"The King is Dead" (Sparta scenario)

This scenario is set in Sparta in the year 485 BC. To play it, you're going to need the Sparta sourcebook. And, pretty obviously, if you're not going to be running the game then you might want to look away now. Nothing but spoilers from here on in.

Still here? OK, the characters are young men investigating the death, apparently by suicide, of the Agiad King Cleomenes five years ago. That happened. I won't list all the history here because you can look it up. Our own campaign is fantasy (a trope I was stuck with - see previous post) so the characters' enquiries spun them off into an adventure involving the Antikythera mechanism, an interstellar wreck that caused the Thera eruption, and various other madly OTT elements. Frankly, if you ask me, you'd do better to keep the fantasy out of it. Maybe Cleomenes faked his death so that he could live in quiet retirement with his Athenian lover Naira. That's one possibility. It's your campaign; you decide...

The characters, having reached age 20, have been given their first staff (bakterion, a mark of adulthood), their first red tunic, and have just been inducted into their platoon (enomotia). Together they comprise a sub-unit of syskenoi, or “tent companions”, comprising a table in the fraternity (or mess-hall, syssition) to which they all belong. All have been picked to be members of the Royal Guard, the hippeis (“equestrians”) which means they are regarded as elite for their year.

Characters who attended the same school will know each other from an early age, but it’s likely they all got to know each other over the “gap years” as epheboi before they became young adults.

Each character will have a 50% chance of having an admirer (erastes). These are buddies/lovers in their 30s or 40s who, as full adult citizens of the Spartan state, can make introductions on a character’s behalf. The characters will need at least one admirer to get anywhere, because as youths they are not allowed into the lesche (club-houses) or the Agora. Having more than one admirer between them would be better because that is less suspicious (you’re not asking one person for a whole bunch of favours) and quicker (spreads the load). The chance of getting your admirer to do you a favour is based on charisma and/or appearance.

The festival

The Karneia is a week-long festival to Apollo (though also having secretive associations with Dionysos) involving dancing, sacrifices and athletic events in a sacred wood west of Sparta.

The chase
Five youths (ie 20-30 years) are picked as hunters. Starting from a stone carved with an image of Apollo Aphetaeus (“the starter”) they must pursue an agetor, an older priest who is garlanded in flowers. To win they must return with his garland, which is a good omen for the year ahead.

There is prestige in avoiding five younger trackers, so the agetor won’t just give it to them on a platter. But the hunter with the garland isn’t out of the woods yet – at least one other hunter has been sneaky enough to hang back, refreshed, planning to grab it off him as he returns and take the credit.


The kill
This is a wrestling contest, fought in three rounds. Anybody can take part. Just do those as competitive skill rolls. Only the final round (if a PC gets into it) needs to be played out.

While that’s going on, the helots have their own wrestling bouts in a field half a mile away. Some young Spartans go to watch, pretending nonchalance. But the helots are not prohibited from wrestling, so some of their fighters aren’t bad.

(What might strike the characters about the helot celebrations is that they are a much more drunken affair. On the rare occasions helots are given wine, they drink it stronger and in far greater quantities than the abstemious Spartans.)

Ankylos could speak to them here; see below.

The feast
Everyone dines in tents to mark the end of the festival. There is a rhapsody competition and anybody can join in. It’s while taking a piss away from the feast that Ankylos approaches them – assuming he didn’t speak to them already if they sneaked off to watch the helots wrestling.

Ankylos (40) is well known in Sparta. He is a veteran of the Battle of Marathon, having been in Athens at the time. (Sparta sent no army as the Karneia that year meant they had to wait for the full moon.) They would know that he is close to the Agiads.

He points out a helot called Talus from a village called Gythio. “I want you to keep an eye on that one. There’s a suspicion he’s gathering arms for a little band of helot trouble-makers. See if that’s true. If it is, deal with him. But only after you have proof – we’re soldiers at war, not crude butchers.”

If they watch, they will see Ankylos go back to consult with Cleombrotus (55), Leonidas’s brother.

At Gythio

The characters have to decide how to watch Talus. If they travel undercover, they would be best advised to do so in small groups. Together they look conspicuously tall to be helots. They would also need to hide their long hair – the mark of a Spartan, forbidden to lesser ranks (though in fact credible in any free Greek citizen, even though few outside Sparta retain that style today).

They could of course go openly as Spartans, under the pretext of official business (assessing the workers and crops, scouting locations for military manoeuvres, etc) or leisure (hunting, for example) or ritual (visiting remote shrines or relatives in the country) or indeed with no excuse at all. But any of those might make it hard to get a close look at what Talus is up to.

Or they could nominate a small group to be “the helots” who can go undercover, travelling with the rest as their servants.

Talus is a woodcutter and lives in a house next to his lumber yard, up a track about half a mile from the rest of the village. Observing the timber carts going up the track, perception roll to notice they are not empty.

If they look in the carts they find bows, arrows and hard cudgels.

At Talus’s house
Talus has very high perception skills so will not have any difficulty spotting them – not least because he knows they are coming. “Why don’t you come inside?” he says.

Inside they are met by Ankylos. He explains this was the only way to meet them well away from prying eyes. They can trust Talus, by the way; he’s a “step brother” who served as a scout for the army. It’s a sensitive issue and Ankylos says that the purest Spartans are the young. They are fresh with the ideals that too often become alloyed with convenience, politics and self-interest. That’s why this has to be completely confidential. They’ll understand when he tells them what they have to do.

(Another advantage, though Ankylos has the good manners not to labour this point, is that senior Spartans will not really take them seriously. The questions they will need to ask could raise suspicions if an older man asked them, but coming from them will seem like youthful enthusiasm, an eagerness to find out about the world. They can, in short, count on being both indulged and discounted.)

Ankylos tells them about the ex-king Cleomenes. Supposedly he killed himself five years ago after going mad. But there are enough suspicions and loose ends that Cleombrotus and his brother, the new king, Leonidas, want it looked into.

“You might do worse than to start by talking to Cleomenes’s old comrade Vabis – if he’ll talk to you, that is. Or maybe the undertaker who supplied the coffin; I forget his name. If you have any news, give it to Talus here or to my sergeant, Ktesios. If you come to any conclusions or uncover any evidence, be discreet.”

Conducting the investigation
Cleombrotus himself can’t do much for them because he mustn’t be seen to be involved, but he will send occasional information or instructions via his friend Ankylos or the perioikoi sergeant Ktesios, and he can also provide resources such as a ship if they need it.


Investigating Cleomenes’s death

Cleomenes apparently committed suicide in his cell and was buried at the Agiad vaults a few miles outside Sparta. That was five years ago.

Who had cause to want him dead? After reigning thirty years, during which he pursued a very active foreign policy, he had made many enemies:

◦ The Persians, whom he resolutely opposed his whole life
◦ Ex-king Demaratos, whom he effectively deposed six years ago
◦ The Argives, six thousand of whom he massacred ten years ago
◦ The island of Aegina, whose entire ruling council he arrested and took to Athens for trial six years ago

How to conduct the investigation
It’s not easy. As 20 year-olds, the characters aren’t able to enter the Agora or the market-places, and are generally looked on as “freshmen” by older Spartans. They have some options, though. They can get information and even introductions from their erastai (older male admirers). Also, they can try and approach people they want to talk to:

◦ At a temple
◦ In the Dromus while exercising
◦ At the Hippodrome
◦ By inviting them to a hunt (above-average wealth needed to host a hunt)
◦ By calling at their mess-hall (if they have a mutual contact to introduce them)

The arresting officer’s story
With the help of an erastes, or through their own contacts if any of them have been groomed for the Krypteia, the characters might get to talk to Akratos (42) who was one of the Krypteia men sent to arrest Cleomenes and is one of the few who have first-hand evidence of his madness:

“When we asked for his sword he handed it over without a fuss. Said how he didn’t want to spill Greek blood. Greeks, he called us. Well, obviously they had to lock him up.”

The order to arrest Cleomenes was issued by the Ephors immediately after a sub rosa meeting with him in the Senate. The meeting was at Cleomenes’s request and lasted several hours. The Ephors at the time are now private citizens (the term of office being one year) but of course they will not speak to the characters or to anyone else about what went on behind closed doors.

The old comrade’s story
They can also try talking to Vabis (55), the king’s long-time campaigning comrade who has fallen on hard times and is now an “inferior”, so can be approached (which is why Ankylos suggested it) – though he still has his pride and may bridle at being questioned by mere youths. A good time to approach him might be while he’s exercising on the Dromus. They will need to impress him somehow to get him talking.

Vabis knew of Cleomenes’s love for the Athenian Naira and spoke to him when he came back to Sparta just before his arrest. Cleomenes said he wanted to forge an alliance of all Greece against the Persians.

If they ask about Naira: “She was the wife of the archon of Athens, only the Athenians booted them out despite King Cleomenes’s support – or maybe because of it. The archon and his wife moved here, only he died about six months later. Ten years back, this was. Just after that fuss about burning those Argives alive in their grove.”

If pressed, Vabis admits to wondering if love of Naira drove Cleomenes to poison his friend Isagoras, her husband and the former Archon of Athens, and the guilt drove him mad. Certainly he can attest to Cleomenes being increasingly obsessed by the threat of another attack by Persia, and that he had come to believe that the only way to deal with that was to unify the whole of Greece – an idea that, to most Greeks, certainly seems insane.

The jailer’s story
In jail Cleomenes was guarded by a one-armed helot called Hogros (50). The characters will probably assume he’s a lot older than his fifty years, incidentally, because helots lead a hard life. Hogros admits to giving Cleomenes the knife he killed himself with:

“He said bring me a knife so I can cut this bread up. Well, I’m not going to argue with a king, am I? Or any Spartan come to that. Then he said bugger off and let me eat in peace. So I did. And he did himself in while I was gone, and I’ve not had a nice job like that since.”

Where was Cleomenes imprisoned? In a small lock-up just off the Street of Barriers. Hogros was assigned to stand guard outside the door.

Where was the fatal wound? Hogros can tell them as much as the undertaker Eumaeos can (see below).

Who came to visit Cleomenes? Hogros knows where “that fancy lady” (he doesn’t know Athandania’s name) lives and will try to get money for taking them there – he says she came to the cell but he was under orders not to let her in, “nor that Athenian bint neither” (ie Naira). Cleomenes did see “the king and his brother” (Leonidas and Cleombrotus) and a couple of the Ephors. “Other’n that, just me.”

The undertaker’s story
They can talk to the peroikoi undertaker Eumaeos (39) who lives in Therapne, a town south of Sparta. He collected the body for burial but instead of bringing it back to his mortuary, he was instructed to take it to Cleomenes’s house and bring the coffin there. He tells them that Cleomenes slashed at his arms several times, leaving multiple cuts, then finally drove the knife into his heart.

Who was the last person to see the body before it was placed in the coffin? “The Athenian woman, Naira. She drew out the knife with her own hand. Ice-cold, those Athenians.”

If they probe further, Eumaeos will mention that Naira was accompanied by a Spartan noblewoman, Athandania. He was specifically ordered not to treat the body in any way, just put it in the coffin.

The family friend’s story
They can talk to Lady Athandania (40), a cousin of Cleomenes. They’ll need to arrange a meeting, possibly inveigling an invitation to one of her afternoon salons at her decidedly non-regulation grand house in the outer suburbs of Limnai.

Have each player roll 3d6 for family wealth. Anyone with above-average family wealth is eligible (13+ on 3d6) then make a charisma, poetry, or appearance roll to get an invitation. Or a player might come up with a clever way to get themselves invited, of course.

Athandania thinks that the Ephors murdered Cleomenes and hushed it up. She’s not too discreet about keeping this view a secret, though she wouldn’t come out and say it to a bunch of youths. If a character eavesdrops on her, he may hear her mention it to an Athenian guest.

She is willing to tell them that her friend Naira (40) left Sparta right after the funeral, having lived here in exile from Athens for nearly twenty years.

Where did Naira go? “I had a letter from her a couple of years ago saying she was living in a remote place and missed other women to talk to, but she expected to be back in the swing of things in a few years. Oh, and she said something about how she ought to be able to see Aphrodite’s birthplace on a clear day.”

[Naira is actually now living on the island of Antikythera, about three days’ sailing to the south. A lore/mythology roll is needed to identify Aphrodite’s birthplace as Kythera.]

At the cemetery
They will need to sneak into the Agiad burial vaults as there are patrols of veteran Spartans. With timing to run in between patrols, an uncontested stealth roll will do it. Failure means the sentries come searching and you need a hide roll.

(An important question is how many of the characters will attempt this. Too few and they may not be able to open the vault where Cleomenes’s coffin is entombed – or may fail to find a clue. Too many and they will be spotted.)

To open the vault quietly requires a difficult strength roll Failure makes a noise and they’ll need another hide roll – or one of the characters could make a run for it to decoy the sentries away.

Inside the vault there is room for three characters. The coffin is open and the body is not here. Make a search roll to spot an obol (intended to go under the tongue of the corpse) in the broken remains of the coffin.

After making the report

They again arrange to meet at Talus’s house, only this time Cleombrotus, the king’s brother, comes with Ankylos. Naturally he only hears the bits that interest him.

“There’s going to be war with Persia. The old king Demaratos has gone over to their side. No doubt they’d love to turn up here and restore him as their puppet. We don’t want any legitimacy issues.”

Ankylos: “It might be worse. There could be two ex-kings drifting around out there. A madman and a traitor. To have a challenge to the Eurypontid line is bad enough, but suppose there’s an Agiad pretender too.”

“Even if Cleomenes is alive, which I don’t believe, he would never side with Persia. He’d sooner – ”

“Slit his throat? He did that already. It’s a risk, is all I’m saying. And this isn’t a good year to be taking risks.”

They turn to the player-characters:

“Go and look into that last expedition, when he went to arrest the council of Aegina. Whatever drove Cleomenes over the edge, it happened on that trip.”

Investigating Cleomenes’s final expedition

The year before his death, Cleomenes took a fleet of fifteen ships (ie his entire Royal Guard) to arrest the twelve councillors of Aegina who had paid tribute to the Persians. He had been thwarted in an earlier attempt to do so by his co-regent Demaratos, but since then he had managed to replace Demaratos with a new Eurypontid king, Leotychidas, who was his ally.

The councillors fled east towards Rodos, but Cleomenes intercepted and captured them in the Aegean on his flagship the Hydra’s Tooth. He then returned them to Athens.

Talking to marines
Some of the Royal Guard who accompanied Cleomenes’s expedition are willing to talk about it. (As the characters are royal guards themselves, it’s not hard to find a pretext for meeting.)

Xiphos and Stibades are a couple of guardsmen whom the characters might end up talking to. They’re not clear about details like navigation, but they can relate how there was a storm, the flagship got separated from the rest of the fleet, they found the Aeginetan ship in a lagoon and there was a boarding action.

“Twenty of us, thirty Aeginetan marines. Not much of a fight.”

“Well, it wouldn’t have been, only – ”

“Oh yeah. We hit a rock and the king went overboard. Full armour, you don’t come back from that.”

“Only he did.”

“He sure did.”

It comes out that Cleomenes was thought lost but later showed up on a nearby island. “Must’ve got his armour off and made it to the shore. Sixty years old, too. Fitter than a man half his age.”

The difficulty is getting details out of the Royal Guard without pressing the point too much. In addition, they aren’t giving a statement, they’re reminiscing – embellishing the bits that stuck in their minds, glossing over things (like precise navigation) that aren’t what they know or care about.

Talking to the sailors
To look for some of the sailors who were on the expedition, the characters need to travel to the port of Helos, about twenty miles south of Sparta.

It’s pretty easy to find sailors who can talk in general about the fleet – where it sailed from (Helos), when (early 491), where it returned (Zarax, though five ships went to Athens), when (late spring 491), and so forth.

Use streetwise or diplomacy skills to find a sailor in Helos who was actually with the fleet. Roll once a day. This is easier in ports along the east coast of the peninsula (Zarax, Kyphanta, Prasiai, Tyros) in which case allow a bonus to the roll. A special on the roll indicates a sailor who was actually aboard the Hydra’s Tooth.

Any sailor can relate the basic facts of the expedition: that the Aeginetans seemed to be heading for Rodos, a Greek colony that has been in Persian control since 490 BC but which was then (in 491) autonomous. The fleet was scattered by storms in the Cyclades. If the characters think to ask, the prevailing winds were driving the ships south of a true course from Aegina to Rodos.

A sailor called Sophilus who was a crewman aboard the Hydra’s Tooth can tell the full story:

“We caught up to them in the lagoon of Callista. We needed to intercept them before they got to the open sea because that was a trim fast ship – we’d never have overtaken it under sail. Hurrying to get across their bows, we ran her onto an oddly shaped rock in the lagoon and the whole ship nearly went over. I remember old Thrulon saying, ‘That’ll blunt the tooth.’ The general went over the side – ”

“The king.”

“King, was he? So he went over the side, gone like a stone, but the Spartans mopped up the Aeginetan forces – their chief told them to surrender, in point of fact. We were resupplying water on one of the islands there – not Callista itself, but an island on the north-west of the bay where the water’s less salty – and the rest of the fleet showed up. A few days later, the top men went to make an offering at an old shrine to Apollo. Well, they say it was to Apollo – I saw it and it wasn’t like any shrine to Apollo I ever saw. Anyway, who do you think they found there, naked as a babe and twice as lifelike? Only the old king that was thought drowned. So that was a lucky escape, only they do say he went mad and killed himself, which just goes to show a man can’t cheat Hades for long. If the gods want you dead, they’ll first take your wits away.”

Travel at sea

Ankylos can provide them with a letter from Cleombrotus to secure a twenty-oared galley in Helos, along with fifteen other rowers (five perioikoi, ten helots) which means that five men can be free as marines at all times. If that's where you want to go with the scenario, you could do worse than look at Tim Severin's Argo as an example of a twenty-oared Grecian galley. This article by Lionel Casson has everything you could possibly want to know about sailing speeds in ancient times.

Obedient to their laws

Maybe you noticed the Sparta roleplaying sourcebook that popped up in the sidebar recently. Here’s the story with that. One of my group’s longest running campaigns is the Immortal Spartans, devised by Tim Harford, in which a bunch of young Spartans discover they have Highlander-like regenerative powers. As a meta-campaign, it has proved a robust armature on which to hang individual mini-campaigns set in Alexander’s empire, Caligula’s Rome, 9th century Baghdad, and even 1930s New York.

The irony is, the campaign hasn’t till now had a whole lot to do with Sparta. We began the game already on the march to Thermopylae. (We could hardly slink back home afterwards. You know how the Spartans treated deserters?)

But as a long-time Tekumel enthusiast, I’m always more interested in the social and cultural side of roleplaying than all the scary monsters and super creeps. So I got to thinking it would be fun to run a prequel game before our little band became immortal, back in their salad days as junior soldiers of the Spartan state. That meant drawing a map – I always like to start with a map. And so I got to researching Spartan society from a gaming perspective.

I should insert a caveat here. Nobody knows a lot about daily life in Sparta in the early 5th century BC. Our best source is probably Herodotus, writing only a generation later. Pausanias’s descriptions come from the 2nd century. Plutarch was separated from the heyday of Sparta by half a millennium; by his time all that was left was a sort of theme park Sparta for Roman tourists. The upshot is that I had to create a Sparta, not necessarily the Sparta.

Another caveat: there are no women player-characters in this campaign. We do have one woman player, but her character is a man because the game required us all to be soldiers in Leonidas’s royal guard. Women in Sparta at this time actually have a pretty good life compared to, say, Athens, where they would be shut up behind closed doors or obliged to go about veiled. Spartan women owned property and conducted business, they were confident and outspoken, they mingled on the street with men and wore no veils. In fact, they were sneered at as “thigh showers” in the rest of Greece because of their revealing split skirts. Meeow. So you could have a game based around a group of Spartan women, but it would have a very different character from one involving Spartan men.

The best equivalent I can think of off the top of my head is the way men’s and women’s roles are portrayed in classic westerns. Out on the wild frontier, men are men and they let their fists and six-guns do their talking for them. But that society is at heart matriarchal. Women don’t take a back seat the way they would in the drawing rooms of cities back east at the time. Think of the Spartan mother pointing to her son’s shield as he set out for war: “With it, or on it.” They could be as laconic as their menfolk, those Spartan dames.

Anyway, if you pick up the Sparta sourcebook, bear in mind that it’s just designed for roleplaying male characters. Which is also something of an irony, as the game I chose to run didn't involve any of the fighting for which we nowadays think the Spartans famous. This scenario was 90% investigative. The players are tasked with uncovering the full story of King Cleomenes’s suicide -- if it was suicide. That scenario would have been equally suited to female characters, but as it was a prequel I was stuck with the characters we already had. If you play it (coming up next week) with women characters, drop a note in the comments about how it went.

Setting the scene for the PCs

The year is 485 BC – five years after the Battle of Marathon, but Persia remains an ominous storm cloud in the east. You are Spartans youths who, at 20, have just entered the lowest category of adulthood. Who knows what the future holds for you. Great things? But to you as individuals that is meaningless; a great future means a great future for the Spartan state which is your whole lives.

In creating your character, recall the advice given at Delphi. First: know thyself. You are Spartans, trained for the specific purpose of being hoplite infantry, the world’s most effective shock-troops. Never mind what you later became; maybe the seeds of that were in you even this early, but right now you are soldiers of the phalanx. Secondly: nothing in excess. There’s a temptation to max some stats and minimize others, but a well-rounded character may do better in the long run.

The virtues of a Spartan are: obedience, loyalty, courage, steadfastness, and piety. Reflect those how you will, but bear in mind that you are the aristocrats of your society – the knights, in effect – and civilized behaviour is important to you. Your principal training is in spear, shield, javelin and military manoeuvres. And yet you are very far from the brutal, half-savage warmongers of 300. It is said that it is easier to convince ten thousand Athenians to go to war than one Spartan. To draw an anachronistic parallel with today’s Marines, you are the sheepdogs. Your training is aimed at making sure that, while Spartans rarely start a fight, they can be sure of being able to end it.

While choosing your other skills, you may want to consider how you spent your late teens – that is, the “senior high” of the Agoge. This is where you pick up those extra-curricular skills.

Maybe one in ten of the 18+ group are considered as recruits for the Krypteia (think: Special Branch meets the Freemasons) and to test their mettle this “regeljugend” are sent out into the countryside to spy on helots and murder any who seem like they might be trouble-makers. So in that case you might pick up stealth skills and outdoor survival, for example.

Other late teens focus on subjects like diplomacy (learning languages, history and oratory) or on religious matters (lore and ritual) or on athletics and sports (especially the rugby-on-steroids ball game episkyros). Or maybe you’ve stepped out of one of the main school paths to do your own thing: travel, hunting, even medicine; those would count as eccentric choices but are tolerated in moderation.

• GURPS Greece  
• Spartans: An Epic History
• The Spartan Army 

Do I gotta draw you a map?

Actually, you'll be glad to hear that the map is by Russ Nicholson, not me. (As if you couldn't tell, right?) This is the one you've been waiting twenty years for: the map of Ankon-Konu, soon to be opened up to exploration by The Serpent King's Domain, seventh in the Fabled Lands series. Paul Gresty is hard at work on that now and it's shaping up to be the best FL book yet. Don't take my word for it, try the demo for yourself here.

The Kickstarter campaign was planned and run by Richard S Hetley, our editor, line producer, and invaluable consultant on the series. I asked for his thoughts on getting this dazzling new map from Russ:

"As always, it's been great to see new work from someone who helped build our favorite game worlds. It's also been interesting watching the notes from Paul, which quite literally were a printout of the old Ankon-Konu map covered with marker and pencil doodles, iterate into something that gives a sense of place. There was only one spot where I thought there was a bit of a hiccup: in Smogmaw of the first draft, there was a mysterious plain triangle sticking out of the top of the city. Was it supposed to be a rooftop? Perhaps a misplaced decoration like a flying bird? Or a gigantic pointy-cap mushroom? Russ took this feedback (I didn't mention the mushroom bit...) with all the rest and made the final version you see here. It communicates very well."

I'm not showing the whole map in all its multicoloured glory here because I think it's only fair that the Kickstarter backers get to see it first - as they will in the hardcover edition to be published by Megara Entertainment. A few months later Fabled Lands Publishing will release a paperback version, but for that one you'll have to make do with black and white.Still looks pretty spectacular, though, wouldn't you agree?

Gamebooks: the value of doing it with dialogue

Eighteen months back, Leo Hartas talked me into starting work on an interactive story app. Leo is a very persuasive fellow, and it sounded such a beautiful plan the way he told it. I’d write the thing, Leo would do the artwork, and his coder friend would put it together in his spare time.

I really should have known better. Spare time is pretty much a mythical concept anyway, and so the chance of such a project ever happening decreases exponentially with the size of the team. After six weeks and two Skype calls, the coder admitted he was too busy and Leo got a contract to illustrate six kids’ books. The project went quietly back to bed and set the alarm clock for never.

Still, all experience is useful. Some of the writing made its way into a novel called The Mage of Dust and Bone that Jamie and I may yet finish. And I had enough fresh insights about gamebook app design to fill this blog post. So not a total loss.

The app, which was going to be called Winter’s Rage, was a sandbox adventure based on the Christmas scenario here a while back. The map would serve as the top level of navigation through the story, as in Fabled Lands. Nothing new about that; it’s been a staple of CRPGs from Might and Magic right through to Sorcery.

Encounters

‘When you have an encounter, you’ll drop down from the map to a location screen that will be mainly text.’

‘I could do illustrations for each location,’ said Leo.

‘No. Doesn’t work. See, we’re used to using a map in real life without thinking about it. Our brains have the subroutine that means we look at where we are on a map and that’s part of our seamless word-view. But as soon as you put a picture of a church, say, in front of somebody who up till then has been picturing the world as a map or via text, suddenly they’re thinking, hmm, that’s not a real church, that’s a drawing. So then you’ve broken suspension of disbelief.’

‘But I thought you said you'll be wanting little mugshots of the characters’ faces for when they’re saying something?’

‘That’s different. When the brain is used to interpreting images symbolically – a figure on a map, a face next to some dialogue – then artwork doesn’t pull you out of the story. Given that we have to have text, simply because it’s cheap, we need to let the text be the player’s main “world rendering medium” and any artwork has to conform to that design principle. That is unless you can find a million dollars down the back of the sofa, in which case we’ll do it all in a 3D environment with audio.’

‘Text it is.’

We came up with a screen template for locations like this:

OK, OK, gimme a break - I'm the designer, all right? Leo would've done the art. Anyway, at the top you’ve got the location name (The Bank Road in this example) and under that a brief description that sets the scene. Then you’ve got the faces of the characters who are here. In this case there’s a Blind Man who you just met at the start of the adventure and who is accompanying you along the road. Your answers to his questions are creating your character at this point – eg he begins by asking if you’re familiar with these parts, and you can answer either ‘I’m an outsider’ or ‘I grew up not far from here’.

But I digress. The point here is that you’ve just had an encounter, that’s why the view has dropped down from the map level. The encounter is with the Robber. So then we look at the pane below, which is the dialogue. This is where the action of the story gets presented. Why? Because the key to keeping the player’s attention is writing in the moment. That’s not new either; it was invented, or at least popularized as a novelistic technique, by Samuel Richardson in the mid-18th century. If you’ve read my Frankenstein app, you’ll see the same technique in action throughout. The entire text there is what Victor Frankenstein is saying to you, so his words must carry all the narrative, rather like in a radio play.

The advantage of placing the narrative emphasis on dialogue is that readers of an app will skip descriptive text. Description is less compelling to an untutored eye even in a regular novel, and when you’re leaning forward waiting for the next decision point, the temptation to scan for surface meaning may become irresistible.

Not so in the case of dialogue, because we’re attuned to care about other people and what they say. Arguably the main reason for these big, energy-hungry brains is to interpret the nuances of meaning in speech.

The way we planned to do it in the app, the dialogue would appear one speech bubble at a time, with a beat between them. You could read and re-read it at your own pace, obviously. The beats were there just to reinforce the sense of them speaking in real time, rather than everybody’s dialogue appearing at once like on the page of a book.

So the Robber says, ‘Hand it over. All your money.’ And it turns out your blind companion also has something to say: ‘Gar John’s-son, I know your voice. Have you turned to thievery now?’

(Later in the adventure, you will typically be travelling with a companion – more about them in a minute. For example, if your companion was Fosse the hunter, in this encounter he’d now chip in with: ‘Huh. Since when wasn’t he a thief? Five years old and I caught him taking rabbits from my traps.’)

Options

Then at the bottom of the screen, under the dialogue for the encounter, you’ve got the DECIDE tab. When you tap on that, you’re presented with your options. Why not display them right away? Extra unnecessary taps/clicks are usually a bad idea on an interface, aren’t they? Yes, but here it’s to stop your eye just scanning straight down to the bottom of the screen for the options. It keeps you in the story.

If you tap DECIDE, in this case you’ll get two options to choose between:

• ‘It’s not gold you’ll be getting from me, it’s cold steel.’
• ‘I don’t need to fight you.’

As often as possible, like there, an option will be a line of dialogue. Say you choose not to fight. That dialogue gets added to the scroll underneath what’s been said already. Then, after a beat, the Robber will reply to you:

‘I don’t need to fight you.’
   {set #Spared_Robber = true}
   // #Spared_Robber is an inline conditional not visible to user
   // sets reminder that Gar Johnson may be encountered later
   {beat}
Robber: ‘I’m starving. I was sick. Couldn’t get no work.’

And your options now:

• ‘Take this coin and buy yourself some bread.’ { if #Status_Noble == true }
• ‘Winter’s hard on everyone. You’ll survive.’
• ‘Come and see me at the manor house. Maybe I’ll find a job for you.’

Options can be conditional, as in the example above where the option to give the robber a coin is only available if the player is an aristocrat.

Companions

You pick up companions at the manor house, which is the player's base of operations for the game. You can only pick one companion to accompany you at any given time. You can change companion when you return to the manor house, though sometimes they may be absent on their own errands, depending on the adventure timeline.

Companions become more loyal to you over time, assuming they see you solving problems and showing good leadership. A companion who is more loyal to you will volunteer more personal information (possibly unlocking backstories) and also uses their skills more effectively. Therefore it makes sense not to switch companions too often. Balance that against the need to have the right companion with the right skills for specific tasks.

When you return to the manor house you can show any clues to the steward or the NPC companions you didn't pick up - so you can get the benefit of advice from any of those four listed with a delay, but only the one companion you pick to go with you will notice things, prompt you during investigation, help in fights, unlock subplots, etc.

A possible mechanism for giving the player hints is that when you’re at the manor house, companions will talk to each other (‘You won’t believe what I saw up on the heath, Sir Werian…’) based on their preset relationships, and if you listen in you will get the benefit of their theories.

NPC companions add an element of communitas and emotional grip to an adventure game - a discovery I made by happy accident when writing Down Among the Dead Men, though I guess the germ of it was there in the interactions with the faltyn in the Blood Sword series. As a rule, people are way more interested in character and the development of relationships than they are in facts and the development of plot. Given that Winter's Rage was to be a gamebook app constructed almost entirely through dialogue, and an investigative adventure at that, having a foil for the player to interact with was essential. Not only did the choice of companion on each mission mean a set of skills and insights that would customize the experience, the companion also gave me as writer another pair of eyes and another voice to interlocute the world for the player. And, as this is an adventure with a ticking clock, interjections from the companions can be used to ratchet up the tension.

Takeaways

Text is inexpensive, but there are some tasks it doesn't handle well. Artwork is useful for the top-level navigation of the adventure (ie the map) and to depict the faces of nonplayer characters. But don't be tempted to use more than that. Presented with a little judicious artwork, the brain interprets it symbolically; too much and your "gamebook app" becomes a broken CRPG.

Also, use dialogue as much as possible in place of descriptive text. Even in the example above, in the final version I'd probably have lost that descriptive line "a robber steps out" in favour of a companion saying, 'It's a robber!' or 'Now who's this?' or 'This guy looks a bit shifty' depending on which companion it was, the time of day, that kind of thing. After all, you know you've dropped down from the map level because an encounter was triggered, and you can see the guy's face has appeared in the mugshot pane. You don't really need a stage direction to tell you what's going on here.

In order to get maximum mileage out of dialogue, focus on writing to the moment. Listen to radio plays. Read how it's done in something like Pamela, Riddley Walker or the Frankenstein app I mentioned above. Anything you can let the dialogue carry, do so. Strip down descriptive text to the barest scene-setting. Don't tell when you can show. There's nothing new about any of this; it's just that it hasn't often been applied to interactive literature before.

*  *  *

Writing this, I’m thinking it’s a shame we never got to do the game. It was to be the first in a series of interactive adventures set in the world of Legend. If I’d only had a coder with no wife and kids and re-enactment hobby to eat into his leisure time, eh? Ah well, it’s water under the (half built) bridge.

Eight crimson arrows

John Jones recently pointed out that there's a pretty glaring omission in the reissued edition of Castle of Lost Souls. Most of the illustrations are not in the paperback, for reasons I can't remember now but it may simply have been that I couldn't get good scans of them at the time. Okay, fine, you can use your imagination. So no harm done? Ah, but one of those illustrations contained a vital clue. Here it is, along with the corresponding section:

192

You go only a short distance before arriving at a door. On the floor in front of you, eight crimson-fletched arrows have been placed in an intriguing pattern. You can pick up the arrows if you wish; remember to note them on your Adventure Sheet if so. There is no other way on from here, so you step forward and open the door. Turn to 153. 

And while I'm about it, I should also thank John for having helped out with some very useful advice on The Eye of the Dragon, another of those '80s gamebooks that recently resurfaced from the tidal flats of time. It's thanks to him that the Dagger of the Mind spell now does 3 points' damage instead of 2. Mind you, if you find yourself thinking of using it as a free strike in combat then you might have trouble completing the adventure. Just saying.

Last of the Golden Dragons

The Eye of the Dragon didn’t start off as a gamebook. It was a scenario in my Empire of the Petal Throne campaign. The ruined city that the players had to visit was not Thalios but Ngala, out on the Flats of Tsechelnu about a hundred and fifty miles from Jakalla.

I can’t find any notes for the scenario, and that's probably because there weren’t any. Our main weekly game was held at Keble, first in Mike Polling's room and later with Jack Bramah, Robert Dale or Colin Williams hosting, and those games were on Sunday afternoons as a legacy from when we spun off from the Dungeons and Dragons Society at Jesus. I’d usually arrive to run the session after a leisurely start to the day and a long brunch, so there was rarely any preparation and we preferred it that way. For this scenario, though, I had at least drawn up a fairly detailed map of the ruins.

At a guess the game took place in late 1981 or early 1982, because it was obviously inspired by the movie Escape From New York. The players will have included Oliver Johnson, Mark Smith and Robert Dale. I doubt if there was any super-powerful ancient artefact at stake – more likely it was a routine escort mission for their temple. The twist, such as it was, lay in the fact that the players must have been anticipating trouble from an amphibious enemy such as the Hlűss or Hlutrgu, but it turned out they were up against a party of Grey Ssu. Hence all the hypnotic jiggery-pokery, and with it the seeping paranoia of never knowing whether the comrade right behind you might have already been got at. (John Carpenter movies were clearly a big influence on my umpiring style.)

For the gamebook I kept the unity of place and time, starting the adventure as you arrive at the ruins at dusk and finishing at dawn. The Grey Ssu became the Kappa – not the water-dwelling creatures of Japanese folklore, but pearl-eyed and coral-boned nonhumans whose name derived from the Greek letter, which seemed to fit with the vaguely Graeco-Roman flavour of the city.

Some nods to the scenario’s origins at Oxford can be seen in the Amber Pantechnicon (a wonky Radcliffe Camera), the crossroads of Carfax, and the talking sphinxes, inspired by the Emperors’ busts in Zuleika Dobson. For some reason the Sydney Opera House got a look-in too; maybe that was Russ’s idea.

The USP of Eye of the Dragon is that you are a sorcerer. In retrospect I could have come up with a more interesting way of handling that than the Vancean system – which is delightful in the Dying Earth stories, but doesn’t make for very interesting gameplay. In our Tekumel games at that time, magic involved the sorcerer constructing a number of mental “spell matrices”. After a spell was cast, the spell matrix became “fatigued” and you needed to spend time in meditation in order to restore it. You could still cast a spell using a fatigued matrix, but it cost twice as much energy. That would have been a better mechanic than the all-or-nothing approach I went with for the book.

Other snippets… Master Giru is based on Professor M.A.R. Barker, creator of Tekumel, to whom the book is dedicated. His player-character Firu Ba-Yeker is well known in Tekumel gaming circles. Lord Mantiss was a nod to Ian Livingstone, who often urged me to include a character called Mantis in Adventure, the role-playing game I was designing for Games Workshop – or, as it turned out, for myself – in the early ‘80s. (Years later, Ian was to return the gesture of homage by releasing his own version of The Eye of the Dragon. That's a joke by the way.)

For a while I toyed with the notion of giving the book a thorough overhaul. It could do with a bit more grit. The pally way the scholars talk to you at the start never rang true. More suspicion would have helped - and would have resonated with the pervasive distrust once you arrive at the ruins and find that so many would-be allies have been nobbled by hypnosis. I even jotted down a few notes:

The idea is that you’re different somehow. People treat you with fear, suspicion and loathing. We never say if it’s skin colour, a deformity, or what, but something marks you out as Other.

Oh, and you are a miracle worker, sorcerer, whatever. Maybe instead of being “of the Elder Race” this is more like being born a mutant.

So you’re recruited for this job. They don’t like you, but they need you.

You go and get the Eye, then at the end they ask you for it. And we end with you wondering whether to let them have it...

Another option was to rejig the book as a Fabled Lands Quest, with the action starting in Dweomer and then zipping over by means of one of those convenient dimensional portals to the vaguely Hellenic land of Atticala.

But in the end I realized that most people are buying these reprints to fill gaps in their gamebook collection. There isn’t a lot of appetite for revised versions. The Keep of the Lich-Lord was different – we had to rework that because we didn’t have the rights to the Fighting Fantasy setting. But The Eye of the Dragon is in its own universe – and it’s not Legend, at least not quite the low-fantasy Legend familiar to Dragon Warriors players, despite the reference to a place called Achtan. So in the end I changed only a couple of monster names (“dungeon devil” and “blood fiend” – must’ve been in a rush that day) but otherwise left the text unmolested.

The Eye of the Dragon is now available in paperback on Amazon:

The sanity clause

There have been a few recent posts (eg here and here) about Victoriana and the Cthulhu Mythos because those have been the setting and theme of our current campaign. Actually, when the campaign began I thought it was Victorian, period. (Or Victorian Period, take your pick.) All that Lovecraftian stuff came later – presumably because the opening scenario was borrowed from Cthulhu By Gaslight – but it’s in the nature of such things to set a course for the rest of the campaign, so now I’m resigned to facing mi-go and shoggoths every fortnight.

I’ve nothing against Lovecraft, let me say. Quite the reverse. His stories may not be the sort of thing I’d typically read for pleasure, eldritch or otherwise, but I greatly respect him as a creative innovator. Here's the snag: taking a body of literature and reworking it for role-playing inevitably steers the whole thing towards the reefs of parody. Imagine an RPG based on Crime and Punishment, with the consequent thumping emphasis on Ruthlessness and Guilt points. Or a Hemingway RPG which reduced Papa’s entire body of work to just booze, machismo and bull-fighting. So usually when I’ve played Call of Cthulhu (which isn’t often, I admit) it’s felt like nothing more than a lark, a one-off session of light relief for the players in between real role-playing.

But there’s always a silver lining. In that reductive approach involved in distilling a role-playing game out of an author's canon, there are going to be some interesting questions, at least a few nuggets gleaming in the mud. Take Call of Cthulhu’s SAN (sanity) rules. Is it actually the case that coming face-to-polyps with a Lovecraftian monster automatically drives you insane? And if so, why?

In the literature, you see, Lovecraft always starts off with a neurotically unstable lead character. That’s his shtick. He doesn’t pit a Steve Costigan type against the nameless spawn of the cosmic abyss, so we don’t know if they’d end up a gibbering wreck like a typical HPL protagonist or whether they’d wade in undaunted with fists flying and guns blazing. Actually, there is a famous round-robin story, “The Challenge From Beyond”, where Lovecraft brought the plot to a shuddering cliffhanger and Howard continued it, lustily and hilariously jettisoning Lovecraft’s psychic meltdown in favour of some raw, red-blooded action. (When you read it, just remember these guys were having fun with their public images, m’kay?)

But could a hero made of the sterner stuff that flowed from Bob Howard’s imagination face Elder Things with impunity? Or did Lovecraft intend that his monsters radiated some sort of frightful psionic effect that would drive even Conan mad? I found a debate about this online.

“A Lovecraftian monster is one in the style of H.P. Lovecraft's writing, which has a lot of vague depictions of unfathomable, indescribable, alien monsters. You would lose your sanity because that's what usually happens when you see one, like how looking at Medusa would turn you to stone.”

“I disagree. Medusa turns you to stone because of some kind of magic. Lovecraftian monsters do not inherently ‘cause insanity’, the loss of sanity is something that happens in our human minds because we can't comprehend them.”

Ah, now there we might be onto something. Except… can no one comprehend them? And the degree of unfathomability always drives a person mad? I can accept that a medieval crusader would find these critters freakishly scary, but what about a trained biologist? If you're accustomed to peering down a microscope at unearthly little boogers like dust mites and hydrothermal worms, would you still take one look at a fungus from Yuggoth and start screaming that such things cannot beeeee? Might there not be some scientists who would be more curious than scared? A commenter called ShakaUVM addresses this point:

“Lovecraft thought that people couldn't deal with the actual reality of the universe. As it turns out, though, people like Carl Sagan managed to [contemplate the reality of the universe and] keep their sanity intact. Ultimately, it's because Lovecraft believed in certain Victorian tropes, like people passing out when something became overwhelming – his heroes faint all the time – and that knowledge could drive people insane.”

“The kind of horror that Lovecraft writes about would come from the realization that there is no God, that the universe is vast, chaotic, undirected, and unthinking.”

“When we have pictures of our place on our world in an insignificant solar system in an insignificant galaxy, we don't go insane from the insignificance of it all. We can comprehend that and still want to wake up and go about our business every day.”

That chimes perfectly well with my own view of the universe. I don’t personally think there’s a God or that the universe has “meaning”, and that doesn’t bother me at all. Facing the realization that we are an insignificant speck in the universe – well, of course we are. Ten billion Earthlike planets in this galaxy, a couple of hundred billion galaxies at least, and the distinct possibility that our universe is a tiny local phenomenon in a possibly infinite metauniverse. “Yes, Z, you are insignificant.”

Anyway, I can’t quote the whole discussion here. Shoot over and take a look at it. I’ll wait…

OK, so the assertion of Call of Cthulhu is that there are some things so completely unthinkable that every single human being, if forced to confront them, would go insane. But maybe what we have here is an observer bias. As a writer, Lovecraft was especially interested in neurotic characters, and may have intended us to conclude that the people most readily drawn to Cthulhu cults and manifestations were psychically the most sensitive and fragile among us. His chosen genre was horror, his intent was to unsettle, his style – let’s be charitable and call it Poe turned up to eleven. His fiction is bound to portray a terrifying, unspeakable, mind-blasting universe the way Hallmark movies always present a saccharinely sentimental one.

Writers flavour the world they create in their stories. They don’t necessarily intend for us to take that as a template for how the universe works, because literature is never intended to be an undistorted reflection of reality. So in drawing inspiration from literature for our role-playing system, maybe we need to be wary of using the whole cloth of an author’s work. Making a universe that’s going to last a whole campaign requires a bigger box of tricks than a set of stories built around a single theme and authorial voice.

And yet... it's a fine line, isn't it? A Lovecraftian role-playing game in which none of the neuroses is baked into the rules mechanics would be effectively indistinguishable from any other 1930s RPG. Which in turn invites the question: does literary style have a place in role-playing? Is it right for the system to impose that kind of prescriptive story framework on the players, or should the themes of a campaign emerge in play from the interaction between the characters and the world? Over to you.