One for the diehard Fabled Lands players this week, as I came across the original titles that Jamie and I were considering for the later books in the series. We must have drawn up this list right after writing FL books 1 and 2. The books up for discussion, clockwise from top left, later became known as Over the Blood-Dark Sea(book 3), The Serpent King's Domain(book 7), The Plains of Howling Darkness (book 4) and The Legions of the Labyrinth (book 10, still unpublished).
I've already recounted our struggles to get the publisher to accept Devils & Howling Darkness as the title of book 4, but WH Smith's were worried that any mention of devils might scandalize fundamentalist religious groups. Jamie and I didn't think they'd buy the FL books anyway, but we argued the point in vain.
The notes refer to our editor, Ian Marsh, who also helmed the Virtual Reality gamebook series. I believe he also digitally typeset the books, though I don't suppose the publishers paid him anything extra for doing that.
My biggest regret here (other than the book 4 title) was not being able to use The Blood-Dimmed Tidefor book 3. Jamie and I are both fans of Yeats, as you will have noticed if you read The Chronicles of the Magi novellas -- but there I had to pay out of my own pocket to use the poem, because Yeats's work didn't enter public domain till 2009, and we'd have hit the same problem with FL book 3. So we borrowed a line from Homer instead (oînops póntos) and took liberties with it: haîmops póntos, I suppose it would be, "the blood-eyed sea". Given that the book takes place on the Violet Ocean, maybe wine-coloured would have been a better fit.
Arthur, King of Britain, has fallen in battle. The Knights of the Round Table – Galahad, Gawain, Lancelot. All dead. Years have passed since Merlin was last seen.
Morgan le Fay, Arthur’s half-sister, survived the final battle. With her army of renegades and monsters, she now advances on Camelot.
The kingdom's last defenders are those who were left behind. Those who were too young or too old to fight, too weak or of too lowly a status to be summoned to the final battle.
As the light of civilization flickers and the Dark Ages close in, those few survivors are the only ones left to keep King Arthur's dream alive.
Their sole ally is Merlin who, though trapped within a prison of stone, is still able to observe the world invisibly. His magic gives him the power to help Camelot’s last defenders.
But an important question remains to be answered: whose side is Merlin really on?
PLOT
King Arthur and his knights have fallen in battle. As winter closes in, Logres is a lawless land threatened by Saxons from the east and brigands from across the Irish Sea. Without leadership, and with many peasants and their lords having died at Camlann, the harvest is poor and trade gives way to barter or simple theft.
Morgan, Arthur’s half-sister, brings her army to Camelot, meaning to crown her son Mordred as Arthur’s successor. The player-characters are a ragtag group of apprentices, peasants, squires and outsiders who must try to rally resistance to Morgan’s rule – or else bend the knee to her.
The campaign involves missions of rescue, sabotage, interception, fact-finding, and alliance-building. Alongside that, the player-characters find themselves drawn into the psychic and spiritual clash between Merlin and Morgan, who will visit them in dreams, visions and various magical guises in order to enlist them to their cause.
But the question is not only which of the two sorcerers to follow, because neither Merlin nor Morgan truly embodies King Arthur’s ideals. The ultimate choice the player-characters must face is whether to accept magical patronage or to abjure both Merlin and Morgan and take the harder path of independence.
A typical campaign might play out like this:
Session One: “Abandoned”
The characters learn they are the last defenders of Camelot. Morgan brings her army to the gates. Although they successfully prevent her from taking the castle, they have to flee for their lives.
Session Two: “Pursued”
Morgan sends unnatural creatures to hunt the characters down in the wildwood. The characters learn grudging respect for each other’s abilities in the running battle to survive.
Session Three: “Hidden”
They find refuge with an old knight who survived the final battle and now plans to retake Camelot. He arms the characters and makes one of them a knight.
Session Four: “Lost”
Disaster strikes – the plan is a shambles, the old knight is killed, and one of the characters is captured by Morgan.
Session Five: “Underground”
Using the labyrinths constructed years before by Merlin, the characters penetrate Morgan’s tower and rescue their comrade – but she has already been infected by Morgan’s magic.
Session Six: “Desperate”
Retreating into the wildwood, the heroes must undertake a quest to stop Morgan’s spirit from possessing their rescued comrade. In the process, they find a new ally.
Session Seven: “Hope”
The characters are in high spirits with the apparent recovery of their comrade and the arrival of new recruits. But Morgan has tricks up her sleeve yet. And in his prison under the earth, Merlin is scheming.
Session Eight: “Riven”
The highest-born character meets Merlin in a dream and is convinced that the others to have forsworn the oath of chivalry by recruiting commoners. He betrays them to Morgan.
Session Nine: “Armed”
The characters each acquire a sword or other enchanted weapon from the Lady of the Lake, becoming the New Knights of the Round Table.
Session Ten: “Home”
Emboldened by their new weapons, the New Knights return to Camelot and prepare to confront Morgan for once and for all.
Session Eleven: “Embattled”
The characters plan to divert Morgan’s army while the New Knights attack her tower. Finding their way past undead sentries and magical traps, they find she has fled. But the character who was abducted earlier, still troubled by the spell Morgan cast on her before, is able to see where she is headed: the Isle of Avalon.
Session Twelve: “Bereaved”
Morgan intends to destroy King Arthur’s body and prevent him from ever returning to the mortal world. The New Knights take to sea and finally face her on a bleak rocky shore at the western edge of the world. Repenting his earlier betrayal, the high-born character kills Morgan but is himself fatally injured.
Session Thirteen: “Victorious”
The New Knights bury their fallen comrade on the shore of Avalon. Sailing through a titanic storm that threatens to sink the ship, they confront Merlin but manage to trick him back into his prison of stone for another hundred years. As the storm passes they see a vision of King Arthur, who tells them they are now the true Knights of the Round Table. They return to a Britain restored at last after years of civil war.
That’s a very highly prescribed storyline, of course, and provides no more than the scaffolding of how events will play out if the player-characters were to do nothing off their own bat. Your players’ mileage (and direction of travel) will and should vary.
CHARACTERS
Who are the player-characters?
If you’re using rules that describe characters in terms of their roles (which naturally isn’t how I’d do it) then some obvious archetypes are:
Survivor
Turncoat
Spy
Deserter
Another axis would be Novice/Veteran. The novices (probably most of the PCs) aren’t ready for this fight but it’s coming to them anyway. Think Luke in Empire Strikes Back. They don’t have the luxury of waiting till their skills are honed.
It’s also possible to be a veteran: an over-the-hill hero, maybe left out of the final battle (as Sir Ector was) because they’re old and they cannae hack it anymore. Think Obi-Wan in Star Wars. On a good day they might recapture flashes of their former glory, but really they’re more Dad’s Army than Round Table.
What are the PCs doing?
Building an army of resistance fighters.
Fighting with or parlaying with the Saxons (usually both).
Deciding who to trust (Merlin? Morgan? Aelle? Or only themselves?)
Keeping Arthur’s dream alive.
Dealing with local threats (raiders, a ‘monster’ in the woods, a renegade knight, a sick child, a starving village, etc).
Missions will include: rescue, sabotage, interception, fact-finding, diplomacy, and small stuff to remind them that reality is woven from ordinary people’s lives as much as from abstract ideas. Of course I would say this, but watch Richard Carpenter’s Robin of Sherwood to see how a master does it. Oh, and you should of course watch Excalibur too while you're at it.
NON-PLAYER CHARACTERS
Morgan le Fay
Arthur’s half-sister (the daughter of Gorlois, Duke of Cornwall, and Ygraine, Arthur’s mother) is the primary antagonist of the campaign. She is infamous for her ruthless pursuit of sorcerous knowledge.
How should you play her? She could just be the traditional Big Bad, lusting after power for its own sake and installing her own family in positions of authority. There was a time I’d have said that was too superficial to make a credible story, but now we’re in the era of Trump. Still, just because the real world is dumbing down that’s no reason for games to do so. It’s more interesting if Morgan stands for a set of beliefs that are directly opposed to Arthur’s. She wants to show that the ideals of Camelot are unachievable, irresponsible, unrealistic, dangerous. She despises the mass of humanity and is exactly the sort of person to say that Arthur’s better world could never come about “because of human nature”.
That’s why it’s not enough for her just to kill the player-characters. She could accomplish that easily, but she needs to discredit and destroy Arthur’s dream, and to do that she must arrange things so that the heroes fail. It is the death of their hopes she seeks, and only then their physical destruction.
Morgan is an arch-manipulator with an instinct for everyone’s desires and fears. She can use illusion, promises and even the offer of real wealth or power – whatever best works on the character she wants to control. A chance to say goodbye to a loved one who fell at Camlann? She can grant that. If your dearest wish is to be respected she can gift you with qualities of authority or skill in battle. If what’s riding you is guilt, she can engineer an opportunity for you to atone.
Of course she won’t make any of these offers as herself. ‘Join me and together we can rule,’ fools no one. Instead she might talk to you in the guise of a trusted friend, or send you a vision, or contrive for you to be given a sword from a lake or to win glory in a joust. Whatever will be most likely to corrupt you. Those who are being beguiled by Morgan never realize it until too late.
Morgan’s army is a rabble of the lowest sort: malcontents, thieves, drunks and scoundrels. These are the bitter of soul who seethed with resentment through the heyday of Camelot, scowling at every case of neighbour helping neighbour as if it were a personal rebuke. Now they feel vindicated by the collapse of Arthur’s project. The world in its festering state reflects their own nature and how they believe everyone else to be. Where Arthur offered unendurable hope, Morgan presents her followers an easier vision: of hate, vicious struggle, and the salve of tearing everything down to the same squalid depths.
Morgan’s servant is Friar Adge, a sanctimonious toady whose broad rubbery smile never reaches as far as his eyes. He’ll pass himself off as an honest broker between the factions, but the truth is that he cares for nothing and no one but himself.
Mordred
As Arthur’s only surviving nephew, Mordred arguably is his rightful heir as succession in the Celtic kingdom of Logres is through the female line. Many would dispute Mordred’s right to the throne, first because of his lack of honour, second because he is not of the Pendragon lineage, and lastly because he was supposedly run through by Arthur during the final battle. He dragged himself the length of the spear to deal his uncle a mortal blow, sustained and given inhuman strength by either rage or sorcery, but surely nobody could have long survived that?
In fact Morgan placed him for three days and nights in the cauldron of rebirth, but he emerged with a grey pallor, lank hair, dull eye, and a dun aspect as if the sun is unable to fully illuminate him or draw any colour from his flesh. He speaks rarely, and in a voice both cold and gravelly, as if his words were echoing from a deep well. If the King and the Land are one, woe betide the realm when Mordred is crowned.
Merlin
A long-lived and mysterious master of the magical arts who was trapped within a rock far below the earth by the nymph Nimue. Now he is able to interact with the living only by means of dreams and visions.
Cursed with a vision of the chaos to come, Merlin dreamed of salvaging something from the Dark Ages but has seen his best hope die with Arthur and the civil wars that now ensue. Merlin is capricious and of ambiguous morality, and gradually the characters may come to realize that in helping them he has his own agenda.
How should you play Merlin? He can glimpse far into the future and is even said to live his life backwards, so you could occasionally have him present the characters with a random and seemingly impossible or self-defeating task. Arthur knew how to use Merlin’s counsel without becoming dominated by him, but will our heroes manage that?
Guinevere
Arthur’s queen has retreated to Glestinga convent (Glastonbury) and supposedly takes no part in worldly affairs. Some say that her alleged infidelity was a trick by Morgan, who used a magical glamour to seduce Sir Lancelot in the guise of the queen.
Aelle
A Saxon chieftain who has taken advantage of Arthur’s death to start carving out his own kingdom in Andredswald, the vast swathe of forest in the south of Britain. He is ambitious for the title of Bretwalda - first Saxon ruler of Britain. Both the player-characters and Morgan stand in his way, but it seems as if Merlin could have a use for him.
What happened to the Knights of the Round Table?
Sir Ector was too old to go to battle. Sir Bedivere left Britain on pilgrimage after returning Excalibur to the Lady of the Lake; the characters might hear news of him from foreign travellers. Sir Lucan was transformed into a standing stone on the shore where Arthur was taken to Avalon.
If any other Round Table knights appear in the campaign, use them carefully. These are mythic figures (think of Cap’s fight in the S.H.I.E.L.D. elevator) but their day is done. They shouldn’t ride in to save the day. The fight belongs to the player-characters and their allies now.
THEME
The themes of a roleplaying campaign should emerge in the moment from the player-characters themselves, not be baked into a plot before the game starts. So, with the proviso that the players are always free to explore whatever interests them in the world – joining Morgan, fighting or allying with the Saxons, opposing or supporting Merlin, even ignoring the ostensible main storyline and instead following their own path – here are the in-built themes.
On the surface, the struggle of the age might seem to be the incursion of the barbaric Saxons into the land of the Romano-British and their allies (mostly Celts, but including descendants of legionaries who might be from anywhere in the Empire). That’s how both Merlin and Morgan regard it, and the existential question for them is whether the Romano-British side should be ruled by laws or by an autocrat – in either case the eventual goal being to drive the Saxons back.
But the new generation of Arthurians may take a broader view. If a civilization is to be ruled by laws then the obvious model is the Roman Empire, a multi-ethnic union in which mere tribal squabbles are to be scorned. In such a context, inexperience and youth may be the very qualities most needed to create a better future. With a Year Zero approach, the characters could build a new culture to replace the old ways – something that is the logical next step from King Arthur’s ideals but that the more inflexible Merlin is not entirely happy about. Though starting as bitter enemies, the Britons and Saxons might reluctantly unite against mutual, arcane foes. Together perhaps they can forge a new world to live in.
Although full of fantastic adventure, this is not a purely action-driven campaign. The simple mechanical detail of what happens is not as important as the effect it has on the people involved. Our story happens to be set at the collapse of the Roman Empire in Britain. But it could as easily take place in Nazi-occupied Europe, or central Africa or Syria today.
What did Arthur stand for?
King Arthur’s rule was rooted in Romano-British principles and his principles may indeed seem outmoded as the Dark Ages tighten their grip. He elevated knights on merit rather than birth, promoted trade and the rule of law, encouraged innovation in the arts and sciences, and upheld Christian ideals of peace and tolerance. In the latter days of his reign he used the title Duke more often than King, suggesting that he might abolish hereditary monarchy in favour of a primus inter pares elected by the Round Table. Small wonder that Morgan and Mordred wish to see that ideology crushed into the mud.
Camelot Eclipsed is a story about growth and change in response to adversity. On a character level that allows the players to investigate themes such as responsibility, courage, grief, and jealousy. The things our heroes must choose between are hatred and love, suspicion and trust, treachery and friendship.
SETTING
Logres is a mythic realm governed by the pathetic fallacy. At the height of Arthur’s rule the orchards and fields brimmed with abundance, Milk was rich, apples crisp, bread laid out on every table. Peasants sang merrily as they worked, wayfarers were greeted with hospitality, each season was the archetype of its weather.
But now the king is gone. As you travel you’ll find abandoned manor houses, half-empty villages, hungry dogs, pillaged chapels, and crops left to rot in the fields. Rain trickles in under your collar, bursts the river banks, raises swarms of mosquitoes, and leaves the roads deeply rutted with fetid, sucking mud. Days are drear and blustery, nights cloudy and cold. Anyone met on the road is greeted with suspicion. Peasants hide from strangers or drive them away. A traveller might be murdered just for his cloak and boots.
STYLE
Which image of Camelot are you going to go with? The Pendragon RPG is explicitly set in the 6th century, albeit with imagery more suggestive of the Pre-Raphaelites. It’s clearly a mythic time that allows a wide variety of interpretations. I’m not sure now which era Ian Marsh had in mind for his original campaign – it felt quite medieval – but for the sake of this account I’ve settled on the mid-5th century, not long after the departure of the Roman legions, if only to shake up players’ expectations.
Logres is not a Malorian world of rattling knights and weathered ivy-clad castles. To our protagonists, the Round Table does not belong to the distant past. Barely a generation has passed since the legions departed Britain. Older people (30 years and up) were alive when the Rescript of Honorius was sent, telling the British cities to look to their own defence – the very edict that gave Arthur authority to take the throne. People think of Camelot as having held back the tide of barbarism by sustaining the ideals and benefits of the Roman Empire. The Dark Ages are coming, but not without a fight.
Camelot is a fabulous Romano-British citadel built along classical lines, with colonnades and domed halls emphasising the Roman heritage. The look is something between a fortified villa and an early Gothic basilica. The masonry is sparkling white limestone, newly hewed less than a generation ago. This is not the crumbling old castle seen in films. It’s a brand new edifice of sharp stone edges. The interiors of the castle are adorned with vivid wall-paintings, dark tapestries and heavy mahogany furniture creating striking contrast to the dazzling white hallways.
Armour is not the heavy, clanking iron plate of medieval times. Elegantly efficient laminar or scale armour, burnished to a silvery sheen, is as much a work of art as a tool of war. Knights wear muscled steel cuirasses fringed with pteruges, often studded with enamel or jewels, and their limbs are protected by articulated bands of steel. Magnificently crested helms and visors evoke the masks of Greek theatre or images of wild beasts.
This helmet (from the Staffordshire Hoard) is from at least a century and a half later, and Anglo-Saxon to boot, but it's a thing of beauty so I can't resist including it.
Away from the battlefield, robes are admired for being fashionably cosmopolitan. Distinctive decorative patterns and totemic insignia identify each knight and give them a wild, romantic look – as much tribal as chivalric.
Once beyond the confines of Logres, the characters encounter another Britain known to no Roman. A misty and threatening savage land of wastes and forests, of secret cults, proscribed druids, of Celtic rebels and Saxon raiders. A land of dreadful rituals whose gods can only be appeased with atrocities. A place of isolated villages, invisible from the straight Roman roads, where superstition never ceased to hold sway. The land of a darker past – and future – age.
The characters can be multi-ethnic – not for tokenistic reasons, like a quota-driven BBC period drama taking an airbrush to historical credibility in order to flaunt its fashionable colour blindness, but because a mix of cultures, languages and races reflects the world as it really is at this time. The Roman Empire is in collapse, but its boundaries still stretch far, permitting the story to incorporate characters from Numidia, Egypt, Judea, Thrace, Arabia Petraea, even as far as Syria. (Our comic book and TV versions of Camelot Eclipsed included an African farrier, Hannibal, and a Jewish inventor, Ozzy - short for Ozymandias.)
RULES
For Ian Marsh’s original campaign we used Pendragon. The campaign was structured around both the character-based conflict of who to trust and the physical challenges of the week’s adventure, and Pendragon’s system of ideals, passions and virtues played strongly into the former.
I haven’t played it, but a recent game that has been compared to Pendragon is Romance of the Perilous Land. I get the sense that it’s designed to recreate a timeless “British mythic” feel rather than a specific setting, but that said you’re going to have to do a little custom work whatever system you opt for.
You could also use a Powered by the Apocalypse variant. I’m imagining something like Night Witches or The Last Fleet, where the characters’ emotional lives defuse or exacerbate the tensions arising from the missions. If you’re thinking of a homebrew PbtA (and aren’t they all?) then the core stats might be Social, Martial, Mystical and Practical.
Alternatively you could forget about formalizing the character’s emotional lives through game mechanics and “just try acting”, in which case a set of rules like Jewelspider will have all you need. In my games I usually prefer to keep characterization loose and steered by the players, on the grounds that actual human beings can play the nuances of human behaviour a lot better than any set of rules can. But that’s for very long, open-ended campaigns where the players are committed to deeply immersive in-character play. It’s far more likely that you’ll run Camelot Eclipsed over a limited number of “episodes” and with overt story themes, so a certain amount of rules straitjacketing does make sense. (Regular readers might want to frame that statement as it’s not something I say very often.)
HOW THE CAMPAIGN CAME ABOUT
My introduction to Ian Marsh’s Camelot Eclipsed was at a roleplaying convention in the Midlands. It was the late ‘80s and, if memory serves, that evening offered games by Michael Cule (Tekumel) and Sandy Petersen (Call of Cthulhu) but the moment Ian told me the premise of his scenario I was hooked. I played Uchdryd, a foul-mouthed bully who might very well have inspired Sir Uwain in the fourth Knightmare book, The Sorcerer’s Isle.
After a few years, seeing that Ian had no intention of doing anything with a brilliant concept, I got his permission to try developing it variously as a series of novels (with John Whitbourn, who created the character Aelle), as a comic strip (with Russ Nicholson for The DFC), as a videogame or interactive drama (with Leo Hartas) and even as a television show (with Cat Muir and Rob Rackstraw). None of those came off, but you can read the TV pilot script here for some ideas of one way to take it.
A couple of earlier posts told the story of how back in the early ‘80s I got together with a bunch of friends to cook up what nearly became an ongoing gamebook saga. Almost ten years later, in May 1992, some of those same people gathered to talk about devising a shared world. Present were:
…and me, of course. We set out that evening - almost exactly 26 years ago, good grief! - to design the framework for a fantasy world so that we could write stories in a shared setting. Here are the minutes of that meeting:
THE SHARED WORLD
As we progressed it appeared we were heading for a 'realistic' setting in which mythic heroes and high fantasy could still be accommodated as far as possible.
[The first sign of a crack right there, if you ask me. What makes a fantasy setting interesting is the idiosyncratic focus of the creator. That 1% inspiration should come from one person. Others can share the 99% perspiration of turning some broad brushstrokes into a detailed picture. But the way we were doing it, we were headed towards “low fantasy with some high fantasy too”. More dog’s breakfast than gods of creativity! – DM]
We decided the first ten or so stories should be set in and around one city state which has a peculiar geographical location.
1) Religion
Some gods do exist but never obviously intervene in the lives of mere mortals. There are many other gods revered, some in the shape of historical heroes. These are not real in the sense of having power. Some are little-known cult deities worshipped by small sects.
The Empire is a theocracy, having one dominant god. The priests use this single religion as a tool to dominate all others. The God Emperor is both the secular and religious leader. The Empire attempts to proselytize, spreading its monotheistic beliefs to those on its borders before swallowing them up militarily. This is an oppressive religion, based on fear.
[I imagine I wasn’t at all averse to portraying religion as a tool of oppression, but will have been more dubious about the obvious plan to make the Empire “evil” and our city-state “good”. I didn’t come from a D&D background like some of the players, so to me that alignment approach to fantasy stinks of propaganda and I’d have been bound to subvert it in any stories I wrote for the setting. – DM]
2) Technology
There is no gunpowder and it is a pre-industrial early iron age world, which still includes some bronze age technologies.
The means of transport (reptilian? dinosaur? what about something like an ankylosaur, useful in battle because of it club tail, they could also be used as battering rams, crushing mud and wooden buildings like tanks.) is cold blooded and very sluggish unless warm. They can be ridden in a wooden mahout or a basket. It is sometimes necessary to warm them using fires to get them to 'start' in the morning. These beasts are important in battle. Because they move faster in very hot climes, yielding better communications, the Empire has enjoyed an advantage. They are never fast moving and messages are carried by runner. There are no horses.
[The idea of the principal riding beast being cold blooded, and the effect that would have on warfare, definitely came from me. I used it in my own campaign world of Medra. I didn’t see them as heavily armoured and slow – that sounds like it was borrowed from the chlen, the sole beast of burden in Tsolyanu. Not surprising, as most of us had been playing Tekumel for more than fifteen years by this point. – DM]
Ziggurats figure prominently.
[Odd – and possibly another unconscious swipe from Tekumel. Or is it just that the Bible has taught us to expect our evil empires to come with the trappings of Orientalist architecture? –DM]
Important buildings (palaces, temples, the amphitheatre where the demos meet, the trade exchange) are built of stone. Less important buildings are timber, then timber frame and adobe (not wattle-and-daub because those require horse or cow hair). Hovels and slums are simple mud brick affairs.
3) Climate
The Empire is hot, sub-tropical. It is centred just south of the tropics. The weather gets colder as you go further south.
[We reversed the globe, possibly inspired there by The Book of the New Sunor simple contrariness. The hot climate could have been another similarity with Tekumel – midsummer temperatures in Jakalla nudge 50° C – or simply because so much fantasy fiction is windswept, cold and muddy. – DM]
The city state area is warm Mediterranean in climate. The fault line, or volcanic ring of mountains, that currently contains the Empire would produce geographical quirks due to the layers of mist and molten magma lakes.
The barbarous lands could still be temperate, they are barbaric because the beasts of burden barely function there rather than because of extreme cold. But the further reaches could even be subarctic.
4) Geography
The Empire lies in the middle of the continent and is fringed by city states and perhaps some smaller kingdoms. Its southern border is the curved fault line caused by one tectonic plate slowly crashing into another. This has thrown up an arc of young, very high, and uneroded mountains. These old rocks have split and volcanic eruptions have added new peaks and mounds of ash. In addition where the crust is torn the molten magma has come to the surface, creating unusual conditions. Avalanches of snow reaching the lava have given rise to the layer of mists which hangs forever mysterious above the foothills.
Fault lines generally give rise to mountain ranges with one sharp face and the other more gently shelving to the plain. Is the sharp face of precipices facing north, hemming in the Empire?
[Oliver’s A-level in Geography will have come into play here. –DM]
In the centre of the fault line of mountains is an area where the two tectonic plates have not yet met, of much lower land. Our city state is a gap city, geographically sited to command the vital pass between the mountains.
The home city state is a trading centre acting as a conduit through the mountains from the southern lands of the barbarians and the lands of the city states to the empire.
We know of three other city states, one inside the empire, one more military minded than ours, and another port city on the nearest coast.
5) Social organization
Most cultures have slaves.
The Empire
See religion and elsewhere. The Empire would appear too powerful to be stopped by our city state but perhaps there are other potential problems on its many borders, diverting its resources.
The home city state
It is a fledgling democracy. All descendants of the original inhabitants of the city have the vote on every issue. They jealously guard their privilege as the founders of the city state. Prominent among the demos are (i) a few Patricians, heads of what were the noble families which probably still own many of the orchards and grain fields outside the city, and (ii) the Demagogues or rabble rousers. Oratory is an important skill and the styles used would be different for the two types.
[I like the potential for political tension, an idea that I suspect came from Jamie or Mark. It’s not clear whether the Demagogues – wrong word, I know – are descended from the original inhabitants, and therefore get a vote, or are agitating from the outside. No doubt that would have got worked out in the stories. –DM]
There are mercenaries for hire here and a distinct mercenary group.
As a wealthy trade centre the city state, with its advanced culture and great minds, has been a magnet for traders, craftsmen and others who have come to live there. Many of these are very rich, but are disenfranchised as only the offspring of the original inhabitants have the vote. These people who feel discriminated against under the current system might be suborned by the agents of the Empire.
How large is the population of this city state?
6) Sorcery
We agreed the incidence of magic should be fairly low so that the intrigues, military campaigns and human interaction don't become meaningless. Of course great magics might be explained away by the people.
Theomagy: Magic practiced by priests, usually in groups within temples. Particularly strong in the Empire. This magic typically takes some time to plan and execute but can be very powerful.
Philosopher mages: A few great minds casting their spells alone or teaching philosophy and sorcery together in their schools. They use the basic elements of magic. The search for a 'missing' element has become a part of their tradition. They are flexible in their approach and can use magic extemporaneously.
The barbarian races practice shamanic magic.
One of the philosopher mages thinks he is about to develop telepathy (Dave's idea).
[That notion was attributed to me but I have no idea why I thought it might prove interesting. Perhaps I meant the kind of telepathy that allows long-range communication, which certainly features as a very rare and somewhat unreliable resource in Medra. – DM]
Given the importance of the weather on the ubiquitous beasts of burden the importance of weather magic or perhaps weather prophesy would be significant.
7) The inhabitants
The inhabitants of the city states are either olive or coppery skinned.
The barbarians are white with red or light hair. The dominant race in the Empire are black. By making black people the most dominant culture we are reversing the norm.
[The people of both Tekumel and Medra are dark-skinned, so that was obviously comme il faut for our fantasy thinking at the time, and fair enough too. Those pale, red-haired barbarians were a bit of a cliché though! – DM]
There is an intelligent race of firedrakes living on the fault line in and near volcanoes. They soar on thermals above magma lakes. They are cold blooded and need heat to fly/glide and to think clearly. Away from the heat they become torpid and slow-witted. When hot they are capable of psionics. Humans don't think the firedrakes are intelligent.
[I remember Mark particularly liked this idea and was going to write a story about a human coming to realize that the firedrakes, normally encountered in their torpid state and therefore considered just animals, actually had a sophisticated civilization within the rim of the volcano. –DM]
8) History
The expanding Empire has prospered through a divide and rule foreign policy, better use of the warbeast/beast of burden, and unified religion and thought. The Empire has reached its natural borders and there is a head of pressure building up. Its expansionist economies need more subjects and slaves.
The northernmost city state, which lay inside the mountains, has been recently gobbled up by the Empire. "Look what happened to the northernmost city state,” warn the (correct) prophets of doom.
Our home city state has been recently, or is about to be, approached by the more military-minded state nearby to look to its defence and join an alliance.
The Empire is attempting to subvert the minds of the diverse people of our city state in preparation for taking it over. It will also be working to keep the city state diplomatically isolated.
* * *
As you will have realized, we never did anything else with our shared world. That was the only time we got together to discuss it. Sometimes an idea just fizzles out, and the only way you can see that is by spending a little time developing it. In this case I think there were just too many of us to create a coherent universe. Collaboration works fine in pairs (note that only a year or two after this meeting, Mark and I had devised Virtual Reality and Jamie and I came up with Fabled Lands) but with six people in the room – it’s not an ego thing, it’s just that you all want to go off in different directions and nothing gels. Or is it that groupthink distracts you from exploring those different directions? One or t'other.
Funnily enough, if the rights to do Tekumel novels had dropped into our laps, that’s what we’d all have spent the 1990s writing. Tekumel works because it’s the vision of one mind: Professor M A R Barker’s, which has then inspired others to expand upon it. Or look at how many authors can do interesting work in Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos universe, or in Mike Mignola’s Hellboy universe (a spin-off of the former, come to think of it). Or the biggest beast of all shared worlds ever, Stan Lee’s Marvel Universe.
What do you think about shared worlds? Any favourites? Or do you find that having multiple authors working in the same universe just creates a hopeless collision of styles? The earliest shared world I'm aware of is Charles Dickens's Mugby Junction, which is well worth a look:
This seems a good pick for April 1st. Not that it’s a joke as such, but it is a slightly silly knockabout scenario with a whiff of poisson. The original version used Dragon Warriors stats, and must have been written right after The Lands of Legend when we still thought Book Seven was on the cards, but it’s certainly too light on story to ever have been considered for inclusion in a DW book.
I have a feeling that Oliver and I knocked it up for White Dwarf on the basis of a casual conversation with Ian Livingstone in which he hinted that Citadel Miniatures might benefit from a scenario designed to sell figurines – “you know, like a monster hunt.” But Games Workshop wouldn’t have seen any mileage in a scenario based on Dragon Warriors rules because DW was sold in bookshops, so made no money for them.
That was around the time of the famous “sod off” issue when White Dwarf had been wrenched away from editor Ian Marsh and was in the process of transforming into a figurines catalogue. Well, Oliver and I had no illusions on that score, so with a quick edit the scenario jumped across to the Warhammer universe. Even then, though, I don’t think it was ever published. Maybe GW suggested repurposing it again for Tetsubo and by then I’d had enough of the thing.
The scenario is really just an excuse for a string of tabletop fights, first a scrap in the Tin Inn – pardon me, the Whaler’s Wassail – and then opening into a rambunctious monster hunt on Spike Island. It’s typical of the way White Dwarf was trending under the new Nottingham regime, but a little more real roleplaying fun could be squeezed out of it by encouraging some factionalism among the PCs, perhaps, or if the metamorphosis abilities of the oni and rakshah are used to stir up a little Thing-style paranoia. Otherwise just crack out the beer and pretzels and start swinging.
BIG GAME
A scenario for Dragon Warriors and Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay by Dave Morris and Oliver Johnson.
Party composition (DW)
This adventure is best suited to assassins, though any adventuring profession can take part. As a guideline, the party strength should be as follows:
If there are only a few players, the party can either consist of high-ranking characters or player-controlled NPCs can be used to bring it up to strength.
PLAYERS’ INTRODUCTION
You have come to the port of Burhaven on the north-west coast of Cornumbria. Much of the last part of your journey has taken place in the sort of torrential downpour that always accompanies the arrival of spring in this part of the world. Soon all the rivers have flooded their banks and the road along which you ride has become a slough of mud. It is with some relief that you stoop under the overhanging eaves of the only inn in this small port. You are pleased to note that a ship rides at anchor in the harbour, for you have come here expressly to get passage on a ship going south. Evening settles in as you take in the scene from the shelter of the dripping eaves. Far out beyond the harbour walls, through a grey mist of rain you can just make out the sombre silhouette of an island. A wan light glimmers from a hilltop tower there.
GAMESMASTER’S INTRODUCTION
Last night, in a terrible storm, a barque was swept onto the rocks of Spike Island. The sailors were all drowned, but their living cargo escaped from the wreck. This was an oni, an exotic monster not found in Cornumbria - or anywhere in western Legend (WFRP: the Old World).
Master Altan, the wizard who lives on Spike Island, is a collector of strange beasts. Having heard tales about oni from sailors returning from the Orient, he sent his hunters to catch one for his menagerie. His sources told him something about the oni’s magic, so he had provided them with an enchanted cage that would suppress its powers. After many months, the hunters had discovered an oni in a cave in distant Opalor (WFRP: Cathay) and managed to catch it after a fierce struggle.
They began the long haul north, back to Spike Island, to claim the reward they had earned. The voyage was fraught with many dangers, all of which they survived only to die in the shipwreck with their destination in sight. The bars of the magical cage were smashed on the jagged rocks, and the oni was set free.
It set out towards Altan’s tower and there, taking the disguise of a shipwrecked sailor, sought sanctuary. Altan was suspicious, but before he had a chance to pierce the oni’s disguise with a spell it had breathed its poisonous, mind-destroying fumes upon him. Fleeing in terror, Altan stumbled out into the storm and made a desperate escape from the island using his Ring of Far Deliverance (see below).
Making its way into the vaults below the tower, the oni was amazed to discover Altan’s menagerie: a shrieking, blood maddened collection of some of the strangest creatures in all Creation. One, a hag calling herself Annis the Spit, convinced the oni to open the cages. The creatures of Altan’s menagerie poured out wildly into the night. Annis and the oni remained in the tower, which they have quickly befouled to become a suitable lair. Annis is spiteful with petty evil and is content to let the monsters roam the island for now, though she intends to transport them all to the mainland to spread mayhem as soon as she can get hold of a ship. Although the oni is evil, it has its own intelligent goals (returning home, for one) and is not interested in such chaotic malevolence. However, being a stranger in a strange land it has decided to follow Annis’s lead for the time being.
THE WHALER’S WASSAIL
Meanwhile, Altan has found his way to the Whaler’s Wassail tavern on the mainland. The oni’s breath has destroyed his intellect, but his personality is unchanged. Always a good man, he feels responsible for the evil that has happened and has a driving need to set things straight. Unfortunately, he is now quite befuddled and cannot remember precisely what did happen. He remembers that the monsters are free on the island, and realises that they must be rounded up or killed before they harm anyone. He cannot remember precisely what monsters there are, and has forgotten all about the oni.
As the player-characters enter the inn (see map below) Altan has just asked some whalers whether they will accompany him back to the island. They are reluctant because they are naturally a little leery of him. The wizard has always been a recluse, viewed with awe and fear by the locals. The strange cries that sometimes echo from his island have given the place a baleful reputation. He has, however, just offered them 50 Crowns a head to do the job. This represents several months’ earning to the whalers, so they are sorely tempted. They want to think carefully about the idea, and will certainly become irate if the PCs pre-empt them by offering to go with Altan in their place.
When the PCs enter, there are eleven people in the taproom. The six whalers (table B on the map) are dressed from head to toe in rank-smelling oilskins. Their greasy faces are concealed in the shadows of their oilskin hoods. They reek of the bloody charnel of their trade, and their evilly sharp harpoon-spears lean against the table where they sit.
Whalers
2nd rank fighters; ATT 14; DEF 8; attack with harpoon (2d4, 4) or knife (d6, 3); special attack: can throw harpoon (d8, 4), armour bypass means it lodges in the target’s flesh causing 1 HP damage per round until pulled free, which causes 1d3 damage; AF1; HP 9, 9, 8, 10, 9, 11; MAG DEF 3; EV4; move 10m (20m); STEALTH 11; PERCEPTION 5
Skills: Sailing, Row, Fish, Orientation, Strike to Injure, Consume Alcohol, Swim.
Possessions: Harpoon (counts as javelin, but barbed: increase the value of any critical hit by +1); flensing knife; oilskin cape; 12 shillings.
In another corner (table A) sit three officers of the Temptress, the ship lying at anchor in the harbour. They wear the stiff epaulettes, voluminous capes, oak-carved gorgets and double peaked hats favoured by the sailors of Ereworn (WFRP: Kislev). The tallest of the three is Captain Flint of Salamur Port (WFRP: Erengrad). His helmsman and first mate have accompanied him so that the rough whalers don’t try any tricks. Flint intends to pay them for the whale oil he is shipping across the Glaive to Algandy (WFRP: south across the Channel).
Sailors
4th rank fighters; ATT 16; DEF 10; attack with sword (d8, 4) or dagger (d4, 3); AF2; HP 16, 15, 15; MAG DEF 6; EV4; move 10m (20m); STEALTH 14; PERCEPTION 8; special item: Captain Flint has “Davy Jones’s Sparkler” (a ring of obedient parts) and a hipflask containing healing potion.
Skills: Sailing, Orientation, Fencing Sword, Left-hand Dagger, Storytelling, Dodge Blow, Astronomy, Cartography, Read/Write, Swim.
Possessions: Sword; dagger; leather jerkin; 5 Crowns; Captain Flint has two special items, Davy Jones’s Sparkler (a Protection Ring vs sea monsters) and a hipflask of enchanted rum that acts like a Potion of Healing.
Altan himself sits in deep shadows beside the hearth (table C), still in his dripping wet cloak waiting impatiently for the whalers to make up their mind about his proposition. He mutters to himself, wringing his hands and taking slurps of wine from the jug beside him. He will explain his plight to anyone who asks, and will accept their help in preference to the whalers whom he does not trust.
Altan should not be characterized as stupid. The oni’s breath which effectively reduced his intelligence has done this by destroying his power to concentrate. He now keeps forgetting things and can only carry a thought through by tremendous effort of will. Listening to him ramble away takes a lot of patience, and often it is quicker to complete his train of thought for him, but he does not give the impression of being stupid.
Altan is accompanied by his ape, Jemai, the only loyal creature from his menagerie. It too is soaked to the skin and chatters with the cold. It has a limited power of speech (instilled in it by magic) but it will only speak when spoken to. This is because Altan objected to unnecessary interruptions when he was working. If asked, Jemai will tell the player-characters about the oni ( “Strange thingy with grinning face came out of storm, ‘n’ blowed smoke in master’s face...”).
Altan
13th rank sorcerer; ATT 12; DEF 6; strikes with staff (d6,3); AF0; HP 13; MAG ATT 28; MAG DEF 18; EV5; move 9m (15m); STEALTH 16; PERCEPTION 12; special items: Ring of Far Deliverance (a ring of teleportation with 7 charges) and Cap’n Sabre’s Galoshes (boots of water walking); notes: Altan can still attempt to cast spells, but he must first roll to see if he remembers the spell (a d20 equal to or under his current Intelligence score of 5) and then has a 70% chance of miscasting it.
Skills: Arcane Language (Magick); Cast Spells; Read/Write; Scroll Lore; Secret Language (Classical); Identify Plants; Rune Lore; Magic Sense; Herb Lore; Magical Awareness; Meditation; Demon Lore; Identify Magical Artifact; Identify Undead; Mythical Beast Lore.
Possessions: Staff; robes; Ring of Far Deliverance (casts Teleport, usable once per month); Cap’n Sabre’s Galoshes (permit wearer to walk on water); pet ape
Magic Points: 33 (But Altan must test against Intelligence in order to cast a spell successfully or use any other knowledge skill.)
Spells: Petty Magic - Gift of Tongues, Glowing Light, Magic Alarm, Magic Lock, Protection from Rain; Battle Magic Level One - Cure Light Injury, Wind Blast; Battle Magic Level Two Mystic Mist, Zone of Sanctuary; Battle Magic Level Three - Cause Fear, Magic Bridge; Battle Magic Level Four - Aura of Invulnerability, Strength of Mind. (Altan didn’t manage to take any spell ingredients with him when he fled from the island.)
Jemai the ape
ATT 10; DEF 6; attacks by biting (d4,1) or throwing small objects (d3,2); AF0; HP 3; MAG DEF 3; EV6; move 12m (25m); STEALTH 17; PERCEPTION 13
Skills: Acrobatics, Concealment, Dodge Blow, Flee!, Pick Pocket, Scale Sheer Surface
Possessions: Toothpick, bag of pistachio nuts, brocade waistcoat, purse containing 12 Crowns and 3 shillings.
Jemai attacks by biting or throwing small objects. If there’s a brawl, he will climb up to the rafters out of harm’s way.
The innkeeper, Humbrol Greytooth, is behind the bar. He tolerates brawls as a way of life in Burhaven, but if his inn looks like getting seriously damaged he will use the crossbow he keeps under the counter. Otherwise, Humbrol’s only interests are serving ale and selling titbits of information to his customers.
Humbrol Greytooth
Unranked human; ATT 11; DEF 5; fights with cudgel (d3,3) or crossbow (d10,4); AF0; HP 8; MAG DEF 3; EV3; move 10m (20m); STEALTH 12; PERCEPTION 4
Skills: Blather, Brewing, Consume Alcohol, Disarm, Evaluate, Haggle, Storytelling, Strike to Stun.
Possessions: Crossbow, leather apron, cudgel
Special ability: Never surprised by anything that happens at the inn.
The taproom of the Whaler’s Wassail is mapped here in case of a brawl. (Download a larger version here.) Quite possibly such a brawl will start (like many in the past) because of the parrot. This annoying bird hears anything whispered within ten feet and will then immediately repeat it in a very loud squawk. Humbrol thinks his parrot is an exceptional bird – which it is – but does not realize that this is not a good thing. Many a muttered joke or remark about another patron has been relayed by the parrot with cawing bravado, sparking off a fight.
The standard DW or WFRP rules are adequate for any fight, but the following structured tactical rules may be preferred by those who like to brawl with precision. Attacks (including missiles and spells) must be aimed at someone in your 120° line-of-sight zone (see map). Each combat round is divided into three action phases, as below.
* Each hex represents about 1.5m, so a normal move is 6 hexes per round and a running move is 12 hexes. Alternatively you can backpedal – move backwards a total of 2 hexes. To run you must have taken a move action in the previous round and you must take a move action in the following round. When you take a move action you are not obliged to go the full distance but you must move at least 1 hex.
** In melee you can strike at an adjacent character in one of your front three hexes. You can only hit in melee if you moved no more than 2 hexes in the same round.
Within each phase, actions are first announced by all players in order of Reflexes (ie lowest first) and actions are then carried out in reverse order of Reflexes (highest first). When announcing, you only have to say which option you’ve chosen, not how you’re planning to implement it. For instance, you might say “move” but not how far or where, or you might say “hit in melee” without having to specify whom you’re going to hit.
Moving onto furniture costs a character 2 hexes from their move for the round and they must make a Reflexes test (difficulty factor 14) or fall prone. There’s no cost for moving off furniture, though. Fighting from on top of a table gives +1 ATTACK and DEFENCE. The tables and bar are immovable, but the chairs can be swung – or they can be thrown up to (Strength/4) hexes. Chairs count as (d8,3) weapons in DW rules, while the parrot's perch can be used as a staff once the parrot has been prised off it.
If an actual hand-to-hand slugfest is appealing, optional close combat rules can be used. Under he optional rules, any character can move into another's hex. It is possible to stand off a character closing with you if (i) you have a weapon and the other character doesn't and (ii) they are approaching from one of your three front hexes. Otherwise they collide with you and you both go down in the hex. Once in this situation, characters can only fight one another using unarmed combat, dagger or cudgel. They get to strike in both the first and third phases each round. DEFENCE of both characters is halved. Instead of fighting, a grappling character can spend the round trying to extricate himself and stand up; he has to roll under Reflexes on d20 to succeed (unless the other person is also trying to get up).
Getting to the island
There are a number of boats by the quayside. These belong to the whalers, and theft will result in a hot and bloody pursuit. Each boat takes up to sixteen people (minimum crew six) and the whalers are prepared to hire one of them out for 20 Florins (WFRP: shillings) a day.
Captain Flint’s ship is due to weigh anchor tomorrow morning, so if the characters intend to sail with him this will only give them the night to explore Spike Island. Flint is quite inflexible about his schedule unless bribed, and no other merchant vessel is expected in Burhaven for ten days or so. The Temptress has a crew of fifteen in addition to her three officers. These fellows have been given strict instructions not to allow anyone aboard. They have hung oiled nets over the sides to give would-be boarders a slippery climb.
Only a skilled mariner will be able to steer a ship or boat to the jetty on Spike Island. Characters with a nautical background (DW: see Book Six) might just have the appropriate expertise. If not, their craft will be seized by strong coastal currents and swept into the island in a random location: roll d12 to determine the shore zone on the island map (see next post).
Come back next week for the concluding instalment.
Following on from the Brymstone town map, here is the introductory spiel for one of the player-characters in the Brymstone campaign. I just handed each player a background and let them work it up from there. Don't always do it that way - in fact, at no other time - but this was an experiment. The player in question was Ian Marsh, of Dragonlords and White Dwarf fame, who now runs Fighting 15s. The character was inspired by Vina's fate in "The Menagerie" - what if you got put back together by beings that didn't understand all the mortal components? I explored the theme again in my Knightmare novel,Labyrinths of Fear. (I don't think there was even a single labyrinth in it, but the title came from marketing. Surprising they'd know a word that long, actually.)
I did two versions of the character intro. One was all Robin of Sherwood, the other a bit weirder. Can't remember now which I gave to Ian, so here are both:
Meeting Anath
When you were young, you made a mistake that changed the whole course of your life. You killed a man.
The reasons do not matter now. Only the fact that you were once a fifteen-year-old boy with a bloodied sickle in his hands, standing over the body of a freeman. Your parents had died years before, and you had nothing to hold you to the village to wait for such justice as the lord would dispense. You stole a horse - second heinous crime - and fled to the wildwood, to become an outlaw. A wolf's-head. You have killed many times since then.
You thoughts stray back to that distant time. A long-ago night in another world, through which a terrified youngster rode from his pursuers. You pulled the horse about, trying to get it to leap a narrow crevasse above a stream. Snorting, it threw you. You plummetted down into darkness -
- you have been wandering for a long time in a lightless wood. Your hands grope blindly around the stunted boles of dead trees. A faint glimmer of starlight reaches your eyes, but as you make for it a tall figure steps across your path. You have a burnt stump of wood in your hand. You cannot breathe as the figure approaches with silent tread. A gleam as he smiles - a faint, ironic smile that does nothing to reassure you. He strikes his knuckles together hard, and a spark flies from them. It touches your torch, which bursts alight. You look up to thank the man, but he has gone. The torch burns brightly, giving you a hot red light with which to see your way from the wood. You make for an open field, feeling the heat of the burning torch on your face.
You woke then from the dream which has recurred so often since. Someone was standing over you in the darkness. Through all that long night you stirred fitfully, gripped by a fever, rising momentarily into consciousness and then sinking back into delerium. As dawn broke, the figure who had attended you throughout your ordeal laid his cold hand on your shoulder. "Sleep now," said he, "for I would have no ill befall thee."
You slept through much of the day following, wondering half in sleep about the strange man who had rescued you. He had brought you to a rough cave beside a river, a place which stank of herbs and earth. You rose to walk about the small cave, but found that your legs shook with weakness. You slumped back on your pallet of logs and stretched hide, waking again at sunset to find the tall man there again. He wore green, and his white hair, gathered by a silver circlet, touched his shoulders. He beckoned you to follow him to the mouth of the bower, pushing back a net of creepers. A pack of wolves waited in the gathering dusk for their master, crouched low and watchful.
"Thou art healed." The tall man turned to you, holding out a longbow and quiver for you to take. "I am Anath. Tonight we hunt together, my son."
You took the bow from his hand. His smile was like an icicle in winter sunlight.
Waxing poetical It was at the turn of the year that you stood, overshadowed by trees stiff with hoarfrost, waiting for three lords baleful with ire to speak. A green-garbed lord leaned forward on his throne of oak:
"Hearken to us, you who share the mortals' breath, who choose to walk upon the earth broken by plough, to drink the water plundered from ancient wells." It was in the cold moonlight that you waited, caught in a web-tangle of wooded shadows, listening to three lords solemn with portent. One spoke to you from his root-twined seige: "Year has piled upon year since Kernac worked his magic. The Shapeless One has long been fettered, yet now men have forgotten those chains that are to break." The third lord sat in silence while the winter wind stirred his grey cloak. A bittern boomed as the moon escaped from cloud. He then said: "Surrender to sleep, you mortal's son. Already the winter has stolen you from the old world, licked your flesh with its barbed tongue, filled your lungs with its cold laughter. Awaken with the reborn land, go into the east. Join battle with the ancient foe, the skulking one, the stealer of gifts most precious and true."
With sweeping cloaks all three rose to stand in starlight. Faces of ashen grey stared from under elfin hoods. All spoke together: "The days on middle-earth for all are numbered; he who may should wrest renown, steal from Fate his fame; that is a hero's sweetest solace, his best memorial when he has departed from the world."
You wake up in a wooded bower. The forest around you is ablaze with the colour and sounds and scents of a glorious spring morning. The words of the poem linger in your mind like the fragments of a dream, but you can remember nothing else that happened since you rode into the wood. That must have been months ago, for it was close to midwinter then!
Of the two versions, I have a feeling I used the second one to start with because it dropped in that hint about the Shapeless One, who was the campaign's Big Bad, a shapechanger called the Brollachan. Well, I say he (it?) was the BB, but actually he only catalyzed the existing tensions that were building up between those loyal to the local lord and the freemen of the town. It was a riot - literally.
Paul Mason once said that I had "sensibly used a professional career as a stepping stone to fandom". There was a lot of truth in that. When writing for publication, you often have to compromise for the sake of being commercial. This was particularly true in the early days of gamebooks, when the key to an extra fifty thousand copies was how much you could bear to write it like Fighting Fantasy.
That's one reason why the DW books started off in a rather generic fantasy world (if you look at the bestiary in Book One, for example) and only gradually developed their non-dungeoneering, anti-high fantasy flavour. Martin Scorsese calls it smuggling, and I like that because it sounds quite respectable. The truth is, you don't want to write things like "all elves have the senses of a 2nd rank Mystic" and you really don't want to include furry-footed halflings, but that was (or seemed to be) the price of getting the series published. It's only with the Magnum Opus Press re-release of the series that I feel Dragon Warriors is finally finding its proper niche among a small but highly committed group of serious roleplayers. I would love to have done supplements such as Jewelspider and The Legend Sourcebook, but even today it would be hard to make them viable except as pure labours of love.
Anyway, back to 1986. I know Ian Marsh from his days as editor of White Dwarf. He knew Paul Mason through RPG fandom - and in fact at that time they each rented a floor in the same house. Paul had written a Dragon Warriors scenario for his fanzine imazine, following that up with a review. Ian wasn't in any hurry to show me the review. I suppose he thought I'd be offended, but when I tracked down the review (below) I agreed with everything Paul had to say. His comments helped encourage me to accelerate the process of turning DW into a proper roleplaying game. Okay, that led to Book Six, which sold far fewer than the rest of the series and canned future plans for Books 7-12 - but I'd rather have written that book than a dozen D&D-ish bestsellers. (Hence Paul's comment about fandom - very perspicacious.)
This review appeared in the Autumn 1986 issue of imazine and I've kept it word for word. I'd like to run Paul's DW scenario, which is not available on the web as far as I'm aware, but I'd better properly get his permission for that. The timing is opportune: he is staying with us this week on a trip back to Britain with wife Keiko and son Misha. If he can bear to allow twenty-five-year-old fanzine writing to see the light of day, and if my scanner can cope with the faded text, watch for "The Tower of Horglin" here soon. Paul described the scenario as "an exercise in irony"; FF fans better look the other way.
After last issue's Dragon Warriors scenario, one question that's cropped up in many letters is 'Why Dragon Warriors?'That's one of the questions I'll be answering in this comparative review. But first, a few nuts and bolts.
King Arthur Pendragon, in the form currently available, consists of a box, containing two books (one only 16 pages long), a large poster-map, plenty of charts and character sheets and dice. It costs quite a lot of money (depending on where you get it from, but it's on its way down from the mid-twenties; it's currently around £17). And to be honest, that isn't the whole game. If you're at all serious about Pendragon then you should also buy the Pendragon campaign (to the unenlightened, this is what is known as a rip-off).
Dragon Warriors is presented in paperback book form. Individually, the books cost £1.75, and you only need the first two to play the game (number three, while it has a few token additional rules, is mostly scenarios. I haven't read books four onwards thoroughly, but I gather they're much the same), This is what is known as cheap.
The reason why I chose to review the two games together is because they have the same subject matter, and yet are so intriguingly different. Both are games about Medieval Europe, an area formerly dominated by the awesome shadow of Chivalry & Sorcery. Yet the differences leap out at you before you open the books. Dragon Warriors is a British mass-market game, clearly aiming for 'the kids', that hotch-potch of individuals of both sexes and with ages ranging from 6 to 60 who play Fighting Fantasy gamebooks. The back cover blurb is predictably cringeworthy. It appears to be cobbled together from adverts for D&D as well as promotional literature for Fighting Fantasy. In short, it's a cash-in.
In contrast, Pendragon oozes refinement. The price quickly signals that this is a game for the cognoscenti, and the cover art and copy is tasteful. It's a game of 'Quest, Romance, and Adventure', we are told, and none of, that crude hack 'n slay stuff. It enables you to play out the lives of a dynasty of characters against the tempestuous setting of Malory's Albion.
First impressions upon perusing the contents of the respective packages tend to confirm the initial impression. In Dragon Warriors we find a seen-it-all- before array of introductory material. This breaks no new ground in explaining the concept to newcomers I can't help wondering whether it isn't a little pointless trying to interest new gamers by using the same old approach. The book then goes on to fill vast amounts of space with combat, with the glib assertion that the rules for this are 'the most fundamental element in any FRP game.'
Pendragon is elegantly laid out with plenty of space, and tasteful illustrations. Each page has a narrow column running down its edge of heraldic motifs, quotations from Malory, examples and so on -- little bits and pieces that complement the main text. However, in stark contrast to Dragon Warriors, it contains no introduction to role-playing whatsoever! Purchasers of Pendragon are thrown straight into a discussion of the feudal background, followed hard by the section on character generation. There's not a word about what role-playing is. Clearly, this game is aimed at people who know already. Pressing on into Pendragon we discover that it has an elegant system. All stats and skills are rated from one to 20. Any activity is attempted by rolling a D20 and comparing the result to your skill. If you're 'unopposed' then you have to roll under to succeed. If you're 'opposed' then you have to roll under your skill and have a greater score than your opponent if they, too, have rolled under their score. That's the game system. I like game systems that can be explained in less than a paragraph.
What I don’t like quite so much is game systems which have lots of chrome bolted onto them. Having established that it has an effective and up-to-date system, Pendragon then does its best to spoil things with a lot of niggly problems. There are a host of secondary mechanics which all work in different ways (the AD&D problem). There is the strange tradition of making improvement dependent upon a successful use of a skill. Apart from leading to the infamous Golf Bag Syndrome ('I've hit with my sword, so I'll get out my mace') this is simply wrong in describing how people improve their abilities. And there are tables, tables, tables (few of them round).
Another quirk is the game's use of various game systems, casually slung into the rules before they've been explained. Very disconcerting. A good set of rules should playable after the first reading.
These gripes about Pendragon pale rather in comparison with Dragon Warriors. Dragon Warriors is elegant insofar as RuneQuest and D&D are elegant - for the simple reason that Dragon Warriors is D&D grafted onto RuneQuest. There are no skills. Instead activity is run off attributes, and there are lots of little paragraphs covering special cases ('Dragon Warriors -- the Ultimate Role-Playing Game for GMs with eidetic memories').
The Dragon Warriors combat system is simple - but bizarre. There is a standard 'To Hit' roll, simply discovered by subtracting your opponent's Defence from your Attack. After this you must roll again - rolling a special dice (depending on weapon) to 'bypass' or penetrate the armour, If successful you do a fixed amount of damage, if unsuccessful you do no damage. This is an odd system.
The quirky combat system highlights one of the major problems with Dragon Warriors - the game is dice crazy. In a game for the mass market, it is unforgiveable to demand that they go out and buy all these funny shaped dice, when it is perfectly possible to come up with a system as good as or better than the DW system using only six-sided dice (I know - I've done it). If you are trying to get people into roleplaying, there's no point in alienating them with unnecessary expenses.
Thus far, the message of this review could probably be summarised: 'Dragon Warriors is cheap and nasty; Pendragon is costly but good'. It'll do for now, but there's a little more to it. Pendragon is considered by many to be the future of rolegames. If so the future consists of absolute regimentation. Not regimentation in the wargamer/simulationist sense, but an even more insidious control. Because Pendragon, in its pure form, wrests the control of the player characters away from the players, away even from the referee, and invests it firmly in the rules. The game features a selection of quantified personality traits and features, which must betested against in order to take actions. In the hands of a powerfully motivated referee, who was prepared substantially to ignore these rules where it seemed unnecessary, the system would work very well. Give it to a relative novice, however, and what resulted would not be what I understand by role-playing. Pendragon also has a slight thrown-together feel to it. The Player's Book and the Gamemaster's Book don't appear to have been so named out of any desire to be functionally accurate. The Player's book is full of information about the running of the game. Separating the two books, particularly when one ends up only 16-pages long, makes no sense at all. It looks to me like one of the classic game company 'Oh sod it, chuck it out like that and nobody will notice' decisions.
And to be honest, Pendragon is not well written. it is a very dry set of rules. The attempt to conjure up the legendary atmosphere of the Arthurian romances is made only through odd quotations from books. The rules themselves might as well be for chicken farming.
All of this brings me back to the question I stated at the beginning of the review 'Why Dragon Warriors?' Well, despite a magic system with little Magic, ancient rule systems, scenarios that are mostly dungeon encounters with no internal logical and precious little atmosphere; despite all these, and the many more faults of the game - there is something there. There is a little spark in Dragon Warriors which comes out ever so occasionally. Whether it be in the sample game conversation (far better than I've seen elsewhere), the faerie quality of some of the monsters, or the feudal feel, something with atmosphere does come across in Dragon Warriors. One or other of the authors have clearly done their best to slip in this 'Sense of Otherness', 'Sense of Wonder', 'Sense of Faerie' between all the sub Fighting Fantasy stuff that supposedly sells the books. And Dragon Warriors is cheap, and Dragon Warriors is aimed at a mass market. Sonething good in the mass market is qualititatively equivalent, in my eyes, only to something superb in the specialist market.
Pendragon is aimed at experienced gamers. It is probably the commercial game with the most pure 'narrative' approach. I like it, and I recommend that you buy it when Games Workshop bring out their hardback (which will include the material from the Pendragon Campaign, and parts of the Nobles Book - thus eliminating Chaosium's shameless rip-off). But it's a game which inserts the rules forcefully into areas where I think they should tread delicately, if at all. It's a game that will be a 'story-telling boardgame without a board' in the hands of any referee who accepts the premise of its system. Pendragon is a flawed masterpiece. Unfortunately, it is not superb.
