The Conclave: "The Unmade Future"

My write-up for the fourth session of Tim Harford's Conclave campaign went a little differently -- I did it before we played the game. It seemed natural, my mage character Surma having his unique view of things, and as a player I hoped it might encourage the others to fight together as a team.

SESSION FOUR(THOUGHT)

‘Get into the carts,’ I told Ironside and Aareth, ‘and gird yourselves for battle.’

The names of the horses were already on my tongue. I bent them to my will – the beasts, that is, not my mortal companions – and they dragged the carts around to face the foe, arraying themselves wearily for the charge.

‘More foolishness from you!’ snapped Ironside. ‘These poor clapped-out beasts are not fit to fight.’

‘Nor fast enough for us to flee,’ said Aareth, a little of Rabbit coming to the fore.

There is no need to tell when you can show, as the storytellers say. Reality buckled, melted, shifted at my command. In place of the blown and sag-backed nags that had drawn us here stood proud champing mares, flesh-eating thoroughbreds from the stables of Diomedes, scalding steam snorting from their wide nostrils, rolling eyes abrim with bloodlust, their hooves striking white-hot sparks from the ground.

With difficulty our two warriors pulled back on the reins, biding their time for the charge. By means of fortification enchantments they hastily honed their strength and skill for the fray that was to come. The advancing line of nameless ones were only fifty yards off now, but stumbling despite their discipline as Eli worked magic so that each tangled clump of grass and every loose pebble, each cleft in the earth and cranny of treacherous gravel, made sure to turn their feet and cause them to falter as they came.

Hurstyk stood in silence, deep contemplation furrowing his brow. I knew without needing to ask – he was reading the pattern of flaws in our foes’ weapons, the minuscule cracks and impurities in the worked metal of their blades. When they struck, by his most potent art those dormant weaknesses would be exposed, to blunt their blows and even shatter the weapons in their hands.

Wax, who had been mustering shelves of black cloud across the star-glutted heavens, brought down his gaze and the sky spat fire, each bolt crashing and rebounding around the enemy leaving them scorched and smoking. Despite their unnatural resolve, they seemed warier now, their onward march less relentless.

Following my lead, Idhelruin now wove a change in the carts in which Ironside and Aareth stood, changing them into bronze-flanked chariots with iron-studded wheels built to crush flesh and splinter bone. Another flourish occurred to him even before I had time to ordain it, or perhaps it leapt from my mind to his, and great scything blades grew out from the axles. Their edges were as sharp as the midwinter wind that scours my realm when the sun is in his grave.

‘Now ride,’ I exhorted our charioteers. ‘The god of swift death blesses your endeavours. Be the hurricane that flattens the crop of nameless ones. And Farris – ’ I looked him in the eye as mortals do when they intend words of special import – ‘go through them and strike to their master, for your sword yearns to slice the white gold from his finger.’

There came a rush – wind, darkness, chaos, the unmade future. I can see no further. Let us hope my deific sight has vouchsafed the outcome that our determination will bring to birth…

*  *  *

As it turned out, they couldn't bring themselves to work from Surma's playbook, so instead it went like this in the conventional account, ie the one written after the game. The dramatis personae incidentally are: Aareth (sometimes known as Wolf or Rabbit), Eli (a self-proclaimed inquisitor), Farris Mundir (also known as Ironside), Hurstyk the Whisperer, Idhelruin, Surma, and Wax of Ear.

SESSION FOUR

The insects and night-creatures proving ineffective, I turned them into savage dogs and they began to tear the nameless ones apart. Ironside hurled daggers that added to their woes. At the same time, Hurstyk dispelled the effect that was hampering our magic, though with the caveat that his remedy was only temporary. Idhelruin caused the hillside to collapse, and I evoked pelgranes that flew Aareth down to sever the heads of our foes. I did not ask why he wanted their heads, but it seemed reasonable.

The clouds parted and the moon shone down, and at that moment my night creatures lost their names and were stuck in mid-transformation, a horde of sorcery-swollen insects, dog hybrids, giant mosquitoes and the like. The impediment to our magic had, we sensed, returned with the moonlight.

‘Now you see why you should not use unnatural magic,’ muttered Eli.

I swept my hand to put a cloud across the moon, lessening Pale’s effect on our powers.

‘Where is Feltass?’ said Aareth. ‘He vanished when the insect swarm first attacked.’

‘He took another form and entered the ruined inn,’ realized Hurstyk.

‘He has rifled our backpacks!’ said Farris.

[Note: a backpack is a fabric container with arm straps that those who practice restrained magic, or no magic at all, must use to carry around their possessions.]

Idhelruin had briefly gone back into the inn. ‘He has taken the bell!’

‘He has the bell!’ the others cried. ‘We must retrieve the bell! At all costs he must not keep the bell!’

Eli sent a whisper to my and Aareth’s ears: ‘Idhelruin has been subverted to the cause of our enemy.’

I knew nothing of the bell, nor of what cause our enemy even represents, but I misliked to have Feltass escape us.

‘He has fled by folding space and time, to carry him of an instant from here to Duke Dartness’s townhouse,’ said Idhelruin. ‘We must pursue in the same way.’

Aareth used magic to invigorate the horses, then glanced at my heavy cloud that was even now sliding away from the face of the brooding moon. ‘Let’s go by cart. If we are between one place and another when Lord Pale’s nullification effect comes back, we might spend eternity there.’

‘We could undo the magic Feltass cast,’ was Eli’s opinion, ‘and that would return him here.’

He was wrong in this conjecture, but there was no time to explain it. ‘If we cannot pursue, or bring him back, let us disrupt his own channel between here and there, stymying his arrival at the Duke’s palace.’

‘Yes,’ agreed Aareth. ‘The Duke must have but one catamite.’

A spell was worked, though as Wax and I do not use spells to achieve our will we stood aloof. ‘It is done,’ said Hurstyk. ‘I do not know where Feltass is, but the image we saw showed the bell wrenched from his grip into a woman’s hand.’

‘The bell!’ shouted Idhelruin again, causing everyone to jump aboard the carts. We rode swiftly down towards the town.

‘Is Feltass the same person as Birch?’ wondered Aareth. ‘He's the one who wrote the book On Those Who Have No True Name, isn’t he?’

‘No, that book was written by the being who styles himself Lord Pale.’

‘Ah, so Birch was the one who summoned the White Watcher?’

‘No. Birch and Feltass are both agents of Pale; they wear similar white gold rings. The wizard who summoned the Watcher was called Obsidian. Apocryphally, Obsidian was killed by the Watcher – specifically, “sent to the Dry Lands”. I now realize that was his plan. In the Dry Lands he made himself into Pale, or merged with a pre-existing entity to become what he is now.’

‘The Dry Lands?’

‘Death.’

We had reached the town. Idhelruin and Eli regarded each other with some tension. ‘Give me the true name of the bell,’ said Eli, calling across from the other cart as we raced down the streets, causing townsfolk to leap out of the way, ‘and I will seek out where it has been taken.’

Idhelruin provided a name. Eli gave him a long suspicious look (unfortunate, as with his eyes off the road he squashed a sleeping drunk under the wheels) and then wove his magic, conspicuously using a different name for the bell from the one Idhelruin had given.

‘It is at the palace of Princess Sheytelandin,’ he said.

Idhelruin drew up the horses. ‘Eli, you are in the service of Lord Pale!’

Aareth and I exchanged a glance. ‘Which of them can be trusted?’ he wondered.

‘Eli, you said that Idhelruin had been seduced by Pale,’ I said. ‘Now he accuses you. And for a fact we all heard you use a different name for the bell just now – ’

‘The bell. We must get the bell,’ came the chorus from the back of the carts.

‘Surma, I suspect both you and Idhelruin may have joined with Lord Pale,’ said Eli.

Strangely, this had the effect of making me think they could both be trusted. ‘So where is the bell?’

‘I don’t think it is at the Princess’s palace,’ said Idhelruin, ‘as Eli is trying to lead us astray.’ But he bade the horses walk on and we made our way to a gate in a garden wall. This was the palace – really just a townhouse, though grander than most.

Magic unlocked the gate and we went in. On the veranda two guards stood smoking pipes, and Idhelruin was about to greet them as old friends, but Eli reached past him and made them sleep. With surprising ease given his years, Idhelruin took hold of the ivy on the walls and ascended to a balcony where the drapes of a darkened bedchamber billowed in the night breeze.

Hurstyk, who had come to the quayside in Port Karmon by jumping from boat to boat across the harbour, had had enough of the ‘balance and restraint’ preached by the College. He commanded the air itself to loft him bodily up to the balcony. An unexpected but welcome development, this. He no longer permits his thinking to be shackled by  mortal considerations, and nor does Idhelruin – as we shall see.

They found the Princess suffering from the white plague. After a struggle, Hurstyk cured her but, strangely to my mind, he left her in the dumpy, wrinkled body that time had cruelly inflicted on her. Idhelruin, who seemed once to have been her lover, naturally found himself unenthusiastic for a reunion and became shadows, the better to permeate the palace and find where the bell had fallen.

Down in the garden, unnoticed until now, the roses around us had lost their colour in the moonlight, becoming pallid and sickly with a perfume that threatened to lull our senses. Wax stooped and inhaled deeply. I called on a breeze to dispel the scent, blowing it back upon the one who had conjured it.

Eli noticed that the gate had locked itself behind us. ‘Our enemy is coming!’ he said suddenly, and scaled to the balcony to warn the others.

This came as no news to me. I could feel the gem the Summoner gave me growing warm. ‘It holds the true name of the White Watcher,’ I told Farris, ‘and it tells me he is near.’

Hurstyk descended and, noticing the two sleeping guards also had symptoms of the white plague, he cured them. As before, I took note of the characteristic name of the plague, but I have no art to use that knowledge in healing. If ever I call on the plague – a remote possibility, but one never knows – it will be for other purposes.

Idhelruin emerged from the house, substantial once more. ‘I found the bell in the wall. It is ironic that it should have fallen back into reality here, in the house of one who was most dear to me, but after all there are no coincidences.’

Eli was trying to unlock the gate, but some enchantment was working against his efforts. Farris stepped past him and kicked it off its hinges. They looked out into the street and turned with looks of wild urgency.

‘We have tarried too long,’ said Eli. ‘The enemy is here.’

‘Go through the gate,’ I said. ‘It leads directly to the Sea Lion.’ I was glad I had spent so much of our voyage memorizing every true name of that vessel, as it made the fold in space easier to contrive. Even so, I struggled to maintain it against the dulling weight of Pale’s influence.

They went through. Eli was the last. He turned at the gate, and I thought he intended to make some criticism of my flagrant use of magic, but I had misjudged him. ‘Take some of my strength in case it is needed, Surma,’ he said, and his parting gift filled me with renewed energy.

Now I am here in the garden, the gem hot against my skin. In a story it would look like courage, or even sacrifice, but the plain truth is I could not permit the upstart god to claim my mortals as his own.

The Conclave: unreliable narrators

For the third session of our Earthsea-adjacent campaign The Conclave, here are three write-ups of what happened, one from the point of view of my character Surma, another by Frazer Payne's character Idhelruin, and a third version by Tim Savin's character, an inquisitor called Eli. (I didn't actually know what inquisitors are in Earthsea, not having read the books, and even after the campaign wrapped I wasn't much wiser.) The rest of the Conclave were: Wax of Ear (Oliver Johnson), Farris "Ironside" Mundir (Inigo Hartas), Hurstyk the Whisperer (Paul Gilham), and Aareth "Wolf"/"Rabbit" (Aaron Fortune).

SESSION THREE

As we sailed east, I walked the ship familiarizing myself with the true names of the strakes and timbers, sheets and sails. Hurstyk took note. ‘Why are you doing that?’ he asked.

‘Wait and you will see.’ I had forgotten that the minds of mortals are bound by Time.

In due course we spied a ship athwart our course, its sails furled and barely stirring in what had been until now a brisk breeze. Its flag hung limp, yet we could make out the design of a pale moon on a white field. It was the ship of the nameless man, Jude.

‘A trap?’ was Ironside’s judgement.

‘We could go round,’ suggested Hurstyk.

At sea Aareth was once again a wolf, not a rabbit. ‘My crew are well trained. Let’s go alongside and board it.’

‘I’ll sink it, shall I?’ called Wax from the back of his turtle.

‘But there might be innocents aboard,’ protested Eli. ‘Women and small children, or slaves.’ He pinched the bridge of his nose and looked with other senses. ‘No, it’s just our enemies.’

Sprugel the turtle submerged, but soon returned. ‘Around the ship is dead water,’ said Wax. ‘Fish writhe and die as they approach. I did not like to go closer.’

By now the vessel had begun rowing towards us. There came a sense of taint on the wind, and with it a dulling of magic. I called for a hurricane I know of and it came in a rush. No hurricane is of temperate manner, but this one was in a foul mood. It swept down on us and on the other ship. The masts bent. Rigging snapped. The sails strained and were torn away.

‘Mercy on us!’ cried a chorus of terrified voices. ‘We split! We split!’

But I knew every name of every part of the vessel. Even as it lurched and spun before the wind, I remade it. The mast, twice as stout, sprouted in a strong spiral like the tree that holds the world. The hull reshaped itself, sleeker and stronger than ever. Vast sails spread like dragons’ wings, catching the full fury of the storm and bearing us swiftly before it.

Our foe, his vessel surrounded as it was by a zone of dead magic, could not transform it in like manner. We soon lost sight of it floundering far astern amid the crashing waves.

As we sailed on, it seemed a good time to consult the books I had brought from the library. ‘It will be arduous to make these pages speak aloud,’ I mused, holding one by its cover as though it were a dead bird.

‘I shall read,’ said Eli, opening On Those Who Have No True Name. He stared at the title page, trying to focus. ‘That’s strange. Can you make out the author’s name? It is obscured.’

I looked. The letters were a blur, but I discerned the name. ‘Lord Pale. I’m getting notes of maggots, grave cerements and decayed bones.’

Eli concentrated for a moment. ‘It seems connected to the ship we saw… Yes, I have it! The last person to look in this book was a man called Felt, or something of the sort. He was aboard Jude’s vessel, I’m sure of it. He has a true name, but by some means he has made it indiscernible.’

‘Let’s look at one of the others,’ said Aareth, taking up Slayings of the White Watcher. The first page showed a woodcut of a pale figure far off in a barren landscape. The pages turned themselves, more and more swiftly, and in each successive picture the figure drew nearer, nearer.

‘Enough of that.’ Ironside stepped forward, reached over Aareth’s shoulder, and slammed the book shut.

‘Let’s not look at the third one,’ agreed Aareth, visibly shaken by his literary encounter with the White Watcher.

Idhelruin was gazing up into the sky, now scoured to a clear blue as the hurricane veered off in a huff. ‘That gull…’ he mused. ‘Is it a gull?’

‘Shoot it down, men,’ cried Wax.

‘Come here,’ I told the bird, and it alighted on the deck. Idhelruin was right, this was no gull but a transformed wizard. I discerned his true name, or as much of it as I needed, and restored him to his normal form. An old man with a long white beard was crouching there on the deck before me.

‘I would not want Surma to learn my true name,’ remarked Ironside to Eli.

‘Of a certainty he would use it to destroy you,’ agreed Eli – this conversation occurring just seconds after they had seen me rescue a wizard who had become trapped in his own enchantment.

The old man looked up. ‘I thank you. I took that form to flee a dreaded foe, but I began to lose my own nature within that of the gull.’

‘I need no magic, then, to divine who you are,’ I replied. ‘You appear a trembling dotard, you are motivated by timidity, and your own spell nearly doomed you. Clearly you are one of the wizards of Hythe.’

‘Mirrorwaith!’ cried Idhelruin, helping the old man to his feet. ‘This man is my master. Fetch him a cloak, someone.’

‘Whom did you flee?’ asked Aareth.

Mirrorwaith pressed a hand to his brow, recalling his human memories. It was clear he recognized Aareth. ‘In Franmouth, Duke Dartness has a new advisor. You are supplanted by one calling himself Feltas, who now has the lord’s ear. He wears a ring of white gold. It was fear of him that drove me thence.’

‘You don’t seem frightened now,’ pointed out Hurstyk.

‘Of a truth, I recall the fear but as I stand among you it seems like the unreasoning dread a child might have experienced. I suspect Feltas ensorcelled me.’

‘We’ll learn more at Hythe,’ said Aareth.

Ironside was struck with a sudden realization. ‘We’ve sailed past Hythe. It was masked from us by magic.’

‘This comes as no surprise,’ said Wax, who stood alongside the rail on the back of his turtle. ‘There are myriad deadly dangers bestride the land. A plague. Men with no name whom magic cannot scathe. An unstoppable figure from the realm of death. The assassination of wizards. Faced with such calamities, of course the reaction of the knitting circle of Hythe would be to hide in a cupboard and twitter fearfully.’

It was agreed we would sail on to Franmouth, and enter the port not in our own ship – now very distinctive with its masts like fantastical saurian spines, its living alar sails, the organic moulding of its bulwarks and the glittering tegument that now armoured its hull – but aboard one of the trading vessels whose captains were known to Hurstyk.

Before we transferred to the other ship, I took a flying fish that one of the sailors had caught and stripped it of its scales, putting these in a small leather pouch.

The quayside at Franmouth was teeming with travellers from other isles, so we presented not too outlandish an appearance – other than Wax, standing naked with his coral spear.

‘We’ll travel in these carts,’ said Idhelruin. ‘I know a place up in the hills above the port, close by the abandoned lighthouse. Feltas goes there each night in the small hours to converse with the twelve grandees of the town, newcomers all, who now hold sway over its trade and commerce.’

‘I will walk,’ announced Wax.

I could see his point, but I had never before travelled in a cart and was intrigued by the novelty of it. The god of swift death riding in a slow cart – the poetic fancy of it struck me. At some point I must find a talented dramatist and command him to author a play with such a scene in it. But that is for another day. We set off up the track into the hills.

Idhelruin had promised us a ghastly hovel and he was as good as his word. The windows were gaping holes in the dank wattle and daub, the door a rotted plank, the roof mere scraps of straw. Behind it on the crest of the hill stood the lighthouse, in scarcely better repair.

Inside was of course colder than out. Taking a clay pitcher from something that must once have been a table, Idhelruin poured himself a cup. ‘Be welcome, friends,’ he said. ‘This is poor stuff, but to me it tastes like the finest wine.’

‘It is the finest wine,’ I told him. And so it was, now that my word had made it so, and yet I saw a trace of disappointment cloud his brow as he sipped. Could it be that he preferred his own imagination to the reality I wrought?

We fell to planning. It was agreed that our most skilled shape-changers should enter the lighthouse at midnight in the form of a bat and a mouse in order to eavesdrop on what Feltas said to his lieutenants.

The door fell open (quite literally) and Wax staggered in. ‘I met a nice man called Harper who gave me drugs and I gave him drugs and he wanted me to go home with him but I said no there are people waiting and I went and he didn’t follow me but he waved and I saw his sapphire ring.’

‘It wasn’t sapphire, was it?’ I said. ‘It was white gold.’

‘Mmm,’ agreed Wax, sinking to the dirt floor in a stupor. ‘White gold.’

Hurstyk shook his head. ‘And it was such a good plan.’

Eli looked around. ‘He is coming here now with twelve others. And those twelve have no true names.’

Aareth began to weave an enchantment that would selectively admit or bar the door against whoever he chose. Hurstyk bent over Wax, using herbcraft to restore his senses. Ironside magically fortified his strength in readiness for battle.

I went outside and addressed every insect, rodent and night creature for a mile in all directions, commanding them to my will. A second spell transformed them into monsters of their kind – bats with scything fangs, mosquitoes bigger than hornets, adders whose toxin would cast a man into blistering agony, crickets with bladed limbs to slice skin as the fabled river fish of southern jungles are said to.

At a hundred yards off we saw them coming up across the downs, moonlight painting their faces pale as mannikins. ‘Zombies..?’ mused Aareth.

‘Let us find out. Even zombies can be stripped clean by sharp teeth and rasping mandibles.’ And I sent my swarm, a vast black bank like a thunderhead, up out of the grass and thickets to assail them.

They staggered, but even with a hundred cuts and their eyes swollen shut with stings they continued towards us, axes and clubs in their hands.

‘I’ll make their trousers fall down,’ said Eli. But even that had little effect beyond the simply comical.

Wax lurched out of the hovel, gulping fresh night air to clear his head. ‘I’ll call on lightning,’ he said. A trifle jejune, I thought, us having already tried that same ploy in our fight with the Watcher on Dain, but after all why change a winning formula?

And as the heavens crackled, reluctant to spew fire out of a clear sky, the twelve marched on, serene and deliberate, drawing inexorably closer. And behind them, his white gold ring lambent in the starlight, came Feltas.

Idhelruin’s version:

We fled Port Karmon and the invisible webs of the wizard Birch, in search of some sort of vulnerability for the White Watcher. The plan was to sail to the Great College on Hythe, en route to the Black Knot, a labyrinth in Tar Tuva.

We neared the ship of the nameless Jude. Wax approached the ship from beneath the waves, riding on his turtle familiar, but retreated when he ascertained that the ship was surrounded by a defensive spell which killed any sea life that approached it.

We sailed on. I sighted a seagull flying near. There was a strangeness to it. I brought it to the attention of Surma, who, with great force, named the bird as Mirrowaith (my former master), and commanded it to land and resume its former shape. An old man appeared.

Mirrowaith had been struck by terror of a new arrival in Franmont, Fellteth. This man had quickly become first adviser to Lord Dartness, and stayed close to him. Strangely, Mirrowaith could not recall the exact nature of his fear.

Hurstyk and I both deduced that the wizards of Hythe had suffered a similar fear-inducing attack, for they had hidden the place and disappeared into animal forms, in which someone had trapped them. The scale of the spells being accomplished by the enemy seemed almost insurmountable. We felt isolated from our comrades, alone against an enemy that eluded comprehension.

I asked the company to come with me to Franmont, a city that is dear to me. At once the preening began, as they devised great, gaudy contortions of reality in order to dock the ship in the harbour. As we approached Franmont, I hailed one of the many coastal cutters. The captain was eager to lend an inconspicuous skiff, via which we were conveyed towards shore. A series of small boats came alongside, one after the other, to talk in hushed tones to me before casting off again.

A pair of union carters waited at the quay. Wax, contrary as ever, eschewed the carts, preferring to walk in his gaudy and conspicuous way through the streets. Indifferent, I bade him go where he wished. The carts carried us up towards the hills to the north of the city, through the shanty area, to High Road House, a crumbling inn. It is the last place on the track along the promontory to Fyfeld Light, a derelict lighthouse.

My spies had learned a little about Felteth. He wears a white gold ring. He rarely leaves Dartness’ side, except on nights when he steals away to Fyfeld Light to join twelve newcomers who have all risen in power as swiftly as he. I informed the company of what I knew, and pointed out the two hundred yards of clear ground approaching the lighthouse, and invited proposals for how they might begin to collect information.

Wax reappeared, very late. He was intoxicated by the magic substance of some man who had bewitched him in the side-streets of Franmont. The enemy most likely knew of our presence, and what little subtlety had been contrived lay as if trampled by a childrens’ carnival.

Eli deduced that Fellteth was approaching on foot with twelve men, shortswords drawn. One wore a white gold ring. Eli saw that they were Nameless Ones.

We laid our plans.

Surma called up a storm of insects from the woods and heathland. Some were huge. His magic was strong that day. But the Nameless seemed able to endure the storm with a calm befitting of adepts.


Eli’s version:

The book about those with no true names was written by one styling himself Lord Pale, as Surma divined. I approached it with habitual caution, anticipating bewitching hexes. My process for reading dark texts written by forbidden omnipotent entities from beyond the Veil is simple. Firstly, I invoke the Light of Ulthuan, lest the air itself by touched by the darkness. Next, I bring my hands towards the book, feeling forth with the Touch of Illithor, such that contact hexes built into the fabric of the cover are triggered and contained like moths within a prison of light. These steps undertaken, I determined it was safe to open the text.

Opening the tome, the book of leather and skin parchment revealed a poem, inscribed in the festering fungal mold from the six week corpse of a holy man. So far, nothing extraordinary. The inside of the book revealed a poem. Naturally, this was laced with patterning designed to entrance and deceive, as even the most mundane of poems is wont to be. I wove the Utterance of the Literal Child to flatten the layers of the text into as simple and powerless a form as possible.

Nonetheless, this poem was powerful indeed. My lips found themselves wanting to chant the refrain, "Lord Pale saves. Lord Pale rises." It took a considerable act of will to set it aside. Happily, such a text leaves a strong imprint from former readers. It was a simple matter to invoke Delver's Indelible Patten, and by this method I divined its most recent previous reader, and his location.

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.

Goodbye to the tabletop?

There's a division among roleplayers when it comes to gaming over the internet. It's not quite as fraught as the bonkers split about mask-wearing but it seems to run deep. The other day we had a player drop out of our game. As he put it:

"The whole Zoom thing is a pain. I just don't enjoy sitting in front of the screen, trying to get a word in, moving a marker around on a map, or waiting for the referee to come back when he's got several private messages to deal with. I much prefer the snacks and drinks, the face to face interaction, and the quick 'can I have a word'. It feels more real like that somehow."

Until recently I was playing in two online RPG campaigns, one on Zoom with Roll20 for dice and maps, the other audio-only on Discord. Of course there are good and bad points. I rarely bother with a full tactical map, but in Roll20 it's harder to do a quick sketch to show where everybody is. (Do please point me at some good software for that if you know of any.) As for the Discord campaign, I loved it but we did benefit from having stripped-down rules and a brilliant referee in charge. It wouldn't work so well with a complicated game system and lots of dice rolls. Also my private gripe about Discord is that it was designed as a chatroom; players who miss having visuals will comment on the action by posting cartoons and movie stills, which runs against the immersiveness of pure audio. If there was a way to turn off that legacy feature and go full theatre of the mind it would be perfect -- at least for those of us who are radio hams in spirit.

Our disaffected player's point about snacks and drinks was interesting. I like having friends round for dinner. Also I like gaming. I don't much like mixing the two. One of the great things about gaming during lockdown was that we can jump in, play for three hours, and say goodnight. Nice and focused. No need to eat supper, stow everyone's coats and bags, clear a metric pileup of crisp packets and wine bottles off the table, and so on. Admittedly Zoom and Discord aren't so good for dinner parties but, hey, you can't have everything.

If anything the quick 'can I have a word' is much easier online. You can set up breakout rooms in both Zoom and Discord and it's easy to pop over to those for a private chat. Around a table, everybody has to get up, squeeze round, avoid tripping over other players' scattered belongings... You could waste two minutes getting into the next room just to say, 'You secretly search the body and find nothing.'

For me, the biggest advantage of online gaming is being able to play with friends who live at the other end of the country. They could hardly ever make it along to a real-life session. Avoiding salt-saturated snacks and tooth-corroding fizzy drinks is just a bonus. So I'm in no hurry to get back to physical games. But what do you think? Screen or table?

Open the box

Red Ruin Publishing have announced the launch of a new Dragon Warriors fanzine, The Casket of Fays. You can get the first issue free and here's hoping it's the first of many. 

I've had a glimpse under the lid of issue #2, which includes a delectably creepy reimagining of one of the very first magic items I ever invented -- pre-DW, that is.

Did I mention it's free? Get over there.

Stories that resonate

The film director Brian De Palma once gave a vivid description of how resonance works in storytelling. He likened different elements of the story to charged rods. When they get to just the right separation – CRACK! – you get a spark that illuminates the narrative. Too far apart and the discharge doesn’t happen. Too near and you get a closed circuit that never charges up in the first place.

One of the best uses of resonance in games is in Grim Fandango. The 1930s style of the setting allows a pseudo-Art Deco motif in the office block where the hero works, which is the headquarters of the Department of Death. Real-world Art Deco was influenced by Egyptian art, making it an excellent metaphor for the afterlife which is the setting of the game. In Grim Fandango, that Art Deco style comes with a spin, though, in that the decorative images used are not Egyptian but Aztec – which pulls us back to the origins of the Day of the Dead festival in pre-Columbian myth.

The 1930s trope also works well with Grim Fandango’s noirish private-eye slant and the slightly shabby elegance familiar to anyone who has ever visited a Mexican town like Morelia or Oaxaca. The game begins in the city of El Marrow, which looks like a sleepy burg that time has passed by. Indeed, this impression is accentuated by styling the world of the living, which the hero briefly visits, on Richard Hamilton's brashly colourful Pop Art paintings of the 1950s. (Life is to afterlife as the urban USA is to rural Mexico? That's resonance.)

Resonance can be used with varying degrees of subtlety. The least overt involves repeated images that defy instant critical analysis and so work on a very deep level. Examples of this kind of resonance – which we may call motifs – are hats in Miller's Crossing, water and the lack of it in Chinatown, and the use of discordant sounds and background noise in Touch of Evil.

More obvious are symbols that visually express the subtext. Hitchcock's thrillers often embody a sense of inevitability or danger by using shadows that seem to form a web or the bars of a cage. Orson Welles' Touch of Evil is set on the border between the USA and Mexico, and the story concerns a moral border: the grey area between the two lead characters, played by Welles and Charlton Heston. Those are more overt forms of resonance because they operate at the mind's liminal threshold.

Least subtle of all is resonance that simply swipes its whole scenario from another story or from the real world. I haven’t seen the new Picard series and know nothing about it apart from the screenshot that suggests Jean-Luc is now hanging out with Elrond. But a review mentioned that it deals with the refugees displaced by the destruction of the planet Romulus (what is it with Star Trek writers and blowing up planets?) and the notion that a less progressive administration at Starfleet is shirking their responsibility to help them.

Now, I have no quarrel with Star Trek being political. It always was; that was the whole point of it. The question here is whether it’s the kind of Roddenberrian allegorical scenario that fires us up with interesting ideas about timeless philosophical or political issues, or whether you’ll watch it and say, “Oh, so it’s a story about Trump.” The former is one of Mr De Palma’s lightning flashes: it’s alive! The latter fizzles out, its energy draining away in worthy obviousness.

I’m not sure if I’ll ever find out. There’s way too much TV these days to keep track of, and after seven seasons of TNG and Grabthar knows how many movies I don’t really feel the need for yet more Picard. But if you liked the show and can convince me it’s not from Western Union – well, okay then. Make it so.