And Now....A Wolf-Man On A Motorcycle

More specifically, it’s a criminal lycanthrope--member of a rather unusual gang in circa 1913 Los Angeles--astride a 1911 Indian Motorcycle.

I offer this in lieu of the digression I was planning on my preparation for this weekend’s impending game session. I’ll save that for a post-game report.

The art is by the very talented Diego Candia.  It's a panel from a digital comic I wrote and created which hopefully will be appearing as a download for a new application for a very popular device. I say "hopefully," as all the details aren’t ironed out, as yet. Anyway, the story is called Hell-Bent: Infamous Monsters, and features freelance troubleshooter Sam McCord, and his “floating gang” of specialists, versus the aforementioned criminal enterprise.

Though this is the first Hell-Bent story completed, it wasn’t the first conceived. In trying to come up with a second entry for Zuda Comics (and maybe influenced by the research I’d done in making up my character for a sort of magic realism Boot Hill game I was playing in), I conceived a horror/action/Western story, set in Mexico during the Revolution of 1913. Sort of The Wild Bunch or The Professionals meets Army of Darkness, maybe.  That story still languishes, after a couple of artists, and a number of other set-backs.

But the eight pages of Infamous Monsters--which I wrote almost a year ago--have been penciled, inked, and colored, and are being lettered as I write this.  And that’s pretty cool.

Sword & Sorcery Heroes in the Bronze Age [Part 2]

This is the second part of an article originally written for my friend Jim's Flashback Universe Blog. It's part of a series called Bronze Age Spotlight.  This particular piece examines the S&S characters adapted to comics in the so-called Bronze Age, this time, those from DC Comics, in the main.

In regard to Part 1, I'm indebted to Marty Halpern of More Red Ink who pointed out an error: Effinger's When Gravity Fails was nominated for a Hugo and a Nebula, but unfortunately won neither.  The post was corrected accordingly, and in doing so I caught a few typos and cut-paste malfunctions which have also been corrected.  Dammit Jim,  I'm a Doctor not a word processor!

Hopefully, I'll be closer to error-free today...


DC's Sword & Sorcery: “TWO SOUGHT ADVENTURE”

“At least we have something in common!—we’re all three crooks!”

- Catwoman (to Fafhrd and Gray Mouser) Wonder Woman #202 (1972)

Perhaps it was because DC didn’t have the works of Robert E. Howard to fall back on, or maybe it was a reluctance to delve into this sort of material, but for whatever reason, they didn’t adapt as many literary sword and sorcery characters as Marvel.

When they did, at least they got two for the price of one—Fritz Leiber’s sword and sorcery duo, Fafhrd and Gray Mouser.

Fafhrd and Gray Mouser’s prose debut was in Unknown in “the Year of the Behemoth, the Month of the Hedgehog, the Day of the Toad”—well, in story, at least. In our world we may reckon that as August 1939. Leiber chronicled the twain’s adventures off and on from that story until 1988’s “The Mouser Goes Below”—a longer span than the entire life of Robert E. Howard. Fafhrd was a Northern barbarian from Cold Corner, and Gray Mouser was a thief and one-time sorcerer’s apprentice from the urban South. They met in decadent Lankhmar, “City of the Seven Score Thousand Smokes,” and became lifelong friends and companions in (mis)adventure.

When Fafhrd and Gray Mouser came to comics, they did so in an unlikely place. They first appeared on the last panel of Wonder Woman #201, during her powerless, kung-fu-fighting, Diana Prince era. Issue 202 has them teaming up with Wonder Woman, her sifu I-Ching, and Catwoman, to thwart a wizard and save Jonny Double who’s trapped inside a mystic gem. In the words of Bart Simpson: “You can’t make this stuff up!”

The issue was written by New Wave science fiction luminary, Samuel Delany. Highlights include Fafhrd backhanding Diana, and Mouser and Catwoman having a totem-appropriate face-off, before they all decide to join forces. This all serves as a “backdoor pilot” for the twain’s run in the bimonthly Sword of Sorcery series premiering in 1973. It only ran for five issues, but featured original stories and adaptations, most scripted by Denny O’Neil (except for one by George Alec Effinger), and featuring art by Howard Chaykin, Walter Simonson, and Jim Starlin.

Fafhrd and Gray Mouser vanished from DC at the cancellation of Sword of Sorcery. The two were next sighted at a different company in a 1991 Epic limited series which reunited them with Howard Chaykin, who scripted adaptations of Leiber’s tales. All issues featured evocative art by Mike Mignola.

“Let teachers and priests and philosophers brood over questions of reality and illusion. I know this: if life is illusion, then I am no less an illusion and being thus, the illusion is real to me. I live, I burn with life, I love, I slay, and am content."

- Conan “Queen of the Black Coast” Robert E. Howard

Sword and Sorcery comics did good business in the Bronze Age, both with licensed characters, and original creations like Arak, Dagar, Wulf, Claw, Ironjaw, and the Warlord. It was a true Golden Age for comic book sword-swinging!

Today, Robert E. Howard properties are still appearing in comics, mostly from Dark Horse.  So far they've given us two successive Conan series and various limited series, a Kull series, and a Solomon Kane limited series. Image has given us a line inspired by some of Frank Frazetta’s great sword and sorcery-themed paintings. Marvel and DC, on the other hand, have concentrated on the mainstream superheroes that are their bread and butter; most of their sword and sorcery creations stalk only the back issue bins.  True, we have gotten a Showcase Presents: Warlord, but that's about it.

These things go in cycles, surely. Maybe one of these days will see Karl Edward Wagner’s Kane, Charles Saunders' Imaro, or perhaps the outré exploits of Michael Shea’s Nifft the Lean, realized on the comics page.

Sword & Sorcery Heroes in the Bronze Age [Part 1]

This is an article originally written for my friend Jim's Flashback Universe Blog.  It's part of a series called Bronze Age Spotlight.  This particular piece examines the S&S characters adapted to comics in the so-called Bronze Age.  I thought it was relevant here and worth repeating...

"Know, O Prince, that between the years when the oceans drank Atlantis and the gleaming cities, and the years of the rise of the sons of Aryas, there was an age undreamed of, when shining kingdoms lay spread across the world like blue mantles beneath the stars…Hither came Conan the Cimmerian, black-haired, sullen-eyed, sword in hand, a thief, a reaver, a slayer, with gigantic melancholies and gigantic mirth, to tread the jeweled thrones of the Earth under his sandaled feet."
- The Nemedian Chronicles (Robert E. Howard, “The Phoenix in the Sword”)


In 1970, Conan came to Marvel comics, and by some reckoning, brought the whole of the Bronze Age with him. In the years that followed, other swordsman and thieves and various treaders of bejeweled thrones, would follow on Conan’s sandaled heels. They would be visitors from another time—another world—in more ways than one. The four-color world of superheroes would collide with the realm of Sword & Sorcery, a literary sub-genre born in what Lin Carter called “the sleazy, gaudy, glorious golden age of the pulps.”

So come with us now, back to the Bronze Age, where--in the Roy Thomas penned words of Conan the Barbarian #1—“A man's life is worth no more than the strength of his sword-arm!”


Marvel's Swords & Sorcery: “THE MOST SAVAGE HEROES OF ALL!”

Kull
Robert E. Howard’s Conan was the first literary sword and sorcery character to make it into comics, but he wasn’t the first sword and sorcery character. Conan made his debut in the December 1932 issue of Weird Tales in a story titled “The Phoenix on the Sword.” This story takes place late in Conan’s life, when he’s king of Aquilonia. It seems a strange place to begin chronicling the barbarian wanderer’s adventures, given the distinct lack of wandering and the decreased levels of barbarism, but this beginning seems to have come by accident. Conan debuted in a story Howard rewrote from a story he had been unable to sell featuring an entirely different character. The original story was “By This Axe I Rule!” and the original hero was Kull. It was Kull, debuting in Weird Tales August 1929 with “The Shadow Kingdom,” who is often considered the first sword and sorcery hero.

Only two Kull stories were published during Howard’s lifetime, though others have made it into print in collections since. Like Conan, Kull’s a barbarian that winds up winning a kingdom. Unlike Conan, the majority of Kull’s adventures deal with his life after becoming king, and mainly center around how heavy the head is that wears the crown. Kull’s a more philosophical and introspective character than Conan—which may explain why he’s never been as popular.

He’s a (relative) latecomer to comics, too. He first appeared in 1971 in Marvel’s Kull the Conqueror, then a succession of two more short lived series of that same title from 1971 to 1985. He also starred in a short-lived, black and white magazine Kull and the Barbarians (which sounds like a gothabilly band, doesn’t it?) in 1975, and made some crossover appearances with Conan in Savage Sword of Conan. After years of quiet repose, King Kull loosed his blade again, this time for Dark Horse, beginning in 2008.

You just can’t keep a good barbarian down.

Thongor
Not only wasn’t Conan the first sword and sorcery character, he almost wasn’t the first to make the leap to comics. Roy Thomas, tasked by Martin Goodman with bringing sword and sorcery to Marvel, had assumed Conan would be too expensive. As he relates in his essay in The Chronicles of Conan Volume One (Dark Horse), he had initially pursued the first sword and sorcery character he had gotten into—Lin Carter’s Thongor of Lemuria.

The Thongor novels were a canny attempt by serial pasticher Lin Carter to combine two of his passions in one. To wit: Thongor--Northern Barbarian (remember Cimmerians? Like them) who adventured in a pseudo-prehistoric milieu (the Hyborian—uh, Lemurian Age) but one which included city-states, airships, and invented flora and fauna (like Barsoom, or Amtor, or—well, you get the idea). In other words, they were Conan if written by Burroughs, or Howard doing planetary romance (which he actually did once, but that’s another story). Thongor swung his first sword in The Wizard of Lemuria (1965).

Roy Thomas and Stan Lee figured the younger, less established Carter would cut a deal for less. And apparently, Stan thought “Thongor” sounded more “comic book”—and he has a point.

Such was not to be. Due to the vagaries of negotiation, Conan came through, and Thongor would sit on the sidelines until March 1973 with Creatures on the Loose #23, where he would begin flexing mighty thews and generally behaving in a Conan-esque manner. Ravenhaired Thongor became a red-head after a couple of appearances, perhaps to distance him visually from his barbaric forebearer. Only, presumably, his hair-dresser knows for sure. Thongor battled monsters and foul sorcery until Creatures on the Loose #29 (1974), when he lost the book to Man-Wolf. Several of his appearances were written by George Alec Effinger, whose 1986 cyberpunk novel, When Gravity Fails,  was nominated for both the Hugo and Nebula awards. Gardner Fox, with a long history of comics work and sword and sorcery (with his barbarian, Kothar) would work on the run as well.

Thongor is obscure today, but he had shining moment of popularity (apparently) in the seventies. Lin Carter relates in Imaginary Worlds, that a Thongor musical was in the offing, though I’m unsure if it was ever actually performed. A Lin Carter website tells of a Thongor movie in production that was reported in Starlog #15, apparently from the same cinematic titans that brought us the Doug McClure (and Caroline Munro!) vehicle The Land that Time Forgot.

Elric
L. Sprague De Camp, pasticher-in-chief, and his aide—uh—de camp, Lin Carter, had been adapting Howard’s non-Conan yarns into Conan stories to feed the maw of the Lancer Conan paperback series. Thomas had copied that approach in the comics, but expanded it to the adaptation of even non-Howard stories into Conan stories. In March 1972, he’d port over another character into Conan’s world—aided and abetted by that character’s creator. The two-part story beginning in Conan #14 (“A Sword Called Stormbringer!”) adapted the original thin, white duke, Elric of Melnibone, in the Mighty Marvel Manner. Conan and Elric team up against Xiombarg, the Queen of Chaos, burrowed from the Chronicles of Corum, another of Moorcock’s fantasy series.

Elric, albino prince and sort of anti-Conan armed with the don’t-call-it-a-phallic-symbol sword Stormbringer, is the creation of Michael Moorcock, and first appeared in literary form in the 1961 novella, “The Dreaming City.” His story continues to this day, the most recent novel having been published in 2005.

This Marvel Team-Up-esque two-parter wasn’t Elric’s only foray into comics. French artist Philippe Druillet of Metal Hurlant fame, produced an unauthorized Elric graphic novel in the late sixties. Later, the “Dreaming City” was adapted as a Marvel (Epic) graphic novel by P. Craig Russell and Roy Thomas. Since the end of the Bronze Age, Elric has periodically raised his runesword in comics from First, Dark Horse, and DC.

Brak
One of the writers who provide more Conan comics material was John Jakes. Before he became forever linked with Patrick Swayze (at least in my mind) by the TV movie adaptation of his 80’s best-seller historical saga, Jakes wrote some Conan-inspired tales of sword-swinging adventure. His barbarian hero was blonde with a braided ponytail, named Brak. Brak first appeared in “Devils in the Walls” in the May 1963 issue of Fantastic. He went on to star in a series of novels beginning in 1968 with Brak the Barbarian. In 1982, Jakes’ second successful historical fiction series, North and South began, and Brak has been seen no more.

Jakes first foray into comics was without his creation. He wrote the plot that became Conan the Barbarian #13, “Web of the Spider-God” (January 1972). Exactly a year later, Brak debuted in the second issue of the horror anthology Chamber of Chills. This story was reprinted in the black and white Savage Tales (vol. 1) #4 (July, 1974), whose cover promised “THE MOST SAVAGE HEROES OF ALL.” Brak went on to do battle with the minions of evil, god-thing Yob-Haggoth, in his quest to reach Khurdisan the Golden and the high life, for just two more stories in Savage Tales (issues 7 and 8) before disappearing into the mists of Bronze Age legendry. Brak never even got a cover appearance, most of those having been hogged by Ka-Zar.

Next time, we'll take a look at Sword & Sorcery as adapted by DC.

The Rock Cried Out: Dwarvish Origins

I'm probably not the first to notice that Todd Lockwood's rendering of the dwarf in the 3e Player's Handbook illustration of the PC races looks rather anthropoid.  It's proportions seem realistic--like the dwarf is a non-sapiens homonid rather than some fantasy creation, or just a stumpy human.

That got me to thinking about how to add a twist to dwarves in my campaign world. 

I thought about Arthur Machen's idea of an aboriginal race getting pushed out by later cultures, and becoming the source of legends of elves and faerie folk, as put forth in The Novel of the Black Seal, and borrowed by Robert E. Howard in several yarns.  That brought to mind a real relative of humanity maybe driven to extinction by our ancestors.  A group of short, stocky folk, dwelling in caves (in the popular imagination), and from northern climes--Neanderthals...

"Living in caves from the start, these aborigines had retreated farther and farther into the caverns of the hills..."

- Robert E. Howard, "People of the Dark" (1932)

This is a tale told by the dzarduk, the dwarves of Arn, in their great and hidden halls beneath the fells:

This is our oldest tale. A tale from before we counted time. This is the tale of how we became Dzarduk...

It was an Age of Winter and the People (who were not yet the Dzarduk) still lived above the ground. They worked only flint, and did not know the secrets of metal. They hunted great beasts of the forest and the tundra for their meat and for their skins.

It was a hard life, but the People were hard as well. They survived.

That was until the Tall Folk came.  They were not as strong, nor as hardy as the People, but they were more cunning in the use of tools, and they bred in greater numbers. The Tall Folk gradually forced the People from their ancestral hunting grounds. They drove them into the highlands and to the edge of the great ice.

It is likely that there the People would have died, but for the dreaming.

A young shaman had a dream of a star fallen from the heavens into the deep mountains long ago. From within the star, a voice beckoned. It promised safety to the People if they could find its resting place.

Older shamans felt the power of the dreaming, but disagreed on its interpretation. They called on the spirits for guidance, but got no answer. All the People met in council. Many thought it foolish to go further into the mountains, into the realm of ice. Others felt it offered their only chance of survival.

Debate went on far into the night, and when it was over, the People were sundered, each band going where it would. Those that chose not to follow the young shaman's dream were lost, and are no more.

The rest travelled many months in the mountains, through ice and snow. They fought great beasts, and remnants of elder races. Many of the People died.

When they finally came upon the valley where the star had fell, they knew it to be a place of great magic. The star, though broken and half buried, was a wonder--it was made of metal, though the People had no word for that substance yet. When they came close, all could here the voice inside, beckoning.

Many became afraid, and would not approach. The young shaman and a few brave hunters went inside the star. They beheld strange things that they could scarce describe. There were dead beings like men, some of them made of the shining stone, like the star itself.

As they stood inside the star, the shaman called out to the voice of its spirit: "You called and we have come. We beg shelter."

"Shelter I will give you," the spirit responded, "but not without a price. I have waited long for someone to answer my summons. I journeyed far to come here, so far I have forgotten much.  My people have died. Some on the voyage, some in our final fall. I have been damaged. There is no one to tend me."

"We will be your people," the shaman said. "Our old gods have forsaken us, or past on. We will tend you, and serve."

The shaman was then caught in a piercing light, and the hunters--brave though they were-- became afraid they had angered the spirit of the star, and it would kill them all. Then the spirit said:

"If you are to be my people, you must change. You are not yet suitable to my purposes. If you will serve, I will make you wiser than any other people in artifice and the working of metal. But you must be warriors as well as craftsman. I will make you stronger, and cunning in war.  That is the only way that we will endure."

The shaman didn't understand all the words the spirit spoke, but it knew truly that this was the only way the People would survive. He took the spirit's words back to the People. Many were afraid, but solemnly they accepted the offer.

The spirit revealed to the People the sheltered cave entrance that part of the star hid.  It showed them how they might find food in it's stores.

Around the fires they built that first night, the People told this story. The story of how we became Dzarduk, the people that were forged.

Reel Adventure Seeds

Inspiration is where you find it. 

Here are a few adventure seeds, side quests--what have you--riffed off of films which might not neccessarily scream "adventure fodder."  Throw 'em in your sandbox and see what your player's do with 'em.

Mild SPOILERS follow, if you haven't seen the films. 

"What happened to her eyes?"

Quarantined by fearful authorities in a sprawling but isolated keep, the players combat an outbreak of a strange contagion which turns its victims into raving undead.

"Men like tempered steel.  Tough breed.  Men who learn to endure."

The PCs are hired by a nobleman to rescue his wife who has supposedly been kidnapped by a half-orc bandit chieftain, and taken to his wilderness stronghold.  As the mission unfolds, the PCs find that everything may not be as simple as they've been told.

"Ghost or not, I'll split you in two."

In a rural fiefdom, people live in fear of a monster which strikes without warning, killing people and livestock.  The PCs are hired to find the mysterious beast.  The hunt isn't easy as it appears, as powerful conspiracies fester, and the monster attacks may only be part of a larger, sinister plan.

"There ain't nothing sacred about a hole in the ground or the man that's in it.  Or you. Or me."

The PCs hear that a nobleman is offering a hefty reward for anyone who brings him the head of the scoundrel who got his daughter with child.  A little investigation reveals the scoundrel is already dead and buried, which ought to make acquiring his head easy...Except that the grave's in hostile territory and other bounty-hunters are on the trail.

"ribbit."

A PC excitedly brings an old box he found in the corner of a dungeon to the rest of the party.  It contains an ordinary appearing frog.  The PC relates that the frog told him that it's actually a Slaad potentate imprisoned on this plane, and cursed to this form.  If the PCs aid its return to its home plane, it promises them vast riches as reward.  This is what the frog's discoverer assures the others.  The frog or Slaad, however, never speaks to anyone but the character who found it...

Interlude in a Galaxy Far, Far, Away

Stopping the traditional fantasy train to stretch my legs at the science fantasy station...

I've been working my way through The Clone Wars: Season One on blu-ray.  While notably a kid's show in some ways (every episode starts with a moral, for instance) it is, in some ways, more complex and thoughtful than the prequel films.

Anyway, some half-formed observations about Star Wars' ubiquitous droids have been nagging at me for sometime.  Watching an episode the other day, and seeing those bird-headed (and brained) battle droids not only make poor tactical decisions, but do so due to over-confidence, it finally crystallized for me.

The humanoid species of the galaxy programmed these droids?  I think not.

Follow me here: I can buy that people might program artificial intelligences that make bad decisions--maybe that's just an unavoidable sequelae of having that level of AI.  But AI that are arrogant, boneheaded, dishonest, or overconfident?  That seems unlikely.  Yes, AIs like this do show up in science fiction, but they're typically unique entites, not armies of fretting domestics and slow-on-the-uptake battlebots.  I mean, if that was just the inevitable downside to sapient droids, then I think people would just choose to do without them.  Seems like they're more trouble than they're worth a lot of the time. 

So how does one explain the evidence before us in the canon--the fact that pain-in-the-ass droids are found all over the galaxy?

My theory is that the humanoid races don't actual make droids.  Those droid-foundries on Genosis are apocryphal.  I think droids are machine-life enslaved by the biologic sapients of the galaxy. 

I don't really envision Walrus Man or Snaggletooth out on slaving runs (though Jabba's treatment of Oola the Dancing Girl, and Watto's ownership of the Skywalkers might suggest that I'm being naive).  I think maybe certain fringe biologic races or perhaps other droids, sell the droids to galactic society.  These droids aren't manufactured in the sense of being designed by teams of engineers and rolled out of factories, but instead droids are self-replicating.  They "reproduce" in some way (not likely sexual, despite what your thinking), and the resultant neonate intelligences go through some sort of growth/maturation process.  This allows for their (many) personality quirks. 

I don't know if droids "evolved" naturally--I doubt it.  Probably they were initially created by a long-vanished precursor race, or by the transcendent AIs that succeeded a precursor race.  Since that time droids have been undergoing evolution, changing in ways that have made them as complicated and flawed as any biologic sapients.

So the slavery thing...Well, apparently galactic society is just hugely bio-chauvinist.  The bio-sapients are just culturally incapable of viewing droids as anything but machines.

I know this won't fit well with everyone's version of the "Star Wars Universe."  There are also probably some details from the films I haven't addressed.  But I find the nuance this adds to the universe compelling. 

All this speculation is making me consider an unconventional Star Wars campaign sometime in the future...

Ascension

“I feel myself becoming a god."

- Titus Flavius Vespasianus ,79 CE

One the fundamental features of D&D is that character’s become tougher and more powerful—often extraordinarily so—as they become more experienced, i.e. “level up” as the kids say. This has never really been addressed “in game-world” that I’m aware of except, in a way, in Mentzer’s so-called BECMI edition of D&D. Here the “endgame” became achieving godhood. I think this is an idea with a lot of potential—and a lot of potential to give “in world” context to other rules elements.  I’ve utilized to that end in the world of Arn. I don’t envision it as something to form the primary focus of the game (it won’t be the endgame of every campaign—or any, necessarily), but more as something to fill out the background. The major inspirations are the BECMI metagame plus some transhuman/posthuman space opera (particularly David Zindell’s A Requiem for Homo Sapiens trilogy with its “vastened” gods). Since first starting to play with this idea, I’ve discovered Erikson’s Malazan series contains the similar idea of heroes “bootstrapping” themselves into deities, so you might want to check them out as well.


The following is from a treatise by Mnaurmon Lloigor, a renowned scholar and historian, late of Thystara:

It is one of the fundamental features of the universe that mortals may by great deeds come to be invested with capabilities and perceptions superhuman, making them as gods. Such beings are known as “ascended.” Theologians argue this point with thaumaturgic and natural philosophers but have yet to articulate a compelling argument that the supernal objects of human worship are in anyway demonstrably different from ascended beings. In fact, some deities have emerged in historic times by this very process—noble Ahzuran, the patron of the Empire, among them!

How mankind acquired the knowledge of ascension is lost to prehistory. We certainly can trace it to the ancient Empire of the Godmakers, for whom ascension apparently formed a central cultural rite. Perhaps the Godmakers stole this knowledge, or were given it under apprenticeship to some nonhuman elder race. Some have suggested that it was the older, true gods, from whom it was stolen. Or perhaps it was they who carelessly bequeathed it to man.

From where ever it came, we know something of what that knowledge wrought. The Godmakers’ civilization soared to heights mankind has never achieved since, and numerous god-like beings—Immortals—arose.  These godlings made war with superhuman armies and reality-searing weapons against the last redoubts of the elder races, and fell abstractions from the noumenal planes, and finally, against each other.

Then they succumbed to strange fall, and their civilization was gone.

The Godmakers left us no written record (beyond perhaps some indecipherable monumental text), but fragments of their knowledge has been delivered to us through the hands of earlier ages, and the sometimes suspect memories of long-lived, extraplanar entities. Secrets were preserved in hidden places, in some cases by oral tradition, in others by arcane means.

And then there are the subterranean labyrinths constructed, or invoked, apparently to be the crucible of apotheosis—and persisting to tempt the brave or foolish to this day. The purpose of these structures, however, was not immediately recognizable. Other sources were less cryptic and less dangerous.

It was the young conqueror Azuranthus, known to us now as Ahzuran, who became the first man in millennia to claim these secrets from an ancient order of mystics, and ascend, becoming both emperor and patron deity. The knowledge of ascension became part of the teaching of the imperial cult, spread to all parts of the empire.

God-Emperor Ahzuran eventually chose to move beyond this plane. With strife between old faiths and new, political tensions in far-flung provinces, and the machinations of the nascent ascended which had followed in Ahzuran’s wake, the empire could not hold without its patron.

In the period of turmoil that followed, the class of professional adventurers emerged. Foremost, they were interested in finding wealth amid the ancient ruins, or even just looting the treasure troves of  Ahzuran's empire. Over time, however, skillful (and lucky) adventurers began to discover that the dungeons provided a path to ascension. This knowledge became widespread as the empire's successor states began to coalesce.

To this day, adventurers continue pursue the legacy of the Godmakers and of Ahzuran. They dream of temporal power and riches, but also of the chance of godhood. Perhaps some even think on Ahzuran’s last, cryptic pronouncements, wherein he hinted of levels of attainment beyond the ranks of the ascended, and suggested there was even greater power to be won in realms beyond human perception, for those audacious enough to seize it.