Tales of Blood and Glory: The Murthe by Jack Vance

I tend to prefer short-stories to full-length novels. Maybe I just have a short attention span, or maybe it really is a more focused medium. In any case, here's a short story I recently read, and maybe this post will become a series...

The Murthe is the first story in Jack Vance's Dying Earth novel Rhialto the Marvelous.

The story opens filled with intricate detail and Vance's best flowery prose. The book's eccentric namesake, the wizard Rhialto, sits

at breakfast in the east cupola of his manse Falu. On this particular morning the old sun rose behind a curtain of frosty haze, to cast a wan and poignant light across Low Meadow.

But despite the peaceful surroundings, all is not well. Rhialto is repeatedly disturbed by subtleties in the local flora and fauna and therefore instructs his servant in the extravagant techno-babel of a Dying Earth wizard:

"Ladanque, I will be strolling the forest for a period. Take care that Vat Five retains its roil. If you wish, you may distill the contents of the large blue alembic into a stoppered flask. Use a low heat and avoid breating the vapor; it will bring a purulent rash to your face."

"Very well, sir. What of the clevenger?"

"Pay it no heed. Do not approach the cage. Remember, its talk of both virgins and wealth is illusory; I doubt if it knows the meaning of either term."

"Just so, sir."

Ultimately, Rhialto's walk does not go smoothly and things go from bad to worse when all but one of his Wizard colleagues fall into the clutches of the legendary "White Witch Llorio". Rihalto and Ildefonse team up with a mysterious time-traveling Wizard named Lehuster in a desperate attempt to thwart Llorio's plans and save their colleagues.

In the end, the warring Wizards are reduced to spectators to a much greater struggle between two archetypal forces of Elemental Male and Female. Vance's skill as a stylist is really felt at this point, as Rihalto and Ildefonse's decadent speech contrasts wildly with the regal, poetic tones of Calanctus and Llorio. This makes Llorio's climactic lament all the more powerful.

"Hope?" cried Llorio. "When the world is done and I have been thwarted? What remains? Nothing. Neither hope nor honour nor anguish nor pain! All is gone! Ashes blow across the desert. All has been lost, or forgotten; the best and dearest are gone. Who are these creatures who stand here so foolishly? Ildefonse? Rhialto? Vapid ghosts, moving with round mouths! Hope! Nothing remains. All is gone, all is done; even death is in the past."

Set in a post-apocalyptic fantasy setting, Vance's Dying Earth stories often carry this theme of lost greatness. A master of prose, Vance expresses this here with the contrast between the rich, Byzantine descriptions in beginning of the story and the classical overtones of the finale. Indeed, the reader feels the loss viscerally, the decadence of the Dying Earth and how all of mankind's greatest triumphs have waned to naught in the planet's twilight years.

Used Book Shopping Cart

I recently received a couple crates from my parents' storage, containing my old book collection from High School and various other doodads. So I made my first trip to the used book store to trade-in some old books!

I brought in 7 books from The Wheel of Time series and this is what I got in return. Did I get a good deal? You be the judge :)

The Chronicles of Amber: Volume II by Robert Zelazny

I've never read any of the Amber series, but I understand that it was very influential on classic DnD. I would have liked to start with Volume I, but thus is used book shopping and beggars can't be choosers.







Foundation and Empire by Isaac Asimov
I have a weakness for Asimov short-stories. The retro robots, the (often corny) twist endings. I've never read any of his novels though, so this was an easy pick.







Beyond the Farthest Star by Burroughs
I didn't recognize the title of this one, apparently being one of Burroughs' less popular works, but I immediately recognized Frazetta's work on the cover and then saw the author. The weird space-plane leaves a bit to be desired, so apparently Frazetta later did another version of the cover with a dude with a raygun and a lion-thing, but I included the picture of the cover from the edition I have. I've only ever read A Princess of Mars so I'm interested to see how this compares.




Night World by Robert Bloch
I never heard of this, but I recognized Bloch's name from the introduction he wrote to The Best of H.P. Lovecraft: Bloodcurdling Tales of Horror and the Macabre. I see he wrote Psycho and was a member of the Lovecraft Circle so I'm curious to see if I can spot any of HPL's influence.







Hyperborea by CAS
I had just about given up finding any other books when I pulled this out from behind another book: a short story collection by one of my favorite authors! I've read plenty of his stories over at Eldritch Dark, but I've never owned any printings of them. Just goes to show: with used book shopping, persistence pays!

Local Flavor: Creating Mood in a Sandbox

flavor

One of my goals as GM is to create a mood for the setting. Published adventures often help you out with this by providing descriptive/evocative passages to read aloud, but what if I'm running my own on-the-fly sandbox-style setting? Tables like this one for Sandbox Weddings can help, but they're not very general purpose, and you can only use it once or twice in an entire campaign.

I've been playing with some of the In a Wicked Age Oracles over at Abulafia and having a lot of fun. For the uninitiated, In a Wicked Age is a story game which provides Random Sentence Generators, or Oracles, as part of it's setup. The sentences are generally quite evocative, giving a full dose of mood along with quite a few potential adventure hooks.

So here's my idea for creating mood in your RPG setting:

1. Make a table of Oracles that apply to your game setting from here
2. When the PCs arrive in a new town/landmark/hex etc. choose an Oracle at random
3. Use the first sentence or two generated by the Oracle to create your mood element

Example for Polish Resistance

For an example, I chose the following Oracles for my Polish Resistance game, which I see as having a sort of Post-Apocolyptic/Noir/Occult mood:

1. Casblanca Oracle
2. Pulp Oracle- Weird Science
3. Noir Oracle- Down These Mean Streets
4. Pulp Oracle- I Love a Mystery
5. Modern Occult
6. Demon City Blues
7. Cascadian Folklore
8. Pulp Oracle- Rip-Roaring Twenties

Now let's roll up a few examples:

Scenario 1: Party enters a small village

• Roll: 5/A violent demon passes from host to host by touch.
• GM Says: You see a few villagers peering into the front door of a small farmhouse. A young man turns around, his face pale, and vomits on the ground.

Scenario 2: Party is walking along a long forest road

• Roll: 1/A Limousine, delivering a beautifully-dressed couple to a fashionable address.
• GM Says: A fancy horse-drawn carriage passes by. Through the window you glimpse a beautifully-dressed couple.

Scenario 3: Party enters a Large Town

• Roll: 2/A gyro-jet pistol, found at the scene of a crime.
• GM Says: You overhear two Polish Policemen talking "...and then we found this!" he says, brandishing a strange chrome pistol.

Scenario 4: Party checks into an Inn

• Roll: 7: Once a Great Lake, full of voices, now a hot Desert, where the spirits meet
• GM Says: From the window in your small third-story room you can see the outskirts on the East side of town, where the forest stops abruptly and the ground slopes down into a deep bowl. Not a single tree can be seen growing in that abrupt valley.

*Note that the first and third roll also present a potential adventure hook, without shoving it down the players' throats i.e. NPC X says "I'll give you 100GP if you solve the murder".

Polish Resistance: Session 4

Session four was experimental for me in two regards:

1. It was the first Google+ hangout game I've run/participated in
2. It was the first time I've DMed with such an extensive collection of random tables in order to create a sandbox-style setting

As far as the first point, it was successful, overall. We ran a session and had some fun. We started off with character creation--I think that took longer than it would have in a face-to-face game. Once the game got started, though, it flowed quite nicely.

In-Game Summary

Andre, after losing the rest of his party in the previous session, came riding into the village of Lipnik. There, he teamed up with Shmengy, a callous resistance fighter with a KIS submachine gun and a penchant for motorcycles and grenades.

They tracked down the barn where the German half-tracks Andre had been tracking stayed the previous night. They interviewed the farmer who's barn was commandeered, but didn't speak to his wife or search the barn.

They headed South on the tail of the half-tracks, only to be attacked by a pair of zombies. These were faster and tougher then the previous batch and had to be blown up or have limbs destroyed to neutralize. Andre caught his headless-zombie in a body-lock, then stuffed a grenade down it's gullet--blowing it to pieces but badly wounding himself in the process.

Shmengy manged to wrangle their two terrified horses and bring Andre back to town where a doctor was called. After a week of regular medical attention, Andre was back on his feet.

While he was bedridden, he sent a letter to his cousin, a German intelligence officer and double agent for the resistance. He asked about the zombies and asked her to send her response to Sandiomierz, hoping to be there in a month to hear her answer. Of course, the mail will only reach there if the Germans retake the city, so he will likely need to search out her response in Opatow.

During the healing time, Shmengy kept his eye out for a motorcycle+sidecar he could steal, but he was wary while working alone and didn't attack the few German convoys that did pass by.

By the time Andre was better, the zombie problem had become common knowledge and people in town were scared. The party recruited an NPC, one Jurek Szewc, who wanted to help with the now widely known zombie threat. He is a resistance weaponsmith and he carries a homemade KIS submachinegun.

So the party left of horseback and with a pack mule, in hope of picking up the now cold trail of the German convoy. They reached the village of Kurow, finding it much like Gojcow: deserted with a chemical smell in the town square. They found a female survivor who told of the Nazis killing everyone, then shoveling some chemical substance onto them. A pair of robed people approached the bodies, but she felt such an aura of fear that she hid and didn't observe anything else. The Germans left an hour later and that night the dead walked in Kurow.

The party stocked up on lamp oil and rations from the small, abandoned general store and prepared to continue South.

Polish Resistance: Character Creation II

When I picked a subset of Cyberpunk 2020 character creation rules for my Polish Resistance games, I missed out on an important rule: Friends & Enemies. There are three reasons I skipped this one:

1. It was part of the complex Life Events step which I considered extraneous. Anyway I prefer that characters start with minimal back-story so that the player can flesh out the character during play.
2. Generating a friend/enemy required 7 dice rolls for the various tables provided, and I was looking for a simplified rule-set.
3. I came from a DnD background where no such rule exists, so I saw it as extraneous.

However there are some good reasons to add Friends and Enemies to character creation:

1. In city-based settings, the city is too complex to come up with a detailed description of the cityscape. If the GM is going to give any depth to the city, he needs to focus on just the part of the city the characters know. A Relationship Map is a good way model the social aspects of this.
2. Having players create NPCs is a good way to encourage them to contribute to the setting in an active manner. Hopefully this mindset continues during play.
3. The focus on character relationships moves the game's goals from purely combat and treasure-based to other goals. For instance gaining power, influence, and a reputation. Perhaps that's why DnD's endgame is so elusive: if the whole focus is on treasure and XP from the beginning, it's hard to suddenly transition into a mode of finding followers, a castle, etc.
   

So without further ado:

Simplified Friends & Enemies Rule

Create 1d3-1 friends and 1d3-1 enemies for your character. Each NPC should come with a name, a short description, their relationship to the PC, and where they usually can be found.

Rules-Centric vs. World-Centric Gaming

For this post, I'd like to describe two different idealized styles of play for pen & pager RPGs. The styles are also not tied to any particular rule set, although some rule sets may tend to encourage one style over the other. These styles are idealized in that most actual games being run will contain some elements from each.

Rules-Centric
In a Rules-Centric game, the focus of play is on the game rules, both the general rules as well as any module-specific rules. Much like a board game, the rules lay down the parameters for the characters' interaction with the game world and players state their actions using the vocabulary of the rules, as opposed to the vocabulary of the game world.

World-Centric
In a World-Centric game, the focus is on the game world, while the rules are just a tool for supporting play in that world. The options for character action are as limitless as the game world allows and players state their actions in the language of the game world.

The Computer Game Test
A simple test to check where a games falls out on this spectrum is to answer the question "How easily can it be translated to a computer game?" If it is Rules-Centric, then the translation is simply a matter of writing a program to enforce the rules. If it is World-Centric then the translation will be impossible, since the limitless possibilities of the gaming world cannot practically be expressed to the computer.

ImmersionPerhaps the most important difference between these two play styles is how they effect immersion. Immersion is a subjective experience, however in my experience, World-Centric play tends to be much more immersive than Rules-Centric play. This for the simple reason that focusing on the game-world, rather than on the rules pulls you deeper into that world.

In my opinion, this is one of the major arguments for the continued existence of pen & paper RPG's in the computer-age. For all the graphics, algorithms, voice acting, etc., pen and paper RPG's still have the potential to provide a more immersive experience.

Rule Completeness
There is a trend in game design to produce endless supplements and encyclopedic rule-books covering every possible situation real or imagined. Since rules define the limits of the game world, Rules-Centric games have a much greater need for these additional rules, so that a greater range of situations can be covered. World-Centric games on the other hand, are not limited by their rule-set and the GM(possibly with the help of the players) can just make up a suitable mechanic when needed, so the need for supplements is much less acute.

Mapping to GNS
GNS is a well known theory of game styles based on what players want to get out of the game.

If we had to map these styles to the GNS model, I would say that the Rules-Centric style roughly corresponds to Gamism in that much like a traditional game, the rules define the limits of the game. In this sense, the Rules-Centric style sees an RPG as a highly complex board game.

The World-Centric style is also largely Gamist, but it is a very particular kind of Gamism: Immersionist Gamism. A World-Centric game is unlike traditional games in that the goal is not winning via the rules mechanics, rather on creating an immersive experience for the players. As such, the rules take on a secondary importance.

"It's very 'gamist', but also in its own way very immersive"

Non-Banal Magic in DnD

I've been thinking about Noism's excellent post about non-banal D&D. The gist is that many of DnD's rules and systematization make otherwise interesting concepts, like monsters and magic, mundane.

DnD magic is already said to be "Vancian". Nevertheless, while reading Vance's, Dying Earth and Eyes of the Overworld, I had a few ideas how to un-banalize DnD magic:

1) Spell Rarity
No one, or at least very few magic users, still have the knowledge required to come up with new spells. Magic spells are found in written form--players don't choose a new spell when they level, and their single initial spell is determined randomly by the DM.

Non-Banal Because: This means that the magic users will need to actively seek out new spells, often times from powerful magic users who guard their knowledge carefully. Similarly, magic users will have to guard their spells carefully. Ultimately makes spells a more valuable and exotic resource.

2) Learning Spell Difficulty
Anyone who wants to memorize a spell for the first time must roll a die to see if they succeed in an hour's time. Chance of success is a function of intelligence, spellcaster level, spell level. They can retry for as many hours as they want, but the chance of success is halved each time(rounding down).

Non-Banal Because: it gives magic more flexibility and less predictability

3) Memorization Limit
The number of spells that can be memorized at one time are the same as DND rules. Characters without spellcaster levels can only memorize a single first level spell. This number can be exceeded, with a chance of going insane.

Non-Banal Because: it gives magic more flexibility and less predictability. Allows players to take chances.

4) Spell Failure
Even once the spell is memorized, there is a chance of failure when using it. This chance is also a function of intelligence, spellcaster level, spell level.

Non-Banal Because: it gives magic less predictability. Spellcasters will be more careful about how they use their spells.

6) Some spells require components.

Non-Banal Because: these spells cost more than the user's time. They may have to seek components from far/dangerous places.

7) Allure of the Unknown
DM shouldn't introduce well-known spells, or when he does, rename them something exotic.

Non-Banal Because: magic is not a closed, well-understood system