We were talking recently about alignment, and because I don't believe in those concepts I've never been very interested in heroes and villains, either in games or in fiction. The kind of fantasy stories I grew up with featured characters like Cugel, Elric, and Conan. No nursery-room ethical posturing for those guys. They did what they did for their own reasons. We could sympathize, even root for them and despise their foes, but there was never any suggestion of objective cosmic goodness.
I expect the same of player-characters in roleplaying games. Some have been very decent -- or have tried to be, as it's never easy doing good in a realistically complex world -- and some have been murderous and sought to justify it. The important thing is none of them were fairytale saints or pantomime villains. They acted from the motives that make real people do things.
If your interest was piqued by news about my forthcoming Jewelspider RPG last time, there's more today. Much more, in fact. I've been working away at the magic system, and finally it's been unveiled to all those patient Patreon backers.
Jewelspider is set in the world of Legend (the same setting as Dragon Warriors) but it's more of a realistic take on Legend's medieval origins. This is the world as the people inhabiting it believe it to be. Magic is real, but it isn't a matter of careening fireballs and glitzy special FX. Typically a spell takes minutes, hours or even days to cast, but the outcome is much more significant than simple artillery.
The theory is that an evocative and flavourful magic system will mean that every spellcasting attempt is an adventure seed in its own right. To achieve that goal I'm eager for feedback from the Patreon backers (that wisdom of crowds thing) and after that I'll be releasing the game, first as a PDF and then in print form.
In brief, this is how the Jewelspider magic rules work:
The Nature of Magic
Magic in Jewelspider is a subtle art, often requiring tools and time to manifest. The core of the system lies in reality's reluctance to be altered by magic; overt magical effects are challenging to achieve.
Spellcasting Mechanics
Mastery Levels: To cast a spell, characters must possess mastery in the relevant type of sorcery.
Skill Use: Most spells are cast using Reasoning, though some can be woven from artistic expressions using Artistry.
Intrinsic Difficulty: Each spell has a difficulty level that must be met or exceeded for successful casting.
The Seven Magical Laws
Each of these modifies the difficulty of casting.
Contagion: Using personal items like hair or nails can influence spell difficulty.
Subtlety: Spells cast without witnesses are easier to achieve.
Deferment: Delayed effects are simpler to integrate into reality.
Proximity: Closer targets make for easier spellcasting.
Impermanence: Temporary spells are easier than permanent ones.
Invitation: Spells accepted by targets (even unwittingly) are more potent.
Sympathy: Artistic mimetic components (e.g., a feather for a levitation spell) can enhance spell effectiveness.
Tools and Time
The effectiveness of a spell often depends on the tools used. Rings, Diagrams, Books, Apparatus, and Laboratories each provide varying bonuses and require different amounts of time to use, from instantaneous to several hours.
Success, Failure, and Partial Success
Success: If the casting effect equals or exceeds the difficulty, the spell works as intended.
Failure: No effect occurs, though mishaps are possible.
Partial Success: Unexpected, often uncontrolled effects occur, adding a layer of unpredictability and excitement to spellcasting.
Counterspells and Wards
Defensive measures like Wards and the innate ability to resist spells by other sorcerers add depth and strategy to magical duels and encounters.
If you want to dive into the full details and join the conversation, head over to my Patreon page. Your support helps bring Jewelspider to life, and you'll get exclusive content and a behind-the-scenes look at the development process. Or just join as a free member, which still gives you access to a whole lot of early posts and ensures you'll get updates about publication.
(The image at the top is from Robin of Sherwood. As if you couldn't tell.)
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 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 Walkerand 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.
Occasionally in comments on this blog I've mentioned the idea of myth levels as a way to represent a step-change in capability between characters in a role-playing game. As a fan of Sergio Leone movies it seems only natural to devise rules like that. In this 2001 discussion (fromAnnwn magazine, by the way) between Tim Harford, Paul Mason, Ralph Lovegrove and me, we touch on that and other disconnects between how the role-playing world ought to be and how the rules actually shape it to be. I've seen a fair few role-playing games where the designer tells us how the game should be played, and what the resulting game world ought to be like, but the system they give us (when gamed, as it will be) doesn't lead to anything of the kind. Designers, it's like being the Founding Fathers - you want the game to turn out a certain way, you have to do the work.
Tim: The trend throughout the late 1980s and the 1990s was towards more rational, logical, modular and universal systems. The idea was to provide a simple but realistic means of resolving the usual game questions about combat, success rolls, and so on. Some did fairly well at this task, others didn’t. Along the way, something was lost. Perhaps the problem was with the idea of “realism”. Different games have their own reality. A system like GURPS, for example, is necessarily atheistic. Characters are defined in modern terms, and GURPS handles fate, luck, magic and so on rather clunkily. It’s just a patch, and in a “universal” system it’s hard to see any other way of doing that. In DW, we need to capture the spirit of the time and the place and build it into the rules from the ground up. Heroes can wrestle with giants because they have great spirits. Hannibal could freeze a man into an ice statue [a reference to Knightmare 4: Fortress of Assassins], not because he was a sorcerer, but because he was Hannibal. “My strength is as the strength of ten because my heart is pure,” should be in the rules from the start, not as a “Pure of Heart” advantage (gives x10 ST). The best example of this, for me, was the Judge Dredd system. It was simple, it was stripped down, it gave everybody a special angle or talent, and it captured perfectly the “reality” that an unarmed Judge can take out a dozen thugs with tommy guns any day of the week. That’s the advantage of a focused system done well.
Dave: Or another example from Robin of Sherwood... Little John is wrestling with a stranger. It’s an edgy situation, a “friendly” match but not very friendly, as they don’t know who the guy is and they may very well rob him later. Then, angered by something or other, the stranger suddenly lifts Little John clear of the ground and throws him down. A conclusive victory (and very effective visually, as I recall, because of the sun behind them as the stranger lifts Little John aloft). Everyone sees this and, stunned, they go down on their knees, now recognizing the stranger as Richard the Lionheart. At the time, we talked about this kind of thing being represented by “myth levels”. If I’m myth level 10 and you’re myth level 1, you will not beat me in a fight even if you do have a much higher weapon skill. It’s back again to the idea that characters must be able to affect the narrative directly.
Paul: What’s the “narrative”? I think it’s dangerous to refer to characters affecting the narrative, because it seems to get people thinking in terms of manipulating their characters to make a story, which is different from immersing yourself in the character in the setting, and trusting in natural human processes to sort a narrative out of what happens.
Dave: I agree with you wholeheartedly. Instead of “affect the narrative”, I should have said “characters affect reality” – sorcerers and notable or mythic types especially. In fact, one thing we could say is that there is no difference (as Tim pointed out with the Hannibal example) between a mythically important character and a wizard. They can achieve the same results, even if apparently by different means. So maybe all magic-using characters should start at myth level 2?
Paul: Might it not be best to start off by talking about the spirit of the time and place, using whatever metaphors and references we can, before even starting to consider mechanics? To build up some kind of corpus of things we want the game to do before thinking of how to design rules that encourage those things to happen?
Dave: Agreed. Design should always begin with a feature-based description of the end product you’d like to have. Then we can start thinking about the way to achieve it.
Tim: If you look at the sources of inspiration for games like Dragon Warriors, you find that it doesn’t work the way it does in games. The effects are arbitrary, the limitations whimsical. Some great sorcerers never seem to cast a spell, while others never cast the same one twice. To a certain extent that’s inevitable: a storyteller can be creative and never needs to explain. A game designer is supposed to produce some kind of logic behind everything, for the sake of simplicity if nothing else. The lazy way out is to delegate all responsibility to the referee and players. That’s fine as far as it goes: they have far more responsibility for having a good time than any game designer. But professional (!) pride urges me to provide some framework to help this creativity, and to provide boundaries which are there to guide rather than constrain.
Dave: RPG designers have been trying since 1975 or whenever to create a set of rules from which dramatically satisfying results will emerge. Obviously this isn’t working – for instance, applying D&D experience rules to an online RPG like Ultima has just meant the unbridled massacre of new player-characters for their experience value. Taking Legend: we know we would like a world that is very like the Middle Ages but with a delicate flavouring of magic. But Dragon Warriors played strictly by the books would not deliver that world. Possibly we could get better results from rules that dictate the end result, not the way it’s achieved, as in Maelstrom. The special effects are left to the player and referee to agree. Eg, a wizard can exert an effect limited by distance, duration, and area, the degree of deviation from reality, and the degree to which other people’s wills oppose the effect. The last factor means assigning points from each person’s will into what they care about. Say my will is directed 30% into preserving my own life, 35% into immediate family, 15% into my lord, 10% into my church, 10% into friends. So churches end up very well defended from magic because lots of people care about them, even if only marginally. Subtle use of magic is encouraged – I might wait until you are sleeping, and your will is weaker, or I might find ways to distort your senses so as to trick you into walking off a cliff instead of zapping you directly. Or I might undermine your reputation with illusions so that friends and family gradually turn against you, thus stripping you of your defences. (The way Mastermind manipulated Phoenix in the X-Men, for those comic fans among us.)
Paul: There is another consideration: there’s little point in reinventing the wheel. It’s unlikely that Dragon Warriors 2 can be the same game Dragon Warriors 1 was, in the sense that it won’t be a mass market paperback converting gamebook readers into role-players. Rather, I would suggest, it might be best to approach it for what it really is: the game intelligent Dragon Warriors would want to be playing, 15 years down the line. Thus the magic system should be an attempt to do something that hasn’t been done before: create a magic system that actually feels like magic. Of the previously published magic systems, I still have a soft spot for Chivalry and Sorcery, simply because it managed to be genuinely arcane. But even if that approach had not already been bagged (and duplicated, by Ars Magica), it would still not quite fit the Legend that Dave described. As I understand it, DW magic should be more Mabinogion than Paracelsus. So it might be worth to start off by bouncing around general ideas about the nature of this framework. Does it involve “spells”, for example, or is it going to involve a more freeform set of magical “skills”? Is there going to be any effort spent on play-balance for magic, whether that be out-of-setting (mechanical) or in-setting (folkloric defences and so on).Another important issue: how homogeneous is it going to be, system-wise? Is there going to be the feeling that magic is pretty much the same however you learn, it, with only the decoration different? or will there be radically different systems to reflect a sense of diversity? That’s assuming there are any systems, of course.
Tim: (I like the idea as magic as a battle of collective wills. It seems to capture a great deal.) Homogeneity is to be avoided. I see a world containing magical creatures - fairies and sandestins, for example. They have their own ways of casting magic, which need not be transparent in the rules. Human magicians can bargain with them, or try simply to compel them to service. So that’s one way to command magic: by proxy. But I could also imagine a highly doctrinaire school which depends very much on ritual and on discovered spells. Here, the very rigidity of the spell system is an advantage: it emphasises rote learning. But such tricks as the “Imp-Spring Twinkle-Toe” seem another way to power; and the use of magical paraphernalia one more again. This doesn’t seem to be a problem. I wouldn’t want to see an attempt to break this down into “character classes”. I picture the “average” wizard in haphazard pursuit of magic in any form. We need to make the following concession to play balance: characters of equal myth level should be on a reasonably even footing. So a Myth 4 knight won’t be overly troubled by the enmity of a Myth 2 sorcerer - unless the knight is unwary, of course. Incidentally, I hate the nomenclature but love the concept of Myth Levels.
Dave: Again, I fully agree. I’m using this nomenclature just as a “developer interface”. And yes, a Myth 4 knight is of course on a par with a Myth 4 sorc. That is tautological - it’s the very thing that Myth levels define - eg, can this jumped-up little git really beat Captain Kirk? Of course not.
Ralph: Magic that feels “like magic” is quite a subjective term, but to me it suggests a slightly more spiritual or academic approach than the exoteric “press this button for fireball” spell system like AD&D. In order for magic to be truly mystical, it needs a cosmology behind it. This doesn’t have to be a defined “spirit world” as in White Wolf’s Mage... it’s more of a system of approach. The best model for magic are the real spiritual systems of the Kabbalah and other esoteric doctrines. The human body is the lowest, most base entity in the hierarchy of the human existence, and married to it is the soul, which (very) roughly equates to the personality and individual consciousness of the body. The soul is then a vehicle for the spirit, which is the “higher man”, the divine spark within a human. (To the more learned scholars out there: please forgive my bumbling through the halls of the arcanum, I’m still learning).Okay, metaphysics aside, what you have is this: the Spirit of a mortal is their true nature on the higher Spiritual plane of existence. Magicians are able to work their magic through their awareness of their higher selves. This is a concept prevalent in all sorts of spiritual teaching, from Hindu Akasha to Hermetic lore and Shamanism (in its broadest sense, encompassing systems such as Wicca and Scandinavian myth). In order to make it useful as a conceptual tool in the game, the “higher self” should have a set of statistics that are analogous to the “mortal self” on Earth - for example (picking a much used stat template) the higher self’s Fire, Earth, Air and Water translate to the mortal man’s Social, Physical, Mental and Magical skills respectively. The upshot is this: as the mortal man’s Myth status increases, it increases one or more of the higher man’s stats. Those Higher abilities might then be interpreted on the Earthly plane as incredible fighting prowess (Earth), the ability to sway enormous bodies of men and reduce a man to a quivering wreck with a glance (Fire), etc. This is not a particularly new idea: Runequest included the shaman’s fetch in its rules for Spirit Magic; Mage has the Avatar; Nephilim made use of elemental “Ka”. I don’t think that any of these games used the concept in quite the same way, however. The whole “Mythical Warrior” game is in many ways about both player and character ego, and the “higher man” literally is the Ego.
Paul: This also matches some of the early thoughts on the I Ching. Some writers argued that the oracle directly connected with a higher, simplified plane, and because the higher plane was simpler than our own, interactions between cause and effect were more amenable to comprehension and control. Thus, although the I Ching tends to be regarded as a means of fortune telling, to early Chinese theorists it was far more than that: more like poking around with the motherboard of existence. An adept was supposed to be able to use the I Ching to effect changes in reality. All of which suggests that this higher (Platonic?) plane may be a useful concept, if only by analogy, for the working of magic. How, if at all, does it relate to Faerie? It would be nice if not handled directly. In other words, a high ‘Earth’ score doesn’t just represent ludicrous brute strength, but the capacity to affect ‘Earth’ on the higher plane... which will in turn end up affecting the lower plane, in the same way that the ‘myth levels’ that have been discussed before do. Thus, a very strong enemy will be able to beat a weaker (but higher myth level) character if the contest is narrow down to the purely physical. The latter’s advantage would be, however, that their higher myth level enables them to find other ways of winning. This can be rationalised (within the game) in metaphysical terms as being the exercise of a higher, Platonic, potential. It also seems to represent the ‘genre’.
Dave: I just watched A Chinese Ghost Story 2 and was reminded that it was one of the inspirational sources for the myth level concept. The sword-wielding general in it is no sorcerer, but he is able to hold his own (briefly) against an invisible demon by dint of sheer skill. One idea might be that myth level lets you use the wrong skill for the job and still somehow get an effect.
Paul: I like that idea: presumably myth level is also useful in carrying on after one’s limbs have been hacked off? The danger here is of ending up with something that appears very similar to Feng Shui’s genre convention of “mooks” (whatever the hell that means) and “named characters”. On a very trivial level of course, myth level was something that original DnD level was supposed to represent. I also incorporate the “use any skill to defend against magic” in Outlaws, but without tying it to myth level (which doesn’t exist in Outlaws, except insofar as heroes tend to have higher skills).
"Enter a world of magic, folklore and danger. Here, superstition covers people’s lives like autumn mists cover the moors, and terrifying monsters with bizarre powers lurk in the shadows. The king is a weakling, barons scheme against each other, and lordless knights, back from the Crusades without the honour or riches they were promised, roam the countryside in search of adventure, or prey. Ruined castles and burial mounds are the lairs of the supernatural, or newer, more sinister masters. Labyrinthine underworlds lie forgotten below ancient temples and city cellars. The dark places of the world hold riches for those who would search for them, and the keys to great power - or death"
My world, but not my words. That's James Wallis's evocative description of Legend, the setting for the Dragon Warriors RPG.Through his Magnum Opus imprint, James reintroduced the dank, gnarled, cobwebby, and generally eldritch landscapes of Legend to tabletops across the world.
Those Magnum Opus books were beautiful volumes and they have pride of place on the shelf beside my desk. Nowadays you can only get the game in PDF form, sadly - but hie yourself over to Lulu and you can print up a hard copy at a very reasonable price.
But I digress. Legend is characterized by its dark and downbeat tone. Adventurers here are more Gangs of New York than The Iliad. There is magic, but it's rare and capricious and nobody quite trusts it - not even the sorcerers. If you've ever seen Robin of Sherwood, you'll know what I'm talking about. So now try this:
"Icy fogs hung over rivers and marshes, serving all too well the ogres that were then still native to this land. The people who lived nearby... might well have feared these creatures, whose panting breaths could be heard long before their deformed figures emerged from the mist."
Legend? No, this is the undefined but vaguely Dark Ages environment created by Kazuo Ishiguro for his novel The Buried Giant. I bruised and battered it somewhat in my review on the Mirabilis blog, though no worse a drubbing than it got from Tim Martin in The Telegraph. Nonetheless, if you like your fantasy with a tang of melancholy then you should take a look. And the encounter with the pixies who seem like skinned rabbits and sound "like children playing in the distance" as they attack - now that's as sinister a scene as any I've encountered while role-playing in Legend.
Anthony Horowitz was on today's Guardian blog asking, "Do we still need publishers?" If you happen to follow any of the blogs that are proliferating like tribbles in the bow wave of the self-publishing explosion, you probably felt your heart sink a little at that news. But, unlike the vast majority of those, Horowitz's piece is actually worth reading.
Partly that may be because he's a proper writer, with multiple successes to his credit including Alex Rider, the Power of Five, Foyle's War and - if your memory goes back that far - even a few episodes of Robin of Sherwood. (Actually, forget those - he was just starting out, and had the impossible task of measuring up to the legendary Richard Carpenter. But the other stuff more than makes up for it.)
And, instead of just asserting a position and backing it up with hectoring bloggadocio, Horowitz considers the various possible futures of publishing and leaves us with some interesting questions. Thus, where many self-pub bloggers come across like doorstepping Jehovah's Witnesses, he's bringing the persona of an intelligent dinner party guest. Anyway, I urge you to pop over to the Guardian website and read the piece for yourself. Regular FL readers may be particularly interested in what he has to say about digital books:
"I'd love to write a murder mystery where you could actually tap on a bit of dialogue you mistrusted and discover that the character was telling a lie. Where the reader actually had to become a detective and where the last chapter, the reveal, had to be earned. Or how about a book with different points of view, where you could choose which of the characters became the narrator?"
The second of those ideas certainly did well for Ellery Queen eighty years ago, incidentally, so why not now?
I have my own story about self-publishing. I ran into a well-known author who wrote a very successful novel. It came out almost twenty years ago, but even so I'll bet you've heard of it. He saw me with an iPad and asked, "Do you think these ebooks and things will catch on?" It turned out that he still owned the digital rights in his novel, as those hadn't entered the picture back in the early '90s. The publishers wanted to do a Kindle edition and were offering him 25% of net receipts.
"Email me the book," I said. "I'll turn it into a Kindle file this week and you can have 99% of net."
"Isn't that like vanity publishing?" he worried. It isn't, in fact. Vanity publishing is where somebody runs off a limited print run and makes money by selling the books at a high price to you and your friends. But his point was that self-publishing still carries a stigma - and, of course, there'd be no publicity.
He should have done it. The book is already famous, and everyone knows he's a proper writer. But instead he went and signed with his print publishers, who must have been aching from the strain of holding back their Cheshire Cat grins as they walked him to the door. Ah, so foolish - but so many authors are still a bit befuddled by the digital age. Annoying, too. That one percent would have paid for me and Jamie to write a dozen books!
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.
