Conquerors cards 3

The last five cards today. If you're planning to try it out, you'll need to cut these out and stick them onto square pieces of white card. (Oh well, it could be black card if you must - all the same color, that's what I'm getting at.)

Conquerors cards 2

Five more cards tomorrow, and the rules on Friday.

Conquerors cards 1

The first five Conquerors cards today. Rules to come at the end of the week.

Conquerors

The enemy is close at hand. The time of the final battle draws near.

Your own forces and those of your foe face each other across the dusty plain. Sunlight glints like droplets of fresh blood on bronze shields and polished armour. Swords and spear-tips bristle above the ranks.

Horns and war-drums sound. The troops advance grimly. Each warrior has sworn to fight and even die on your behalf. As their general, you must make sure their sacrifices are not in vain.

To beat your opponent you must strike through to his fortress. Your armies are equally matched in strength, but that is not the only factor that will count in this battle. Luck and skill are even more important.

So, floridly, ran the intro for a series of little books I devised in the late '90s with my schoolfriend Nick Henfrey. (I don't mean we were at school in the late '90s, that was much earlier; I just want you to know that the RGS Guildford is to blame.)

They were square-format books, quite short, and each page looked a bit like the image above. Here's how they were played:

Find someone else with a Conquerors book and challenge them to a duel.

You both start at the first spread in the book, where you will see there are four characters to choose from. Holding the book up in front of you, decide secretly which of the four you are sending into battle. When you and your opponent have both chosen, you hold out your books to each other with the character you have chosen facing towards the other person. Reciting your character's catchphrase is optional.

Now compare the characters to see who wins. For example, say you chose Greebo the Hog and your opponent chose Sir Grim of Grinn. Sir Grim is CAVALRY and Greebo's results table shows that he beats CAVALRY opponents, so you have won that round. The winner moves on to the next spread while the loser remains on the same spread.

Both of you then decide which character to send into the next round of battle as before. Last round's loser can choose the same character as before if he wishes, or one of the others on that spread.

If you draw with your opponent, both of you move on to the next spread. The winner is the first to win through to the end of their book.

As you see there, we called the series Conquerors (like conkers, geddit?) and although the prototype was done using fantasy characters, we intended you could have all sorts of themes: Wild West, superheroes, horror, gladiators, aliens, and so on.

The reason you never saw a Conquerors book is that publishers, almost without exception, hated the idea. One said to me, "I cannot conceive of any reason why we would ever publish such a thing." The exception was Richard Scrivener at Puffin - the only male editor who we pitched it to, indeed possibly the only man in a senior position in children's publishing back then. Richard saw that boys of 6-10 years would have a lot of fun with something like this in the playground. No, it wasn't getting them to read Sir Walter Scott, nor to abandon their doubtless woeful and (so it was thought then) culturally programmed interest in violence, gusto and gore. It was Top Gear for small boys.

Unfortunately, though Richard and I worked at it, we couldn't get the costings right and the series never got started. By that time Jamie and I had started working at Eidos on our RTS game Plague (later Warrior Kings) and so I didn't have the time to chase up Conquerors further.

Anyway, although designed as books, Conquerors can equally well be played as a card game. And, as many readers of Fabled Lands and Dragon Warriors now have sons or nephews of the right age, I'm going to post up some cards over the next few days and you can give it a whirl.

More Selentine magic

Some more Tamorian magic today. This is typical of many such spells in that you don’t need to whip up a storm of magic points to use it, you just need to know what freaky procedure to follow. Bear in mind that if a Tamorian scholar today found a book containing a spell like this one, he would be highly unlikely to tell anyone else about it. We’re presenting it here for the GM to use in creating a uniquely horrible NPC villain rather than as a resource that should be allowed to get out among the gen-pop of player characters:

Process by which one may obtain a familiar servant, or fetch
being notes from the journal of Septimus Delectus Lambo, master arcanalist of Selentium

“First obtain a mole or other small burrowing creature that has died of natural causes. Place it within a lead box, filled with the caster's own blood and spittle. Seal the box with corpse wax and wind about with the hair of a condemned criminal cut while yet hanging upon the gallows. Next take the box to a sepulchral place and bury it in the rib-cage of a man dead at least forty years. Do this at the dark of the moon. Sleep upon this spot until the time when the moon is full, when the fetch will visit you in a dream. Then the box may be disinterred and the fetch released. Each day the fetch must be allowed to suck blood from its master, whereupon it renders him service. Retain the box as its abode.”

Evidently a loathsome procedure which would most certainly get you burned at the stake in any civilized country in the 10th century A.S.. Squeamish player-characters can console themselves with the thought of Lambo’s historical fate (torn in four parts by a quartet of devils to whom he had each promised his soul) while those who have no scruple at all will merely demand to know the fetch’s specifics, as follows.

The fetch appears as a sort of large maggot with its creator’s face. It is part of him, having 1 of his Health Points. It cannot fight, but is difficult to hit (DEFENCE and EVADE both 17). It resists spells with the MAGICAL DEFENCE of its creator and, if he is a sorcerer, warlock or elementalist, it also has Magic Points equal to his rank (taken from his own total) with which it can cast the spells known to him. It sees in darkness and can travel through wood or earth (but not stone or metal) at 10m a round, leaving almost no visible trace. When it returns to its box and the lid is closed, the caster knows all that it has seen while absent from him. If the fetch is slain, the caster immediately takes a wound of 1-10 HP, and the fetch’s 1 HP (but not its Magic Points) is forever lost to him.

A lost Fighting Fantasy gamebook

I keep saying, "Here's a curious little fragment" so by now you know that's par for the course around here, right? Today we've got one of several proposals that Jamie and I submitted to Puffin as ideas for Fighting Fantasy books.

The book the Puffin editors went for in the end, The Keep of the Lich Lord, was actually our least favorite of the bunch. The one reproduced here, The Mists of Horror, might have been fun to do but we were keener on four others: Curse of the God Kings (based on one of our epic role-playing campaigns with Oliver Johnson, Mark Smith and others), The Best Thief in Arantis (which I was very very glad to eventually write, located instead in its correct Arabian Nights setting, as Twist of Fate), The Keeper of the Seven Keys (very ambitious that one; you played the bad guy in what would have been a gamebook precursor of Dungeon Keeper) and Jamie's favorite, Dinosaurs of Death, which did exactly what it said on the tin and surely would have pleased boys everywhere. Including us two boys who wanted to write it.

Maybe we'll run some of the others later, but for now here's the pitch we made to Puffin Books for...

The Mists of Horror

You are a journeyman-sorcerer travelling to a new College of Magic where you intend to continue your studies. Your journey takes you from the city of Harabnab across the wild moors of Ruddlestone's hinterland. Full of high spirits, you decide to ride on ahead of your retinue to arrange lodging at an inn along the road. As you return to join them, you find yourself riding into gathering fog banks. You can find no sign of your servants, nor of the books and travelling-chest that were on the mules with them. You go on to the inn, expecting your servants to turn up there, but night falls and still they have not arrived.

Outside, the fog has closed its grip on the countryside. You can see it sitting along the ridges of the moor like the ranks of a phantom army. You realise you would have no chance of finding your servants now, so you return to brood by the fire. It is nearly midnight when a man staggers in, his clothes torn as if by brambles and his face white with shock. The landlord recognises him as the miller from the next village down the road. He mutters a few cryptic remarks about "the Faerie King" and "the Unseelie Court" before collapsing in delirium.

The next day, you look out of your window to see the village encircled by fog. Stray wisps creep across the ground outside, and it seems the fog is closing in.

You go downstairs to find the villagers gathered in the common room of the inn. There are mutterings about an old stone circle out on the moors, and the village priest fearfully relates the ancient story that this was a portal leading to the Otherworld, where the spiteful fays of the Unseelie Court reign supreme. The ancient tradition was that a blood sacrifice should be made once in every hundred years to keep the portal closed, but since the locals turned to the worship of the benevolent Hamaskis, God of Wisdom, they have not kept up the rituals of their forefathers.

Now the mutterings in the inn begin to grow, and soon panic at the thought of Otherworld magic turns the villagers into a crazed mob. Fearful for their lives, they seize the innkeeper's daughter - a friendly girl who served you food and drink the night before. They mean to sacrifice her to the callous Old Gods in the hope that the magical portal to the Otherworld can be closed again. You are horrified at such a suggestion, though you realise that their terror is such that you cannot hope to reason with them. Along with the priest, you manage to persuade them to at least let you have one day in which to find the stone circle and try closing it with your own magic. What you do not tell them is that you are only a journeyman-sorcerer, and you have scant hope that your own power will be enough. Still, you must try - or else an innocent girl will go to her doom, and her blood will be on the hands of these honest but frightened villagers.

Having crossed the circle of mist around the village, the protagonist finds himself in the Otherworld - a magical envoironment where events follow a strange dreamlike logic. His success will be decided in part by his ability to adjust to the different ways of thinking that this environment demands.

The protagonist's task is to find the Unseelie Court, which corresponds in the Otherworld to the stone circle's position in the real world. His missing servants are being held captive oat the Court. There he must battle the Faerie KIng to drive the Otherworld back and close off its contact with the real world. Throughout the adventure, a major worry for the protagonist (as expressed in the narrative) will be the need to conserve his magical power for the initiation tests he expects to face at the College of Magic.

In fact, victory will only be won by attacking the Faerie King with no holds barred - seemingly giving up on the hope of entering the College later. However, this in itself merely constitutes a moral choice for the protagonist: in order to win he has to forget his own selfishness. Making the correct choice in this situation means the reward of a second victory on returning to the village: not only are the villagers (including the girl) safe from the threat of the Otherworld, but the fellows of the College of Magic have learned of the trouble and now deem the protagonist worthy to enter their ranks.

Dem bones

It is quite likely that the first volume of the Fabled Lands RPG, if it ever appears, will come packaged with a sourcebook of Akatsurai, the eastern island inspired by Jamie's and my love of Oriental cultures.

The very good reason for this is that we have 80% of the book already written. Firstly because we wrote the entirety of a medieval-period Japanese sourcebook called Tetsubo that we originally intended for publication as a Warhammer supplement. And second because our gaming group ran a Heian Japan role-playing campaign using Paul Mason's Outlaws of the Water Margin rules, and the events of that campaign formed a large part of FL Book Six.

Although Tetsubo was not destined to see the light of day in its WFRP incarnation, putting it together was about the most fun project we've ever worked on together. Not least because it gave us an excuse to watch dozens of great Chinese and Japanese movies. At any rate, between the 200+ pages of manuscript we have for that and the half-dozen scenarios from the Kwaidan campaign, there's enough there for a pretty thick book. And that's even before we add the FL RPG rules. And you can grab a free copy of the Tetsubo part of it by clicking on the cover there in the sidebar. 

In this famous Kuniyoshi triptych, Princess Takiyasha, the daughter of Taira no Masakado, uses a scroll to call up a skeleton spectre to menace Mitsukuni, Lord of Shimoda. According to legend, Takiyasha's powers of witchcraft derived from her father, who foiled attempts on his life by surrounding himself with magically created duplicates. In the center panel, we see that the Lord of Shimoda has just defended himself against an assassin, so perhaps the purpose of the spectre is not to bite off his head, as videogamers and anime enthusiasts may suppose, but simply to give him some sleepless nights in which to reflect on this disturbing intimation of mortality.

Ad Blankestijn explores a possible inspiration for Kuniyoshi's flesh-tingling apparition here on his fascinating blog. Ad writes:

"...I could not only admire ukiyo-e by Kuniyoshi such as “Mitsukuni defying the skeleton specter,” but also saw mummies of yokai. These were apparently preserved in temples, where in the past they must have been taken out of their boxes and shown to the gullible country folk whenever the priest wanted to scare them into belief in higher powers. They were made by stitching together the bones and skulls of small animals as monkeys and birds and adding feathers or skin (or doing intricate things with washi paper). These yokai mummies looked so creepy that they really scared me more than the prints!"