Back in February, when Trey posted his nice Forgotten Heroes of Sword and Sorcery, I somehow reimagined the singular article as a new series of posts and quickly promised to contribute something the series.
Trey was quick to bring to my attention that the article was not a new series, but was simply a standalone post. Still, that didn't keep him from accepting my offer to contribute to this site. So, I present today a sequel to a post that didn't really need one: an examination of another Forgotten Hero of Sword and Sorcery – Dar elLan Martak, the champion of Robert E. Vardeman's Cenotaph Road series.
March 2010 marks the 27th anniversary of Robert E. Vardeman’s Cenotaph Road – not necessarily the type of anniversary one makes note of typically. You can either call me early to the 30th anniversary or late to the 25th, but be that as it may, the first book in the series was originally published in March 1983, so there you go.
Prior to the Cenotaph Road, Vardeman’s main claim to fame was that he was co-author on the War of Powers series with Victor Milan. While I can’t really tell you how will War of Powers series sold, it seems it’s modest success during what many consider a lean time in the Fantasy genre, coupled with a resurgence of interest in the genre was a enough to convince publisher Ace to green light a series of books on which Vardeman would be the sole author. In total the Cenotaph Road series runs over five novel , and Vardeman used the series to revisit two characters he had first presented in a short story called "The Mating Web" in the Offutt-edited Swords Against Darkness III back in 1978. These characters were the previously mentioned Dar, a sort of reckless ranger type of character and a huge 12-foot spider named Krek.
While this pairing of adventurer and giant spider had been seen before in the pages of Piers Anthony’s Castle Roogna, Vardeman’s original short story presenting the idea predates Castle Roogna by a good five years. Interestingly enough, the hero in Castle Roogna is named Dor. Make of that what you will.
"The Mating Web" was not the only story Vardeman reused in the making of the first Cenotaph Road novel, as chapters one and two were appropriated from a short story called "The Road to Living Death" that appeared in Shadows Of in 1982. As one might suspect, the weaving together of old short stories into the larger framework of a novel was not entirely successful, with the first two chapters introducing characters and information that seem unnecessary at best and incongruous at worst.
At its best, the book had the light breezy feel of an author exploring concepts he had long thought about over years of crafting short stories. Once one gets past the haphazard first two chapters wherein the hero's paramour and sister are raped and killed in different circumstances, the story slowly starts to find its true tone, which is a sort of cross between the Robert Asprin Myth Adventures series and the Dragon Knight novels of Gordon Dickson, with maybe a little of the driving pace one might see in the works of Jack L. Chalker. The primary plot of the first books is a bit simplistic, but it belies a more intricate and insidious subplot that will unfold over the course of the series.
Why has this series never been republished? I don't think we have to look any further than the inscrutable character of Dar. While the story is told from his point of view, I’ll be damned if you ever really get to know the character. Mostly that’s because he seems to sort of just act as a plot device to move you from one scene to another rather than be a fully fleshed out character.
Early on we are told he is good natured and the local sheriff views Dar like his own son. Yet in the same chapter, it is suggested Dar is not only no stranger to violence but that he has no trouble killing his opponents. I guess the sheriff could come from a really bloodthirsty family, but the two descriptions still seem a little at odds to me.
We are also told Dar possesses unparalleled woodsman skills honed from years of experience in the woods, but within the same chapter we are told Dar was able to decipher ancient runes on crypt which have escaped interpretation by scholars for ages. Again, this seems like an unlikely pairing of character traits.
Possibly his worst sin is that Dar is just sort of boring. Despite him being the hero of the novel, you hardly care when at the end of chapter one he has been framed for murder.
I’ll be honest, if it weren’t for the promise of a giant spider that appeared on the cover, I doubt my 20 year-old self would have ever finished the series.
Fortunately, if you hang tough for another chapter, you will be rewarded when Dar resigns himself to a life traveling to distant worlds via the dimensional gateways that mystically appear at unmarked gravesites, from which series takes its name. For it is on the Cenotaph Road that Dar meets the real star of the series, Krek, the giant spider from the Egrii Mountains.
The character of Krek is just flat out awesome. Too chicken to stay and provide a meal for his mate, the monsterously huge Klawn, Krek has fled his beloved mountain home in search of adventure but throughout the series, he suffers from a bouts of guilt for having betrayed his arachnidian nature. Of all the characters in the first book, Krek feels like the best fleshed out. He is a nice combination of whiny Doctor Zachary Smith from Lost in Space and appalled Spock from Star Trek. His constant indignation at the fraility of humans and their inability to comprehend spider cultural bugaboo are the best thing in the book. He also makes for an interesting action character as all of the best battle scenes center around Krek.
On the flip side, there are times when seems like Vardeman doesn’t quite understand the enormity of Krek as a character, and because of this, some of the humor bits fall a bit flat. In one scene where in Dar is lamenting his inability to penetrate a huge fortress, he fumes when Krek finally reminds him that as a spider, he can easily scale the castle walls. Ha ha! Of course! How could he forget!
Taken as a stand alone story, the first book ends well enough, with some nice plot twists and character moments. If Vardeman’s weakness was cardboard characterizations, his strength was his well thought out plot, sense of humor and innovative ideas. As the series progresses, with the exception of some rather awkward sexual situations in the third book, it builds nicely on the character of Dar and his relationship with Krek. That the series has never been republished in some collected edition is a crime.
For while I can’t really blame you for never having heard of Dar elLan Martak, that you have never enjoyed the witticisms of Krek is a shame.
Turns out Vardeman's second Cenotaph Road novel was titled The Sorcerer's Skull! Small world.
Here's another installment of my issue by issue examination of DC Comic's Warlord, the earlier installments of which can be found here...
"Duel of the Titans"
Warlord (vol. 1) #4 (December 1976-January 1977)
Written and Illustrated by Mike Grell
Synopsis: In the palace of Thera, Deimos gloats over his captive, Tara. A guard rushes in to warn him of an attack--which a cannonball through crashing through the wall emphasizes. Morgan and his army have arrived.
Using siege equipment Morgan taught them how to build, his army is overruning the Theran forces. Deimos is pleased, however, as he's counted on Tara being bait to draw Morgan to him. Using the mysterious scrolls of blood he conjures up a giant, demonic creature. When the creature begins to turn the tide of battle, Machiste suggests retreat. Morgan instead climbs a seige tower to shoot Deimos, but the villain is using Tara as a shield, so he shoots the strange device from which the demon materialized. The demon dissipates as the device shatters. Morgan uses the self-destruct device from his plane, set off by a shot from his pistol, to blow open Thera's gates. Morgan's army takes the city, and Morgan cuts through all who oppose him to get to Deimos.
He finds his nemesis attempting to flee with Tara still captive. Desperate, Deimos challenges Morgan to a duel for his freedom. Over Tara's objections, Morgan agrees. Morgan has them fight in darkness, and Deimos draws first blood, but Morgan's fury carries the day, and he kills Deimos with one blow. The tyrant slain, Tara and Morgan plan to return to Shamballah, but Morgan urges his army to continue the fight for freedom. Ignored by the victors, the tome known as the scrolls of blood lies next to Deimos' body. Its cover reveals it to be the technical manual for a solid hologram projector.
Things to Notice:
- The deity Deimos served as high priest was the sun god.
- Deimos has apparently read Dante's Divine Comedy, or either he (and Dante) have actually been to the gates of hell.
- Despite the Skartarians having weapons suggestive of at least a Medieval European level of technology, they've never invented siege equipment dating from several centuries BCE in the outer world.
- Again Morgan foils Deimos' plans with a well-placed bullet through a technological device.
Where It Comes From:
This issue's title likely comes from the American title of a 1961 sword and sandal film (Italian title: Romolo e Remo) directed by Sergio Corbucci and starring Steve Reeves and Gordon Scott. Corbucci is better known for his Spaghetti Westerns, with Django (1966) probably being the most famous. Reeves is best known as Hercules in Italian sword and sandal films, while Scott played Tarzan in five films and three episodes of an aborted TV series.
Deimos' quote ("Abandon all hope, ye who enter here") is a common translation of the Italian phrase " Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intrate," which is the inscription over the gates of Hell in the Inferno section of Dante Alighieri's fourteenth-century epic poem, The Divine Comedy.
Deimos' use of the scrolls of blood demonstrates Clarke's Third Law: "a sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." Apparent magic actually turning out to be ancient technology is a common pulp fiction trope.
Uncertainty in the wake of a tsunami. The vague feeling persists that the party has missed something (and they have). When in doubt, seek out Magical Orders for answers. Renin’s prophetic dream is better appreciated post-disaster. Riches fallen from the sky are on everyone’s mind—but how to get to them? A ship is needed, but in a devastated port, none are available. Old enemies in the criminal underworld are approached, and agreements struck, but sea transport isn’t one of them. A detour to haggle with a magic-monger proves fruitful. On the other hand, smuggler kingpins are busy men and difficult to contact through strangely-accented intermediaries. A chance encounter offers a ship for hire within the week, and reveals the troubling history of the destination.
Sunday's installment of our Warriors & Warlocks campaign, freely adapted from Paizo's The Second Darkness, featured the usual cast: Zarac the acquisitive veteran, Renin the psionicist with the troubling dream, and Brother Gannon the thief in monk's clothes. Apearances were made by the half-elf mage Samyrantha Bel-Tanis, their friend in the Esoteric Order of the Cryptograhers, and their enemy, crime boss Clegg Haddo, who's now their business partner in the gambling house they "inherited." The party's new employer was introduced: merchant speculator Tavrem Kalus.
This session revealed one of the problems inherent in the the whole "adventure path" thing. The player's missed out on a major story reveal at the end of the first module, which was no big deal there--advice was even give on how to handle that--but module two begins with assumption that the player's got all the pertinent information from the last one, and offers no alternatives. It wasn't terribly difficult to work around--after all, the total of modules I've gamemastered in my whole career being somewhere short of ten, I'm used to making stuff up--but it seems an oversight.
So left in the limbo between the official end of the last module, and the vague beginnings of this one, the player's got a little time in the "sandbox" of the city of Raedelsport, which I worried might bore them, but apparently didn't.
Despite the over a month gap since we last gamed, the player's are actually beginning to remember stuff about the city's locations and personalities (or at least getting better at remembering where to find them in their notes). Everyone seems to be having a good time, though the two more novice players (one of them just started playing with this campaign) are a little tentative at times.
And we've finally arrived at a system to ensure the economic burden of the traditional game pizza order is shared fair and equitably by habitual cash carriers and non-carriers alike, so there's that.
"Well, it was as I was sayin', sirs. Me and Ninefinger Nev had been hired to help this crew--out-of-towners, but experienced-like--for this smallish delve. Easy break and grab, it seemed.
And so it were. At first.
Their lockpicker was at work on a couple of Thystaran strongboxes, when a scout--Northern feller, Hrarn, was it?--comes back from checking down-tunnel a peice, pale as a corpse. 'Fore he can get a word out, it comes floatin' in. Never seen one before, but I heard plenty, and knew it for what it was soon as I saw it.
It comes in slow, unhurried-like--floaty--like its riding a gentle breeze, only of course there ain't no breeze and never would you get one big enough to move a monstrosity like that, anyhow. It's eyestalks are moving all about like its lost something and can't find it, and its one big eye is jerkin' and twitchin'. By the gods, sirs, it looked like it was nervous! Or maybe, paranoid might be more the like.
Anyways, it floats in bold as you please--unconcerned--paying us no nevermind, really. And its lips are moving like its talkin' to itself! Mumblin'. Couldn't make out no words, but it was like it was off in its own world.
Then, the captain calls for the mage, and that sound seems to snap the beast to. Its big eye focuses and the little ones quit squirmin'. The thing starts laughin'--gigglin'-like--high-pitched and crazy. Then there's witch-fire 'round the eyestalks, and a cracklin' sound, and I dove for cover behind those strongboxes. And not a moment too soon.
I had my head covered, so I saw no more, but the screamin' started right quick..."
- Transcript of interview with Hout Gedry, conducted by Tuvo brek Amblesh, Magister of the Library of Tharkad-Keln.
 "Exterminate, annihilate, DESTROY!!!"
- Doctor Who, "The Power of the Daleks" (1966)
By the standards of most intelligent beings, the creatures known as beholders are insane. They hold a hatred beyond reason of all non-beholder life, and spend their time either in gleeful murder and destruction, or in deep reverie, fantasizing about future horrors they might commit. A multiverse cleansed of every other living thing is their fondest wish.
Other beholders are not free from their violent proclivities, either. They hold strict and capricious ideas of racial and intellectual purity, which may lead them to turn on each either with little provocation. This leads to perhaps justifiable paranoia that any other beholder they may encounter is a would-be assassin. Only occasionally will a beholder emerge with the force of personality, intellect, and brute strength necessary to gain the temporary loyalty of others of its kind.
Beholders worship no deities. They refuse to acknowledge any power greater than themselves. The destruction of a vulnerable godling is one of the few tasks that have brought beholders together in the past. When confronted by higher order beings they may either become sullen and passive aggressive, or unreasoningly violent, and effectively suicidal.
Discussion of the biology of these beings is largely fruitless as their physiologies don't conform to terrene physical requirements. They don't appear to have organs in the usual sense, and sages believe that their substance my extend partially into other dimensions. Some have made the case that their peculiar mental processes may be a result of this.
Beholders have never been seen to reproduce. Some scholars hold that they propagate by budding, though admittedly with no evidence for this assertion other that some vague notion that their inner workings resemble animalcules writ large. Others theorize that they do not reproduce at all, and so there are only a finite number of beholders in existence.
If true, that perhaps provides a sort of twisted reason for their behavior. Unable to countenance lesser beings going on when their great race fails, they strive to bring an end to everything.
For myself, and I suspect many others of my generation, a interest in fantasy was formed long before discovering Howard, Tolkien, or Leiber. Comic books played a part, but a lot of it was born in the ritual of Saturday morning cartoons. Before the rise of anime, before cartoons were slick, 30 minute commercials (even the toy tie-ins), there were a number of cheaply animated, sketchly plotted works of fantasy that captured our imaginations.
The first and maybe of the best of these was Thundarr the Barbarian. Airing originally on ABC from October 1980 to September 1982, Thundarr told the story of the titular barbarian in his battle against evil in a world 3000 years post-cataclysm--"a world of savagery, super-science, and sorcery"--as the narrator told us. Thundarr relies on his strength, his almost insane recklessness, and his lightsaber-esque sunsword to combat bizaare Jack Kirby designed wizards with nonsensical plans of pure evil. He also hung out with a sorceress, Ariel, and the humanoid, Ookla the Mok. Thundarr gets a lot of love of on the internet, and justifiably so. It's like Kamandi plus Conan with all the slow parts taken out for short child-like attention spans.
In 1981, Filmation brought Blackstar to CBS. Blackstar had a sort of sword and planet thing going. It was the story of astronaut John Blackstar who gets sucked through a black hole and spit out into "an ancient alien universe." Stranded on the apparently rather sparsely populated planet Sagar. He pulls on a fur skirt, jumps astride a winged, dragon horse, and swings the crystalline starsword in the fight for freedom. Fighting for freedom against the Overlord turns out mostly to entail hanging with the comic relief Trobbits--who are best described as part Seven Dwarfs and part Keebler Elves--and waiting for danger to find him. The cheap animation on Blackstar made Thundarr look like a Disney feature film, and the plots were thinner, if that's possible, but the exotic creatures and situations did have an appeal if you were 8 years old, which I was. Still, Blackstar only lasted one season.
Filmation struck again with a similar concept, He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, in 1983. Masters of the Universe was, of course, a pre-existing toy line, but Filmation made some changes or additions for their animated version--which included adding a secret identity and making it generally more superheroish than the Donald Glut penned mini-comics that had originally described a more barbaric (dare I say, Thundarrish?) world. I was ambivalent about the changes as a kid, and my resentment has only grown over the years due to the relatively greater popularity of the cartoon with its pink-vested Prince Adam and comic relief Orko.
That same year--the same month, in fact--CBS gave us Dungeons & Dragons. TSR and Marvel Productions conspired to bring this to the small screen. It featured a group of kids transported to a fantasyland by one hell of a roller coaster ride (I assume their parents sued the amusement park). They promptly gained the accouterments and abilities of various D&D classes, a cryptic Yoda-esque mentor, and an evil nemesis. Tiamat appeared quite a lot, too, which was cool. I would suspect the cartoon helped get kids into gaming, but I've never met anyone that identified it as their gateway into the hobby, so I can't be sure. I know it influenced some of the adventures and early characters of my friends and myself, though.
There's kind of a lull in fantasy cartoons for the next few years until Visionaries, which was a toy tie-in and was in the era when that really began to matter. It was syndicated (like He-Man had been) and came on Sunday mornings not Saturdays in my market. Visionaries had an interesting backstory, though. It took place on an advanced world, where the age of magic suddenly returned and technology failed. As one would expect in such a situation, people immediately get divied up into heroic and villainous knights and start acting into a pseudo-Arthurian manner.
The era's last flourish was in 1991 with Pirates of Darkwater. Too old for Saturday Morning kids TV (well, at least until college restored that ritual), I missed out on it when it originally aired, but have since come to appreciate it. The story was a seafaring, fantasy adventure on an alien world. A young prince sets out to save his kingdom from an intelligent (and evil) liquid ("Dark Water") which was trying to tke over the planet. Pirates was clever in its use of alien exclaimations (and possibly expletives) mixed into its dialogue. It's really too bad it hasn't had a DVD release.
In the age before there were whole channels devoted to kids' programming, and before network Saturday mornings were given over to tweener programming and kid reality shows, gems like these--even the ones of lesser value--were things to be treasured. I can't claim they were of higher quality than what has come after--indeed, in many cases I'd agree they come up short in that regard--but there was a crazy inventiveness to some that slicker productions seem to have lost.
In the vein of my previous post on movie inspired adventure seeds, I thought I'd turn to the small screen, and see what sort of fantasy rpg adventure fodder might be found in episodes of Star Trek The Original Series.
SPOILERS follow if you haven't seen the forty year-old TV series...
"The Cage"
The Plot: The Enterprise crew follow a distress signal to Talos IV, but find that they've been duped by telepathic aliens who take Captain Pike captive.
The Adventure: Make the distress call a village seeking aid, replace the Talosians with Mind-Flayers, and put the whole thing in a dungeon. Easy.
"Shore Leave"
The Plot: Captain Kirk orders shore leave for the Enterprise crew on a seemingly uninhabited planet. The landing parties begin to see strange sights drawn from their thoughts--including a White Rabbit, samurai, Don Juan, and people from their past.
The Adventure: An island that's basically a thought-responsive amusement park for a long vanished race, is exactly the sort of thing Gary Gygax would've put in an adventure.
"Mirror, Mirror"
The Plot: A transporter accident sends Kirk and companions to a parallel universe, where the Federation is a barbaric empire, and everyone has an "evil" counterpart.
The Adventure: Evil duplicates of the party (or maybe good ones?) running around sullying their good (bad) names, or competing with them would add an interesting wrinkle to any campaign.
"I, Mudd"
The Plot: The Enterprise is commandeered by an impostor crewman who takes it to an uncharted planet. There the crew find the con man, Harry Mudd, who has set himself up as the king of the planet of androids.
The Adventure: A lost city full of androids (or magical simulacra, if you like) who desperately want to serve--and protect adventurers from their dangerous lifestyle--certainly has humorous possibilities.
"The Way to Eden"
The Plot: The Enterprise is hijacked by a criminal scientist and his space hippie followers who are looking for a paradise planet.
The Adventure: Well...uh...hippies...umm--elves, maybe? Yeah, I got nothing here. Sorry.
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