftly before it.

Our foe, his vessel surrounded as it was by a zone of dead magic, could not transform it in like manner. We soon lost sight of it floundering far astern amid the crashing waves.

As we sailed on, it seemed a good time to consult the books I had brought from the library. ‘It will be arduous to make these pages speak aloud,’ I mused, holding one by its cover as though it were a dead bird.

‘I shall read,’ said Eli, opening On Those Who Have No True Name. He stared at the title page, trying to focus. ‘That’s strange. Can you make out the author’s name? It is obscured.’

I looked. The letters were a blur, but I discerned the name. ‘Lord Pale. I’m getting notes of maggots, grave cerements and decayed bones.’

Eli concentrated for a moment. ‘It seems connected to the ship we saw… Yes, I have it! The last person to look in this book was a man called Felt, or something of the sort. He was aboard Jude’s vessel, I’m sure of it. He has a true name, but by some means he has made it indiscernible.’

‘Let’s look at one of the others,’ said Aareth, taking up Slayings of the White Watcher. The first page showed a woodcut of a pale figure far off in a barren landscape. The pages turned themselves, more and more swiftly, and in each successive picture the figure drew nearer, nearer.

‘Enough of that.’ Ironside stepped forward, reached over Aareth’s shoulder, and slammed the book shut.

‘Let’s not look at the third one,’ agreed Aareth, visibly shaken by his literary encounter with the White Watcher.

Idhelruin was gazing up into the sky, now scoured to a clear blue as the hurricane veered off in a huff. ‘That gull…’ he mused. ‘Is it a gull?’

‘Shoot it down, men,’ cried Wax.

‘Come here,’ I told the bird, and it alighted on the deck. Idhelruin was right, this was no gull but a transformed wizard. I discerned his true name, or as much of it as I needed, and restored him to his normal form. An old man with a long white beard was crouching there on the deck before me.

‘I would not want Surma to learn my true name,’ remarked Ironside to Eli.

‘Of a certainty he would use it to destroy you,’ agreed Eli – this conversation occurring just seconds after they had seen me rescue a wizard who had become trapped in his own enchantment.

The old man looked up. ‘I thank you. I took that form to flee a dreaded foe, but I began to lose my own nature within that of the gull.’

‘I need no magic, then, to divine who you are,’ I replied. ‘You appear a trembling dotard, you are motivated by timidity, and your own spell nearly doomed you. Clearly you are one of the wizards of Hythe.’

‘Mirrorwaith!’ cried Idhelruin, helping the old man to his feet. ‘This man is my master. Fetch him a cloak, someone.’

‘Whom did you flee?’ asked Aareth.

Mirrorwaith pressed a hand to his brow, recalling his human memories. It was clear he recognized Aareth. ‘In Franmouth, Duke Dartness has a new advisor. You are supplanted by one calling himself Feltas, who now has the lord’s ear. He wears a ring of white gold. It was fear of him that drove me thence.’

‘You don’t seem frightened now,’ pointed out Hurstyk.

‘Of a truth, I recall the fear but as I stand among you it seems like the unreasoning dread a child might have experienced. I suspect Feltas ensorcelled me.’

‘We’ll learn more at Hythe,’ said Aareth.

Ironside was struck with a sudden realization. ‘We’ve sailed past Hythe. It was masked from us by magic.’

‘This comes as no surprise,’ said Wax, who stood alongside the rail on the back of his turtle. ‘There are myriad deadly dangers bestride the land. A plague. Men with no name whom magic cannot scathe. An unstoppable figure from the realm of death. The assassination of wizards. Faced with such calamities, of course the reaction of the knitting circle of Hythe would be to hide in a cupboard and twitter fearfully.’

It was agreed we would sail on to Franmouth, and enter the port not in our own ship – now very distinctive with its masts like fantastical saurian spines, its living alar sails, the organic moulding of its bulwarks and the glittering tegument that now armoured its hull – but aboard one of the trading vessels whose captains were known to Hurstyk.

Before we transferred to the other ship, I took a flying fish that one of the sailors had caught and stripped it of its scales, putting these in a small leather pouch.

The quayside at Franmouth was teeming with travellers from other isles, so we presented not too outlandish an appearance – other than Wax, standing naked with his coral spear.

‘We’ll travel in these carts,’ said Idhelruin. ‘I know a place up in the hills above the port, close by the abandoned lighthouse. Feltas goes there each night in the small hours to converse with the twelve grandees of the town, newcomers all, who now hold sway over its trade and commerce.’

‘I will walk,’ announced Wax.

I could see his point, but I had never before travelled in a cart and was intrigued by the novelty of it. The god of swift death riding in a slow cart – the poetic fancy of it struck me. At some point I must find a talented dramatist and command him to author a play with such a scene in it. But that is for another day. We set off up the track into the hills.

Idhelruin had promised us a ghastly hovel and he was as good as his word. The windows were gaping holes in the dank wattle and daub, the door a rotted plank, the roof mere scraps of straw. Behind it on the crest of the hill stood the lighthouse, in scarcely better repair.

Inside was of course colder than out. Taking a clay pitcher from something that must once have been a table, Idhelruin poured himself a cup. ‘Be welcome, friends,’ he said. ‘This is poor stuff, but to me it tastes like the finest wine.’

‘It is the finest wine,’ I told him. And so it was, now that my word had made it so, and yet I saw a trace of disappointment cloud his brow as he sipped. Could it be that he preferred his own imagination to the reality I wrought?

We fell to planning. It was agreed that our most skilled shape-changers should enter the lighthouse at midnight in the form of a bat and a mouse in order to eavesdrop on what Feltas said to his lieutenants.

The door fell open (quite literally) and Wax staggered in. ‘I met a nice man called Harper who gave me drugs and I gave him drugs and he wanted me to go home with him but I said no there are people waiting and I went and he didn’t follow me but he waved and I saw his sapphire ring.’

‘It wasn’t sapphire, was it?’ I said. ‘It was white gold.’

‘Mmm,’ agreed Wax, sinking to the dirt floor in a stupor. ‘White gold.’

Hurstyk shook his head. ‘And it was such a good plan.’

Eli looked around. ‘He is coming here now with twelve others. And those twelve have no true names.’

Aareth began to weave an enchantment that would selectively admit or bar the door against whoever he chose. Hurstyk bent over Wax, using herbcraft to restore his senses. Ironside magically fortified his strength in readiness for battle.

I went outside and addressed every insect, rodent and night creature for a mile in all directions, commanding them to my will. A second spell transformed them into monsters of their kind – bats with scything fangs, mosquitoes bigger than hornets, adders whose toxin would cast a man into blistering agony, crickets with bladed limbs to slice skin as the fabled river fish of southern jungles are said to.

At a hundred yards off we saw them coming up across the downs, moonlight painting their faces pale as mannikins. ‘Zombies..?’ mused Aareth.

‘Let us find out. Even zombies can be stripped clean by sharp teeth and rasping mandibles.’ And I sent my swarm, a vast black bank like a thunderhead, up out of the grass and thickets to assail them.

They staggered, but even with a hundred cuts and their eyes swollen shut with stings they continued towards us, axes and clubs in their hands.

‘I’ll make their trousers fall down,’ said Eli. But even that had little effect beyond the simply comical.

Wax lurched out of the hovel, gulping fresh night air to clear his head. ‘I’ll call on lightning,’ he said. A trifle jejune, I thought, us having already tried that same ploy in our fight with the Watcher on Dain, but after all why change a winning formula?

And as the heavens crackled, reluctant to spew fire out of a clear sky, the twelve marched on, serene and deliberate, drawing inexorably closer. And behind them, his white gold ring lambent in the starlight, came Feltas.

Idhelruin’s version:

We fled Port Karmon and the invisible webs of the wizard Birch, in search of some sort of vulnerability for the White Watcher. The plan was to sail to the Great College on Hythe, en route to the Black Knot, a labyrinth in Tar Tuva.

We neared the ship of the nameless Jude. Wax approached the ship from beneath the waves, riding on his turtle familiar, but retreated when he ascertained that the ship was surrounded by a defensive spell which killed any sea life that approached it.

We sailed on. I sighted a seagull flying near. There was a strangeness to it. I brought it to the attention of Surma, who, with great force, named the bird as Mirrowaith (my former master), and commanded it to land and resume its former shape. An old man appeared.

Mirrowaith had been struck by terror of a new arrival in Franmont, Fellteth. This man had quickly become first adviser to Lord Dartness, and stayed close to him. Strangely, Mirrowaith could not recall the exact nature of his fear.

Hurstyk and I both deduced that the wizards of Hythe had suffered a similar fear-inducing attack, for they had hidden the place and disappeared into animal forms, in which someone had trapped them. The scale of the spells being accomplished by the enemy seemed almost insurmountable. We felt isolated from our comrades, alone against an enemy that eluded comprehension.

I asked the company to come with me to Franmont, a city that is dear to me. At once the preening began, as they devised great, gaudy contortions of reality in order to dock the ship in the harbour. As we approached Franmont, I hailed one of the many coastal cutters. The captain was eager to lend an inconspicuous skiff, via which we were conveyed towards shore. A series of small boats came alongside, one after the other, to talk in hushed tones to me before casting off again.

A pair of union carters waited at the quay. Wax, contrary as ever, eschewed the carts, preferring to walk in his gaudy and conspicuous way through the streets. Indifferent, I bade him go where he wished. The carts carried us up towards the hills to the north of the city, through the shanty area, to High Road House, a crumbling inn. It is the last place on the track along the promontory to Fyfeld Light, a derelict lighthouse.

My spies had learned a little about Felteth. He wears a white gold ring. He rarely leaves Dartness’ side, except on nights when he steals away to Fyfeld Light to join twelve newcomers who have all risen in power as swiftly as he. I informed the company of what I knew, and pointed out the two hundred yards of clear ground approaching the lighthouse, and invited proposals for how they might begin to collect information.

Wax reappeared, very late. He was intoxicated by the magic substance of some man who had bewitched him in the side-streets of Franmont. The enemy most likely knew of our presence, and what little subtlety had been contrived lay as if trampled by a childrens’ carnival.

Eli deduced that Fellteth was approaching on foot with twelve men, shortswords drawn. One wore a white gold ring. Eli saw that they were Nameless Ones.

We laid our plans.

Surma called up a storm of insects from the woods and heathland. Some were huge. His magic was strong that day. But the Nameless seemed able to endure the storm with a calm befitting of adepts.


Eli’s version:

The book about those with no true names was written by one styling himself Lord Pale, as Surma divined. I approached it with habitual caution, anticipating bewitching hexes. My process for reading dark texts written by forbidden omnipotent entities from beyond the Veil is simple. Firstly, I invoke the Light of Ulthuan, lest the air itself by touched by the darkness. Next, I bring my hands towards the book, feeling forth with the Touch of Illithor, such that contact hexes built into the fabric of the cover are triggered and contained like moths within a prison of light. These steps undertaken, I determined it was safe to open the text.

Opening the tome, the book of leather and skin parchment revealed a poem, inscribed in the festering fungal mold from the six week corpse of a holy man. So far, nothing extraordinary. The inside of the book revealed a poem. Naturally, this was laced with patterning designed to entrance and deceive, as even the most mundane of poems is wont to be. I wove the Utterance of the Literal Child to flatten the layers of the text into as simple and powerless a form as possible.

Nonetheless, this poem was powerful indeed. My lips found themselves wanting to chant the refrain, "Lord Pale saves. Lord Pale rises." It took a considerable act of will to set it aside. Happily, such a text leaves a strong imprint from former readers. It was a simple matter to invoke Delver's Indelible Patten, and by this method I divined its most recent previous reader, and his location.

At the Fey Lantern festival

I've posted write-ups from our games before, fully aware that reading about other groups' escapades can be like hearing somebody recount last night's dream, but I think that now and again write-ups are justified as they give a flavor of what tends to happen in our Legend sessions. Not that your Legend needs to be anything like mine and Oliver's, no sirree, but occasionally I get asked the question, and here's one way of answering it.

This description of a session is by Frazer Payne, who was running a Dragon Warriors campaign at the time. (Very retro for our group; we normally use GURPS 4e.) My character went by the name of Sir Lazarus. He called himself that because he believed he had been slain in the course of joust with a mysterious knight at a bridge. The player-characters' patron, a mysterious wizard, brought him back to life, but the magic didn't restore him from the ghastly pallor of death, hence he had a very low Looks score. Arundel was Tim Savin; Katherine was Zelah Meyer; Helsceatha was an elementalist played by Aaron Fortune. I forget the other PCs right now.

Jewelspider Campaign

Session 4 write-up by Frazer Payne

Silas led his horse gingerly into the icy black pool. Ripples spread too slowly. As he entered, so he also seemed to emerge, so that for a moment he had the hair-raising sense that he was breaking the surface into an upside down world. His companions followed.

They rose out of a pool identical to the one they had entered: circular, with wide steps winding out of the bottomless depths. The steps led up into a great stone hall. Two upper floors and a beamed roof had collapsed to the flag-stones revealing a gloomy sky. A new ceiling, a tracery of tree branches, could faintly be seen through the drifts of mist that hung in the cold, still air.

The pool lay in an alcove against one long wall. To the right, an opening led into a tower. To the left, where -perhaps- the great doors had been, the wall was gone. In its place was dense forest. The forest crowded in through the windows too, vines questing ahead to clutch the dead hall’s stone bones from the inside.

The pool settled behind them. Slowly, a great bloom of silt rose from the depths of the pool until it clouded the surface. Silence boomed.

Lazarus and Uric went to examine the tower. The door was gone, leaving a black hole. Going through, they found stairs leading up. But only six. The rest of the stairway had collapsed into rubble. The wall of the tower had given way too, rent from top to bottom. In its stead there grew a tall fir tree. Its branches had grown into the tower, filling it. Pieces of masonry hung trapped in its blackness.

Lazarus touched the broken stone. It was newly broken, perhaps within the last couple of weeks. This was no ancient ruin but the site of sudden and recent violence. He retreated, thoughtful.

But Arundel dared the climb. He snaked between the branches, working his way higher and higher, until the branches grew so close together that he feared he would have to shirk his armour in order to get through. He was close to the top but could get no further. He climbed out through the gap in the wall, and made his way inch by inch upwards, the forest floor – faint through the mist – far below him. Looking out, he saw that the trees all around were at least a third higher than the great hall.

Finally he reached the top of the tower. Half the floor was all that remained. Gazing from the ramparts, he saw the forest stretched away in all directions.

Resting against the battlements was a mirror. At first glance, its frame was of the most ornate metalwork: iron and copper and gold. But closer inspection showed that the metal, twisted together, was as it might have been when it was delved from deep beneath the earth: lumpen, pitted, meteoric. The mirror was a sheet of polished metal, blackened and spotted with age. Arundel’s reflection was faint and dim. Strapping it to himself, he made his way back down through the boughs and brought the mirror before his friends. Since the hall was perhaps once Glayve’s own, the mirror seemed likely to be the sorcerer’s property too. Curious, each looked into the mirror in turn.

Arundel went first, for the mirror was his prize. At first he could see nothing. Then, faintly, he began to perceive a pale shape moving in the darkness. It appeared to be a maiden, dressed in white, running down a path that led into a black forest. He had a strange feeling that he knew the girl. She was distressed, and seemed to be trying to find a way forward through the trees, even though she was sore afraid of them. He sensed that she was fearful for someone deep inside the forest. Suddenly, the branches contorted, adopting a more fearful aspect. The mirror went dark.

Next, Katherine took up the mirror.

“I can see my father’s farmstead,” she whispered. “The forest is growing around it, encircling it.” She frowned. Her home, to the north of Jewelspider, was a good half a league from the forest edge. What she had seen could not possibly be real. Perhaps this mirror showed only lies or phantoms?

While the others strained their eyes, none of them could see anything in the mirror until it came to Lazarus.

Lazarus saw a scattering of faint lights in a great darkness. “Perhaps it is the night sky,” he thought. Then, one by one, the lights scattered away into the darkness until he was following only a handful. He sensed they were travelling through the darkness together. One by one, each light flickered and vanished until only a single light remained. Then Lazarus sensed that what he was seeing was, in fact, glinting metal. Suddenly it was enclosed be velvet blackness, lit as if by an infernal flame before being engulfed.

Lazarus pondered the vision as his companions made camp. And even though he was very tired, sleep took a long time to come to him.

Silas took first watch. He soon felt quite alone, sitting by the dim fire, though he told himself it was only boredom. He decided to go hunting. Making his way out into the silent forest, he found himself amongst ferns as tall as a man, and dwarfed by trees that would have towered over a cathedral. Venturing further, he noticed that the trees were tallest near the great hall. Those further away were of far more normal growth, though no less discomforting. There was no game to be found.

He returned to stir Uric.

The muddied water in the pool lurched. Something huge had moved just below the surface. The forest seemed to flex, branches swelling forward, vines clenching the walls tighter. The hall sagged. The floor cracked and buckled. The pool swirled again, and silt and brick dust boiled to the surface.

Everyone was awake now. Helsceatha lurched to his feet and clutched the air. Bellowing words of power, he drew his fists to his chest. With a roar, the wall behind the pool bulged and burst to tumble onto the pool. But the stones fell in and disappeared, and did not fill it at all. Quickly, they led the horses out of the hall and into the forest.

They did not know where – or even when- they were. Which way was north? If this was Jewelspider, which was the way out and which would lead deeper into the forest?

Lazarus examined the great trunks of the trees. Moss had grown on one side, while mushrooms grew among the roots on the other. “East is that way,” he announced with confidence, and so they set off.

It was not long before they came across a path leading northeast to southwest. The mist was still thick, but they could hear that a gorge was close to the south edge of the path. Water churned deep below. They walked for long hours, with the path twisting before them beneath the black boughs of the forest. They ached in their bones. Lack of sleep was taking its toll, so, as evening came on they made camp.

“We should get off the road,” said Uric.

“Anyone could track us on this frosted ground” said Arundel. “Even I, with only passing skill, could follow our trail… anyone intent on finding us could do so”. And, dejectedly, the others agreed. And so they got down in the middle of the bleak path and set a watch.

It was during Lazarus’ watch that Freer awoke. He was weak from his wound, his mind wandering, but he talked quietly to Lazarus about the moment when his former friend, Argelise, had dealt him the deadly blow. He talked about the rag of cloth that Argelise had clutched in his sword hand, ripped from Freer’s own cloak. “That token allowed those puppet-making demons able to deliver this blow to me, I am sure of it,” he whispered, looking fearfully at the black-edged wound in his arm. Then he slept.

Helsceatha had a dream. He was low to the ground, running through the forest as fast as he could go, his arms laden with trinkets. He awoke to find his shadow servant had escaped. Quick as a flash he raised the alarm. From his dream he knew where to search, and the companions ran, bleary eyed, into the forest in pursuit.

Lazarus saw a dark shape in the shadow of a tree and loosed an arrow. Running through the frosted ferns, they gathered around the tangle of roots where the arrow had landed. The frost was disturbed, as if some small animal had gone through death throws on the spot, and the arrow lay in the middle, its tip and shaft burned black. Scattered around were the various items that Helsceatha had purloined, with the help of the shadow servant, from Glayve’s cart. Helsceatha bent to pick them up, careful to recover each one.

They stepped out of the forest to see a barren land stretched out below them. Furrowed fields lay, white and silent under the frost. Far away in the mist the glint of lanterns marked a village. They met a young man on the road leading a donkey. He was cautious of anyone who would dare the Jewelspider road, especially at this time of year, but told them about the village of Hecund.

A festival would take place there in two days time, the Fey Lantern Feast. Banquet tables lined the forest edge in readiness. Before long, rich and poor from miles around would gather to feast, and perhaps be joined by the faerie folk themselves. Notaries would venture beyond the forest eaves with elaborate lanterns. Maidens would enter the forest bearing candles, there to learn the name of the man who would marry them. Of course, said the boy, no iron or steel would be welcome, for the faerie folk cannot bear its presence.

In the town, all was bustle. Young and old, rich and poor, were making ready. The streets were alive with the construction of elaborate lanterns for the festival. There was much honour to be gained by having the finest lantern, for only the best were likely to draw the faerie folk forth. Strange, brightly decorated masks were being made from wood pulp: long, gawping fish-heads, cattle muzzles, arched faerie faces.

The companions took refuge in a stable, as all the inns were full.

Lazarus decided to raise some funds by selling the strange, glowing globe that Silas had delivered from Glayve. Negotiations with a merchant were not to his liking. But word quickly spread of his wares. A carriage drew up on the cobbles outside the stable, and a liveried servant called the companions to the door. Lazarus stepped to the front, picking straw from his clothes. The item had drawn the attention of the haughty Lady Grey, eager to find an unusual bauble to light her festival lantern. Her offer seemed good to him, so he sold Silas’ globe too.

Silas was more concerned with the lady’s maid, and before long had negotiated a meeting with her. “This evening, at the back window of the old mill house, where my lady is guesting,” she hissed, and the carriage rolled away.

Image by Alex Jane from Wikimedia Commons.

A fresh start for the Year of Wonders

I resisted Facebook for the longest time. It’s not that I don’t like tech, I just don’t care for people that much. (Only kidding. I like people just fine. It’s the pet photos and soccer chat I wanted to avoid.)

Finally I’ve had to succumb, and the reason is that Leo Hartas and I needed to set up a Facebook page for our comics saga Mirabilis: Year of Wonders (If you need a this-meets-that, try Tintin hunts Fantastic Beasts with a soundtrack by Danny Elfman).

This is part of our big push to get the Mirabilis project moving again. The story was originally serialized in weekly British anthology comic The DFC, published by Random House. When The DFC folded, our story was left unfinished but our rights were tied up in a complicated contractual tangle. It took me months of increasingly desperate negotiation to find a way out of that limbo, made all the more fraught by the fact that none of the people involved in the mess would even return my calls. Luckily I knew Philippa Dickinson, the original publisher of Dragon Warriors and one of the truly nicest people you could hope to work with, who by now had risen to be the head of RH’s children’s publishing division. She pulled strings with the powers that be and got me and Leo our rights back.

Thus unfettered I could stop chewing my nails, but it was still far from plain sailing. We secured a publisher for Mirabilis, but though they did a beautiful job of the production they failed to get copies into any shops. I had to lug a couple of bags stuffed with copies to the Gosh! Comics store in London – if you bought one of those, hang onto it like a Penny Black with Queen Vic in a hipster beard, because they were almost the only copies that ever saw the light of day. The rest, I hear, went astray between the printer (in Bosnia) and the distribution warehouse (in Lancashire) and may now be propping up wobbly café tables somewhere in Germany.

So, back to the drawing board. A comics publisher reached out, but the deal they offered was like a handshake from Don Corleone. We were expected to sign over all rights in perpetuity to them, even though there was no obligation for them to keep the book in print. After the epic struggle with Random House there’s no way Leo and I could accept terms like that. As a creator, all you have is your work. You can't let other people lock you out of it.

What about Random House themselves? Well, Philippa had retired by this point, and the mildest way to put it is that having escaped the clutches of the contract we didn’t really have a lot of friends there. We were in our gulag and, at any other time in history, there we might have stayed. But this is the 21st century, right - with social media and crowdfunding and shit. So Leo and I have spent the last few weeks getting ready for a full and concerted relaunch of this mighty fantasy saga. Our plans include:

• a Patreon page where aficionados can come and pledge as little as $1 a month to help fund new instalments. Pages of the comic go up there Mondays and Fridays with higher-level backers getting access to backstage blog pieces and other goodies.
• a new website where everyone can read the comic absolutely free – just a little way behind the paid-up supporters on Patreon, who also get higher-res versions of the art.
• the aforementioned Facebook page where you can get updates on Mirabilis and any other books, comics, movies or games that we thing might interest you.
• a Twitter account with daily instalments of the comic.

And we’re toying with the idea of a Kickstarter to fund a Mirabilis gamebook. Or app. Maybe a boardgame. Possibly all three and - I dunno, a roleplaying game too? The Patreon backers may get a say in that. The exciting thing is that it's a community where everyone gets a voice.

Here’s the thing. We could really use your support – which is, after all, the whole point and rationale of what we’re trying to do now. We’re bypassing the publishers and distributors and going straight to the people whose opinion and backing count most. That’s you, we hope. The readers. Already we've got backing from Jason Arnopp, the 21st century's Stephen King, from the Jedi Master of gamebooks Stuart Lloyd, and from musician, artist & game designer Frazer Payne, among others. Good company to be in, and an absolutely priceless vote of confidence when we're starting a new venture like this. Thanks, guys.

If you can spring for a few dollars to actually fund the work, then you’re our BFFs till the sun dies – but even if not, a like on Facebook costs nothing and can really help boost interest. You never know, this could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

Under the wood

The festivities give an excuse for laziness, so today's post is just a pointer at "Wayland's Smithy", a scenario set in Legend that's still up on Tim Harford's very occasional blog/webzine Annwn.

I ran the scenario as a response to the characters wanting magic swords. You can't just buy those in Legend, you see, and typically of Legend scenarios it didn't turn out at all as anyone expected. Duryakin (played by Frazer Payne, who created the Annwn logo) shared the Lady of Baptismarl's bed and the next morning planted the apple she gave him under a tree. Later, as the characters rode back weary from their adventure, they passed that same tree and heard a baby crying. Years later, Duryakin returned the sole survivor of the Iron Men campaign, now blind, and took up residence in the derelict manor of Baptismarl with his strange son.

Before that, my own character, Caliburn, who had managed to get some of that faerie ore turned into a sword, dropped the damned thing in the grave of his best friend Joseph Lynch (played by Tim Savin) having been beguiled briefly into believing in the possibility of magical resurrection by Tim H's infinitely devious sorcerer Kal ki-Lan Tor.

All of which is a long-winded way of saying that little apple seed gave us a lot of gaming fun and I hope it does the job for you too. Plenty of other useful posts on Annwn too, such as this one on the Apocalypse that may or may not happen in Legend in the year 1000. Hopefully December 31st will pass without an extinction event in this universe. Season's greetings!

Paragon

You may have got the impression from his introductory Dragon Warriors scenario, "The Darkness Before Dawn", that Frazer Payne is one of those referees (I don't like the term "gamemaster") who force the players to jump through the hoops of a pre-planned story.

Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, the games we've played in Frazer's worlds have given us all the freedom of action you could wish for. In his Paragon campaign (described aptly by Fraz himself as "Manga-meets-Kafka-in-a-Bavarian-forest") we were set loose in a city ruled by fear and allowed to find our own plotlines, to the extent that at one point we abandoned the city that Fraz had mapped out and detailed with such meticulous care and went cruising off to a far outpost of the empire where my character planned to muscle in early on his inheritance. A lesser man would have thrown his notes in the air and told us to stick to what he had planned. Not Fraz, who was happy to wing it, improvising an ever-wider web of characters and intrigues that allowed him to give us a little unexpected insight on the workings of the Paragonian state while pursuing our own goals.

Paragon is a fabulous game world and a really elegant set of rules. Even more to my tastes is Frazer's follow-up campaign The Ghosts of London. The game background notes alone are some of the best writing I have ever seen - yes, including Faulkner and Fitzgerald. To give you an idea how effective this campaign was, we had to abandon it because one of the players was suffering from nightmares after each session. (If it had been me, I would have wanted to play more often - but à chacun son goût.)

I would love to put up the Ghosts of London material here but what happens to it is up to Fraz. Both GoL and Paragon are absolutely crying out to be published - the world needs both of them a lot more than it needs another elves-n-dwarves fantasy RPG, for example. Frazer is in fact currently at work on a German version of Paragon, though the English language version is yet to be signed by a publisher and the real gem, Ghosts of London, remains on the back burner. To whet your appetite, take a look at this description Fraz wrote of our second-ever Paragon session:

Brother Asp disentangles himself from the straw-pile with as much dignity as he can muster and marches back into the inn. He passes the lawman, Stone, on the stairs, dragging unconscious bodies down feet first.

The common room is a tangle of overturned pallets and bedding, silent except for the night wind blowing through the jagged window frame. With a determined set to his jaw he hoists a couple of pallets free from the mess, stomps back down to the bar and slings them onto the embers in the hearth.

The hospitality of this town leaves much to be desired, he thinks, and in adversity one must look to one’s own abundant resources to ensure a good night’s sleep.

He makes two more trips until he has enough materials to make a tolerable bed before the fire, then settles in. He’ll be glad to be away from here, that’s for certain, and trusting that God will illuminate that intractable airman overnight, he falls asleep.

The tailor enters silently to find the holy man peaceful in the centre of a sumptuous nest of all the bedding in the building. He sits in a booth, tucking his legs neatly up in front of himself for warmth, and enjoys the fire until his eyelids sink down with the flames.

The sun creeps grudgingly over the treetops, giving a cheerless glow to the village rooftops and the airship in the field. The airman pops up from his cabin in a swathe of steam, wrapped head to toe in his altitude leathers, and squints at the sky. A tap on a gauge here and a tweak of a dial there confirms what his keen eye tells him about the weather conditions. It’s cold, misty, and it’s time for breakfast. He slides down the anchor-rope and marches briskly across the field, eyeing the broken glass on the ground beneath the inn window before ducking inside.

It’s no warmer in here, and empty of customers it smells of mould. The holy man is slumped dishevelled against the bar. He’s on his second mug of wine. Stone is on his first pint jug. Both straighten as the airman comes in. Smelling some stiff negotiation in the air, he strides straight past them, ducks under the bar hatch and disappears into the kitchen. The innkeep, doddering around in the pantry, hasn’t even turned to see who’s come in before the airman has plucked a pinch of spice from a forgotten pot on a high shelf, sprinkled it over the sausages sizzling on the hob, decanted them to a plate and swept out again. The innkeep looks forlornly at his empty pan and decides to go back to bed until the strangers have gone.

He’s just snuggled down in his cold sheets when the door to his bedroom bursts open and the lawman strides in, deals him a stiff fine for harbouring thieves in his establishment, and strides out again. It is at that moment that the holy man plants a crate under his window, climbs on top of it and begins to sermonise roundly to the village square at a volume that greatly belies his diminutive stature. There seem to be four bleary-eyed, bedraggled men in the stocks that weren’t there last night, and one of them looks to be unconscious or worse. As the holy man’s voice rises to the heavens, they all look as if they wish they were, too. The innkeeper nearly falls over himself in his hurry back to bed, where he plants his pillow firmly over his head.

As the sun melts the frost from the field so it creeps as mist, sinuously through the grass, back to the brambled eaves of the forest, the airship rises, swings low over the gatehouse and thunders over the crests of the trees.

Below, the holy man can be seen tottering through the archway, and a little behind him, the tailor. The engines’ thud sets the tree tops shivering. Then it climbs, climbs into the low, morning cloud and is gone

into an opaque limbo. For an interminable time the airship creaks and rattles as it churns against the stiff wind, clouds pouring around the gasbag and over the bow like sea spume. The ship becomes at once ghostly in the mist and more solid, every sound close and thick in the wet air. The dark wood, Rope and brass grows a pale fur as beads of moisture cling to every surface. The steeply angled deck is soon streaked with rivulets. Then it breaks into dazzling winter sunlight. The cloudscape is like a frozen ocean, wreathed in gold, and the wooded hilltops like islands. The sky is a vast azure dome, it's distant ceiling glimmering with the last stars.

The air is so crisp it snatches the breath away. Stone stays near the aft mast, holding it tight with one hand. The vibration of the engine through the dense wood has made his fingers numb.

Abenteuerspiel

Jamie has spent the last couple of weeks working with my Mirabilis co-creator, Leo Hartas, on an Escape From Colditz game intended to publicize re-runs of the old BBC/NBC show. You can play the beta (slightly buggy but still fun) on Leo's own site. The spot-on WW2 movie pastiche soundtrack is by the uber-talented Frazer Payne, and one of his tracks is in the beta, so it's worth a look just for that.

Bizarrely, the marketing folk at the TV company wanted Jamie and Leo to squeeze the game below 1.5 Meg so that people could email it to each other - y'know, like you do with Flash games. Well, that's marketing for you, bless 'em.

Anyway, while Leo has been playing around with Flash we started looking at mini-adventure games like Death in Sakkara and visual novels such as The Flower Shop. There I was resisting - I'd rather be writing more episodes of the Mirabilis comic than designing a game - but inspiration struck anyway. As it so often does when you're trying to work on something else. So now we have an intriguing hook for a Mirabilis adventure game and I just know it's going to lie there gnawing at my subconscious until we get on and do it.

The working title is Timber! and the only question now is whether to do it in Flash and give it away for free or to put a bit more care and attention into making an app version.

The Darkness of Morning (sleeve notes)

The title was one of those ideas that bubble up to your consciousness from who-knows-where. I suppose I wanted to capture the sense that not every daybreak floods the world with light like Bellini’s St Francis in Ecstasy. Sometimes day comes as a Pyrrhic victory against the night. Or perhaps I had in mind those dawns that set the high places alight but leave troughs of cool darkness below the hills.

At any rate, “The Darkness of Morning” it was. In story terms the title fitted the mood, because I anticipated players would be getting their first taste of the incomplete and somewhat bitter triumph that's the best you can hope for when you have dealings with faerie creatures in the lands of Legend. In DW, heroism usually comes with a high cost; it’s not Boy’s Own.

How it started was like this. Magnum Opus Press wanted an introductory scenario for their revised Dragon Warriors rulebook, Frazer Payne is one of the best Dragon Warriors GMs I know. I put his name forward and, just to get the ball rolling, sent him a few notes. Over time it became a fully worked-out scenario by Frazer, at some point acquiring the title of “The Darkness Before Dawn”.

The idea of this post is to give you the behind-the-scenes of how the scenario got developed. So you don’t need a spoiler alert at this point, do you? If you haven’t already played the scenario, I recommend scooting off to buy a copy of the book here. You may not survive the scenario (when we played it, the party attacked the White Lady on first encountering her and got wiped out) but at least you’ll know what Frazer and I are talking about here.

Okay, so my original and very rough notes were as follows:

Say the players meet for the first time in a village in the early morning after a heavy storm. They all got caught out in the rain and are cold, tired, wet and hungry as they arrive at the village.

The inn has only one guest room, so there's immediately a bit of possible jockeying for status as they decide who will get that room with its nice soft bed while everybody else has to put up with a pallet in the common room - normally all right, but this is daybreak now so they'll be trying to kip with farmers in and out all morning.

To top it off, there's a big commotion in the village square. It seems the young lord of the manor, call him Sir Olvar, went off last night and hasn't come back. The steward Cethric comes to tell everyone Sir Olvar’s cousin Maxim le Cloche is in charge. There are grumblings at that, as many peasants are loyal to Sir Olvar's young bride Lady Angela, but what can they do? Lady Angela is currently in the throes of childbirth, so nobody can get to see her.

If the players ask, they are told that a ghost house is said to haunt the local woods. Each time it appeared in the past is when somebody in the village is giving birth, and the child has then been stillborn. The legend is that the mistress of the house, a "white lady" known locally as Queen Fhionn, eternally mourns her own lost child and so steals the lives of unborn babies. Last night in the storm, the lights of the white house appeared between the lashing branches of the trees. As Lady Angela had gone into labor that afternoon, Sir Olvar rode out to seek the house and demand of Queen Fhionn that she spare his child.

The point of all that btw is that most novice groups will just cut straight to the adventure. But there's enough set-up there (the snake-like steward, drunken wastrel cousin, pure and plucky young wife, doughty peasants, etc) that they could improv a bit if they want to, and that way cotton on to the way scenarios are really planned - ie hardly at all.

Anyway, most players will head off to the woods and you can make much of the dank, dripping undergrowth after last night's storm. This is the run-on-rails bit that Magnum Opus are looking for in the introductory adventure, as I envisage a series of encounter areas (say a clearing, a cave, a hollow oak, or whatever) where you can put fights and/or tests for the players to get a feel for their characters' abilities.

The Hollow Oak

The players find a clearing. The oak has a hole in the side which has a curtain of ferns over it. The curtain pulls back revealing a sort of puppet booth. Puppets corresponding to the players start to enact a story, beginning with a comedy version of their attempt to get to sleep at the inn. This could especially poke fun at whoever got the private room. Anyone watching for more than half a minute has to save or be rooted to the spot – they then take damage as the play turns nasty and their puppet self starts to be injured.

The puppeteer (hidden from view inside the tree) is a red-headed goblin called Erkiss. If a player manages to get into the tree, Erkiss will flee up inside the trunk and run off in the form of a squirrel.

Eventually they arrive at the white house. Around the back of the house is a forlorn, overgrown garden, gloomy because of the low-hanging branches of trees and the fact that it lies north of the house, so never sees daylight. In the garden are row upon row of infant graves with sad little headstones. These are the children whose lives have been taken by “Queen” Fhionn over the years.

They are met at the door by Queen Fhionn’s manservant. They may recognize him as the goblin, Erkiss. (It shouldn’t be obvious – just give them the hints and see if any players cotton on!) In his servant’s costume, Erkiss is not obviously a goblin – he just looks like a wizened young-old man. Mention his ginger eyebrows and maybe he gives a wink that a player might have seen if he climbed up to the treetop in time to see Erkiss transform into a squirrel. Recognizing Erkiss gives the character who first says so a bonus: his next successful blow will automatically bypass armour and strike for double damage.

In the parlor is a small fire that is dwarfed by the huge stone hearth. The coals creak and shift sullenly as if on the verge of going out. The fire does little to dispel the dank chill that pervades the house. It is impossible to imagine ever being warm or comfortable here, and after their trek through the dripping boughs of the wood, the players feel chilled to the marrow of their bones. In front of the fire stands a big, black-canopied cradle awaiting a newborn child. It’s empty at the moment. The black drapes make it seem more like a funeral pyre than a cradle.

Now at last they will have to face Queen Fhionn. She has ensorcelled Sir Olvar who is now her slave.

Here again there's the opportunity for bargaining or guile, but most beginner groups will presumably just lay into her. It'd be a tough fight but maybe things they picked up in the woods will give protection from her power. After they defeat her and leave, if anyone looks back the white house has vanished, and the little infant graves, now exposed to daylight for the first time, have sprouted clumps of flowers.

Then they've got the job of taking Sir Olvar home. He's still dazed by her magic. Maybe they found a pool earlier that reflected one's true nature or something, and if they get the smart idea to take him back that way and show him the pool, he'll recover. Otherwise it's a bittersweet kind of victory, as they return Sir Olvar to his young wife (whose unborn child now seems safe) but he remains addle-witted and therefore the drunkard Maxim le Cloche is still guardian of the manor (though he seems to be under the dominance of the steward). Maybe the players take up Lady Angela's cause, vowing to visit Sir Olvar's liege (Baron Aldred) to ask for help.

The adventure illustrates the key things the introductory scenario will need, which are:

• Very structured adventure with bits of flavor text to guide the novice GM
• Opportunity for players to flex their muscles in simple self-contained encounters as they learn the rules
• A little bit of optional character- and intrigue-based stuff that they can take or leave
• A lead-in to the further adventures in Baron Aldred's fief

My accompanying email to Fraz:

I think that an introductory scenario should show players what they cannot do as much as what they can. If I were running the scenario, I'd be inclined to make Queen Fhionn impossible for any but the greatest heroes to beat in a straight fight, and novice players would have to outwit her - eg by tricking Erkiss into shapeshifting into a baby and lying in the cradle, or simply putting one of the puppets into the cradle, so that while crooning over her stolen "child" she wouldn't notice the players leading Sir Olvar away.

Realistically, though, I suppose you’ll have to include the possibility of a big fight at the finale. You could say something like, "Normally, beginning characters would have no hope of overcoming a creature as ancient and powerful as this White Lady. Armed with the items they won from their various challenges in the woods, they may be able to defeat her temporarily in a fight. Alternatively, they might be able to outwit her, perhaps substituting a puppet for the child she wants so that she's distracted and allows them to leave with Sir Olvar."

The challenges in the woods are at least in keeping with the tradition of gaining power over a supernatural creature - no matter how powerful - by moral tests and/or cleverness.

Fraz replied:

I hope to enhance the Arthurian 'blighted land' flavor at the front end.

Fhionn = “white cow, she of white cattle”. This made me wonder if the creature should not appear as a grossly fat female (making the players wonder what her diet is!) rather than the fey lady of the lake I had first imagined. In this case, I could allude to her being a kind of twisted avatar of the primitive Earth goddess, the aspect which carries souls back into the earth.

This made me think that the white house might be more primitive, from the outside. I imagine a chalk embankment in a wooded hillside with windows for eyes, surrounded by burning brands which roar up, lighting the mists as the party approach.

Do you like this rather Blair Witch conception, or am I barking up the wrong tree?

I replied:

Well, I would say that the "fey lady" appearance is more in keeping with Legend generally, at the outset anyway - ie kind of saying to the players: beware, in this world things are rarely what they seem. I took it from the Irish "Bean Fhionn" which means literally "White Lady" (cf Bean Sidhe = ghost lady). The grossly fat image - I dunno, that does seem more of a D&D-ish monster idea to me.

But perhaps there's a compromise: she appears to them as the gentle, fey, beautiful but of course heartless lady at first, but if they fight her she gradually changes as her anger grows, becoming the fat, distended hag you're describing. That's in keeping with the way Celtic heroes and villains transform in combat (think Slaine) so imo fits the Legend setting more.

The backstory rationale would be that she was historically a real woman (probably a sorceress) who lost her child by miscarriage. Her grief caused her to do away with herself, and the distraught ghost then attracted the mythago/residue of an ancient but much degraded Earth Mother spirit, as you say, which merged with her to create the creature folk now refer to as Queen Fhionn. I'm thinking of the way that Herne was both a historical figure (Henry VIII's gameskeeper, who hanged himself) and also a carry-over of the Horned God of Celtic times.

I like your conception of the look of the house, most certainly.

Frazer:

My dodgy old mythology book gave me Bo Fhionn, and starts going on about cattle. I like that merging very much. The encounters in the forest could reveal the tragedy of her story, as well as hint at the presence of this older wood-spirit, perhaps by alluding to ancient 'babes in the wood' fireside tales.

Me:

I realize the way I worded it before made it sound a bit like I was damning with faint praise, whereas in fact I think the transformation to gross, ugly hag is a huge enhancement. In that form, the encounter will memorably introduce players to the idea that the faerie creatures of Legend should be feared - much better than just beating up on a pretty lady in a white dress :-)

And I like that the concept was so serendipitous - a sort of misreading of Bo Fhionn (white cow) giving us a really evocatively nasty encounter. Excellent! Great idea to draw in a local babes-in-the-wood myth too. That's nice and creepy. If it was a movie, it should be Pan's Labyrinth.

Postscript: I pre-loaded this post months ago, as I do most of them, but only the other day got some news about Magnum Opus's publishing plans for a new Dragon Warriors book collecting old scenarios from White Dwarf. These adventures were written over a quarter century ago by me, Oliver Johnson and Mike Polling for the unsung editor of WD at that time, none other than Jamie Thomson. Most of the scenarios were originally designed for RuneQuest and/or Dungeons & Dragons, but they've all been adapted to Legend and the DW rules by the brilliant and madly prolific Ian Sturrock. The book is titled In From The Cold (why? why not?) but there have been conflicting rumours about publication date and format, so I recommend you go over to the Magnum Opus website for the latest info. The reissued DW books are splendid, a far cry from the cheap but well-loved paperbacks of yore, and you can buy these deluxe editions here. An asset to any role-playing collection.

7URPS

For our gaming group, GURPS is the role-playing system of choice. We grumble about it from time to time. Combat can be very fiddly, especially when you venture into the maze of special cases involving grappling. As the referee, it's hard to apply commonsense rulings without seeming arbitrary because the rules are so precise, yet they tend to produce absurdities at high skill-levels (in the case of stealth, for example) that risk unbalancing the game if allowed to stand as written.

And yet - it's hugely versatile. (Well: "Generic Universal..." What would you expect?) Steve Jackson and his team have done a heap of work so that you can just get on with your game. It's such a gift to a harassed referee just trying to get the work's adventure ready. Do you want to figure out the relative damage of a Wogdon Dueller or Nock's Volley Gun? Thought not.

For years, the big flaw at the heart of the system was the way it is built on just four stats. This is an evolution from Jackson's earlier Fantasy Trip system, which had its origins in tabletop games. It's simple - but it's a fake simplicity, given the baroque detail layered onto that narrow base. In a nutshell: if you are a great archer, chances are you'll also be a great swordsman and great sneak thief. If you are a great scholar, chances are you'll be sharp-eyed, strong-willed and exceptionally empathic. That's because dexterity (DX) and intelligence (IQ) pretty much drive everything else.

I figured that a little bit of extra detail in the roots of the system would make for more interesting variety between characters without adding any complexity to the game. And so leapt forth 7URPS, a set of quick notes that lets you alter GURPS into a 7-attribute system with the addition of agility (AG), empathy (EQ) and willpower (WL). Take a look for yourself here, and if you think it could be your cup of tea, you can get Frazer Payne's almost magically self-calculating 7URPS character sheet here. A caveat: it will mean nothing to you unless you already have the GURPS rulebook, so go and get that here.

Oh, and the pronunciation? We say "zurps".