More Beautiful Development Sketches for The Great North

Tom Kilian continues to excel himself with the artwork for The Great North, now heading towards completion. As an Easter present, here is a work-in-progress image for the cover:

And for full-page chapter titles for The Place of Keepers:

The Wild Coast:

The Great Broceliande:

The Hardwater:

The Hill of Wolves:

The Emperor's Meadow:

And the Dark River Dale:

These will all be full-colour illos in the final version of the book.

After the War: Thoughts on a Campaign Style

I recently read JG Ballard's autobiography, Miracles of Life, written in 2008 when he was already dying. The fact that he must have known this lends the book a poignancy, but also a disjointedness - it obviously wasn't in his power to really dedicate himself to realising the project fully. By far the most interesting sections are at the beginning, when Ballard reflects on his time in Shanghai and his famous internment at Lunghua by the Japanese occupying forces between 1942 and 1945. And the most interesting aspect of this story is the brief account of liberation and what followed - the orgy of random violence which the Japanese soldiers inflicted as they vacated Shanghai (he recounts some brutal examples) and the subsequent American takeover of the city.

Ballard asserts, and I have no reason to dispute this, that for months and months (perhaps years) after the end of the war some Japanese troops remained in Shanghai under American leadership, performing guard duties and the like. In the general atmosphere of destruction and chaos, this strange union of former enemies appeared perfectly natural. It reminded me of a film I saw nearly twenty years ago in Japan, called Ari no Heitai or 'Ant Soldiers', which told the story of the Japanese soldiers (some 30,000 of them) who remained in China, after the Second World War had ended, as mercenaries or volunteers fighting for either the Kuomintang or the Communists in the Chinese Civil War. 

It also reminded me of the strange fate of the Japanese soldiers captured by Soviet forces in the closing weeks of the war. In Embracing Defeat, John Dower puts the figure of these soldiers at 1.6 million - but nothing like as many were ever repatriated. Some 625,000 were officially returned to Japan by the USSR, and more arrived illegally or unofficially in dribs and drabs after that, but there are still thought to be anywhere between 250,000 and 500,000 who are unaccounted for. Presumably some of these will have died or ended up in gulags, but occasionally on Japanese TV documentaries will be aired about the discovery of the descendants of such soldiers in the far-flung corners of Siberia. 

Widening the focus, there is of course the famous story of the Czechoslovak Legion, a unit of the Imperial Russian Army comprising Czech and Slovak volunteers, who found themselves stranded in Russia in 1918 when the Bolsheviks, having recently seized power, negotiated the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with Germany and ended the war. The Legion, its members desiring to travel to the Western Front to continue fighting the Central Powers, but unable to get there directly by land travelling westwards, decided to go eastwards instead and go all the way to Vladivostok, then catch a boat to France. They then became embroiled in the Russian Civil War on the side of the Whites, and at one point even participated in the seizure of the old Russian Imperial gold reserve. 

And widening it yet further to fiction, there are a few examples of books and films taking place in the immediate, and still often violent and chaotic, aftermath of a war. Gene Wolfe's Soldier of the Mist series is one of my favourite examples - the action takes place shortly after the climax of the failed invasion of Greece by Persia at Plataea in 479 BC, and the main character, Latro, it is assumed sustained his amnesia-inducing head injury during that battle. The detritus of war, and the confusion, with vast numbers of people (civilians and soldiers alike) going this way and that in search of home, whether the old home or a new one, is nicely described by Wolfe in that novel. A leftfield choice, but a very enjoyable flick, is Three Kings, in which three bored US soldiers with nothing to do at the end of the first Gulf War decide to go off on a heist and become embroiled in the general chaos and mayhem of post-war Iraq. You could probably also put Cold Mountain in this category; while I'm not sure whether the events depicted in it happen before or after the US Civil War ended, the depiction of a wandering soldier making his way home across a landscape torn and destabilised by conflict is truly compelling.

The beauty of the War Aftermath campaign mode is that it creates a landscape within which adventure and derring-do are pretty much assumed, but also that it creates the space within which a very wide breadth of choice opens up in respect of play style. The PCs might be purely self-interested rogues wandering here and there looting treasure. But they might equally be self-conscious 'good guys' trying to help the weak and unfortunate - or anything in between. 

And the generalised atmosphere of chaos and confusion can be highly conducive to creative DMing. Imagine a bucolic fantasy landscape such as the Shire in the aftermath of an invasion by an army of interlopers from the Abyss and the subsequent vanquishing of said Abyssal horde by an army of quasi-angelic high elves. What strange beings would be hidden in that landscape, wounded or hidden? What might have been left behind by way of loot by the retreating army? What wandering mercenaries, bands of prisoners and their guards, messengers and refugees would be coming and going, hurrying along or tarrying, behind the next hill or forest? What opportunities would like in store for a band of ex-soldiers now foot loose and fancy free? What would befall a group of ordinary peasants searching for a lost home or family? 

Ode on Discovering Oriental Adventures in the Used Book Giveaway Shelves at the Local Tesco

 

My life is brilliant

My love is pure

I saw a sourcebook

Of that I'm sure

It was sitting on a bookshelf

It was with some other books

And I didn't lose much money on it

'Cause it was going secondhand

You're overpowered and problematic

You're overpowered and problematic

You're overpowered and problematic, it's true

I saw your cover on an old bookcase

And I knew just what to do

'Cause I only had a copy of you on PDF

Yes it caught my eye

As I walked on by

Anyone could see from my face that I was 

Fucking overcome with the desire to roll some d20s

And I don't think that I will play it again

But I took it with me and put it in my study

You're overpowered and problematic

You're overpowered and problematic

You're overpowered and problematic, it's true

I saw your cover on an old bookcase

And I knew just what to do

'Cause I only had a copy of you on PDF

You're overpowered and problematic

You're overpowered and problematic

You're overpowered and problematic, it's true

Gary Gygax must be up there with a smile on his face

When he thought up your unnecessarily complicated rules

But it's time to face the truth

I will never play with you

Metaphysical Syphilis

Syphilis - although I understand there may be some debate about this - likely arose among North American native populations prior to European contact and was spread back to Europe (and to the rest of the world) after the Spanish first began to explore the continent.

Of course, this was far from one-way traffic: North America got off far worse by comparison with regard to the Eurasian diseases which came in their direction after first contact. (I've written about the apocalyptic consequences of this before.) But, separating the conceptual from the awfulness of the actuality for a moment, there is something compelling about the idea of explorers/adventurers being unwittingly exposed to some disease which has potentially history-defining consequences when taken back home.

Disease, though, is not a very interesting or appetising subject for a pen & paper RPG. What if instead we were to think about a metaphysical version of the phenomenon? What is metaphysical syphilis and how is it to be made gameable?

Metaphysical Syphilis: Definition and Examples

syphilis, metaphysical noun a condition of corruption, deterioration or confusion which typically accompanies transition through ontological gateways

A metaphysical syphilis would most commonly arise in the context of adventure. After the PCs have gone from the place of safety (the town, the tavern, the guild, etc.) to the place of danger (the dungeon, the wilderness, the underworld, etc.) there is a risk that they bring back with them an ontological disruptor that causes the place of safety to instead become itself dangerous, different, or discombobulated.

This could be as simple as a literal parasite (as in Alien) or a haunting (a poltergeist or somesuch which follows the PCs back home) that spreads when brought home. But there are other more creative examples in the literature.

One that springs to mind is from the Chronicles of Amber. I only recently re-read the Amber books (about 12 months ago) for literally about the fifth time, but I am now a forgetful old sausage and the exact details have already slipped from my mind - somebody will appear in the comments to tell me I am an IDIOT for getting it wrong - but the main superplot of the first five novels concerns the corruption by blood of the 'pattern' by which Amberites are able to transition between realities. This results in a 'black road' of chaos spreading across all known realities and bringing with it all kinds of ghoulies and ghastlies. This eventually comes to threaten 'home', Amber, itself. 

Another more leftfield and perhaps benign version is the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode 'Force of Nature', in which it is revealed that travelling by warp speed at too fast a speed (this was conveniently forgotten about the following week) actually causes reality itself to deteriorate. It is only a short step from there to 'causes reality itself to deteriorate and for demons to come through the gaps' (now that I think of it, this is I suppose the plot of Event Horizon), which would be a nice way to add complications to any campaign involving actual physical travel between two different planes of reality. (For example, each time one passes through a Planescape gate, there is a chance the gate loses coherence and opens a branch in a totally random other plane, creating a three-way juncture.)

Then there's magic. In MERP, it's the case that any use of magic might attract the attention of a 'shadow'. What if the use of magic may cause reality to decay in some way? Or may indeed cause magical entities to appear as byproducts? 

And, finally, there is the, if you like, biggest 'meta'-metaphysical syphilis of all, which is the PCs themselves. What are the PCs, in the end, other than syphilitic in the purest sense - travelling from one reality to another and, whichever way they go, bringing violence, magic, disruptions, and so on with them - and thereby subjecting it to fundamental change? How about that, eh?