A firestorm of fear

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Blood Sword redux: The Walls of Spyte

"A work is never completed except by some accident such as weariness, satisfaction, the need to deliver, or death: for, in relation to who or what is making it, it can only be one stage in a series of inner transformations."

That was the author Paul Valéry. His quotation is usually attributed to da Vinci (well, it's always Leonardo, Churchill or Wilde, isn't it?) and given in the snappier paraphrased version that Auden came up with:

"A work of art is never finished; it is only abandoned."

More relevant to The Walls of Spyte is Valéry's other comment on this theme:

"In the eyes of those lovers of perfection, a work is never finished (a word that for them has no meaning) but abandoned. And this abandonment, whether to the flames or to the public, and which is the result of weariness or an obligation to deliver, is a kind of an accident to them, like the breaking off of a reverie that fatigue, irritation, or something similar has made worthless."

All right, enough from les éminences grises. Clearly some works of art are abandoned earlier than others, and The Walls of Spyte is the literary equivalent of a baby left on a church doorstep in midwinter. What went wrong?

If you'll allow me to be highfalutin here, I signed off as Blood Sword's showrunner with book four. Whatever came after that, I was but an onlooker, like RTD watching Moffat episodes of Who. When Oliver Johnson and I originally pitched the series to Hodder, we had intended to work on it equally, but Oliver's job started to take up more of his time, with the result that I wrote books two through four single-handed. Then Oliver thought he'd have time to do book five, and we realized that would mean he'd have ended up contributing a quarter of the total work so we could switch our royalty split from 50/50 to 75/25. Nice and simple.

How often do simple plans gang na agley? Oliver had got about a third of the way in when a family holiday pulled him away from ice-bound horror to sea and sunshine. I was busy on other projects, but I agreed to step in and write the finale -- just forty sections, starting from the point where you meet Karunaz and Zaraqeb. I'd already tied up the storylines I was interested in, so it was just the showdown with the Magi. Oliver enlisted Jamie Thomson to pitch in with a hundred sections or so in the middle. I have no idea what shape the manuscript was in when it went to the publisher, but they clearly didn't have time to fix it, or even to proofread it. You cannot, in fact, get through to the end of that original edition without cheating.

The title is an obvious homage to "In the Walls of Eryx" and the story should echo At the Mountains of Madness, but instead of a Lovecraft homage the book came out as really more of a Ross Rocklynne concept rewritten by Robert Lynn Asprin. (You see, I just can't help griping. But, after all, Taika Waititi had a smash hit by turning the end of the world into a silly comedy, so maybe I'd better just go with the flow here.)

I'd always had this idea of astral forces gathering above an Arctic wasteland, and a few years later I got to do it my way in Heart of Ice -- also destroying the universe at the end, you'll note. The idea of the Five having engineered the Blasting in order to Phoenix themselves up to a level of power where they could challenge God -- that bit will have been me. At the time I was probably thinking more of Odin on the tree than self-reincarnating Marvel characters, but that's a detail.

Talking of the Five Magi, W B Yeats's poem seems like it must be the inspiration for them, but in fact I only came across it years later, when I was writing The Chronicles of the Magi. The real seed for the Magi came from a campaign that Oliver ran at Oxford back in the early '80s after we'd all been enthusing about Riddley Walker and Mad Max 2. (Oh yes, about that...) In the campaign we were all feral mid-teen scavengers of a post-apocalyptic tribe, wandering across a landscape of bomb-wrecked highways and nature blighted with chemical weapons. In the sky at night we saw fleeting coloured satellites for which we all felt a degree of "fix". We didn't know what fix was, but any change in fix (as in, "gain +2 Fix with Plague Star") was to be dreaded. I remember an encounter with a local bogeyman we called Smiler, whose face was eaten away in a ghastly rictus and who dwelt in an old bomb shelter permanently shrouded in toxic gas. Oh, if only more of that grim tone had found its way into The Walls of Spyte.

I'm frequently asked about the connection between Dragon Warriors and Blood Sword. They share the same setting, certainly, but I'm not sure I'd class most of Blood Sword as "canonical" Legend. If DW is Robin of Sherwood, which is a pretty apposite comparison, then Blood Sword is the BBC's 2006 show Robin Hood. Or if DW is The Shield, maybe Blood Sword is The Rockford Files . (Both shows I like, incidentally.) On that axis, The Walls of Spyte was Police Squad! -- sorry, there I go again. Anyway, the new edition of the book dispenses with the more knockabout comedy elements (what we used to call "silly dungeon" tone) so maybe it's time to let that go.

What else? Unlike the other Blood Sword redux posts (which incidentally are reprinted at the back of the new edition of The Walls of Spyte) I don't have a lot to say about the writing because most of it wasn't me. Karunaz and Zaraqeb, mentioned above, were characters in my Tekumel campaign, played by Paul Mason and Gail Baker respectively. Gail had recently dumped Paul rather brutally, so I probably let his character behead hers as a salve for a wounded heart.

Oliver must have got the idea for the giant red bat that bedevils you at the start from the Crimson Bat in RuneQuest. I'm just grateful he forgot about the ducks. I also remember Jamie telling me how he was working the word "aoristic", which I think he'd picked up from Greek grammar at school, into one of the riddles. I'm still not quite sure what it actually means, so if anyone can drop a sentence illustrating the aoristic tense into the comments, please do.

I'm disappointed I never got the Blood Sword characters to Ellesland. Or Ferromaine, come to that. There's no sign of Cynewulf, Montombre, Jewelspider Wood, or those other staples of most Dragon Warriors campaigns. On the plus side, I did get to explore the Ta'ashim lands and faith in these books, and that part of Blood Sword -- that is, everything that happens in the muck and mire of the cities of Outremer and the Middle East -- is definitely canonical Legend.

Oh, about that... "Why do the characters refer to their world as Middle Earth?" I'm sometimes asked. "Why not Legend?" Well, Legend of course is a non-diegetic name for the setting, something I'm guilty of with Fabled Lands too. To most DW characters, their world is "the middle earth", ie between heaven and hell. I knew that Tolkien used it for his world, of course, but I also thought everyone knew that he just got it from Middle English literature. Nowadays people think it's his proprietary brand, so where possible I've switched it in this book to other terms like "the mortal world".

Overall, if I'd known the Blood Sword books would still be read today by thirty- and forty-somethings, I’d have been bolder about dispensing with the orcs, goblins and dungeon trappings and made it more like "real" Legend. Especially for the Judgement Day finale, which was much better served in my opinion by Tim Harford's Redemption campaign, of which I've offered snippets here from time to time.

That said, Oliver and Jamie delivered a top-class instance of a dungeon adventure in this book. If I'd played in a D&D game half that good back in the mid-'70s, I might never have spurned it for Tekumel and Traveller. And in the new edition, the more obtrusive Pythonesque bits are gone, Russ Nicholson's marvellous illustrations are reproduced via crisp high-quality scans, and as a bonus you actually can get all the way through to the end. It's still Doomsday, but at least you won't miss it.