The Conclave: unreliable narrators

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

SESSION THREE

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

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

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

‘A trap?’ was Ironside’s judgement.

‘We could go round,’ suggested Hurstyk.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Shoot it down, men,’ cried Wax.

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Whom did you flee?’ asked Aareth.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘I will walk,’ announced Wax.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Idhelruin’s version:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We laid our plans.

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


Eli’s version:

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

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

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

“The Climate of a Foreign Logic” (scenario)

If you tried out last year's Victorian roleplaying scenario “Murder Your Darlings” then you might like to give this much simpler and more traditional adventure a go. It’s also set  in Oxford but a few years earlier, in 1884. Incidentally, in our campaign there is no magic as such, as it’s a science-fictional universe which has room for Cthulhu, time travel and even Victor Frankenstein, but not sorcery. All the same, psionic abilities are real (if rare) and are usually accepted as magic by those who possess them.

Teddy Trittfield has recently gone up to Magdalen College, Oxford, to read Literae Humaniores. Teddy has always been a dutiful child and a hard worker, but in his first term he has not been in touch with his parents and reports suggest that his studies are slipping. His mother (who could be one of the player-characters) is worried that Teddy is neglecting his studies, running up some whopping debts, and falling under the spell of some pretty unsavoury types.

On investigation, it soon turns out Teddy has fallen in with a group of friends who have a dining club called the Procrusteans. They are:

• James Orpington-Soames (Christ Church, English)
• The Hon Reginald Wincanton (Christ Church, History)
• Count Konradin (“Konnie”) von Hegel und Vasserkind (Magdalen, postgrad Music)
• Basil Hinge (Keble, Chemistry)

The Procrusteans at Christ Church are in the circle of the senior History tutor, Sir Nicholas Tollens, who is said to be a member of a club called the Five-Sided Table (motto: Tuta petant alii – “let others seek security”) itself a remnant of the once-notorious Hell Fire Club.

Sir Nicholas has a fellow Five-Sider staying with him, the Spanish spiritualist Jose Lunares.

Sir Nicholas’s coachman is Jollyback and his valet is Chifton. They have some handy skills and can find a half dozen ruffians if needed.

If the player-characters visit Telbeck & Sons in the High Street, who supply hunting equipment to Sir Nicholas, then a bribe of a few pounds will reveal that Sir Nicholas has his bullets engraved with a special symbol. An Occultism roll identifies this as a Satanic rune.

They might also want to buy some firearms of their own:

If the characters search Teddy’s room they will find a burnt scrap of paper in the hearth with part of the Lord’s Prayer written backwards.

Other notable NPCs

The President of Magdalen is Dr Frederick Bulley (73 years old, distinguished, tall, white-haired; quite infirm now).

Teddy’s tutor at Magdalen is Dr William Cove.

The Senior Dean of Arts is Dr Waverly Bamfield.

The Dean of Divinity is the Rev Dr John Joyce.

The Head Porter is Dannock.

The SCR Butler is Carndyce.

What’s going on

Lt-General Augustus Pitt Rivers is relocating his famous collection of obscure ethnographic artefacts to the University Museum. The majority of the collection will not be moved until an new annexe is built to the Musuem in two years’ time, but a few items are already on display. Sir Nicholas and Jose Lunares have a plan to break in, get the mask of Saaga the Devil Doctor, and perform a ritual that will make them both immortal.

To complete the ritual, they intend to sacrifice Teddy, whom the Procrusteans have had doing a bunch of initiation tasks that are actually components of an old spell. So far he's completed the first two of these. The recital of the Lord's Prayer will take place on the final day of Michaelmas term:

• Taking the sacrament while wearing an inverted crucifix
• Climbing the Martyrs’ Memorial to put kindling around their feet
• Reciting the Lord’s Prayer backwards on Advent Sunday

Teddy is important to the ritual because he has some Haida blood – his great-great-grandfather had a child by a native woman in British Columbia in the 1770s. The ritual is actually irrelevant, as is Teddy’s ancestry, but Lunares and the others believe these to be important components of a spell. The truth (at least in our campaign) is that it is all a psionic effect and the mask and Satanic elements are just window-dressing.

“Spells” (psionic effects) to which Lunares has access:

• To enrage dogs and turn them upon their masters.
• To call a fog: 10 yards visibility in which Lunares has a lantern that shines clearly (a mental effect, but one that covers a very wide area).
• To cause people to become drowsy (WL roll) or, if asleep, to remain so.
• To incite paranoia (EQ or argue with friends, to the death if EQ failed again).
• To foresee elements of the future by means of automatic writing.

What the players might do to stymie the ritual:

• Prevent Teddy being abducted. The Five-Siders will use Basil Hinge instead. The ritual can still go ahead but less successfully.
• Prevent Teddy doing the third task. The ritual can still go ahead but less successfully.
• Save Teddy before the sacrifice. The ritual will feed off Lunares’s own essence.

Fully successful ritual:

Both Sir Nicholas and Jose Lunares become immortals. Saaga’s spirit (actually an aspect of Lunares’s own personality) “awakens” in the mask which will float in the air.

Less successful ritual:

Saaga’s spirit (see above) will be available for the Five-Siders to consult and get a “spell” from once each new moon.

Using Lunares’s own essence:

Lunares dies horribly and Sir Nicholas, driven quite mad, insists that he is the reincarnated Saaga.

Background: the year is 1884

The British prime minister is William Gladstone

The American president is Chester A Arthur

The Poet Laureate is Lord Tennyson (until this year just plain Alfred Tennyson)

What you might be talking about:

The electric street lighting starting to appear in London

The first automobiles (early models reaching 10 mph)

Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show now touring the USA

The eruption of Krakatoa last year (still said to be affecting the weather)

The ongoing siege of Khartoum by the Mad Mahdi

The invention of the machine gun (not yet in production)

The opening of the first Underground stations (parts of the Metropolitan & District lines)

The first commercially available fountain pens (1884’s iPod?)

Scotland Yard’s dismissal of the concept of fingerprinting identification

The patenting of linotype earlier this year

Construction of the Cresta Run

Laying of the cornerstone of the Statue of Liberty

The architecture of Gaudi

The banking crisis that is threatening an economic depression

The terrorist attack by the Irish Republican Brigade on Scotland Yard

What you might be reading:

Stevenson (Treasure Island)

Twain (Huckleberry Finn)

Edwin Abbott Abbott (Flatland)

Tolstoy (The Death of Ivan Ilyich)

Das Kapital volume two in early pre-publication pamphlet form

Works by Wilkie Collins, Ambrose Bierce, Jules Verne, Mrs Oliphant, Henry James

Where you might be seen of an evening:

Plays by Oscar Wilde (just starting his career) and Ibsen

Operas by Gilbert & Sullivan (at the height of their success) or Puccini

Concert works by Bruckner and Wolf

What you might be whistling:

“Oh my darling Clementine”

Who you might know:

George Bernard Shaw, 28 years old, unsuccessful novelist (a Fabian)

Oscar Wilde, 30 years old

Richard Burton, explorer, 63 years old but mysteriously left London 12 years ago for Trieste

Lewis Carroll, 52 years old, still resident at Christ Church but no longer teaching

Richard D’Oyly Carte, impresario, 40 years old

Henry Irving, actor, 46 years old.

Sir William Kelvin, scientist, 60 years old

Rudyard Kipling, journalist, 19 years old

Arthur Machen, editor and private tutor, 21 years old

Robert Louis Stevenson, author, 34 years old

Bram Stoker, literary critic, 39 years old

Ellen Terry, actress, 37 years old

Beatrice Potter, sociologist and Fabian, 26 years old

Charles Booth, sociologist, 44 years old, currently compiling London Labour & the London Poor

Lieutenant-General Augustus Pitt Rivers, ethnologist and collector, 57 years old

Thomas Neumark-Jones, occultist, 43 years old

Naturally these or other prominent figures would need to be paid for as Contacts.

WEALTH

Average                      -10 points
You have a job and are dependent on it for living expenses. Income £100 a year.

Comfortable               no points
You have lodgings in a respectable part of town (if that’s where you want to be) and income of £200 a year.

Wealthy                      10 points
You have a townhouse or pleasant home out-of-town and the use of your club. Income £400 a year.

Very Wealthy             20 points
You have a country estate and a townhouse, each with its own staff, plus a coachman and valet who travel with you. Income £1000 a year.

You can live quite well on £400 a year (roughly £60,000 in today’s terms). 

Adventure seed 

The following incident has nothing to do with this scenario, but is a real newspaper report from 1884 that might provide the seed for a follow-up adventure:

Aftermath

Lastly a few notes about how it panned out in our game. Lord Eidolon (Tim Savin) opened the luggage of one of the other characters, Teddy's father, and was affected by a paranoia rune left there by Lunares. This was a powerful hypnotic influence that caused him to distrust the others, which of course soon led to nobody trusting anybody very much. Sensing trouble, Henry Morton Stanley (Paul Gilham) moved from the Randolph Hotel to the Eastgate. That saved him when Eidolon burst into the Randolph lounge and opened fire with a shotgun, crippling a couple of characters before leaping through the window and disappearing into the fog. A city-wide manhunt ensued. The others learned that Eidolon could be cured by burning the rune and giving him the ashes to drink mixed in wine, but that if he failed to do so by midnight the paranoia would be permanent. (Merely a matter of belief, of course, not real magic, but it was the only way to break the hypnotic suggestion.) There seemed little hope of catching him before midnight, or of convincing the police to let them in with a goblet of wine if he was apprehended. As for the fate of Eidolon himself, my write-up of the session ends with this note of finality: "Even his dog now fears him."

Roleplaying write-ups

I sometimes wonder whether game write-ups wouldn’t be a perfectly good way of communicating the essential ideas in a scenario. Published scenarios, after all, are a format that was really created just to sell books. They’re about as useful for running a game as reading the itinerary of somebody’s trip to Provence would be for having a similar vacation.

And in any case, just as in war few plans survive contact with the enemy, and in software development the design is bound to evolve once coding starts, no pre-written scenario can (or should) be run without adapting to what the players do. If they break it, then great – they’re the heroes; that’s what they’re there for.

With a write-up, you’re getting to see how one group of players tackled a situation. If it inspires the referee to come up with something for his or her group, that’s much better than a list of programmed encounters, because every scenario needs to be customized to fit what’s gone before in the campaign. You couldn’t just take a script written for Hill Street Blues, change the names, and insert it into NYPD Blue. In the same way, published scenarios are selling the promise of something that cannot work.

Here are a couple of write-ups of mine. One is in the form of a comics page for a Tekumel campaign I ran back in 1980. The characters had voyaged to the far side of the continent and found themselves in a deserted palace. They relaxed into unexpected luxury but had a rude awakening when a mechanical sentinel turned up at dawn. (That’s why one of the characters was still in just a tunic.) The “Eye” that explodes is an ancient technological device, probably the Eye of Frigid Breath or the Terrible Eye of Raging Power, given the way that Kinamru tries to use it.

The other write-up (below) is the finale of “The Night of the Jackals”, a published scenario for Cthulhu by Gaslight, though much altered to fit our party by referee Tim Savin. I’ve previously recounted the rest of the scenario. At the end we all got killed and came back to life as regenerating semi-immortals. That was pretty much it for my character, who’d been conceived as a Victorian aesthete, not a steampunk superhero, but this was how I processed that finale. A different player would have had a different experience and come up with a different account of it – but that’s the whole point.

The End of the Affair

‘What chance of a getting a drink now, do you suppose?’

‘Even the orchestra has packed up, but I did find this bottle of whisky rolling around. It’s blended, I’m afraid.’

‘Any port in a storm. By the way, aren’t you Dr Dakkar Singh?’

‘Ice?’

‘Quite enough of that for one night. Thanks. Well, bottoms up.’

‘Jaikara. And yes, I am Dakkar Singh.’

‘If we wedge these armchairs here, they won’t slide about too much. I say, I wouldn’t normally, you know, but under the circumstances… I have to ask. Weren’t you mixed up in that business in Hampstead back in the nineties? The soldiers being murdered?’

‘I’m quite sure the papers invented most of it. I do wonder if Stoker got hold of the story for his book. Not the vampire one; the Seven Stars I mean.’

‘A curse, wasn’t it? Mummies and a dreadful blood vengeance business? Look, I can see you’re reluctant, but in an hour it’ll be between you, me and Davy Jones.’

‘I suppose no harm can come of speaking about it now. I was looking into that business, the murders, for the uncle of a friend of mine. We were really just children then. Hardly the foggiest notion of how to conduct an investigation. Though, in our defence, I will say that we weren’t quite as unfailingly clueless as the police.’

‘The fellow in Hampstead who had the mummy – Hollingsworth? The papers said that he’d murdered his own former comrades in order to keep the thing for himself.’

‘Hollingsworth was a victim in the matter, for all that he brought it on himself. I don’t think we can blame him. A lot of otherwise sane men were driven close to something like madness. The real tragedy is that the fire claimed the life of his young son. He just didn’t care what they said about him after that, you see.’

‘How did the fire start?’

‘I wasn’t there for that part. What happened, the previous night the true murderer had called on Hollingsworth while I and my friends were with him. We knew him to have got away with dreadful crimes. He flaunted it in our faces. There was tension. Some of us entertained the possibility of physical violence…’

‘But?’

‘But nothing came of it. Hollingsworth spoke to the man and was persuaded to part with the mummy.’

‘Must have been a forceful sort of person, eh? Some people can do that. Don’t need threats or strength of arms. Their personality alone is enough to dominate others.’

‘That may be true. This man I speak of was a dirty dog without a scrap of principle. He had indeed resorted to violence and intimidation to achieve his ends. And his persuasive powers, far from being the honest result of strong character, were mesmeric and underhand. After he left, we determined to follow him.’

‘You and your friends, you mean?’

‘Benjamin Herzog was a good cross-country runner, a crack shot, and had picked up some sharp tracking skills from an uncle in the Pinkertons. He set off after the villain’s carriage on foot while I and my servant Edwards saddled a couple of horses and followed on a few minutes later.’

‘And your quarry didn’t notice you all filing along behind him?’

‘It was ten o’clock at night, with a thick fog, and they were electrifying the street lights that autumn so most of the old gas-lamps were out. Just as well, as Benjy had possibly had a couple of brandies earlier. He wasn’t on best form that night, put it that way. He told me that a couple of times he nearly ran into the carriage when it halted in the fog. I’d seen Benjy on longer runs than that without getting winded too.’

‘Out of breath, was he? Perhaps that wasn’t the brandy.’

‘Perhaps it wasn’t; we were all very jumpy that night. Anyway, we followed the carriage down to Camden Town where it turned off towards Islington. The roads became narrower and in poor repair. On a shabby terraced street near the Caledonian Road, the carriage dropped off two men and Benjy heard the words, “in the morning”.

‘The carriage went on. We assumed it was still carrying our man, and after a short time its progress in the direction of central London seemed to confirm that, so we returned to the terraced house. You see, we had long ago identified our suspect as having one very tall henchman, whom we called Mr Choker – he did the actual killing – and two other accomplices who he’d told the police were his cousins. The cousins were supposedly touring the country, and thus unavailable for interview by the police, but now we’d tracked them down. Or so we thought.’

‘You alerted the police as to their whereabouts?’

‘That was Edwards’ suggestion. I pooh-poohed it. On reflection it would have just got a lot of bobbies killed. Not that I knew that then, of course. I simply wanted – ’

‘Vindication?’

‘Evidence. Plain facts. But there were no plain facts – not of a kind we could ever present in a court of law.  I had no inkling of that as I picked the lock. I suppose I should describe the house, shouldn’t I? Picture a seedy street north of King’s Cross. Steps lead up to darkened porches. These are dingy terraced houses with peeling paintwork, each occupied by several families or groups of day labourers, two or more people to a single uncarpeted room. The lock on my school tuck shop was far more robust.

‘Once inside, we heard voices from the lower ground floor. Benjy and I crept down the stairs – Edwards was outside watching the horses. I think now that I was as silent as a cat, but Benjy trod on a loose board. Maybe it was the other way round; this was nearly a quarter of a century ago. Luckily Benjy was always a quick thinker. He immediately coughed and began mumbling drunkenly as he launched himself loudly up the other flight to the first floor. I waited, then slipped down the rest of the way to the basement door. From inside came two voices speaking in a language I didn’t know. I try to remember it today, applying my knowledge now. Could it have been Arabic? Quite possibly it was a far older tongue. But time and the mind play tricks, as you know. Nothing I am telling you now is certifiably as it happened.’

‘I understand. But you don’t have to build a case, do you? I mean, this isn’t for a court of law. It’s just between the two of us.’

‘So it is. Certainly I wouldn’t trouble with niceties like evidence now. Back then – I really don’t know. Perhaps we hoped for documents that would prove a link between our suspect and these men. Not a confession, though. We already knew them to be fanatics who would stop at nothing. In spite of that I hadn’t brought a gun. In those days I still believed that to take up the sword meant to die by the sword. That and justice.’

‘Justice, eh? “Ruat caelum” and all that.’

‘I did say that we were tender in years and had not yet put away such childish things. I beckoned Edwards over and found that he had brought along a shotgun. He was Scandinavian, you know. Or possibly Austrian. A big man, though not as big as Choker. We waited till the pubs turned out, and when there were a few people roaming loudly in the street we descended to the lower ground floor room. There was silence inside. No light under the door. I picked the lock.

‘I don’t know if I made too much noise, or whether it was Benjy again, but both men inside were instantly awake. We had surprised them in their beds – well, their mats on the floor. Where you or I might keep a glass of water or a book to read, they had loaded revolvers. Pointed at us.

‘Edwards flung aside his shotgun and ran in. Benjy’s pistol appeared as though by a conjurer’s sleight-of-hand. I, noticing that the second man had fumbled his gun, ran over and aimed a wild punch. It was pretty dark, and I got a solid hit on empty air.

‘Edwards grappled his man, who fired several shots into the wall. Benjy couldn’t get a clear shot. Then the man I was standing over began to change. A veritable metamorphosis, I mean. His bald head separated into hard sliding plates. Spines like those of a stag beetle sprouted on his arms. His body reconfigured as he grew in stature, developing armoured growths like pauldrons. His face – well, I was glad of the poor light.

‘I think now it was a kind of accelerated pupation. Cell division can occur very rapidly if the energy is available. It took the passage of some years to be able to reflect on the experience with such calm detachment. At the time we simply lost our heads. Fright made us like puppets steered by an outside force. Benjy fled, yet I would have staked my life on him having the courage of Horatio. If I’d had my swordstick, perhaps I’d have skewered the creature as it lay there howling and changing. Or perhaps even then I didn’t think myself a killer. Edwards struggled with his man, but a bullet in the arm made him think better of staying. As he and I ran after Benjy, I snatched up the shotgun. At the top of the stairs, Benjy was in such a state that he no longer knew how to open the door. I turned, felt Edwards go by rather than saw him, then discharged both barrels into the stairwell. It did nothing to the creature. I’m not sure if I hit, but in any case its coleopteran armour looked impervious to firearms.

‘We got into the street – I think Edwards simply took the door clean off its hinges. But panic made us run the wrong way, away from the horses. The creature could see in the fog, and it was faster. Best if I draw a veil – ’

‘But what happened? How did you escape unscathed?’

‘Unscathed? I wouldn’t say that. Not unscathed at all. You know The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin – ’

‘What?’

‘No, of course you wouldn’t. Well, that’s the whisky. Now the black waters rise to embrace us. Drowning, they say, is like going to sleep. See the lifeboats there? Little sparks in the darkness. It could be a painting of human hope, eh?’

‘I might have got aboard one of those lifeboats, you know.’

‘Uh-huh. Me too.’

‘Only I was delayed on other business.’

‘As was I. We both had our appointment in Samarra, eh?’

‘Let’s talk of that in a moment. You were going to tell me about the fire.’

‘I wasn’t there for the fire. It was set, I understand, by Ailean Gris. Ironically he was the most perspicacious about our suspect. He unfairly got locked in jail over a weekend for taking direct action against the villain. His only mistake was that the action in question was not nearly bold enough.’

‘Why did he start a fire, though?’

‘Some vague sense. You could call it intuition. He and Tennyson Thurgood had been waiting all night for news from us. When no telegram arrived by breakfast they became agitated. Ailean presumably tried to destroy the mummy, unaware that no weapon in that house could so much as put a scratch on the adamantine crystal of its coffin.’

‘What I don’t understand, the one thing I could never account for… How are you here? Alive. When – ’

‘When you had Choker kill us?’

‘Ah. Well then, plain speaking now. In your final minutes.’

‘Perhaps I died that night, and all the years since then are a long moment’s dreaming. An Owl Creek Bridge experience. But you won’t be familiar with Ambrose Bierce either, Dr Ghul.’

‘Very fanciful. You are still a dreamer, Dr Dakkar Singh.’

‘Oh no, Ghul. That you did kill. My ideals now are as concrete as a million-ton iceberg. You’re welcome, incidentally. All it took was a little misinformation to a radio operator, and the captain fails to make a small course correction that would have carried us a hundred miles south of here.’

‘You didn’t – You wouldn’t doom a thousand innocents just to get me.’

‘The boy I was then would not have done. That’s what you killed. Decency flowers in the hearts of the young, but the old and rich and greedy snuff it out because they cannot bear to think that dreams are better than the meagre ration of reality they allow themselves. The future must not be shaped by those who remember a long past, but by those for whom the world is eternally remade fresh and clean in a new dawn. But I digress – an old weakness of mine. You want to know about that night.

‘As we ran from that house, with the Choker creature on our heels, in all that blind red panic one thing I do remember clearly. Benjy was just ahead of me and I wanted to call out to him and say: Benjy, you were right. For he had thought of killing you, Ghul, right there in Hollingsworth’s study. I saw it in his eyes. You saw it too. But I laid my hand on his shoulder and the moment was gone.’

‘You saved your friend from becoming like me, then. A murderer, as you would say.’

‘Murder? Hardly. He would merely have been putting you down like the vermin you are. He had realized something that I knew too, briefly, when I waited on that rooftop with my rifle for Choker. But I had forgotten it, and Benjy had not.’

‘And that was?’

‘That it was total war. I still imagined the world to be orderly and fair, protected by laws. I had a code that would not let me stoop to your level. And so we entered that basement room with lockpicks rather than a shotgun blast. It’s a mistake I have never made since that night. Now I never give the guilty a chance to surrender. Nor even the innocent, sometimes, as you can see by those lifeboats.’

‘A pretty tale. But you understand nothing after all if you think this ploy is even a minor inconvenience. See this body. It was already old and weak when I took it, and I tire of the pretence of being an Englishman. I look out there and I see a thousand mortal hosts waiting for me to take my pick. You may go down into the dark, but I will not.’

‘That was why you wanted the mummy, wasn’t it? For a long time I couldn’t figure that out. I had simply assumed you belonged to some ridiculous magical cult, but then my own researches uncovered certain facts about the epiphysis cerebri. The pineal gland. That was it, wasn’t it? You told us some fable about the mummy. In life I think he possessed an ability I would now term psionic – the ability to impress his thought patterns upon another’s brain, erasing their identity and imposing his own. And I think it was that gland you sought. By transplanting it into your own cranium, you acquired the power. A kind of immortality, I suppose, if you care only for the mind and not for the self inherent in the body.’

‘Mere transplantation! Can you really have supposed anything so crude as that? I thought you were an eminent biologist, Doctor. Rather I extracted certain proteins from the mummy’s pineal gland which, injected into my brain, promoted the development of those capabilities.’

‘Thank you, Doctor. I merely wanted confirmation that it was indeed a function of the brain. The blended whisky – I would have preferred an Islay – that was so the harsh taste would disguise the neuroinhibitory agent you’ve imbibed.’

‘You’re bluffing.’

‘Reach out. See if you can touch any of those minds you thought were yours for the taking. You can’t. You are locked in that body, Ghul, and that body is for the sea bed. That’s two thousand fathoms – as secure a prison as any crystalline sarcophagus.’

‘You’ll die too.’

‘I would happily do so, if necessary, in order to rid the world of you.’

‘Bah, Singh, you are still an idealist.’

‘I intend to leave the world better than I found it. I suppose that might count as idealism. And leave it I will, when the time comes, not prolong my life indefinitely as you would. It’s time to restore the world as it should be, not this travesty forced upon it by immortal golems who think they remember once being men.’

‘But we could both live. Forever. What if you could have a hundred lifetimes? What could you not achieve? Any one of those huddled masses in the lifeboats. Anybody at all. Think of it – whenever you feel the beat of death’s wing, you could reach out, find a new vessel, drop into the space they fill in the world.’

‘Here is my view of immortality: volvox must die as Leeuwenhoek saw it die because it had children and is no longer needed.’

‘What? I don’t understand. You’re mad.’

‘You called me an idealist. Perhaps you forgot, in the lazy luxury of thinking yourself immortal, that there is no more ruthless adversary than an idealist with only one life to lose. But in fact I have not chosen to waste my death entrapping you. As this ship carries you down into oblivion, I will already be on my way from here. There are others like you that I have to deal with, you see. That’s the road you set me on all those years ago, Ghul. Think of me as the scion of your depravity, a Cronus come to do the inevitable deed.’

‘How? How can you hope to escape? Already the water is lapping over the deck!’

‘I dabbled at poetry, in the days before you destroyed my innocence. And as a poet I had a soubriquet, which I have kept though now it serves me as nom de guerre. You know me as Dakkar Singh, but these days I go more usually by that other name. Nemo.’

Rules for status

My role-playing group has been using GURPS as our default system for many years now. Third edition was a little kludgy but the overhaul they did with GURPS 4e fixed most of that. Even if you don't use the rules, I recommend the sourcebooks.

One aspect of GURPS that we've rarely had cause to explore are the rules for status. Our Legend characters are reviled mercenaries, our Spartans characters are a law unto themselves, our sci-fi characters zoom through a Mass Effect inspired universe of libertarian laissez-faire chaos, our Ghosts of London characters are misfits who have more intercourse with spirits than with regular society. There hasn't been much call for a skill like Savoir-Faire.

Until now, that is. Tim Savin's 1890s Investigators campaign has us playing a mix of social classes, talking to people rather than fighting them, and so we've been drilling down into how GURPS handles all that.

Not terribly well, is the answer - not even in the GURPS supplement designed expressly for the purpose: Social Engineering. Probably one reason is that there is after all no such thing as a generic status system; every society is different. French writers throughout the 17th and 18th centuries were continually puzzled and horrified at the way social classes mixed in England in a way unthinkable on the continent at that time. Henri Misson de Valbourg made this observation while visiting London in the late 17th century:

If two little boys quarrel in the street, the passengers stop, make a ring around them in a moment, and set them against one another, that they may come to fisticuffs. During the fight the ring of bystanders encourages the combatants with great delight of heart, and never parts them while they fight according to the rules. And these bystanders, are not only other boys, porters and rabble, but all sorts of men of fashion.... The fathers and mothers of the boys let them fight on as well as the rest, and hearten him that gives the ground or has the worst.

These combats are less frequent among grown men than children, but they are not rare. If a coachman has a dispute about his fare with the gentleman that has hired him, and the gentleman offers to fight him to decide the quarrel, the coachman consents with all his heart:the gentleman pulls off his sword, lays it in some shop with his cane, gloves and cravat, and boxes in the manner I have described. If the coachman is soundly drubbed, that goes for payment; but if he is the beater, the beatee must pay the sum for which they quarrelled. I once saw the late Duke of Grafton at fisticuffs in the open street with such a fellow, whom he lambed most horribly. In France, we punish such rascals with our cane, and sometimes with the flat of the sword; but in England this is never practised. They use neither sword nor stick against a man that is unarmed, and if an unfortunate stranger (for an Englishman would never take it into his head) should draw his sword upon one who had none, he'd have a hundred people upon him in a moment.

A bigger problem might be that GURPS is written by Americans. Hold your horses there, I don't mean any insult - simply that it makes perfect sense for an American game designer to just add wealth and social class together to get an overall status number, but in fact an impoverished aristocrat, a rich commoner and an average member of the gentry (all in GURPS terms Status 3) would not be treated as exactly equivalent even in 1970s Britain, much less in 1890.

And then there's what higher statuses actually mean. When I visited Bali in the 1980s you'd meet Brahmins - usually not so well off (because they wouldn't stoop to wheedling cash out of tourists) but on the top rung when it came to status. But high status in late 20th century Bali means a very different thing from high status in mid 18th century France. The same numbers of status levels may separate high from low, but what does that translate to? It all depends on the society - indeed, on the sub-stratum of society you're considering. In War and Peace, Field Marshal Kutuzov has lower status than some of the junior staff officers at court. Even a lieutenant can keep him waiting at a whim. Yet on the field, among his own men, presumably Kutuzov's status is very much the higher.

Status and social class have always been important factors in our Tekumel campaigns. There it matters not only which clan you belong to, but also the status of your lineage within the clan. A comparison might be: is it more prestigious to be a commoner at St Peter's College or head porter at Christ Church? A complex issue. In Tsolyanu, if you join a legion or the civil service, your rank doesn't simply add to social status as it does in GURPS. Rather, your social class determines the rank you are likely to rise to. Any damned fool of the aristocracy can become a junior officer in a medium regiment; after that, further advancement depends on ability and bribes (wealth). But that's Tsolyanu. In other societies, wealth might not count for so much, or might count for more.