The same cigarettes as me

So I'm not the only one irked by seeing modern characters popping up in period dramas. I don't know who writes the Movie Media Hub posts on Facebook, but I'm with them on this point. Not specifically feminist characters, though: any character whose function is to spout modern attitudes a few centuries ahead of their time.

I disagree about why such characters are inserted into stories. There are multiple reasons. Most obviously, it's a way for a lazy writer to get laughs. "Heh heh, it's Victorian times but Holmes just said 'OK Boomer'." Ursula K Le Guin griped about fantasy writers who put contemporary American slang into their heroes' mouths:

"...Since fantasy is seldom taken seriously at this particular era in this country, they are afraid to take it seriously. They don’t want to be caught believing in their own creations, getting all worked up about imaginary things; and so their humor becomes self-mocking, self-destructive. Their gods and heroes keep turning aside to look out of the book at you and whisper, “See, we're really just plain folks." '

It happens because some audiences are easily pleased. They are asking, as Oscar Wilde put it, for art "to please their want of taste, to flatter their absurd vanity, to tell them what they have been told before, to show them what they ought to be tired of seeing, to amuse them when they feel heavy after eating too much, and to distract their thoughts when they are wearied of their own stupidity."

Anachronism is also a quick and easy way to get the audience on-side with a character. How can you not root for the guy who's denouncing slavery in the 18th century? Well, there were indeed plenty of people denouncing slavery back then, and a good thing too, but if you are going to put them in a script they shouldn't talk like 21st century characters. Unlike us today, they exist in a world where it apparently wasn't obvious to everyone that enslaving another human being was a monstrous crime. And even if you get the mindset and the dialogue right, it's still a lazy way to create rooting interest. Consider first whether you need to start with a hero whose every attitude is right-on. We were talking about the superfluity of likeable characters in a recent post and, as a great storyteller once pointed out, it is more satisfying to see one sinner that repenteth than ninety-nine decent characters who need no repentance.

Mainly, though, I detest this trope because of its cultural chauvinism. If somebody is interested in a story with an historical and/or non-Western setting, what is the point of inserting modern Western characters? You may say we can't fully know how people in such settings would see the world. Equally, we can't all be as selfless as the Buddha but that doesn't stop us giving money to charity. We make an effort at all sorts of things we can't hope to do perfectly, so why not storytelling or roleplaying? We do know that a farmer in medieval Iceland won't share the attitudes of people at a TED talk. If we want the farmer to make a stand for something we believe in today, we should look for a way he'd credibly conceive of and frame that in the context of his times. In writing or playing such a character, we can find stepping stones that help us imagine their interior life, for example using a process that Robert Graves called analeptic mimesis, effectively taking what you know of a time and place and dreaming it back into existence. That is true even in a fantasy story, as long as it's a fantasy setting where somebody has thought out some of the culture and economics that shape it.

In his book Medieval Horizons, Dr Ian Mortimer contrasts historical accuracy with historical authenticity:

"We impose our own prejudices on the past and reinvent it as 'how it must have been' to conform with our outlook. To appeal to a modern audience, therefore, a medieval heroine in a book or film must be shown as having control over her own life. Alternatively, she must appear constantly fighting her oppressors. Male peasants must similarly include at least once plucky, Robin Hood-like character who leads the others in defying authority. The result is a reproduction of modern society draped in medieval clothing." 

It might be an interesting exercise to write a modern drama but insert one character with the (imagined) attitudes of somebody from the 23rd century. Presumably even the least demanding audience member would spot something amiss then. And how would they take to having their currently fashionable beliefs scorned as antediluvian and even toxic by some supercilious git from the future?

Of course, your tastes may vary. Looking for fiction or games set in the early 19th century, do you want Middlemarch and War & Peace -- or, alternatively, are you looking for Bridgerton? Taking an imaginative leap into another society, or just dressing-up in period costume? Now you know where I stand. Still, those Regency greatcoats are jolly tempting.

The Poughkeepsie problem

It turns out I need to set the record straight about my attitude to The Lord of the Rings. As I confessed in an earlier post, I haven’t read it. When I tried the first book, back in my mid-teens, the cosy Little England prose style didn’t grab me. I was more into Elric and Conan and the whole sword-&-sorcery side of fantasy. It might be different now, but the intervening years have made the plot so familiar that I’m not sure when I’ll get around to it.

All of that doesn’t mean I don’t respect Tolkien’s craft. I’m sure he knew what he was doing, and he did it with imagination and elegance. It’s much like my opinion of the Earthsea and Discworld books. I’ve dipped into them, I can see they’re done well, I admire the authors; the books just aren’t for me. And that’s a very different thing from disdaining them.

This cropped up recently when a friend told me he was planning a roleplaying campaign about defiance and resistance in the face of political repression. “There’ll be difficult compromises and harsh moral choices,” he promised. “And it’s all set in a brutalist industrial landscape.”

Sounded intriguing. I was almost hooked. But then he added: “And it’s got elves!”

Instant heartsink. "Oh," I said. "You had me until the elves.”

“It’s a long way from traditional D&D,” he protested. “The elves aren’t the Tolkien kind. It’s mysterious. It's dark and gritty urban fantasy.”

Imagine you were an HBO exec in 2016, you'd just heard Jesse Armstrong's story pitch for Succession, and then he'd concluded with: "And they're all orcs!" 

I'm against torture, but...

So -- disgust, obviously. But what really gave me pause was that my friend must have got the impression I despise Tolkien’s use of elves. Not a bit of it. From what I’ve seen, Tolkien put a lot of thought into them, and given that he was attempting a European (indeed, British) flavour of fantasy their presence makes sense. It’s worlds always from a recent bestselling fantasy polylogy I had the misfortune to come across, which had elves with guns and mobile phones in a Middle-Earth meets Blade Runner setting. Why elves? The author might as well have called them Romulans or Vikings or Cossacks, all equally out of place in an urban fantasy environment. This is using the surface styling of a fantasy trope without any of the context that forms its roots. It’s cosplay masquerading as storytelling. Ursula K Le Guin would have plenty to say about it -- and did, in her essay “From Elfland to Poughkeepsie”:

"The lords of Elfland are true lords, the only true lords, the kind that do not exist on this earth; their lordship is the outward sign or symbol of real inward greatness."

Le Guin is not talking about moral greatness, by the way. The elves she refers to aren’t angels. In at least one of her examples the elf is being petty – but grandly petty, gloriously self-centred, whining as only a silver-tongued immortal can.

Talking of the stir-it-all-in approach, the modern mangling of myth, she says:

“It is not fantasy, for all its equipment of heroes and wizards […] A writer may deploy acres of sagebrush and rimrock without achieving a real Western. He may use spaceships and strains of mutant bacteria all he pleases, and never be anywhere near real science fiction.”

Le Guin recognized that Tolkien had the genuine fantasy touch. When I say that I haven’t read The Lord of the Rings, that’s not a judgement on the quality of the work. I could have mentioned Dune, another series I never got into only because it doesn’t happen to chime with me. That doesn’t mean it isn’t good. There are plenty of absolute stinkers in the fantasy & SF genres (Sturgeon’s Law tells us that) but also some gems, and those gems are worth celebrating, so I just wanted to be clear where I stand.

More about elves next time. The proper kind of elves, I mean.

Do you really want to live forever?

Even back in the '80s, a career as a fantasy writer was half an excuse to read up on myths and folktales and get paid for it. In preparing my Jewelspider RPG I've enjoyed many a deep dive into folklore. Inevitably my copy of The Golden Bough gets a lot of use and here's a particularly choice snippet from Frazer that deserves to get used in Legend somewhere:

'In legends and folk-tales, which reflect the ideas of earlier ages, we find [the] suspension between heaven and earth attributed to beings who have been endowed with the coveted yet burdensome gift of immortality. The wizened remains of the deathless Sibyl are said to have been preserved in a jar or urn which hung in a temple of Apollo at Cumae; and when a group of merry children, tired, perhaps, of playing in the sunny streets, sought the shade of the temple and amused themselves by gathering underneath the familiar jar and calling out, “Sibyl, what do you wish?” a hollow voice, like an echo, used to answer from the urn, “I wish to die.” A story, taken down from the lips of a German peasant at Thomsdorf, relates that once upon a time there was a girl in London who wished to live for ever, so they say:

“London, London is a fine town. A maiden prayed to live for ever.”

'And still she lives and hangs in a basket in a church, and every St. John's Day, about the hour of noon, she eats a roll of bread. Another German story tells of a lady who resided at Danzig and was so rich and so blest with all that life can give that she wished to live always. So when she came to her latter end, she did not really die but only looked like dead, and very soon they found her in a hollow of a pillar in the church, half standing and half sitting, motionless. She stirred never a limb, but they saw quite plainly that she was alive, and she sits there down to this blessed day. Every New Year's Day the sacristan comes and puts a morsel of the holy bread in her mouth, and that is all she has to live on. Long, long has she rued her fatal wish who set this transient life above the eternal joys of heaven.

'A third German story tells of a noble damsel who cherished the same foolish wish for immortality. So they put her in a basket and hung her up in a church, and there she hangs and never dies, though many a year has come and gone since they put her there. But every year on a certain day they give her a roll, and she eats it and cries out, “For ever! for ever! for ever!” And when she has so cried she falls silent again till the same time next year, and so it will go on for ever and for ever.

'A fourth story, taken down near Oldenburg in Holstein, tells of a jolly dame that ate and drank and lived right merrily and had all that heart could desire, and she wished to live always. For the first hundred years all went well, but after that she began to shrink and shrivel up, till at last she could neither walk nor stand nor eat nor drink. But die she could not. At first they fed her as if she were a little child, but when she grew smaller and smaller they put her in a glass bottle and hung her up in the church. And there she still hangs, in the church of St. Mary, at Lübeck. She is as small as a mouse, but once a year she stirs.'

Here's another example, this time not from folklore but from fiction (Conrad's Nostromo):

'The sailors, the Indian, and the stolen burro were never seen again. As to the Indian, a Sulaco man—his wife paid for some masses, and the poor four-footed beast, being without sin, had been probably permitted to die; but the two gringos, spectral and alive, are believed to be dwelling to this day amongst the rocks under the fatal spell of their success. Their souls cannot tear themselves away from their bodies mounting guard over the discovered treasure. They are now rich and hungry and thirsty—a strange theory of tenacious gringo ghosts suffering in their starved and parched flesh of defiant heretics, where a Christian would have renounced and been released.'

And that in turn reminded me of the wizard Cob in Le Guin's The Farthest Shore, who makes himself unkillable but not in a good way. His body is covered in wounds, he gets stomped and burnt by a dragon, and crawls off helpless. And (gosh, this archetype is everywhere) there's also Kroenen in the Hellboy movie:

Even the scientific pathways to immortality don't sound very appealing. For player-characters, then, immortality is a case of be careful what you wish for.

Elves as cosplay

“My name is Eildonas of Hulda Hoo,” I tell him as we walk. 

“I take you to be one of the Grey Elves,” he says with a sidelong glance, provoking in me a short laugh, since such categories have meaning only to mortals.

I recently quoted that (a line from the elf’s story in Heroquest book one, The Fellowship of Four) when somebody was telling me about their game: "The other players assume my character's an imp, which is funny because actually I'm playing a sprite."

It’s the sort of distinction that probably makes sense in a D&D campaign, where the Monster Manual is treated as a diegetic text. (“It’s a ghoul.” “No it’s not; it’s a shade. Ghouls have red fingernails and regenerate.” Something like that, anyway.) It would make no sense in Legend, the setting of the Dragon Warriors and Jewelspider RPGs, where the peasant warning you about that damned thing out on the moors might call it an imp, pixie, sprite, goblin, redcap or elf all in the same breath.

Another gamer I know, after reading the blog post in which I elaborate on that theme, singled out this line:

“The point is: you don’t need player-character elves or dwarves.”

He asked the other players in his campaign:

“What's your take on the tendency to play 'furries'? I include the Dragonborn (half man, half dragon playable creatures in D&D) and the Tieflings (humans tainted by demonic heritage in D&D) in this. I think it's the same impulse. It's a very millennial thing, perhaps? How does everyone feel about playing nonhumans? Does it appeal? What's the appeal? Does it repel? Could there be a race that would be enticing to play? What would that be like?”

By the way, the faerie folk in Legend never say “human” or “nonhuman”. It’s a bit too Desmond Morris, that. They say “mortal”, stressing their own point of superiority but perhaps also betraying their envy of the part they don’t share, the immortal soul.

Naturally, like for anything else in roleplaying, everyone's mileage is different. For me, those elves and dwarves and trolls aren't “races” in the D&D sense. They are the very embodiment of the Other. So it makes no sense in a Legend game to have player-character elves or whatever. Elves don't have souls, nor goals that we could ever relate to. There's nothing about them that's human except in the glamour that clothes them in a form we can perceive.

But lots of people like playing exotic aliens and races, and if that's the style of fantasy they enjoy then why not. I guess it's a kind of role-cosplaying. They do then get tied in terrible knots over issues like “Drow -- oh dear, are they racist?” Well, maybe, if you're interpreting them as another Homo racial line, ie a sort of mutant humankind. But if they are simply manifestations of how we conceive these debased and residual spirits called faerie folk, then no.

One of my gaming friends likened it to picking avatars in computer games. Avatars (and an avatar is clearly not the player; think Gordon Freeman or Geralt) must have influenced players’ choice of character types over the last few decades. I notice that players very often refer to their characters in third person these days, as though they were avatars that the player controlled rather than personas that they put on. Roleplaying has become the middle-aged man's version of playing with dolls. But as for those dolls being nonhuman, there were plenty of halfling thieves scampering about in D&D games back in the ‘70s, so maybe the trend was set by Tolkien rather than by World of Warcraft. 

I also discourage players in my Tekumel games from taking nonhumans, even though those are simply alien species and not mythical beings. The reason for that is they always end up bring played as stereotypes, extreme versions of human types. Then the game almost becomes an allegory with characters standing for Aggressiveness, Greed, Pedantry, etc. Now if a player could portray a truly alien mindset then I'd be intrigued to see them explore that, but it would have to be a lot more out there than the likes of Worf or Spock.

David Kajganikh, creator of The Terror, said he wanted to appeal to the viewers “who would watch the show if it didn’t have monsters”. That’s where my hand goes up. Unfortunately, Mr Kajganikh meant those who would watch whether or not it had monsters. For me, there’s a fascinating story of ambition, egotism, stupidity, bravery and resourcefulness in the Franklin expedition. It’s not only quite unnecessary to tart it up with Eskimo demons, it’s an insult.

Eliot believed that “anything that can be said as well in prose can be said better in prose.” He wasn’t against poetry (obviously), nor am I am against fantasy when I say that whatever can be done as well with human characters is better done using human characters. Legend is a low-fantasy world not because I want to sweep fantasy under the carpet, but because fantasy is a powder worth keeping dry. That way it counts for something when you do use it. High fantasy adventure is a different style, and in a long-running campaign it leads to diminishing returns; eventually even mainlining the pure stuff isn’t going to give you a kick.

But now I’m mixing metaphors, so perhaps it’s time to wrap up and hand over this over for discussion. Let's close with a typically thought-provoking line by Ursula K Le Guin:

“Fantasy is the language of the inner self.”

At its best, fantasy isn't taking us out of ourselves into dressing-up and escapism. It's taking us deep into our dreams where logic cannot go.

A shopworn formula

Scriptwriting is increasingly about hitting a formula, perhaps because writers and studio/network execs attend the same courses that say X must happen on page Y, and so forth. And today's scriptwriters only have a very limited toolbox of tropes, it seems. Since Alien, every SF/horror movie must have a maladjusted group of squabbling malcontents. That made sense in Alien, where the ship had a commercial crew on a boring long-haul mission, a crew whose dysfunctional dynamic was exposed by the loss of the senior officers who held them together. It makes less sense if the crew is supposed to be a squad of elite marines, or a hand-picked team of top scientists.

Likewise in war movies. Everything today's scriptwriters know of war, they picked up from watching Vietnam movies. That was an unpopular, hopeless conflict fought by draftees who often didn’t want to be there, so naturally the movies written by veterans often feature disenchanted, unruly, squabbling soldiers. But it makes no sense to apply the same dynamic to the troops at Dunkirk or advancing after D-Day – except that's the only way the writers have learned to imagine war.

Star Trek's famous "lack of conflict" is often mocked as naïve, not least by its current writers, but in fact it's the same dynamic as professional astronauts describe. They don't muck about the way George Clooney's character is shown doing in Gravity, nor snit at each other like rivals in a high school movie. When I worked in game development I used to encourage a team attitude where everyone is pulling together to face the common challenges. I called it "bridge of the Enterprise" culture, the very paradigm of grown-up, ego-free cooperation. It’s getting hard to remember now, but that’s what Star Trek once stood for.

Star Trek: TOS didn't lack for character conflict, of course. Not an episode passed without McCoy and Spock having a grumble about something. But I suspect what the producers of Star Trek: Discovery mean by conflict is to have characters constantly at loggerheads like the crew of the Prometheus. Presumably they’d interpret “bridge of the Enterprise” culture nowadays as all about recriminations, secret passions, grudges and shouting matches. But if the show is to make any kind of sense that could never happen; those characters wouldn't get into Starfleet in the first place.

More to the point (because credibility in SF and fantasy is so often taken to be a foolish goal) writing high school moodiness into all the scenes is the story equivalent of putting lens flare on everything. There are other ways to inject tension into a plot, other varieties of conflict than person to person, and other tones of conflict than the shout-n-sulk.

I don't want to get sidetracked into talking about The Rings of Power (which I haven't seen, nor the Peter Jackson movies either) but from the criticism it seems it's making exactly the same mistakes as those other shows and movies. Writers who only have a very limited range of character- and story-tropes not only know nothing but how to write "piss and vinegar" characters, they even think that's somehow innovative.

I'll leave the sign-off to Ursula K Le Guin. This is from her essay "From Elfland to Poughkeepsie", which is mostly about the jarring language used by bad writers, though that's part and parcel of the same problem:

"Tolkien writes a plain, clear English. Its outstanding virtue its flexibility, its variety. It ranges easily from the commonplace to the stately, and can slide into metrical poetry, as in the Tom Bombadil episode, without the careless reader's even noticing. Tolkien's vocabulary is not striking; he has no ichor; everything is direct, concrete, and simple. Now the kind of writing I am attacking [...] is also written in a plain and apparently direct prose. Does that make it equal to Tolkien's? Alas, no. It is a fake plainness. It is not really simple, but flat. It is not really clear, but inexact. Its directness is specious. Its sensory cues—extremely important in imaginative writing—are vague and generalized; the rocks, the wind, the trees are not there, are not felt; the scenery is cardboard, or plastic. The tone as a whole is profoundly inappropriate to the subject."

"A Hole in the World" (scenario)

You’d think multiple successful careers as an inspiring writer, captivating speaker and entertaining & informative broadcaster would be enough for Tim Harford. On top of that he’s a devoted husband and father, a steadfast friend, and one of the very nicest people you could ever hope to meet. But we, his gaming chums, know that he was really put on this world to run great RPG sessions just for us. Readers of the blog look forward to his enchanting Christmas specials for Legend. He created the Immortal Spartans and Company of Bronze campaigns that I’ve written about here from time to time, and another of his casually executed acts of genius was to conceive the Conclave game, loosely based on Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea stories.

After Tim’s Conclave campaign wound up, I ran a two-part session to fill in for the fact that my planned Yellow King campaign had been aborted. This adventure is set in Tim’s archipelago world which I assume is a lot like Earthsea (I still haven’t read the books) but you could port it across to another game world, with or without lots of water. Central to the concept, though, is that the players are mostly great wizards, and this is a world where magic really is powerful. It doesn’t matter how skilled a swordsman or thief you are, any of the wizard characters can ningauble you without working up a sweat.

There are several magical disciplines. Most wizards specialize in three or four of these, but all learn the art of Naming because that is a prerequisite for many other enchantments. Knowing the true name of a thing means that your magic will automatically work on it. For example, if you use Change magic on a rabbit and you know its true name then your statement has the full force of reality; the rabbit becomes whatever you say it is. Most of the time, though, you won’t know the full name of something. The rabbit can’t tell you, so you’d need to infer as much of its true name as you can, using the root name class for animals and then mammals and then leporids – I’m guessing here. The point is that you roll your Name skill first, and your degree of success in that modifies your roll for Find or Mend or Change or whatever. If you fail the Name roll, forget it; you can’t derive the name you need so your magic won’t work.

Tim came up with a very elegant rule system. I won’t recount it here as he might one day want to expand it and publish it (when those multiple other careers don’t get in the way) but you can soon whip up your own. All you need to know in what follows is that Vigour stands for stamina and strength; Skill is imagination, dexterity and intelligence; Wisdom is knowledge, fortitude and judgement. If like me you’re too lazy to read the books, the Isolate Tower has a handy glossary of magical terms, of which the main categories seem to be as follows:

• Change - turn a thing into something else (major) 
• Find - locate a lost item or person 
• Gate - opens and seals paths and portals
• Healing 
• Illusion
• Mend - fix a broken object
• Naming – the key to most of the other magical disciplines
• Pattern - scrying and discerning hidden connections (major)
• Send - project your image; the image can speak and sense, but not physically or magically act on its surroundings; cannot cross water, but otherwise has no limit on distance.
• Summon - bring an object or person (living or dead) to you (major)
• Weather – control wind, rain, fog, and so on

So, to summon a wind you would first try to intuit its name (Naming roll) then make a Weather roll. If somebody is trusting enough to tell you their true name, your magic will always work on them.

Wizards are not supposed to profligately make use of magic. In Le Guin’s stories, a "good" wizard would sail a boat from island to island and sit becalmed for days rather than conjure a wind. "Bad" wizards seem to be those who actually apply what they know. (So, pretty much the way Jedi and Sith operate in Star Wars.) In the game, lacking a specific mechanic or even a logical explanation for why we should restrict our use of magic, the player-characters were soon flinging spells about without a qualm. If you want your game to play out more like a Le Guin story, I suggest something like:

• Use of magic depletes the local mana, making further magic progressively harder 
• Every use of magic has a reaction – good winds one day will mean dead calm the next, etc.
• Unrestricted use of magic affects the wizard’s health. 
• The College of Hythe polices magic – use it too freely and they will discipline you.

Another point about this world: magic is dominated by the wizards’ college on the island of Hythe, which is said to lie at the heart of the archipelago. The college is all-male, making it difficult for women to study magic openly. Any female PCs will probably conceal their gender as Golpas does in this scenario.

At the Tip of the World
The player-characters are all wizards. One of them has his home on the island of Skryp, the easternmost of the known isles. He has noticed that several local lads (Flintoy, Ratch, and Witkin) who went off to sea last year have returned from their voyages with much greater wealth than anyone expected. Some might suspect them of having turned to piracy, explaining the silks and pearls they gave their wives, but the player-character knows they are honest men.

The truth, which the characters will have to ascertain (they only need to ask, but will probably complicate it), is that the three men came by this wealth when their captain, Haspool, claimed the contents of a drifting merchantman as salvage. His ship is the Hazard and it sails out of Port Pressen on the island of Vaygra.

(“Where was the abandoned ship found drifting?” “Couldn’t tell you. We’re not navigators. You’d have to ask Captain Haspool.”)

At Port Pressen
The characters must get Captain Haspool or his navigator (Tully) to tell them where the ships were found drifting. Yes, ships plural. He has salvaged two, both crewless. (“The Bunch of Grapes was not so rich pickings as that first one, the Woven Band, but both were claimed legally.”)

Pirates
The complication is that pirates have got wind of the drifting hulks and are patrolling the area. If they see the characters' ship, they may just decide to raid it. The pirate ship is the Good Work.

• Pirate captain: Korak
• His wizard: Golpas

Golpas is a female sorcerer who passes herself off as a man. She is not powerful (stats 10) but has +1 in Name and +2 in Gate, Illusion, Healing, Send, Weather.

The Zone
A Sargasso-like area of mists and incessant rain; visibility is very poor. The periphery of the zone is a region of cold mist seething like smoke off the incessant rain. Sailing into it is like going into a waterfall.

Make a Vigour +Name roll on entering the Zone. If you fail, you’re starting to get rewritten. You might lose your sense of smell/taste, become increasingly drained of colour, find your shadow keeps slipping away, you cease to leave footprints, start to dissolve into vapour, etc. This is an ongoing effect to be used as a ticking clock to spur the characters later on.

Any attempt to make a Name roll in the Zone is at a penalty of -5 (at the periphery) up to -8 (centre of the zone) as names here fluctuate so fast.

They see a ship drifting without crew (the ironically named Fine Weather). It is listing to one side owing to the water that is filling its bilges. Aboard:

• Gulls with blind human faces. Their shrieking sounds like men poorly imitating the cry of sea birds.
• Outlines in the rain of people – the crew – but they are the absence of people.
• Eyes that can be seen staring out of the timbers.
• Scuttling shapes that seem to be a hybrid of rats and human hands.
• The log book is sodden with rainwater – unreadable.
• The hold is full of crates of spices and furs, mostly ruined.

In the zone, true names are being reconfigured. A name might be cut in half and recombined with another – for example, splitting shape from identity left the outlines in the rain (shape component) and the identity-component was then spliced to the identity of seagulls.

As they quit the Fine Weather, some of their own crew, in the process of having their true names rewritten, start to change. They become like cobweb shells that blow apart on the wind, leaving pale dancing sparks that flit about the rigging. (Have the bosun point out that men in the rigging haven’t moved for several minutes. Those are already husks, who will become dislodged and blow away when anyone is sent up to investigate.)

In the centre of the zone (they’ll need Pattern to locate it as the rain obscures everything) is a missing piece of reality: a rift in the air like a break in a pane of glass. They hear a keening sound of wind as they approach it. Anyone with Name skill (ie any wizard) can visibly see reality warping around the edges.

They cannot approach, but see the hole in reality at a distance. Intermittent pulses of light emit from it, accompanied by a shockwave that they can feel rather than hear. In each pounding shockwave it’s as if for a moment everything ceases to exist.

As they get within forty feet, the effect starts to strip away the substance of the ship. They must turn back, as it’s only possible to get closer once they have the missing piece.

To fix it they must recover the missing piece. It was taken by a wizard, who was transformed by the fragment and fled. But they must turn back now, for almost all the crew are already lost and the rest are panicking.

Possible episode to insert on the voyage if the players need a hint:
They spot an island with a wide bay. No wind is allowed here for it is the home of the sorcerer Jutle. The moment they enter the bay, the sails go slack and no weather can be induced to enter. Jutle is a middle-aged man hauling driftwood on the beach who asks if they are here to see the master. If they recognize him he’ll reveal that he is the master here and will help them, but he is a true ‘softly softly’ wizard and won’t have any truck with using magic flamboyantly.

The Missing Piece
Remember that characters who failed Vigour +Name are now at phase 2 (losing their shadow)

The fragment of reality was taken by a wizard named Agios. He held his name together with his magic but was transformed into a monster. Pattern will reveal his likely routes, Find will take them to him.

As they approach the missing piece it’s night; they sense they will come to it by dawn. It’s overcast, but they see they’re approaching a column some sixty feet across that stands directly up from the ocean. It seems to be of mottled pink and grey marble. Water steams off its side in the early heat of day (unless approaching by night).

This is no marmoreal column but the monster that Agios has become. Out of the haze above comes its giant distorted face. To protect the ship from this initial attack will require defences equalling 50 points – reduce damage from total wreck at 0 defence to protected at 50 defence. (More efficient if they find clever ways to fend it off, eg a mast spears its eye rather than a shield of force in the air. Note that direct attacks are very hard – see below.)

The monster resembles a huge sea-worm with a distorted face like something moulded from clay.

Direct-attack spells are hard to use against this creature:

• Name attempt at -10 (due to continual fluctuations), then
• Spell must succeed by 5 or more to be effective

It can smash masts & hulls, snap up several men at once (make a Skill roll to avoid unless you have a magical defence), etc.

The missing fragment is inside the monster’s stomach. Transforming Agios back to normal won’t last long even if the spell takes. The most effective thing is to get inside the monster somehow. They will need illumination, and must protect themselves against noxious fumes and acid.

The fragment of reality is shaped like two trapezoids and is about the size of a book. To transport it safely (the edges cut through literally anything) they will need to use Change to solidify the air around it or something like that.

Fixing a Hole
Remember that characters who failed Vigour +Name are now at phase 3 (dissolving)

It’s not just a case of slotting the missing fragment of reality back in place. You need to Name it (no modifier) and then cast Change -- but that must be done on the other side of the hole at the same time as in this reality.

To pass through the gap in reality to the alternate world requires Gate. The alternate world is a plain of sand with ripples surrounding the hole in reality, and a ring of greenery (savanna) in the distance. They immediately notice the dead calm. No weather at all works in the affected zone, though there are winds blowing across the steppes. This zone is analogous to how the archipelago world is being changed around the hole in reality there.

To cast spells here:

1. Skill + Name (to read)
2. Then Wisdom + Name (to transform into a usable form)
3. Then cast the spell

The characters are greeted by primitive tribesmen who blame them for breaking the world. This is a world of open grassland in which the only wizards are female – the mirror image of the characters’ own world.

The natives’ shaman (Ma’ada) is reasonably powerful (stats 11) with Name +5 and Change +4. She must make her Name rolls at -5 here just as the PCs had to in their world.

Of course, the natives of this universe do not speak the same language. The characters must find a way to communicate – perhaps through use of Illusion magic, causing images to appear in a campfire.

Remember that somebody needs to fix the piece in place from this side: either one of the characters, or Ma’ada if they can explain to her what is needed, or Agios if he isn’t dead.

The Conclave on Kindle

If you followed last week's installments of the Conclave campaign and want the full novella, it's now available on Kindle. This brings the story to a conclusion, fixes some of the plot holes, fleshes out some scenes, and also includes background details of the narrator, Surma. To quote from the blurb:

Creation is losing the flavour of things, becoming colourless and uniform under the skin of reality. This is why the old songs lose their melody, why the fisherman’s catch is mostly minnows, why the young cast their elders out into the cold, why the storms are violent and unseasonal, and dragons hide in distant clouds.

The world is an archipelago of a hundred islands, beyond whose furthest shores lies illimitable ocean. Magic is real, though rarely tamed, and the College of Wizards maintains a careful balance so that use of magic does not damage the fabric of reality.

But now a new force is at work, twisting and blurring the true names of things that are the root of all that exists. If it goes on unchecked, magic and wonder will drain away. Even life and death will cease to have meaning.

Seven of the greatest sorcerers of the age are invited by the Master Summoner of the College of Wizards to travel to the island of Dain at the archipelago’s heart. The Summoner’s hope is that this conclave, untainted by the politics and intrigues of the College and unrestrained by nature, will be able to hold back the force that is picking reality apart.

Yet to be effective in their fight, the conclave must first work the hardest spell of all -- trust.

If anyone who read the first seven installments on the blog feels like giving the book a review on Amazon -- well, consider yourself rich in undying gratitude! Surprisingly (but also quite pleasingly) some readers have praised it as homage to Ursula K Le Guin -- and as I still haven't read the Earthsea books that's surely a first. An anticipatory homage!

By one of those strokes of serendipity I discovered this week that the filmmaker Michael Powell wanted to make a movie of the Earthsea trilogy. It was designed as a project for his film school students and it was only five minutes long, but what a treasure that would be if it still exists anywhere. Powell incidentally was just as baffled as I am that the trilogy was published in the UK by Puffin (Penguin Books' children's imprint). That's the reason I didn't notice it back in my teens when I was devouring a lot of fantasy and SF. When Powell asked Le Guin why it went to Puffin and not Penguin's adult line, she said, 'Because Kaye Webb is a smart cookie.' I suspect it was because it was assumed back then that a fantasy novel written by a woman must be for ten year olds, so it's surprising that Le Guin thought it was a good decision. I guess it didn't hurt her in the long run.

The Conclave: "Under The Earth"

More from our Conclave campaign, which owes much to Ursula K Le Guin -- or so I'm told, not having read the Earthsea books. (I will, but our umpire Tim Harford advised us not to until the adventure ends.)

And incidentally, in case you're confused, the party do indeed seem at this point to have acquired two enemies named Felt and Feltass (or Felteth according to some of the PCs). Or maybe they're one and the same. They've both got to die anyway, so maybe it doesn't matter...

SESSION SIX

The fish-scale armour made Eli’s heart beat again, and even gave him the power to move. But he was a puppet whose strings I pulled, his own will burned down to a cinder.

‘He is fallen into the sere and yellow leaf, the autumn of his strength. It gives me an idea. I can alter his skin to something like the green of springtime, so that the sun will fill him with fresh vigour. But to do that we need a grove of trees so that I can draw the essence of their sap to replace his blood.’

‘He may not appreciate the metamorphosis,’ mused Hurstyk.

I pointed to the drool on Eli’s slack jaw. ‘He appreciates not even the air that my enclosing armour bellows to and from his lungs. Let us set sail for – ’

‘The nearest island is Tulli,’ ventured Aareth.

I glanced at the hourglass in whose fashioning I had called upon the very name of Time. Its sands flowed swifter, but it would not run out for a day yet. ‘Set a course.’

‘As we go,’ said Aareth, ‘why don’t I read this book, The Black Knot?’

So saying he thrust his hand between its pages, screamed, and wrenched his fingers back. A white gold ring fell to the deck.

‘Lady Pale gave that to me,’ he said, clutching his seared flesh, which Hurstyk treated with his healing magic. ‘I have been under her spell this while, but now am free.’

‘And are you now going to read the book?’

He looked daunted. ‘When I said that just now, I merely meant to cause you mischief in my lady’s service.’

‘Nonetheless, it may hold a clue.’

Reluctantly, it seemed, he turned the pages. Black script on black reminded me of the white on white of Pale’s banner. ‘In the labyrinth of Tartuva there dwell the Sightless Ones,’ read Aareth. ‘They are gods.’

‘All that betokens is the ignorance of the native islanders. I should know. Read on.’

‘A great wizard of the north, Diamansus by name, sought to bring light to the island. He came bearing a prismatic jewel, yet after a battle with the high priestess he was defeated and his jewel was lost in the depths.’

‘That jewel is what we need. Pale occludes true names by dazzling the eye of reality – white on white means that nothing can be perceived. Likewise the Black Knot is darkness layered upon darkness, and in that illimitable caliginosity no true names can be read. The balance between these two is lately disrupted, and if that continues then the world will be washed over with either the blinding light or the blinding dark. There will be no names then. It is the Void.’

‘How do you know these things?’ asked Wax.

‘By consummate and ineffable understanding. You know that I speak the truth.’

The ring still lay between us on the boards. I looked closer and read the true name of the metal. It was of the substance of gold but the essence of quicksilver. ‘There is a mine of that metal very near, perhaps on the island whither we now sail.’

The sages of Hythe chipped in with advice, but I cannot now separate it in my memory from the squawking of the gulls that flew above our sails. It was agreed that they would put their minds to a conundrum, namely how it was that Hurstyk and Wax retained the ability to remember names during our encounter with Feltass, when Pale’s radiance had robbed the rest of us of much of our power.

Moss demurred. ‘I am done with magic.’

‘All of you wizards of Hythe may as well be. You are misers of magic, rich only in the power you refuse to wield even in time of need. Knowledge locked away is not balance, as you like to pretend it to be, but mere indecision. In your cowardice and secrecy you have forfeited the right to dictate to those of us in this conclave who now go forth to face the foe no matter how dreadful her gifts.’

It was agreed that Moss and Mirrowaith would ponder the problem, yet I could see that Hurstyk would find the answer sooner than they.

‘Landfall!’ cried a sailor from the rigging.

Tulli was a small island with a paltry town of low, rude dwellings. Jude’s ship, the one that had nearly intercepted us outbound from Port Karmon, lay at anchor. I noticed a figure in armour swimming across the harbour towards us. I read his name easily but by some intuition felt that it would be impossible to use it in any conjuration.

‘This is strange…’

‘I could shoot him,’ said Ironside.

‘Let’s hear him out,’ suggested Hurstyk.

The fellow came aboard. His armour, which had been of metal, had transformed itself into leather. He announced himself Abdiel, an inquisitor – whatever they may be – and recognized Eli as a fellow member of his order. He leaned close to examine his comrade, who stood rigid in the rainbow armour I had given him but whose face remained slack and without the spark of sentience.

‘He has spent his vigour,’ Abdiel said.

‘We know.’

‘Ah, but I must tell you – ’

‘That our enemy is here. We know that too.’

‘Yes, but what you do not know – ’

‘ – is that they mine for white gold here. That is one of the two reasons we have come.’

We steered the Sea Lion around a headland, out of sight of the port, and Wax on his turtle guided us bare inches above scraping spines of undersea rock until we were harboured safe in a cove near a grove of palm trees that would serve my purpose.

‘What of the ring?’ said Aareth for, like all of us, he sensed Pale trying to scrutinize us through it. ‘Can she see us through it? I’ll put it between the pages of the book.’

‘You’re going to touch it again?’ said Idhelruin dubiously.

Aareth rubbed his jaw. ‘I’ll wear gloves. And handle it with a shovel.’

Abdiel picked up the ring, dropped it between the pages of the book, and closed the cover. ‘Like so, masters?’

‘It is well done,’ agreed Hurstyk. ‘But wait. Abdiel, I perceive you carry a taint. It pervades this whole isle.’ He looked at all of us. ‘The White Death is here.’

‘Fortunately you have mastered it before…’ said Wax, working up to a howl of adoration until he remembered that Hurstyk had forbidden him to do so.

Hurstyk frowned, and turned his magic on Abdiel, finally drawing forth and extirpating the infectious spirits.

Meanwhile, having commanded the seagulls to watch out for spies, I turned my ministrations on Eli. First tender shoots buttressed his skin, working deep through to the bones where sap would refresh his sluggish blood. Green and glossy was his skin. His eyes sparkled now, the dry film gone as new life flowered there. Lastly I enclosed him entirely in the armour, a hard shell in which the burgeoning vitality could come to full fruition.

‘A chrysalis,’ said Aareth.

‘Say rather a seed case, from which Eli’s new life will be born.’

There was a cloud on Abdiel’s brow. ‘I know not he would thank you for this transformation, master. Death is preferable to some fates, I’d say.’

‘Death is easy to deliver. I bring it swifter than most, being the god my islanders look to when a man is impaled on a narwhal’s tusk or slips through a hole in the ice. Working this green magic is not my accustomed way, but to thwart Obsidian we must confound our very natures. And so in this I work a miracle of new life.’

‘Still and all, Eli was proud of his healthy hue. To be leaf-complexioned…’

‘Enough. He will be the flower of your order. You should give thanks, or prayers even – not stand there and cavil like an actuary of Hythe.’

‘Remember the hourglass,’ said Hurstyk.

He was right. We had less than a day to do the other thing we had come for – to take some of the quicksilver ore in case we had need of it on Tartuva. My senses no longer bound by Time, whose name I’d spoken true, I perceived that the tide would be in our favour when it came time to depart. But we must be swift.

‘I’ll stay with the ship,’ volunteered Idhelruin. He was right; we could not leave it in the command of Moss and Mirrowaith.

A fallen palm frond lay by my foot, as big as a pikestaff blade and nearly as sharp. I took it, knowing there would be need for it later.

As Abdiel led us towards the mine, sand-spitting whirlwinds went swiftly ahead of us – spirits conjured by Wax to clear our way. We’d lost sight of them by the time we reached the mine workings.

A cage came up the shaft bearing half a dozen emaciated slaves. I freed the mind of one, a woman named Alma, and she immediately collapsed. It was only the force of magic, that had till now compelled her service, that sustained her from a weakness that was close to death.

‘If we flood the mine, innocents like her will die,’ said Hurstyk.

‘They have guards who work for them too,’ said Abdiel, unsheathing his sword. ‘I think they are not innocent.’

‘So we descend?’ said Ironside, looking down the black shaft.

‘I could summon Felt to us here.’

Aareth looked at me in shock. ‘Summon a living man? I have heard of spirits being summoned, never that.’

‘You have seen me summon insects and vermin.’ I might have mentioned whales, or indeed the wizard Birch who I had nearly called to me in Karmon. I reached out, divining a part of Felt’s name from our previous encounter with him, when I determined he was the last to read On Those Who Have No True Name.

In the depths of the mine, he felt my influence and laughed. ‘I summon you,’ he retorted, and it was my turn to laugh.

Aareth transformed himself into a fly and vanished into the mine shaft.

‘Well, we won’t do that,’ said Hurstyk. ‘Shall I wait here for you? I’m not a combatant.’

Abdiel and Ironside got into the cage, which it seemed could move up and down the shaft by an ingenious contrivance of counterweights and pulleys. I called down a gull and plucked three feathers. ‘When you hold it thus you are weightless and will float down,’ I told Wax. ‘To ascend, flick it like a small fan thus.’

The third feather was for Hurstyk, but he was already using his own magic to descend. Wisely he had realized that a ‘non-combatant’ would not be safe remaining here alone.

Below we almost immediately came face to face with two armed guards. Scenting battle, Abdiel’s armour transformed itself back into plate steel. He was for butchering the guards, but I felt they would be of more use if I brought them into my own service. ‘Now you are free,’ I told them as they bowed. ‘You have a new master.’

‘Felt and Job are deep below,’ they told us.

‘And the whirlwind spirits?’

‘We did not see them. Our former master makes short work of conjured creatures.’

‘Where’s Aareth?’ wondered Wax.

‘Why didn’t you let me kill these guards?’ Abdiel interjected. ‘You said that men are insects.’

‘I said I had summoned insects, Abdiel, but that is a very good suggestion. Aareth, where e’er you are, come to me.’

I saw a glimpse of a fly trapped in a bottle with a spider, the bottle resting in the palm of a wizard who regarded the scene with a sneer. Felt.

‘He cannot come. Aareth, a fly you are no more. Now be a scorpion bigger than a man.’

From far off in the tunnels came a cry of dismay. Abdiel ran towards it, Ironside close behind him. Turning a corner, they faced a chitinous monster with scything claws and a sting that dripped smoking venom. Abdiel ducked, rolled and was past it, still running. Ironside backed towards us. The scorpion scuttled closer. It filled the tunnel. Its pincers scraped the rock walls. All I had specified was bigger than man-sized; it was Aareth’s own hubris that supplied the rest.

‘Sometimes I am not sure I am entirely infallible,’ I said.

‘That will not be easy to deal with,’ said Ironside, noticing how its sting swayed ready to strike.

‘Scorpion, be Aareth again.’ And our comrade stood there, a little puzzled by what had happened to him.

Ahead of us, Abdiel met with Job, the nameless man. Their swords clashed, and Job fought Abdiel back, but the inquisitor’s armour meant that even a swift and surgical blow was insufficient to draw blood. So closely matched, Abdiel’s enchanted plate against Job’s dazzling skill, they might have fought for an hour without either gaining the upper hand. But then Ironside strode forward and put an arrow through the back of Job’s mouth.

‘Do you know,’ said Hurstyk, ‘I’ve just thought of why Wax and I could remember names when the rest of you could not.’

‘It’s hardly the time – ’ I began. Then I saw the look of benumbed wits in his eyes. The others were the same, gazing about them in mild stupefaction as though our affairs here in the mine were of no more urgency than a stroll around a marketplace.

The hourglass! The sands were close to running out. Some sorcery here had folded time upon us – the very enchantment I had considered earlier and then discounted.

‘Aareth, Hurstyk, regain your senses.’ I dispelled the fog that blanketed their minds, then pulled white gold ore together to make a golem of quicksilver nuggets.

‘We must go back,’ said Hurstyk.

‘We can’t. The White Watcher is already here. We need to find another way out.’

The guards told us where the old mineshaft led out under the sea. They were not sure how to get there from these tunnels, but Abdiel – his mind now magically cleared – drew on a mariner’s knowledge of old timbers, pointing out where the beams were new and where they marked out abandoned sections of the mine.

We came to a dead end. Above, dully, rocks stirred by the tide could be heard scraping on the seabed. I drew forth the palm frond, commanding it to form itself into an iron-hard tube as Hurstyk read the patterns in the tunnel roof, pointing out the cracks through which my tube could insinuate itself, widening until there was a fissure through which we could ascend.

On the surface, I reshaped the palm frond into a raft, in doing so allowing the sea to flood down into the mine. Wax’s turtle rose from the water nearby and took the edge of our raft in its mouth, pulling us back to the Sea Lion, where Idhelruin had had Eli’s pericarp-shelled body brought.

We looked back to where the sea frothed and boiled. The torrent pouring into the mine workings might hold up the Watcher for a few minutes, and with luck would inconvenience Felt too.

‘I was going to tell you my idea,’ said Hurstyk. ‘I think that the White Death is tied to Lady Pale’s power. I deduced the name of the White Death, and I cured Wax of it. That could explain why Lady Pale’s radiance did not fully block our ability to remember names. Of course, it’s just a theory.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘It is a consummate and ineffable understanding.’

The Conclave

I like this cover painting (by David Bergen) because it depicts a wizard who might have stepped from the pages of National Geographic rather than Dragon magazine. I’ve had the book for decades but never so much as read the first page. Now that might change because I’ve been playing in Tim Harford’s marvellous Conclave campaign, inspired by the Earthsea books.

Tim began by stripping everything back to just a few pages of rules. I know people are playing full-on tactical dungeon bash games using platforms like Roll20, but our style is more theatre of the mind anyway, so it made sense to pare the system and dice-rolling to a minimum.

There were seven players and we were all wizards in an archipelago world where magic is brought about by using the true names of things. (That’s Ursula K Le Guin’s idea.) We began by describing our characters. Here’s Oliver Johnson on the background of the mage Wax:

“My mentor was my father, ‘Ear of Ear’, the shaman before me, but now ‘of his bones are coral made’ (see below). At the age of 12 he gave me my true name. Since his death, only he, the wind, and his coral brothers know this name.

“Wax is a shamanistic sorcerer on the Island of the Ear in the scorching southern Sandbanks group of islands. As you point out, these areas were never subject to the rule of the High King and have their own language, Al Vari. Though we can of course speak the Common Tongue when called upon, we prefer our own language and customs. Just out to sea are The Great Southern Shoals.

“Wax is a skinny, sun-tanned fellow with dreadlocks and a perhaps a not very clean loin cloth as his sole wardrobe, he carries a conch shell and a coral staff/spear about five feet long. Like many on the island he is addicted to the dreamberries that grow in profusion among the sand dunes. They give him powerful visions of the past, the present and, sometimes, even of the future…

“Along the coast of the Island of the Ear are the many coral houses of my people, a fishing folk with a peaceful way of life. Apart from, that is, at certain times of the year when the fish are running, such as the great tunny migration, when I am called to ritualistically gather the fish into the Bay of the Larynx and the villagers proceed to batter the hapless creatures to death in the shallows (for this, think the Sicilian Mattanza ceremony) . At other times I am required to raft the dead out to the Great Shoals and lay the corpses upon the exposed reef so they can once more become the sea and the coral. I spend many days there as the bodies fall apart, driving the seagulls away so the spirits of the dead will be of the sea and not the air… The reef speaks to me of its mysteries and the wider oceans beyond. Sometimes at the dead of the moon the coral men come out of the sea and sit once more on the beach and converse of their living days. I sometimes join them, listening to their strange clicking language which over the years I have become quite proficient in. The last time they came from the deeps my father told me of a great treasure they had found in the ocean troughs, an immense object like a metal dragon. He does not know whether it is a thing of evil or good, but suspects the former. The ocean depths and the reefs near it are now absent of life.

“Wax lives in a huge cave complex overlooking the Bay of the Larynx, knows as The Pipes. Strange ululations are caused by the fierce sirocco blowing from the south and it seems the wind brings him news of those far away deserts and their peoples. A secondary aid is his conch shell which he often applies to his ear and from which come the voices of the other sorcerers of the isles and the desert lands who also carry these devices.

“Wax is sometimes referred to as ‘Ear Wax’, for there is another sorcerer with the same name on the nearby Island of Wax (known as ‘Wax Wax’). We are not friends, nor shall we ever be, though he, too, has a conch.”

And my own character:

“I hail from the far north, where lie bleak, flat islands of pebbles whose shores are lapped by an iron-grey sea. Sullen fisherfolk live short, hard lives untouched by beauty. By day the frost and the flensing wind scour all in a cruel embrace. At night the vault of stars is vast beyond grandeur, a pitiless glimpse into cosmic infinity that exposes the utter hopelessness of all human endeavour.

“I dwell within the wind and the darkness, being the god Surma -- or at any rate worshipped as such by the few hundred savages of those islands. When the sun is gone and all must huddle around a spitting driftwood fire, they know they must forfeit their own comfort to save offerings for Surma, god of sudden endings, lord of the final moment, who demands propitiation for all the hours he has withheld his attentions from those who yet sit shivering by the fire.

“Those primitive fishermen belong to a tribe called Tarvastans and they eke out a hard life. In the middle of an empty island strewn with large pebbles stands a spire of crystal about half the size of Cleopatra’s Needle. The fishermen burn offerings to the god Surma who lives here, hoping to propitiate him, for Surma is the spirit of violent death.

“Surma is not in fact a god but a human wizard. His name is Kullervo and he was brought up by the Tarvastans, who treated him harshly as he was a captive from another tribe and not one of their own. One day the young Kullervo found the crystal monolith, which even then the Tarvastans regarded with dread, and discovered that by approaching it in a certain way, ‘stepping sideways from sideways’ as he understood it, he was able to get inside. Within the crystal is much bigger and Kullervo discovered he could hear whispers left over from beings who lived here long ago.

“The Jume are dead, as we understand it, but their words had innate power and could not die. Those words echoed still within the matrices of crystal, speaking to the sensitive mind of the child. Kullervo returned day after day, enduring the blows and cruel commands of the fisherfolk as he learned the secrets of the Jume. Soon he contrived the death of the man who owned him, causing the body to sit up on the third night of its wake and foretell the return of the god Surma. Since then, Kullervo took on the identity of Surma and occasionally protects and occasionally persecutes the Tarvastans, though most of the time he forgets their existence, engrossed as he is in the endless mysteries to be gleaned within his crystalline citadel.”

Tim asked us a few questions before the first game. I only have Surma's answers to those questions, of course:

Who trained you? The endlessly echoing voices of the Jume, which in the crystal sanctum have far outlasted the Jume themselves. From their immortal whispers I gleaned the secrets of my art. In the things of which they spoke I am unrivalled, therefore, but I remain ignorant of the gentler ways of wizardry which the Jume disdained.

Who knows your true name? None, but it is there in the world nonetheless, for in my early days of study I spoke it aloud within the walls of crystal, which allow no sound of magic import to be deleted. Yet I will confound any attempt to learn it from there, for I spoke many other names, equally indelible, so that if any foe somehow found his way into my sanctum (no easy feat in itself) they would hear my voice pronouncing many names. How would they know the true name? They would have to sift it from the reverberating choices I have left there, each cunningly contrived to be as convincing as the next.

Where do you now abide? In my crystal monolith – from outside, a grey quartz splinter on a small, barren, rocky island; yet inside it is a palace in dimension, though austere and unwelcoming to any who does not have iron in their will.

One reason why you are pleased to be summoned to the Conclave is that you have seen worrying changes where you live. You wish to discuss them and seek advice from your peers. The names of new things are more similar to each other than they were in older times, more easily determined by grinding logic than by arcane craft and intuition. It is as if the world is losing the flavour of things, becoming colourless and uniform under the skin of reality. This is why the old songs lose their melody, why the fisherman’s catch is mostly minnows, why the young cast their elders out into the cold, why the storms are violent and unseasonal and dragons hide in distant clouds.

In the set-up we were told we'd been invited to travel to the island of Dain by the Master Summoner of the College of Wizards: "Surrity, Lord of Dain, invites you to a feast in honour of his visitors. Parties at Castle Karmon have a reputation for showy social displays, progressing to other forms of immodesty. The thought may appal or delight you, and the invitation to yours to accept or reject."

Surma replied: "It is right and proper I should be at the feast, as I am in a sense at all feasts. Where I pass, flowers wither, a chill deepens the shadows, and all feel an unease at the momentary reminder of their mortality -- a reminder that those who see beneath my mask of resplendent black harpy feathers will not forget."

My write-up of the first game was from Surma's unique perspective, which didn't even trouble to stick to chronological order:

SESSION ONE

Rarely do I choose to leave my lands, but on a whim I responded to an invitation from one styling himself the Master Summoner of Dain, not the least of my motivations for this being whimsical curiosity, for I have heard that ‘a wizard of Dain’ means a buffoon.

Many new impressions, then, in no particular order:

I visited a tavern, a low-ceilinged smoky hovel into which men press themselves like herd animals in a pen. Here they drink away what little wits they possess, exchanging metal rooted up from the ground by manual effort. And they talk and talk, and thus they squander each breath until the last.

At a circle of nine stone seats, along with Wax and six others, I was enmeshed in a spell and visited by one calling himself the White Watcher. He commanded one of the others to die, resisted the most vindictive thunderbolt I could find in those meagre skies, and even managed to temporarily restrain my own freedom of movement. (Note: perhaps he was another aspect of myself?) While I was preparing a means to escape the binding and counterattack, Wax called down some other bolts, one of which brought the senile Master Summoner to himself and he sent the Watcher away.

In the market one of the mortal wizards bought cloth, but rather than give metal coins for it he cured the stall-owner’s daughter of a fungal infection. Her home was smaller and more squalid even than the moss-roofed bothies of my worshippers. I told light to inhabit it, which the mortal wizards took for an illusion. (Note: a kind of visual trick.) The wizard, who styled himself the Whisperer, said that the disease was once common in the isles but had been thought eradicated.

Lord Surrity is the ruler of the island of Dain. I forgot to ask the relationship, if any, between him and the College of Hythe, but their library is on Dain also. (Note: mortal wizards acquire their magic from books; before I leave for home I should visit the Librarian to look at some.)

The greatest marvel: I saw a man who seemed to have no True Name. He styled himself as a slaver called Jude. You would imagine such a one would live as Wax and I live, with one foot in the otherworld, yet he supped his tankard at an ale-puddled bar and did a sordid deal to sell children to a merchant for sexual violation. (At my instruction, this merchant later took the children to the castle and confessed his crimes to the secular authorities.)

Let us end this account at the beginning. Wax arrived at Dain on the back of Sprugel the Great Turtle, a stylish gesture, and disembarked with the unearthly hints and flavours of dreamberry raptures still trailing him in a cloak of half-seen wisps. I came in the form of lustrous pearls borne in a chest by tritons with the heads of fish and hindquarters like octopuses, caparisoned in coral hauberks and sitting astride brine-spitting sea horses that rode forth from the mouth of a blue whale with two centuries of barnacles on her flanks. I did not notice how the mortal wizards made their way to Dain, but I believe they came by boat.

Tim commented: “Surma is a Vancean mage in a Le Guin universe. It shouldn’t work yet it does.” Whether I'll ever prevail on him to publish The Conclave as an RPG is another matter. He is rather busy with books, radio shows and a podcast, not to mention running our weekly game, so it might take a while, but come back tomorrow for another taste of the campaign.