September is kind of gamebook month, what with International Gamebook Day (okay, that was August) and then the Fighting Fantasy convention. I didn't make it along to FFF -- after all, I only wrote half of one Fighting Fantasy book, so my connection to it is rather spurious -- but to do my bit I've reduced, nay slashed, the price of The Hammer of the Sunwhile stocks last or until October 1, whichever comes first.
You can play the Vulcanverse books in any order, going back and forth on multi-stranded quests just like in Fabled Lands, but The Hammer of the Sunis the big one. At 1706 sections it's like two FL books combined. The discount applies to the paperback edition, which you can get at one-third off the usual price (UK) or almost half-price (US) for this month only.
And while we're on the subject of open-world gamebooks, here's some more good news. Martin Noutch, author of the superb Steam Highwaymanbooks, is creating a new four-book series called Saga for Spidermind Games, who publish the hugely successful Legendary Kingdoms gamebooks. Saga is set in the days of the Vikings, is described by the author as "atmospheric, morally ambiguous, and written with a love of place", and if like me you're an enthusiast for all things Norse then you'll want to bookmark that right now.
(Image by Wombo Dream, which has nothing to do with The Hammer of the Sun but I've been playing with it this week and I liked the Ditko-ness of this one.)
If you believe in gods and in life after death, it's not inconceivable that you might consider it an honour to be sacrificed in order to carry a message to the world beyond. Some real-life cultures seem to have taken that view. Frazer gives several examples in The Golden Bough and talks about the sacred king whose reign might well end with a trip to the afterlife. Describing the 16th century customs of the Chichimecas, the friar Marcos de Niza said: "They cast lots to decide who will have the honour of being sacrificed, and with joy they crown him with flowers upon a bed on piles of wood which they set on fire, and so he dies. The victim takes great pleasure in this rite."
"Great pleasure"? Anthropologist Kathryn M Koziol isn't so sure about that. In this paper about another Pre-Columbian culture she says, "Among the Natchez, the mortuary rituals of the elite Suns [chiefs] included the killing of retainers. These retainers were members of the Natchez population and gained prestige for their kin by willingly dying, or at least by performing their willingness to die, to accompany their leaders." My emphasis there.
Professor Nicholas Humphrey gets outraged at the suggestion that the Inca "Ice Maiden" might even have been an enthusiastic participant in her own ritual killing (40 minutes in to this video)...
But Humphrey is a psychologist, not a historian or anthropologist, and the simple fact is we don't know. The sacrifice of the Ice Maiden might have been a crime inflicted on an unwilling victim; it might have been a signal honour jealously coveted among the Inca. Even framing it in those terms only makes sense in the context of our own culture.
Players of my gamebook Necklace of Skullsmay have been on the receiving end of such an honour. On your visit to Chichen Itza ("Yashuna" in the book) the priests of Chaac invite you to jump into the sacred cenote with a message for the gods. Of course, in the gamebook the cenote undeniably is a gateway into the mythic world. In real life (see photo above; that's me on honeymoon) it's just a dirty great pond in which you'd soon go down for the third time. Pleading hydrophobia was no get-out, as there was always the option of getting sacrificed as an esteemed ball player, which is what the spouting snake-heads represent in this carving:
What "recent work" could that possibly be? Time travel? A séance? Because otherwise they just mean "somebody's recent opinion", which is utterly useless. It only tells us about the attitudes of the West in 2021, not of the Rus in 921. We cannot know how people from those far-off cultures regarded a sacrificial victim without knowing what the world looked like through their eyes. Even the word victim implies a modern viewpoint. To them the afterlife was probably as real as sunlight and rain, whereas we know perfectly well they were not off to see Chaac or Odin with a message from the mortal world but were simply being snuffed out. Would they have been frightened or honoured? Both, probably. As Professor Koziol says at the start of that paper I cited, human societies are capable of acts that are simultaneously great and terrible. Our rituals aren't unambiguous, so why should our reactions to them be?
No matter how sure you are that you're about to enter the afterlife, there's got to be a natural fear of death too. A kamikaze pilot crashing into a warship no doubt had feelings of both fear and pride. The September 11 attackers presumably felt exalted, terrified, uncertain and excited all at once. They were told their martyrdom would earn them immediate entry into a heavenly paradise, but did they completely believe that? Would Wikipedia describe them as feeling "happy and privileged" or as having been manipulated and psychologically abused? If we can't even exactly pin down the mentality of modern jihadists, how are we going to judge the cultural mores of five or ten centuries past?
Yet thinking our way into other cultures and other mind-sets is part of roleplaying. On Tekumel, prisoners of war who aren't of glorious enough status to be worth ransoming back to their clans will usually get sacrificed to the gods. In Tetsubo, a character performing seppuku believes he is undertaking an act of courage and dignity. Spock in Wrath of Khan knowingly took a lethal dose of radiation as an act of logical altruism -- it wasn't his fault he was then doomed to an eternal afterlife of sequels, and we can only hope that any player-character attempting the same thing in an SF campaign would be granted the dignity of a true death.
We don't know what it's actually like to be a person raised in another era or culture, but we are all human and we have universal emotions and our imaginations. We can conceive of a credible mindset for a kamikaze pilot or a 10th century slave girl on a pyre or a Maya citizen jumping into a sinkhole. That's as good as it's going to get.
No, it's not an April Fool. Jamie has written a novel and it's published today by Boxer Books. If you don't believe it, order your copy right here (UK) or here (America). In fact, even if you do believe it you should still buy one; Jamie is counting on you for his beer money.
Corvus Gunnarson is a hero in the Conan mold. He returns home after a period of exile to find his parents murdered and his two sisters captured by the ruthless warlord Wulfric Coldblood. Corvus swears an oath of vengeance and sets out to find Wulfric and rescue his sisters. His quest takes him on a journey from the fjords of Norway to the shores of Saxon England and beyond. On his journey he encounters giant sea serpents, pillaging armies, devious tricksters and shape-shifting berserker werewolves.
It's the first of a planned epic series. And, as this excerpt shows, there's a definite flavor of the Fabled Lands in the action sequences:
There were two more loud cracks in quick succession. Lightning bolts flashed down to strike the sea and the water steamed and boiled. It began to bubble, though there was no more lightning. It seemed like the storm was easing off now, fading away as fast as it had come. Certainly the rain was beginning to ease. But the bolt-struck waters nearby continued to roil and boil. Great bubbles rose up and burst into the air, releasing a foul stench of rot, like the breath of a hundred drowned sailors. The clouds parted a little and in the growing light Corvus could see something dark and indistinct rising up out of the depths.
Suddenly a great serpentine head broke the surface of the sea. Great gouts of water cascaded down its scaly ridged skull and the sides of its sinuous and heavily muscled neck. A hulking body - scaled, greenish, pitted with barnacles, finned and tailed like a demon-whale - came up behind it. It raised its head and uttered a rumbling roar that shook Corvus and Orm to their very bones. Its eyes, black and soulless like those of the squid, were wet and cruel and they glittered evilly. The sea-rot stink as of men long drowned filled the air with foulness.
‘Aieee!’ shrieked Orm at the top of his voice, ‘Jormungand, it is Jormungand!’
‘Jormungand!’ thought Corvus. Jormungand was the world serpent, the worm that eats its own tail, the gigantic sea serpent that would kill Thor himself at Ragnorak, the last battle of the Gods at the end of time. This was bad. Especially if Orm believed it – he didn’t believe in stuff like this normally. They were doomed!
Corvus looked up at the great beast, as its head reared up over the small boat. Well, if he was going to die, he would go to Valhalla fighting with the last drop of his blood. Quickly Corvus plucked the long knife from his belt and began to saw at the rope that held him to the mast. If only they’d realized the true nature of the threat. Instead of lashing themselves down, they should have been…. what? What could they do against this thing? He glanced over at Orm. The old man was desperately working at his bonds, his eyes staring in unbelieving terror at the sea-serpent.
As Corvus broke free, the diamond-shaped head of the sea dragon flashed down, great maw gaping, rows of sword-sharp shark-teeth glistening in the sun. Its jaws closed around Orm and the mast, snapping it like driftwood. Orm shrieked in agony. The serpent took him up into the air, and bit deep. His chest burst asunder, spraying blood and entrails, soaking Corvus in gore. Orm’s head fell one way, his legs another. Greedily the vile beast gulped down the rest of him as Corvus scrabbled for his axes, wiping bits of the dead man off his face and arms.
Read on in the first Corvus novel, Oath of Vengeance. "A thrilling epic of bravery, honour and revenge," say the skalds. "By Odin's lost eye, if thou purchasest but a single book this year, let it be this one!"
Verily, that was a word from our sponsor; Abraxas resumes tomorrow. And you Dragon Warriors players get ready, as we'll have some Tamorian magic for you in a week or two.
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