A Thaumaturge campaign using Dragon Warriors rules

Habitués of these parts will already know that I’m an unabashed fan of The Thaumaturge CRPG, so it was only a matter of time before I started noodling around with ways to depict its lightly fantastical early 20^th century setting in a roleplaying campaign. Google tells me that Dragon Warriors in Polish is Smoczy Wojownicy – and this year being the 40^th anniversary of DW and the 120^th anniversary of the June Days, here’s an outline of how that adaptation could work.

Thaumaturges in Dragon Warriors

Thaumaturges, also known as temperomancers, are treated as mystics. To qualify as a thaumaturge, the character must have Psychic Talent of at least 13.

The character does not get spells automatically. They must first bind one or more salutors. Each salutor has a number of spells (usually one per level) aligned with its nature, and which unlock as the thaumaturge advances in rank. The GM will determine the spells available to a salutor when creating it.

When spells are cast, the thaumaturge rolls for Psychic Fatigue in the usual way for mystics except that it is the bond with that specific servitor that is fatigued; if the thaumaturge has other salutors then he or she can still invoke their powers. Each salutor has a different time of day when its bond to the thaumaturge will defatigue.

The thaumaturge can mentally confer with their first salutor. This calls for a few moments of quiet mediation, so it can’t be done in the middle of a conversation or fight. The salutor doesn’t have access to any special knowledge, but it has its own insights and may give some useful advice on the thaumaturge’s current course of action. (The main point of it is so that the GM can give players a subtle nudge when they are at a loss.)

Finding a salutor

Salutors usually attach themselves to individuals with a particular flaw, which the thaumaturge can discern with the skill of Aesthesics. To draw out the flaw, the thaumaturge must provoke the individual to excessively indulge the flaw to the point that they overreach and it causes them trouble. For example, urging a character with the scandal-mongering flaw to go too far and thereby attract the disapproval of the people they are gossiping with. That being achieved, the thaumaturge can acquire the flaw by rolling Psychic Talent or less on d20.

Subduing a salutor

Acquiring the correct flaw to attune with a wild salutor qualifies the thaumaturge to attempt to subdue it. This is a struggle analogous to physical combat except that Magical Attack and Magical Defence are used in place of Attack and Defence. Psychic Talent is used instead of Health Points, recovering at the end of the psychic battle regardless of outcome. Blows struck use d8 for Armour Bypass and do 4 damage. The character’s Armour Factor is equal to the number of bound salutors he or she has. Most wild salutors will have AF of 1 or 2.

If the thaumaturge wins the psychic battle, the salutor is subdued and can then be bound. If the thaumaturge loses, the salutor escapes into the wild and is gone for good; the thaumaturge retains the flaw and additionally suffers madness. (You can roll for madness as per standard DW rules, but better still if the insanity relates to the newly acquired flaw.)

Binding a salutor

Once subdued, a salutor is successfully bound if the thaumaturge rolls Psychic Talent or less on d20. If the attempt fails, the salutor escapes into the wild but can now be tracked using Aesthesics and the thaumaturge can again attempt to subdue it.

Flaws

Flaws are psychological traits such as pride, ambition, envy, recklessness, malice, scandal-mongering. If you have a flaw it may sometimes work as an asset, but think of it as a special ability with a downside, causing trouble for you as well as for others.

The best example of a flaw that springs to mind is the case of Richard the Lionheart, shipwrecked and travelling through hostile territory in the guise of a merchant, who was apprehended by Duke Leopold of Austria because he insisted on wearing a pair of exquisite gloves that no itinerant merchant could afford.

Thaumaturges must acquire a new flaw in order to bind a wild salutor into their service. Additionally, any time the player chooses to act in accordance with one of their flaws they can earn experience points proportional to the inconvenience or danger caused as a result:

Other abilities of a thaumaturge

In place of Dragon Warriors mystics' Premonition and ESP, the thaumaturge has four innate abilities.

Psychometry

This is the ability to read psychic impressions (“traces”) from objects imprinted with strong emotions. By handling the object, the thaumaturge detects the trace. Each person’s trace is as unique as a fingerprint, meaning that the thaumaturge will know if they have seen the same trace before, and if they know whose trace it is (immediately apparent if they have spoken to them) they will always recognize it again.

Psychometry allows the thaumaturge to retrace a person’s steps after speaking to them, following their trace the way a dog would follow a scent trail but with the important distinction that the thaumaturge is not discerning a physical trail but rather is winding back through the character’s thoughts and feelings. Therefore the trail is not only locational but also social; if the character had an important conversation with somebody else, the trace will lead to that person rather than simply the spot where they happened to talk.

The time that a trace can be followed back depends on the thaumaturge’s rank: 5 minutes times the thaumaturge’s rank squared. So a 4^th rank thaumaturge could follow a trace back eighty minutes. This is only a limit on following the path of a continuous trace. There is no time limit on detecting a trace on an object that has strong emotions attached; such traces last for decades.

Psychometry also gives the thaumaturge the power to imprint a message on an object. The message can be read by any other thaumaturge just as easily as if it was written.

A thaumaturge can conceal their trace on an object. In that case, another thaumaturge attempting to read the trace must match their Magical Attack against the first thaumaturge’s Magical Defence in order to do so.

Aesthesics

This skill allows the thaumaturge to read someone’s emotions while talking to them. The thaumaturge can detect whether the person is telling the truth, when they are hiding something, and if they have a flaw.

The same skill can be used to mask emotions, flaws and lies from another thaumaturge, who must match their Magical Attack against the dissembling thaumaturge’s Magical Defence to see through the veil.

Aesthesics can also be used to find a person whose trace the thaumaturge is familiar with. The thaumaturge knows the direction to go, but not necessarily how far off they are. The chance of knowing the distance is 10% times the thaumaturge’s rank.

Manipulation

When a thaumaturge knows what is most important to a person, they may be able to manipulate the person’s emotions to convince them to do something. A character who is eager to impress a superior might be convinced that the thaumaturge is somebody the superior will listen to, for example.

Different salutors play on different emotions and aspirations. When using the manipulation ability, the thaumaturge enlists the salutor’s power and this could cause psychic fatigue on their bond. Treat it as a level 4 spell (analogous to the mystic spell Enthrall, in fact) matching the thaumaturge’s Magical Attack against the target character’s Magical Defence.

Sequester

Thaumaturges who meet can move their conversation onto the psychic plane. Their astral selves appear as they do normally but their surroundings vanish. On the psychic plane it is impossible to speak an untruth, which can be revealing even to the person speaking. Any of the thaumaturges in a sequestered conversation can leave it at any time – usually, that is; you could freak out a player by having them unable to return to the real world. No matter how long the conversation on the psychic plane, when it ends no time will have passed in the real world.

The grimoire

The grimoire is a book of psychic formulae. To use the abilities of their salutors, a thaumaturge must have a grimoire to hand. Without it, they cannot cast spells or manipulate emotions. Their psychometry and aesthesics abilities are unaffected, however.

Running the game

When a campaign is set in a historical setting, there is a temptation to fanfic it by pulling in ideas and characters from any and all contemporary genre fiction. Don’t, that’s my advice. Honour the originality of The Thaumaturge by seeing that it stands on its own merit as an original fantasy setting. It does not need and will in no way be enhanced by treating it as a turn-of-the-century bucket in which you need to throw Sherlock Holmes, Dracula, Raffles, Cthulhu, Allan Quatermain, John Silence, Professor Challenger, or any other intruder from a different fictional universe. Less is more, and once you start down that road you are inevitably lining up to jump the shark.

On the other hand, it’s well worth plundering any and all the real historical details. Characters, events, history – they’re all there on Wikipedia, and provide rich seams from which to mine the storylines of your campaign. There is no better way to absorb the feel of a place than by visiting it, of course, and in the absence of time machines the ideal way to soak up the vibe is simply by playing the CRPG, which does a first-class job of conveying the style and culture of the times along with the combustible atmosphere of a society riven by tensions between past and future, rich and poor, oppressor and oppressed.

Other game systems

If you’re using a skill-based system like GURPS or Call of Cthulhu, you can incorporate the dimensions of the Thaumaturge system: Deed, Heart, Mind, Word. In Jewelspider those first three translate closely to three of the four qualities that define a character: Strong, Inspired, Clever – except that Jewelspider uses Inspired for both persuasion and emotional insights, and splits The Thaumaturge’s Deed stat into Strong and Graceful. 

The snag with using Jewelspider is that it’s explicitly tied into the Legend setting and has no instant-cast spells, so you’d have to junk the entire magic system and rebuild that to be based on salutors and psychic powers.

If you don’t mind working out a bunch of playbooks you could use a Powered by the Apocalypse framework with Deed, Heart, Mind and Word as the base stats. It risks becoming tediously mechanical, as you’d have to force all the character roles through the usual PbtA cookie cutter of, say: thief, reporter, army veteran, bon viveur, artist, entrepreneur, gangster, etc –- and as any of those could potentially be a thaumaturge, the whole playbook structure shatters at the first tap.

GURPS has a lot of detail (here) about weaponry of the period. If you do decide to stick with Dragon Warriors, there are some early 20^th century rules for that here. And if you want to delve deeper into the rich folklore of Poland, take a look at Beyond Corny Groń by Kuba Skurzyński.

This is a repost of an article from my Jewelspider page on Patreon. About half the posts, like this one, are open to all who subscribe to the page whether they are backers or whether they are what Patreon calls "free members". Of course, the choicest pieces are reserved for the paying members, but I hope this one will entice you over to browse among the non-paywalled content and to consider subscribing for the top-drawer stuff.

The sense of an ending

My first memory of the public library is of lugging home a volume of Norse myths as heavy as a thunder-god’s hammer. A red-bearded bruiser with a laugh like the sky splitting. A silver-tongued schemer who can’t help brewing mischief. Together, they fight giants. I was hooked right out of the gate.

Soon after that Doctor Who’s cliffhangers held a generation of children spellbound week after week. James Bond felt like he’d go on forever. (Funny, that.) And the British comic TV Century 21 wrapped all those now-classic Gerry Anderson puppet shows into one shared universe. It all fed the notion that stories don’t ever have to end.

"Give me a child until he is seven..." No truer word, only in my case it wasn’t the Jesuits, it was serial storytelling. And that's fine for kids, in the eternal summer they inhabit, but as we get older we realize the ending of a story is what gives it meaning and value.

What about roleplaying campaigns? In the old days, campaigns were as open-ended as a daytime soap. Campaigns like that can eventually reach a natural conclusion, which is perfect if all the players agree. More often they fizzle out for external reasons, which is rarely satisfying. Nowadays, when campaigns are often built around a high concept with a beginning, middle and end (like Tim Harford's brilliant Redemption campaign, or his equally inspired Earthsea-style saga The Conclave) or designed in seasons like a TV show (Camelot Eclipsed or Keeping the Peace) it's worth thinking about how you can bring them in to land.

Writing guru Rebecca Makkai has some great tips about this. It's a longish series, but worth studying.

• Part One is about open vs closed endings.
• Part Two is about endings that come about structurally. For example, in Redemption the campaign ended when we reconsecrated the abandoned chapel we'd been sent to find.
• Part Three is about meaning, the takeaway you get from the ending.
• Part Four is about the sound, style and tone of the ending. (To apply this one to roleplaying campaigns requires a bit more work.)
• Part Five deals with the change brought about at the end.
• Part Six concerns the way the ending shades into past, present or future.

And author Brandon McNulty has an excellent video essay on what distinguishes good endings from bad ones.

Soldiers Three

H G Wells was a wargamer. Everybody knows that. And when you read something like this (from "With the Main Guard") you could almost believe Rudyard Kipling designed his characters as if they were going into a GURPS campaign:

In the Soldiers Three stories, Mulvaney, the Irishman, is the most interesting. He understands people instinctively and knows how to gin them up and calm them down. He is also subject to bouts of "the black dog", has a drinking problem, and reacts to violence by throwing up, all obvious GURPS disadvantages/quirks. Ortheris, the sharp-as-a-pin Cockney, is small and prickly but a crack shot. Learoyd, the Yorkshireman, is slow but strong. The character sheets write themselves.

The British Raj would make a great setting for a roleplaying campaign. Though I can't see SJG getting around to publishing a sourcebook any time soon, and even Osprey's books of the period seem to be out of stock, here are some weapon stats to get the ball rolling.

We can estimate Ortheris's shooting skill, incidentally. He says he can hit Mulvaney five times out of seven at 800 yards with a slightly substandard rifle. Assume an Accuracy of 4 (1 less than a brand new Lee-Enfield .303). Ortheris can aim for three rounds to get an extra +3 bonus, so he's rolling at +7 in all -- less the range modifier, which is -16. And let's give a +1 to hit Mulvaney because he's a big fellow. So the overall modifiers add up to -8. Ortheris is hitting 71% of the time, so his Guns (Rifle) skill must be 20.

Amazon US

Soldiers Three

GURPS Basic Set: Characters
GURPS Basic Set: Campaigns

Amazon UK

Soldiers Three

GURPS Basic Set: Characters
GURPS Basic Set: Campaigns

After the war is over

I acquired a few imaginary friends in lockdown. Regularly accompanying me on long rural walks are Melvyn Bragg, Tim Harford, Sam Harris, Ralph Lovegrove, Michael Shermer, Tom Holland, and many others, some of whom also happen to be friends in non-imaginary space. One of the biggest highlights of the month is a stroll with Michael Cule and Roger Bell-West, who always seem to be stepping through into my head from the garden of an ivy-clad Buckinghamshire cottage where bees drone in the flowerbeds and there’s the distant thwack and thump of tennis balls. (Don’t disillusion me, chaps.)

Lately a new feature has been added to Improvised Radio Theatre. In “A Gameable Age” Mike and Roger take a deep dive into a historical period that’s ripe for roleplaying. As a culture gamer that sort of thing is right up my street, or winding country lane rather. And it was particularly interesting that they launched this segment with discussions of the English Civil War and the Restoration, because a few years ago I had a notion to set a Legend campaign in a setting not unadjacent to that period.

My idea was to have the characters in Ellesland, but a version of Ellesland resembling our 17th century. Twenty years earlier, in their youth, they had been involved in a bitter civil war that still left scars on society. The players were separately asked which side they had supported, the revolutionaries or the crown. After an interregnum the king had been restored and now we were in a period of reconciliation – in theory.

The point of the game being to play tricks with memory, I envisaged the civil war years as more like the early medieval world of traditional Legend as seen in Dragon Warriors. If a character turned their mind to how twenty years had wrought such changes in society and technology (no sign of pistols or muskets back in the civil war, for example) they’d find the details hazy. Something more earth-shattering than victory or defeat had happened – because, after all, the loss of your twenty-year-old self is an apocalypse. That’s how I intended to characterize the Doomsday of the year 1000 that is supposed to bring an end to Legend.

I realize now that this is a case of parallel development with Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant, which I have variously praised, cavilled about, and neutrally assessed. In a world where magic is real and Parliament is now the seat of sovereignty, an Act of Oblivion has the force of physical law. Such supernaturally induced amnesia allows the characters to forget old vendettas and live in peace. (Hmm, in hindsight, instead of using the idea for a roleplaying campaign, maybe I should’ve written it up as a novel.) If you want to read about it in detail you’ll need to sign up for my Patreon page, but this post gives you the gist of it.

Having got back to thinking about that campaign idea after all these years, I now wonder why I glossed over the Interregnum – surely an interesting period of uncertainty and change. My only excuse is that Mike and Roger skipped it too, but I see that Melvyn Bragg has taken up that particular baton in a recent In Our Time which deals with the kings-&-dates stuff, and for the social history that interests me here's Anna Keay. Between them, my imaginary friends are fully as accommodating as Treesong’s paladins in Jack Vance’s The Book of Dreams.

• Act of Oblivion by Robert Harris
• The English Civil War: A People’s History by Diane Purkiss
• The Fall: Last Days of the English Republic by Henry Reece
• Providence Lost: The Rise and Fall of Cromwell's Protectorate by Paul Lay
• Republic: Britain’s Revolutionary Decade, 1649–1660 by Alice Hunt
• The Restless Republic by Anna Keay
• The Time Traveller's Guide to Restoration Britain by Ian Mortimer

The Cancel Crew

Here's a roleplaying campaign based around a time-travel agency. In the not-too-distant future, the world is run by Outthink, the crowdsourced gestalt decisions of groups of Humanities undergrads who have purged their professors and other patriarchal authority figures, along with oppressive cultural constructs like facts, knowledge and qualifications. (Think of the Supreme Intelligence of the Kree only without the intelligence part.) The PCs are agents of O.U.T.R.A.G.E. who receive instructions from Outthink. Each mission they are given the name of somebody they must go back in time to cancel. This is known as ‘deplatforming them from history’.

Three stipulations make the agents’ task a little harder than just murder hoboing. First, you have to get the person you’re cancelling to name names, ie speak on record about two acquaintances of theirs whose opinions on sensitive topics make them possible candidates for cancellation.

Second, you have to arrange the cancellation in such a way as to ensure the person is remembered by posterity (if they are remembered at all) in a way that belittles them. That ensures they serve as a lesson for others. Simply causing them to be forgotten by history is not as useful and may lead to you being assigned to self-criticism classes. (As for getting to them in childhood and steering them on a more acceptable path… oh no no no, where’s the satisfaction in that? They can repent, but they’ve still got to have done something to repent of.)

And that's the third stipulation: you score extra points if you can get them on record confessing the error of their ways so that posterity can see they were appropriately contrite for being so unwoke.

So to summarize:

1. Get them to give you at least two more names for the proscribed list. 
2. Don’t erase them from history, have their fame live on in a belittled and neutered form. 
3. Don’t mend their ways, have them admit the error of their ways.
4. Oh, and while you're in the past, be careful not to comment on the cuisine; that's culturally inappropriate.

It's okay to frame the target with a trumped-up charge, incidentally. A target's unpopularity alone is enough to make any charge stick. 'So what if it isn't true?' your superiors will say. 'It feels right to us, that's what counts.'

After each cancellation the present day will be subtly (or sometimes not-so-subtly) altered. It needn’t be a drastic world-shaking change. Life just becomes a little bit more impoverished with each sweep of the doctrinal red pen. The time travellers remember the timeline as it used to be, but nobody back home does, so gradually they’re drifting out of cultural sync with their era. If they don’t keep their mouths shut, eventually they’ll be up for cancellation themselves.

Possible candidates for cancellation? I’d steer clear of the big guns of history. Hitler, Stalin, Genghis, Mao – too obvious, not only from the GM’s point of view but from Outthink’s too. The defining characteristic of cancellation is its pettiness and futility – not correcting huge injustices for the benefit of humanity (sorry, hupersonity) but simply getting a boost of self-approval by sweeping history's dust under the carpet. So how about: Wernher von Braun, H P Lovecraft, Thomas Jefferson, Gandhi, Ernest Hemingway, Walt Disney, Thomas Malory, or Cecil Rhodes?

As an easy-in, you could start with contemporary figures whom the players might know of. That way if the campaign hooks them they'll be more willing to do some historical research further down the line. J K Rowling is a clear candidate by reason of egregious wrongthink. Both David Hume and George Bernard Shaw have excited the revisionists' ire. William Shatner supports an autism charity, but that can be exactly the same as supporting Nazism in O.U.T.R.A.G.E.'s book. Michael Richards is surely ripe for cancellation, and as a result the time travellers will return to a future where Seinfeld episodes are fifty percent less funny. They might have to chastise journalist Andy Ngo for assaulting Antifa activists' fists and boots with his face. Or maybe the singer Bryan Adams who, for pointing out that SARS-CoV-2 emerged from a live animal market, was declared "so, so, so, so racist" by a clear forerunner of Outthink -- although Adams arguably perpetrated a more unforgivable offence by inflicting "(Everything I Do) I Do It For You" on the world's music charts.

They can build up to cancelling Harlan Ellison for injudicious improv. And jolly good luck to them taming the robustly irascible Ellison. Later on see if you can find figures from history who the players have never heard of. That way they don’t bring any preconceptions to the table.

And here’s one further wrinkle in time to introduce as the campaign progresses: a further-future agency with very different mores is coming back to edit your timeline. ‘Who SJWs the SJWs?’ as Juvenal said. (That was in a cleaned-up version of his life; obviously the original Juvenal had to be cancelled.)

FAQs

What rules should I use?
Paranoia springs to mind, and GURPS has a whole campaign based around parallel worlds, but here are some other time-travel games. Or how about James Wallis's Fugue system, which is free on DriveThruRPG?

What's the PCs' time machine called?
Since you asked, it's the Huntigowk.

What does O.U.T.R.A.G.E. stand for?
I'll tell you after midday.

A wizard prang

I never have managed to get a game of Ars Magica up and running, despite at least two concerted attempts. We even got as far as full character sheets. Why didn't it happen? Perhaps the degree of world-building needed looked too daunting -- though you wouldn't expect that to deter a group battle-hardened by Tekumel and Glorantha.

Mike and Roger were talking about it this month on their Improvised Radio Theatre With Dice podcast. I'll put money on their campaign happening before mine. (I'd even consider putting money on their campaign actually happening.) And I was reminded of one aspect of the Ars Magica rules that was certainly original but that never thrilled me. The troupe system.

I prefer to really steep myself in a character, which means one character at a time. In Ars Magica you play the magi and also their companions (non-wizardly adventuring friends) and sometimes the magi's servants ("grogs") -- the point being that the magi initiate things and formulate plans, but they don't all swan off adventuring together on a regular basis. For me, one of the line-up would feel like my real character and the other two would just be NPCs that I'd play for the sake of the campaign.

The reason for the troupe is that you typically have your group of players turning up each time, and nobody wants to sit out in the kitchen, so the magus/companion/grog arrangement ensures there's always a character for everybody to play. But hang on a tick. If you're playing online, you're no longer constrained by the need to physically assemble a limited number of players at the same time each week. Now you could have some players take the magi; they might be the ones who can't turn up regularly or who are living a long way off and couldn't travel to a physical session anyway. A different group of players could then take the companions. You can assemble a regular game around whoever can show up (usually the companions and one or two of the magi) and keep the grand planning between the magi for special sessions.

There must have been a point where somebody said, "What about if we got two different actors to play Cordelia and the Fool?" Playing over the internet is meant to shake things up. There are different and possibly better ways for your players to enjoy themselves. So I think it's worth considering, at least.

By-the-bye, I like the idea of some characters playing strategically while others get their hands dirty. You could use it for an SOE game -- any war-based campaign come to that. Or it could be a Star Trek style exploration game, with the regular weekly players comprising the away team and those who only have odd moments through the week playing the bridge crew.

Also it occurs to me Ars Magica would be a great system for a Wizards of Grand Motholam campaign. Now will I buckle down and run it? I guess we'll see.

The Conclave: "Things Hidden In Books"

Here's another extract from Tim Harford's Earthsea-inspired Conclave campaign. The player-characters are all wizards, some of them affiliated with the College of Hythe, others (like my character Surma, or Oliver Johnson's character Wax) loners who are along for the ride.

As in Ursula K Le Guin's novels, the College is entirely male; women who practice magic either don't exist or keep quiet about it. Not having read the books, I don't know why that is or how that dominance is maintained, but the players who were familiar with the Earthsea stories seemed to get it. Surma neither knew nor cared about Hythe's affairs, so I didn't ask.

In the whole of a three-hour session I think the dice were rolled half a dozen times. That for me is the mark of a great game.

A note about Aareth so that the account makes sense. The player described him arriving at the feast last session: "The late Master Hand's favourite boy, not yet thirty and now intimate counsellor in a notorious ducal court, left his lord's fiery hospitality when Master Summoner called. It's well known he's always up for a fresh gaiety -- one learns so much when men take their ease. Wolf as he is most commonly known today (though conversely also as Rabbit to some) is immaculately dressed in iridescent black, as though cock feathers had been woven into a sleek, graceful robe. An emerald pendant tickles on his chest. He slinks into the feast flashing a mischievous, hungry grin."

SESSION TWO

The one who had been the Master Summoner, having lost all his magic in banishing the White Watcher, declared he was now simply ‘Moss’. He gave me the secret of the Watcher's name, fixed within a jewel on his broken staff. We decided to walk back to the town (a novelty) and he told us that he now realized a coercive influence had taken control of him from the time of his arrival in Port Karmon.

‘The Watcher was summoned originally, long ago, by a wizard who directed him to kill all other wizards.’

‘Ah yes. We have all felt like that at one time or another.’

‘He wanted to reign supreme, but his plan went instantly awry. The Watcher began by killing him. The combined strength of the College was necessary to banish the Watcher to the Gallowglass Isles, and even that took the sacrifice of a Great Mage to accomplish.’

And he had given me the being’s name. I looked around my companions. A sacrifice, was it? If it came to that, which of them could the world best afford to lose?

‘We are summoning conclaves of wizards,’ said Moss uncertainly. ‘I don’t know if I was to summon you, though there is some logic in the selection. Wax is from the far south, you from the far north. Eli from the east…’ He trailed off.

‘There is no eastern pole, is there?’ I pointed out. ‘Your theory of cardinal points does credit to you as a mortal, for whom any rational thought is a triumph over brute glimmerings, but would have embarrassed the mage you once were.’

We had arrived at the port. ‘There is danger here,’ said Idhelruin.

‘I will summon my sword and armour,’ said Aareth, starting to work a spell.

‘Good. You are thinking like a sorcerer, not like one of these nannying wizards of Hythe.’

‘Oh no,’ spoke the voices of Hythe, twittering like old women. ‘Using magic so ostentatiously is bad manners. Uncouth it is not to tiptoe around the great spells. A wizard’s robes should be hand-me-downs with leather patches on the elbows. Why not have it that your armour was left at the Library for you to pick up?’

Aareth gave in. Briefly Wolf, he had become Rabbit again.

I spoke to Moss. ‘You will come with us to the Library. Your knowledge will still be of use in our research,’

‘No, I'm no use. I'll just go off on my own.’

‘You are mortal now?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then it is not your place to question my will.’

The unknown influence was working on him still. With magic I removed the veil from his mind and he saw again with clarity for a time – long enough to introduce us to the Librarian, who took umbrage at Wax's nakedness and called him a savage. Wax heatedly pointed out that, as a savage, he might well make use of his coral spear upon the Librarian's person. Libraries should not be so noisy. Already I miss the solitude of my own realm.

The others, prissy Hythe wizards to a man, took the Librarian's part and Wax went to stand outside for a while.

‘We need books on three topics,’ I told Moss and the Librarian. ‘The White Watcher, historical attempts on wizards' lives, and cases of beings or objects with no true name.’

‘We could use patterning,’ suggested the Whisperer.

‘Good idea. While the rest of us search for the books we need with Moss’s and the Librarian’s help, you and Idhelruin attempt logomancy.’

‘We are just going to look for random clues?’ snorted Eli, presumably forgetting that the entire world is built of magic, furnished in magic, roofed over with magic, and stands on magic foundations. He and Aareth went off among the stacks on their own.

Wax returned, behaving very strangely and ranting in odd dialects. Again he menaced the Librarian’s posterior with his spear. I suspected that whatever fell magic had influenced the Summoner now had a hold on him.

Guided by Moss and the Librarian, I searched the bookshelves for the subjects we wished to research. Eli and Aareth conducted their own search without assistance. Meanwhile, Idhelruin and Hurstyk literally stumbled over a heavy tome with a black cover.

Wax rushed forward to kick it away, breaking his toe. ‘Don’t open it, don’t open it!’ wailed the Hythe chorus, wringing their hands in dismay. The main lesson taught at the College seems to be to fear any new thing.

‘It is called The Black Knot,’ said Hurstyk.

‘That is a labyrinth on the island of Tartuva,’ said Idhelruin. ‘The people there worship the Sightless Ones and perform rituals to them in the unlit tunnels.’

By means of an arduously slow process called consultation, it was decided we should travel there. From that, new consultations threatened to spread like an unkillable plague, spawning a thousand other unborn decisions such as when to travel, on what vessel, by what route, and so forth. I saw now why men need gods.

Eli announced that he had found a palimpsest whose words erased themselves as he read. ‘The wizard who summoned the Watcher was called Obsidian,’ he told us. ‘I won’t give you his true name in case it alerts him.’

‘Alerts him? But didn't the Watcher kill him?’

‘The Watcher came from the Dry Lands, which is the realm of Death. That’s how he knows our true names, as our mentors are all there in the Dry Lands.’

‘I have no mentor, living or dead. I named myself.’

‘Only the Summoner could bring the Watcher back from the Gallowglass Isles. He was controlled by a wizard who goes by the name of Birch, who may be in league with the man Jude who has no true name.’

‘Easily settled face to face.’ I intuited Birch’s true name and summoned him.

But – and this was most remarkable – he had set a hundred snares and gates to redirect any conjuration. By the time my summoning reached him, it had only the force of a gentle tug. ‘He has been here in Karmon a long time,’ I concluded, ‘making the whole port his own lair filled with traps worked over years. This is his home territory and it may be difficult to confront him before we know more.’

Moss and the Librarian had finally found the books I asked for: Attempts on the Lives of Wizards, Slayings of the White Watcher, and On Those Who Have No True Name.

‘How is information extracted from these?’ I asked. ‘Never mind, I’ll deal with that later.’

‘Are you going to carry them?’ asked the Librarian.

‘Why, when they are capable of flying? Surely that’s the reason they have these leather wings?’ The books flitting along behind me, I set off for the docks.

‘But Birch is in a tavern near the docks,’ came the timid refrain of Hythe. ‘We don’t want to run into him. Shouldn’t we skulk out of town, tiptoe around the island to another bay, and from there shyly send word for the ship to come to us?’

‘This College has unmanned you all. I will fetch the ship and bring it to whichever bay you decide is sufficiently remote that Birch cannot find you.’

At that they decided the threat was not so awesome after all. We set off together, distracted from thoughts of the long voyage ahead by Wax’s graphic descriptions of his carnal relationships with giant turtles. I began to suspect that it was not Birch’s sorcery that had overthrown his mind, but simple drink.

‘Where’s Moss?’ noticed Idhelruin.

We looked back. The man formerly known as the Great Summoner was clambering up the side of the Library, apparently with the intention of dashing himself onto the cobbles below.

A sigh.

‘I could arrange for a haycart to be beneath him as he falls…’ said Hurstyk.

‘I’d go after him, but my arm is withered,’ said Eli.

‘We warriors are famed for our climbing skill,’ said Aareth uncertainly.

As Moss turned to leap, Idhelruin gestured. The masonry of the building reached out to snag Moss’s cloak. He hung suspended a hundred feet above the ground. I called all the seagulls of the bay and sent them up to bring him down to us.

As Moss was deposited safely on the street, Aareth put a hand on his shoulder. ‘From now on, Summoner, I will not let you out of my sight.’

Wax was on the shore below the docks, fondling his turtle and rubbing its nose into his groin. ‘I’ll come on the ship with you, Aareth,’ I decided.

It was a good choice. The Sea Lion is of ducal quality, sleek and resplendent with silken sails.

‘We’d better call at Hythe on our way to Tartuva,’ suggested Idhelruin.

‘If we must. Like dropping in on maiden aunts, I suppose. But perhaps if we admire their knitting and praise them for only using their magic with genteel restraint, they’ll reveal something that might actually be useful to our quest.’

Wax waved to us. ‘I go to the spawning grounds in the far east,’ he called.

‘He is in his own adventure,’ observed Hurstyk. ‘A dreamberry reverie unclouded by mortal peril. We might come to envy him.’

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.

Come with me to the far lands of Baghdad

Here’s a sandbox roleplaying campaign I ran a few years back. The setting: Baghdad in 800 AD (183-184 in the Hijri calendar). I often like to start out with just a setting and characters, and the intrigues that go with them, then I throw out a bunch of threads and see which the players will grab hold of. The advantage of that approach is they’re familiarizing themselves with the background at the same time as various adventure leads are warming up.

(As for the rules, we used GURPS or you might try Tales of the Caliphate Nights or Basic Roleplaying. Or even write a PbtA version if you have the time; the variety of characters certainly lends itself to that kind of system. Those are all fantasy versions set in "the Arabian imaginary", though, and if you prefer a more historical take, as I do, Guy Le Strange's Baghdad During The Abbasid Caliphate will be your most treasured sourcebook.)

The deep background to the campaign postulated a forgotten era when aliens travelled to Earth and enhanced some humans (the likes of Gilgamesh) to assist them in returning to the stars. Some of that ancient technology yet remains if the characters know where to look.

There’s no magic in this setting, but psionics exist (though very rare). Still, you don’t need to stick to any of the assumptions or storylines here. Just chuck some of these ideas at your players. All they have to do is react in character and the story will shape itself.

BAGHDAD LOCATIONS OF INTEREST

The Shammasiyah Quarter. The inhabitants of these suburbs are Armenian Christians, transplanted en masse by order of the Caliph from their original village. The centre of the community is the Samalu Monastery. Any Christians among the PCs can get lodging here if they need it, but the practices of Armenian Christianity are different from those of the Franks and tensions could soon develop.

The Mamuni Palace is on the east bank of the Tigris opposite the Palace of Eternity. This is Jafar’s residence.

The Bab-at-Tak, the high arched gate at the eastern end of the Main Bridge, is renowned as a meeting place for poets.

The Palace of Eternity (Kasr-al-Khuld) was built twenty-five years ago in the reign of Harun al-Rashid's grandfather, the Caliph Mansur. Its majestic gardens are said to rival the beauty of paradise, and it stands high above the Tigris opposite the Khurasan Gate, free from the gnats that swarm in lower-lying areas.

The four Houses of Wisdom stand south of the Gharabah Gate. Each has a professor and seventy-five students, and in the entrance hall to the campus rests a famous water-clock called the Chest of Hours. The libraries of the Houses are arranged and catalogued to make information easy to find, and for a price the students can copy any work that characters require.

For colour the referee may wish to allude to markets and professional quarters such as the Needle-makers Wharf, the Market of the Perfumers, the Date Market, the Cotton Market, and the Tuesday Market. Also canal names such as the Fowls' Canal, the Canal of the Dogs, the Canal of the Cooks, and the Thorn Bridge over the Nahr Isa canal, adjoining the Market of Shawk-Sellers, these thorns being used as kindling for ovens and public steam baths (hammams, a staple of daily life to be found throughout the city).

The Kufah Gate ("Pilgrims' Gate") in the south-west is where those setting out for Mecca leave the city. And no tour of 9th century Baghdad is complete without mentioning the Office of the Poor Tax (Diwan-as-Sadakah) which stands opposite Dromedary House.

PRINCIPAL NPCs

HARUN al-Rashid (37) the Caliph.

JAFAR al-Barmaki (33) the Vizier.

ABBASSA (28) the Caliph’s favourite sister; very smart.

ASMA (32) another of the Caliph’s sisters; schemer but not very effectual; resentful.

MAMUN (20) the Caliph’s eldest son; good at statecraft, sciences and arts, but no soldier. Likes astronomy. Mother: Marajil, a Persian slave. Advisors: Fahl ibn Sahl and Hasan ibn Sahl

AMIN (17) the Caliph’s second son; good military mind, poor  at politics & leadership; a bit strident. Mother: the Princess Zubaida.

QASIM (15) the Caliph’s third son. Honest, trustworthy – far too much for his own good. Tutored by Prince Malik (see below). Mother: Qasif, a lowborn slave.

MUTASIN (12) the Caliph’s youngest son.

COURTIERS & GENERALS

TAHIR ibn Husayn (30): a Persian general, known as Zol-Yamanein (“the warrior with two right hands”) as he fights with a sword in each hand. 

ALI ibn Isa ibn Mahan (34) a general of Bedouin ancestry, secretive and inscrutable, loyal to Prince Amin’s faction.

Prince MALIK ibn Salih (50) a troublesome character – effective general, member of the Abbasid family, proud, he chafes and gets impatient when not given a task. Has mentored the Caliph’s third son, Qasid, since he was a child.

KHUZAIMA ibn Khazim (48) grizzled chief of police, cautious, plays the political spectrum and is careful not to offend any powerful factions.

IN KHORASAN

FADL ibn Sahl and HASAN ibn Sahl

Brothers (Zoroastrian converts) who are destined to advise Mamun as viziers – assuming that the player-characters do nothing to change the course of history. (As if.)

OTHER BAGHDAD NOTABLES

AHMAD ibn Hanbal (20) an Arab of the Banu Shayban tribe; young zealous scholar who regards the sect of the Caliph to be heretical, and openly preaches such, but is too popular simply to throw in prison.

ALI al-Rida (45) an imam and Dean of the House of Wisdom, seventh descendent of the Prophet, rather unworldly mystical type, mentor of Maruf al-Kharki.

MARUF ibn Firuz (42) “al-Kharki”, a Persian convert from Christianity, extremely ascetic, a hardliner who looks for heresy and impiety. He was formerly the slave of Ali al-Rida.

• SARIK al-Saqati (33) disciple of Ali al-Rida and bodyguard to Maruf ibn Firuz. He is a Sufi martial artist and also has a psionic power to make people forget their family and become detached.

Archdeacon BARADAN (60) of the Samalu Monastery, a shrewd operator who keeps a low profile.

• Vazak, Musheg and Sahak (all mid-30s): assistants to the Archdeacon.

OTHER MONARCHS

The Byzantine Empire is ruled by Irene of Athens (42), who recently (797 AD) deposed her son Constantine VI and had him blinded and imprisoned. She pays a tribute to the Caliph to avoid war (the Byzantines already have their ongoing war with the Bulgars and rivalry with the Franks to contend with) but it’s known that her finance minister, Nikephoros (45), opposes this.

Charlemagne (58) has recently been crowned Emperor of Rome.

Al-Hakam I (33) rules as Emir of Al-Andalus (Iberia) which is the last surviving stronghold of the Umayyad dynasty which formerly ruled the entire Muslim world, until the Abbasid rebellion in which the Umayyad line were hunted and massacred.

Idris II (16) rules as Caliph of the Berber kingdom of Morocco. His father was poisoned by an assassin sent by Harun al-Rashid sixteen years ago, so there’s no love lost there. Still a teenager, Idris is said to be “a person of almost magical ability”.

Ibrahim I (44) is due to be installed as Emir of Ifriqiya (modern Libya and Tunisia) to rule there on behalf of the Abbasids, a response to the ongoing rebellion of the Berbers against their Arab governors.

Krum the Horrible (43) is Khan of the Bulgars. Said to drink from cups made by lining his enemies’ skulls in silver. The clue is in the name.

Obadiah (30) is Khan of the Khazars. Like most of his nobles, he is a convert to Judaism, but most of the Khazars are Tengrists (kind of ancestor-worship meets animism).

She (Hiya = “she” in her native Arabic) is ruler ofthe lost civilization of Kôr in the heart of Africa. She is an immortal, born 900 years ago in Arabia, but who has gained access to some ancient (and possibly non-terrestrial) technology and has been busy learning about it.

In Kôr, Hiya has a Chamber of the Far-Travelling Carpet which has a pattern of tiles on the floor that create a dimensional “carpet” which allows her to travel across great distances. The effect is like teleportation, and the portal remains hanging in the air until she returns to it. Using this, she has been disrupting the Silk Road trade from a hidden mountain fortress above Samarkand.

She wants the arrow (qv) from Nubia, and has sent an android assassin and three mortal but devoted followers to get it. The android is a killing machine with ebon hair and paper white skin. In ordinary human terms she is mindless, and cannot speak or interact socially; nor can she  be detected with ESP. (Tekumel fans may recognize the type.)

ADVENTURE SEEDS

These aren’t presented in any particular order, but note that some are dependent on earlier threads having been picked up.

The Envoy from the West

Charlemagne (known in Baghdad as “Shah al-Ma'in”) has crowned himself Emperor of Rome, and has sent emissaries with gifts for the Caliph. If any of the player-characters are to be European Christians, that’s how they come to be travelling to Baghdad.

Order of Succession

The Caliph is due to announce this shortly. Not even Jafar knows what he’s planning. Traditionally, the eldest son, Mamun, has been the heir apparent, but his mother was a slave whereas the mother of the second son, Amin, is an Abbasid princess.

The ceremony involves the closing of the four gates of the Round City (see below). The Caliph then proclaims that Amin will be heir, and the order of succession will thereafter pass to Mamun, who in the meantime will go to the city of Merv to take up the governorship of Khorasan (Persia). Tahir of the Two Swords comes to Baghdad to fetch him.

The Gates

To mark the announcement of the order of succession, the four gates of the Round City are all closed at noon prayers. It can be seen that each gate is covered in an array of cuneiform-style glyphs.

On close examination:

• the metal of which the gates are made is an unknown alloy.
• they are covered with some kind of graphical cipher, perhaps indicating coded charts.

History: the gates were brought by order of the Caliph’s father from the town of Wasit, which stands on the site of Zandawad, a city built by order of King Solomon. (Unknown history: they were brought originally from Uruk.)

Deciphering the glyphs reveals a kind of stylized map centred on the site of Uruk. It’s clear that there must be a fifth set of gates somewhere, containing missing information required to complete the map, and after consulting the records the characters find that these other gates were sent to the Mosque of Mansur but never fitted. The Imam, Ali al-Rida, refers enquiries to Maruf ibn Firuz, who of course refuses all requests to see the gates.

The fifth gates are being kept at the Bukhariot Mosque in the Lion & Ram Quarter, west of the Round City. Even having found out that much, the characters have to somehow get to see them – not easy, as they are packaged, piled up and far too heavy to lift, and of course the imam of the mosque, Halba ibn-Jubaya, has been told not to grant access.

The fifth set of glyphs firmly pinpoints a location at modern-day Warka, which will lead the characters to the Hairy Man adventure (see below).

A Hairy Man

The ruins of a huge city wall are found by workmen digging irrigation channels for the modern town of Warka. This is part of the ruins of Uruk. This is not widely reported, so unless the characters have deciphered the map on the gates (qv) they will never get to hear about it.

If the ruins are excavated, a tomb is revealed in which lies the perfectly preserved body of a big (7 foot) hairy man with strong, almost ape-like teeth. This is Enkidu, an immortal, who has remained in a state of suspended animation for millennia. The characters may be able to revive him, but ensuring he becomes an ally rather than a rival or enemy is not so easy.

Running Amok

There have been several violent incidents in the Atikan Quarter. The first few were individuals running amok, then larger groups. Usually the pattern is attacks on property, escalating to violence or even murder, and afterwards the perpetrator claims to have only a vague memory of their actions, as in a dream. All except the first incident happened on a Friday.

First of the perpetrators was Hisham of Basra, who is due to be executed in three days. He didn’t kill anyone, but was heard shouting blasphemous remarks. If questioned, he may reveal that he had gone to the Jewish Quarter to try to catch a glimpse of a girl he’d seen.

The actual cause is a teenage girl, Anonui bat-Ezra, who is developing psionic powers that as yet are not under her conscious control. She belongs to a wealthy Jewish family (her father: Ezra bar-Adom) and travels to the bath-house each Friday in a covered litter. One incident occurred on Friday evening outside a house in the Jewish Quarter used as a synagogue.

The Road to Samarkand

Reports are starting to trickle in of disruption on the Silk Road. Caravans have been attacked by bandits out of the hills, who seem to have become unnaturally bold of late. The merchant Yao ZHANG, who claims to be an emissary of the Chinese Emperor Dezong, recently arrived with a report of having been overtaken by a sandstorm crossing the Karakum Desert, and his companions were whisked away “by bridges that walk” – or, at least, the translator thinks that’s what he said. This connects to The Forty adventure.

The Caliph’s New Palace

The Caliph no longer wishes to reside in the Golden Gate Palace, but instead plans to move out of the Round City to the (larger) Palace of Eternity on the west bank of the Tigris. Naturally this raises concerns about security.

The Arrow

A dignitary from Egypt brings the Caliph an arrow that can cut almost anything. (This is literally true; it’s like a vibroblade.) He says it was brought by a traveller from Nubia. The Caliph orders it placed in the palace vaults.

Cursed Ship

Reports from sailors in the Gulf describe a “high, bronze-hulled” vessel, “like a floating castle”.

Prince Mamun's farewell party

This episode follows Order of Succession and The Arrow. There is a party for Mamun on the eve of his departure for Khorasan.

During the party, a guard staggers up from the vaults where the Caliph's treasures are kept. He collapses in front of one of the characters, revealing two long deep sword-cuts across his back.

In the vault there is a circular pattern of rainbow light on the floor. An albino warrior with a fixed, insane expression stands ready to fight as three men with jet-black skin search the racks and boxes. This is the group Hiya (“She”; qv) has sent to fetch the arrow, and can ultimately connect to an adventure based on H RiderHaggard’s novel.

The Forty

This is the eventual result if the characters investigate The Road to Samarkand adventure seed or travel to Persia and end up investgating attacks on the trade routes.

In the hills above Samarkand, the Forty are a group of heretical rebels from Afghanistan. They have come across an ancient alien facility with a huge circular door that opens on a voice command. (One door only partly opens. There’s a smaller postern gate but they don’t know the command for that.)

FORTY THIEVES

Sword 18                                 2d+2 cut

Knife 17                                  2d-1 cut

Javelin 16                                2d+2 impale (with thrower)

HP 15                                      Parry 13, Dodge 12, Perception 17, Stealth 15

Armour: Kevlar-like material (7, weight 20) on torso; mail (4) on limbs, head.

Inside: a tunnel thirty feet tall with gantries (partly collapsed, but now reinforced with wooden poles) to a series of apartments. There are lighting globes, about half of which still work. At the end of the tunnel is a hangar where the Big Spider (a sixty-foot-tall military robot) is housed.

BIG SPIDER

Acrobatics 17; Danger Sense; Combat Reflexes

Leg swipe 15               9d crush (1-3 per round) knockback

Barbed darts    18        4d twice (large piercing -> +50% damage) & reel in*

Blades 18                    3d twice (half armour)**

Dodge 7                      Armour 11      Perception 25

HIT POINTS 120

All its attacks can only be defended against with Dodge.

*If both darts penetrate armour, delivers electrical stun (3d direct to Fatigue) and reels victim in. Victim has two rounds to break free: ST vs effective ST of [damage taken x d6]. Then reaches blades and is wrenched: roll ST or HT vs effective ST of 30 or take 4d crush to neck or limb.

**Used when victim reeled in; remember that these are monomolecular and halve armour.

The Big Spider is not under the control of the Forty, but it recognizes that they control the doors. When the doors are open, it periodically patrols its route and attacks people crossing the border without authorization (ie everybody). It collects all their items, brings them back, but then discards them as nothing matches the items it is programmed to search for. When “parked”, the spider also projects a local view (5 mile radius) of the terrain as seen from a satellite.

The Forty therefore have treasure here worth about 5 million dirhams in the form of gold, gems, spices, silks, artworks, weapons, etc. This wealth is what enables them to bribe a network of informers in Samarkand, allowing them to cow the government there by assassination or bribery.

           

Samarkand

The city is ruled by a Council of Three: Arash, Jamsid and Kazem, all of the House of Aramanth. As it’s Persian, politics is less religiously dominated, though it is not so free and cosmopolitan as Merv or Nishapur.

The Grand Imam is Ardeshir al-Yaha, a moderate, originally from Baghdad.

The leading light in high society is Princess Parisa Esfani, mid-40s, bossy, rich.

The local agent of the Barmaki clan is Sitvar ibn Ghabani, a young and very serious fellow, more resourceful than his callow appearance might suggest.

WHAT HAPPENED IN OUR CAMPAIGN

The player-characters realized the trouble in the marketplace (Running Amok) was caused by a psionic and identified the likely culprit as Anonui, daughter of Ezra the rug merchant. But they couldn’t get access to Anonui until her two older sisters were betrothed, whereupon it would be possible for a third suitor to visit Anonui. So they went to Ezra and three of them asked to marry his daughters.

Charlemagne’s two emissaries, Lanterfrid and Sigimund, were due to return home. The Caliph (at Jafar’s instigation, after a recommendation by the player-characters) appointed Ezra to take some fine rugs to the new Roman Emperor as a gift. Oh, and a white elephant called Abulabaz as well. That gave Ezra and incentive to marry his daughters off, so that they would be taken care of while he was away from Baghdad.

However, Anonui was by now learning to control her power, even though largely unaware of it. She caused Ezra to demand an impossibly huge dowry of 30,000 dirhams for each of her sisters (Buran and Huldah).

Two of the PCs now decided that the best way to deal with Anonui bat-Ezra, the nascent psionic in the Jewish quarter, was not to marry her but to kill her. Yes, I know; I thought it was a dark turn too. They sneaked off without telling the others, crept into her bedroom at night, and smothered her with a pillow. When the other PCs confronted them about this, they fell back on the argument that it was better than waiting till she grew too powerful. (You may recall Nick Fury saying something along those lines. Cap wasn't impressed.)

Hashim was still executed for blasphemy, as the presiding judge Maruf ibn-Firuz (aka al-Kharki) would brook no plea for leniency. But it’s not clear whether Hashim’s fate ever figured in the characters’ calculations anyway. As one of the players put it in the write-up:

“We killed the carpet seller's daughter, making it seem that she died in her sleep. We tried to paint her as a witch to exonerate the young man due to be executed from blasphemy. He was executed anyway.”

At the ruins of Uruk, their map guided them to a hill which turned out to cover a huge man-made dome. They were able to break into this and lower themselves fifty metres to the floor below. Some falling rocks gave them gashes and bruises, but that was nothing compared to the sentry spider-robots that attacked using circular blades on their legs.

They entered what some might have considered a burial chamber, though it was obviously built with a different purpose in mind. Banks of instruments on the walls were now so damaged that only an occasional light blinked on and off. Waking up the power source briefly displayed a holographic star map filling the whole room which showed a planetary system located close in to the galactic core – not that they were able to interpret what it meant.

On a catafalque lay the hairy body of Enkidu. (His hair having continued to grow very slowly over the centuries he’d been in “Odinsleep”.)

A player said in the write-up:

“I think we activated a homing beacon, but it seemed to point straight up into the night sky where there are no ships. Are there? And we saw something that might have been a star map, but there just aren’t that many stars in the sky. Are there?”

Thereafter, having been afflicted by a device called the Eye of Humbaba, they travelled to the heart of Africa to seek help from Hiya. Or did they go to steal her power? It depends which of the players you ask.