Art & Rolemaster

Just a quick thing, but I've always preferred the art in Rolemaster to D&D. I mean, yeah, D&D, T&T, and WFRP all have cool art, and I find them all to be inspiring. But the illustrations in MERP and RM!

I mean, just look at the cover for Rolemaster in the 90s:

I mean, to me, that just yells for me to roll up some characters and go adventuring. It has danger, non-combat awesomeness, the citadel in the distance, the griffon/hippogriff/I can't remember the difference flying in the background.

Man, I think I should change my new setting to Rolemaster.... Does anyone know a good character generator? That's always been my big problem with the game...

The King in Yellow: The Great Joke of Ur-Nannu

Centuries ago, when a great war was waged between Law and Chaos, the Sorcerer Ur-Nannu, renowned for his power, went with his armies to fight the King in Yellow. After many victorious battles, Ur-Nannu's forces were finally overrun in the Skaldian Pass. Ur-Nannu was taken to the King in Yellow's fortress, were he was tortured for many years for the devastation he had unleashed upon Chaos.

Ur-Nannu eventually escaped, and swore that, in revenge for his torture, he would make a mockery of the King.

And so it was that he wrote the play, The King in Yellow, which drove all who read the second act to insanity and despair, and placed them under the power of the King in Yellow. It is considered the greatest of the King's tools.

Yet the King despises it, for it mocks him. It is a work of art, admittedly, despite it's evil, and it is a work of culture and civilisation. For this, the King in Yellow hates it.

For this, though few realise, Ur-Nannu has his revenge. Through this, he has made a mockery of the King.

New Setting

Well, I have decided to create a new setting, loosely based on the Celts, but sort of mixed with the traditional fantasy campaign. I am, however, going to be using my last post as a basis for the setting.

I have yet to create a new map, but I am just going to be doing the initial thinking first.

The initial map will be a medium-sized region, divided between several small kingdoms, with a few more independent barons and counts thrown in for good measure.

The west will be dominated by two or three kingdoms, centred around a cluster of small cities in a large bay, with heavy fighting around one main city-port. The further east you go, the wilder it becomes, being more and more dominated by Chaos.

The Chaos forces will be semi-united under the service of the King in Yellow, who has forced Madness and Insanity to do his bidding.

While Law and Chaos will not be fighting at the time, I think it is a good idea to have that card in reserve, and to make the Civilised Lands a bit less prone to war. Although there will still be fighting, the kingdoms will be trying to organise against the possibilty of war with the King in Yellow.

Religion, Alignment & Alignment Languages

Ok, just as a warning, this is sort of a stream-of-consciousness post, so I apologise before-hand if it seems a little incoherent or if it just comes off as a ramble.

Right, now that's out of the way, onto the post: I was up thinking about this last night. I had been reading Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy, which is basically a dialogue in the old Greek style. Now, this is mostly irrelevant, except for this one fact that spawned the whole post: You see, in the book, when Boethius is imprisoned, he is consoled by Philosophy in the form of a woman who discusses life, fortune, etc. with him.

So, this struck me as a sudden thought: What if, instead of worshipping the god of writing, and the goddess of magic, the people in my games worshipped Writing and Magic. I then thought, 'well, what about alignment? Do they all worship the same thing?'

After that, I decided to group the various things into Law and Chaos (you see, I tend to lean more towards B/X than other editions of D&D). But then it occured to me: What if it was the entire structure of the world?

Now, I have a feeling other people have posted about this before, but it only recently struck me.

So, with the alignments, they would be where you stand with regards to civilisation. The Lawful characters are the defenders of culture and learning, while the Chaotic characters believe in the 'beautiful savage' and other such things. This would give more of an over-arching, well, plot to the setting.

The orcs destroy libraries and murder scholars, not just because they are evil, but because they are opposed to all that they stand for. The great soldiers of the kingdom who sell their lives dearly, do so not just because they are fighting for their families, but because they believe they are fighting for something greater than themselves.

You can take this even further. Let's say there are two deities, one representing Law, and the other representing Chaos. Now, the Neutral characters are those who do not understand, know, or care about the war being raged in the heavens, nor do they care that it has spilt into the land. They will only fight the orcs to safegaurd themselves and thier families. The Lawful characters could be the educated, whether they are aristocracy, scholars, or priests, who are aware of the great battle being fought for civilisation as a whole.

The Chaotic creatures then, would just have a burning hatred of civilisation, and would serve the deity of Chaos.

This brings us to alignment languages. With this system, these could actually make sense. The Lawful language would be the equivalent of Latin or Greek, as the Lawful characters would be the educated ones, for the most part, while Chaotic could be something analogous to Celtic, having many dialects, but with someone from the South being just able to get along with someone from the North. Neutral could then just be a sort of 'trade tongue' amongst the various neutral creatures and characters, a sort of pidgin common, with bits and pieces of various languages thrown in. Most people would know enough to get along, but not really enough to carry on a proper conversation.

What do you think of this? And again, I apologise if it seems a but unclear.

Update, Take 2 or 3

Right, been a long time since I've posted on this blog, so happy new year and all that.

Onto the update: I actually do have some things to post up here eventually, and I have been playing in a WFRP 2nd edition campaign, first as an Agitator who lost his arm, then a slightly insane rat catcher who stuck trophies of everything he killed on his rat catcher's pole. Since then, I have moved onto GMing the campaign, which is quite entertaining. It's been a long time since I've done that.

Not much else to report, just did some changes to my profile (though I'm sure you're all fascinated by this.....), and, on a non-gaming note, some friends and I have just started thinking about starting a hardcore/screamo band, which, if it gets off the ground, should be fun.

I've also started to get back into writing, so this blog should see some more writing whenever I have something to put up.

Hopefully write soon!

Review: The New Death and Others

The New Death and Others is a collection of short stories and poems written by James Hutchings of the Teleleli blog and also from the Age of Fable.

The book opens straight to the contents, before jumping right in with the short story 'The God of the Poor', which, though very short, is one of my favourite stories in the book, reminding of the works of Lord Dunsany, and giving me that same sense of wonder that Dunsany's works give me.

After this story, the book goes on with a fairly good pace, containing some very atmospheric stories, such as 'Todd', to ones filled with bad puns and jokes, though, as I am a real fan of puns, I find them quite hilarious. The most humorous story is, in my opinion 'Everlasting Fire', which I actually did laugh out loud when I read it, which is incredibly rare for me.

Others contain very original material, such as 'The Scholar and the Moon', which contains such inspirational work as a city where the temperament of the people change with every full moon, and where the rooftops are not quite connected to the ground floors of the city.

I can definitely see myself stealing such ideas for use in my games, as well as a few others culled from the various stories and poems.

The poems are fairly good, with 'Under the Pyramids', based on the H.P. Lovecraft story of the same name, and 'Charon', based on the story by Lord Dunsany, standing out from the lot, being quite well written, as well as very atmospheric.

The titular story,' The New Death', though amusing, I would not say is the best story in the collection, although the title I find incredibly inspiring, and may think of something to throw at players based on it....

The presentation of the book is fairly good, with all the hyper-links (I think that's what they're called) working very well. The layout on the pdf is good, with the stories and poems seperated from each other by a nice little divider. There are a few minor problems with the layout, such as the title of a story being right at the bottom of the page, and a few stanzas of the poems being broken up by the pages. These, however, are fairly minor problems, and do not really detract from the work as a whole.

I would definitely recommend buying this book if you either:
1. are looking for a some decent fantasy stories and poems, both humorous and otherwise, or are
2. looking for some inspirational work for gaming materials, or
3. if you are a fan of fantasy and horror works, especially the works of H.P. Lovecraft.

For its small price of $1 USD, this book is a steal, and I highly recommend it.

Deities and the Underworld

This post will probably be fairly short, but the topic has been on my mind recently. So, first of all: Deities.

Now, deities in a game should be more than just a bunch of Roman, Greek and Norse gods that have been put straight into the setting, and no more of the cliches, such as the barbaric god of war, and the nice goddess of healing who requires that none of her followers take another life.

Let's look at the Greek god of healing, Apollo. So, he was the god of the sun and of healing. All good so far, a bit disjointed, maybe, but it is all fine. But, despite being the god of healing, he was not a nice god, as such. My older brother, who is a fanatic of Greek and Latin texts, once sent me a Greek poem (I believe), where the poet first praised Apollo for his might, and then talked about how much he feared him, as Apollo actually meant 'the destroyer' in Greek, related to such words as apocalypse. The Greeks saw him as such because, if he had the power to restore life, then he clearly had the power to take it away as well.

Another example of a more fleshed out deity is the Akkadian goddess Ishtar, the goddess of war and sex. At first, these two domains seem quite unrelated, yet they are: To the Akkadians, it was related in the creation of life through sex, and the violent and quick end through battle. Sort of related. So try to spice up the deities in whatever game you happen to be playing like that.

Now, underworld. I am just going to use the Akkadian underworld as an example for how much better underworlds can be, far more than just another fire-and-brimstone hell, and flowers-and-happiness heaven place.

I would put up a passage from the Epic of Gilgamesh, where Enkidu has a dream and sees the underworld, but I cannot be bothered finding the book, so I shall just give a brief description:

The Akkadians called their underworld the House of Darkness, and, indeed, it was always shrouded in shadow, where the souls of the dead lived, their rank amongst the dead being determined by how many sons they had, with the man with seven sons sitting amongst the demi-gods.

The souls only ate clay and dust, and always thirsted for water, but their is only one well in the centre of the underworld, and they could only ever get small amounts. The ruler of the underworld was the goddess Erishkigal, or something similar, who was constantly mourning the loss of her son, pulling out her hair, tearing her clothes, and raking her flesh with her nails. As she did this, her scribe (whose name escapes me at the moment) was reading out the name of every mortal, where and when they would be born, and how and when they would die.

That is what I call a very thematic underworld (from a game point of view. If that's the afterlife you believed in, I think you would get very depressed). Try to use these to spice up a game a bit more, as it just makes it a whole lot more interesting!