Vancian Talislanta

I've again been pondering running Talislanta in Pelgrane Press' Dying Earth rpg. Why this particular ruleset, which just happens to be based on the work of an author who was a big influence on Talislanta (particularly when there's another Dying Earth game on the way, after all)? Well, attempting to emulate its source material, it discourages combat and killing and encourages social interaction and trickery. While this isn't the only way to approach Talislanta, it is certainly a reasonable way to do it, and one supported by the example of the picaresque travels of Tamerlin through the land in The Chronicles of Talislanta.

Also, take a look at the key ingredients of a Dying Earth adventure the GM advice identifies:

• Odd Customs
• Crafty Swindles
• Heated Protests and Presumptuous Claims
• Casual Cruelty
• Weird Magic
• Strange Vistas
• Ruined Wonders
• Exotic Food
• Foppish Apparel

I don't think all of those are essential for a good Talislanta adventure but Odd Customs, Weird Magic, Strange Vistas, and Ruined Wonders seem to me to be--and none of the others seems at all out of place.

The base level of the Dying Earth rpg is the "Cugel level" which seems to recreate the adventures of the knavish Cugel (hence the Crafty Swindles and Presumptuous Claims). The next level is that of Turjun (of Miir) and the earliest Dying Earth tales, which are a bit more standard Sword & Sorcery.  Turjun level protagonists are more competent and at least sometimes more moral, so the key adventure elements change somewhat:

Talislanta certainly leans "Turjun level" (with many an archetype based around combat), but I don't think it needs to abandon the swindles and verbal interplay of the Cugel level. My personal conception of Talislanta is that it would be best served by analogy to a Vance work that was written between the time of the early Dying Earth stories and the later ones (though Cugel's first appearance does predate it) and that's the planetary romance of the Planet of Adventure series. Tschai presents a sort of Turjun-level-esque hero, Adam Reith, in terms of competence--but he's less bloodthirsty than some other Turjun-level types--who is forced to deal with with verbose grifters at every turn and maneuver through oddball cultures.

Conceptual grounding aside, the ease of adaptation is always an issue with something like this. Completely remaking Talislanta in the Dying Earth system would daunting, even though Dying Earth is not terribly crunchy. I think though a complete adaptation might not be necessary; there may be a way to meld the sort of traditional Talislanta system with the DE mechanics, but I have only started thinking on this. Perhaps more on that in a later post.

Minaria: Muetar

 

Muetar is the largest kingdom of Minaria in land area and possessed of the largest army. Its rulers are the descendants of the Mueta horse lords who first harried the city-states of the Land of the Great Rivers, then were its foederates, until a chieftain general Oyaro (Old Meuta: Hoyaru), forced the Princes of Methluma to give him the title of Supreme General or Warlord. The word, as borrowed into the Muetarian tongue, eventually came to mean "emperor." Oyaro's line came to be the de facto rulers of the land in a military dictatorship that developed over generations into the current feudal state.

The Empire's current ruler is Herrott (Kheroth) of the Pirostar (Phiroshtar) Dynasty. sometimes called "Golden Helm" for brightly polished helmet he wears in battle. Herrott was the second son and given command of the elite guard of the Emperor, but ascended to the throne upon the death of his older brother in a riding accident. While his father's rule was occupied with internal struggles, Herrott turns his eyes toward expanding the empire, but he is cautious and not prone to rash action. He is an avid falconer as well as rider and pampers his prize animals.

Atata, his Empress, is descended form the old Oyarostar line. She has little taste for court gossip or petty intrigues and is judged as aloof and perhaps even severe by her ladies in waiting. Like all Muetarian elite she takes part in the rituals of the martial cult of Anshar (who has absorbed much of the folio and importance of the supreme god Taquamenau in the Muetarian ascendance), but supports a policy of religious tolerance in the Empire. She is an advocate for the poor and is said to use her influence to protect the more moderate clerics of Huisinga--this despite the peasant uprising blamed on radical members of the Sankari sect during the reign of Herrott's father, Maasa. 

Atata is also a patron of the arts and has even brought Ponian theater to the court of Muetar.

Hearing the Owls Hoot in the Day Time

 

Owls Hoot in the Day Time & Other Omens was the title of the 2003 collection of Manly Wade Wellman's John the Balladeer/Silver John stories from Night Shade Books. I have long been a fine of these Appalachian-centered fantasy stories (they were an influence on Weird Adventures). Recently I bought the audiobook of this collection for a work trip. I probably have read these stories in nearly 20 years so it was fun to revisit them and the narrator is just right for the material.

Wednesday Comics: DC, January 1980 (wk 2, pt 1)

My goal: read DC Comics' output from January 1980 (cover date) to Crisis! This week, I'm looking at the comics at newsstands around October 23, 1980.

Action Comics #515: Wolfman's story here is an interesting alternate history of the sort the X-Men would do a lot in the 80s (in fact, X-Men #141, "Days of Future Past" is out this same week!). We see a world where Vandal Savage is the absolute ruler and Superman is his dedicated enforcer, completely convinced of Savage's beneficence, until undercover rebel agents Lois Lane and Perry White make him see the light. The issue ends with Superman vowing to make Savage pay. It's odd seeing the very Silver Age Curt Swan drawing this sort of "modern" story.

In the Atom backup by Rozakis and Saviuk, an agent of cosmic balance named Mallo (who is drawn so mundanely and specifically, I feel like he has to be a reference to someone but I don't know who) is worried that having an Earth-1 and Earth-2 Atom without the same powers will somehow cause a problematic imbalance. So he switches the Atoms' powers, and Ray Palmer has to go through the issue just being tough and not having shrinking powers. At the end of the issue, Mallo restores Palmer's usual powers and plugs the upcoming "Whatever Happened to the Earth-Two Atom?" feature. This story is logically flawed and a bit silly, but it didn't bore me, which is a win for a backup.

Brave & the Bold #170: Burkett and Aparo bring Batman together with Nemesis, probably to try to build interest in the character who's going to return to the backup feature after this. Nemesis and Batman get to the top of the organization that killed his friend and brainwashed his brother to do the killing. It turns out Head is a guy in an iron lung. Nemesis wants to kill him, but Batman convinces him not to. Still, a dying Nazi scientist does the the job. The story has a nice moment where Batman is examining with professional admiration the quality of one of the masks Nemesis uses as a disguise.

Detective Comics #498: The Conway and Newton/Adkins main story starts out a little confusingly as it is a direct sequel to story from 1979, but they don't tell you that until a few pages in. After his last encounter with Batman, Blockbuster falls into the ocean and is presumed dead.  After washing up on a beach, he walks to Bleak Rock, West Virginia, for some reason where he gets involved in the struggle of miners against a corrupt union boss. Batman has been looking for Blockbuster to show up (perhaps a bit guilty over his death) and flies to West Virginia. He is promptly hit in the back of the head by a goon and thrown into a mine. He's found there by Blockbuster who starts to get enraged and wants to kill him. To be continued!

The backup continues the "Barbara Gordon--Murderer" storyline by Burkett, Delbo and Giella. Commissioner Gordon is back to bail Barbara out of jail and the lawyer she's friendly with agrees to represent her, but she doesn't have much time to clear her name--unless she wants to reveal that she's Batgirl. The prosecution has an invoice signed by her for the poison that killed the Congressman, so Barbara knows her administrative assistant must be in on it. She visits her as Batgirl, and the woman admits the part she played, but she didn't want Barbara to go to jail, only to leverage Commissioner Gordon into letting her brother out of jail. She now knows she was duped. Before Barbara can do anything with this information, thugs bust in, and she in knocked out in the ensuing fight. This continues to be a decent storyline.

Green Lantern #136: There's a lot going on in this Wolfman/Staton yarn. Trying to find out what happened to Carol Ferris, Green Lantern and Tom seek out Bruce Gordon who was at Ferris Aircraft the day of the bombing. Bruce Gordon is Eclipso, though, so a fight breaks out that leads to the collapse of the building. As GL flies to save Tom, he is transported away to a future Earth under siege by the Gordanians. The time jump has left him without his memory. The Space Ranger breaks him out of the hospital to enlist his further aid against the invaders. They manage to find a green lantern in an old weapon cache, so Jordan can recharge. Unfortunately, the Gordanians defeat them all and take them captive. While (well, not really since she's in the past, but you know what I mean) all this is going on, Carol is being hunted Most Dangerous Game-style.

Unsurprisingly, the Adam Strange backup by Sutton and Rodriguez is less interesting than the main feature. There's a sort of planetary Olympics going on on Rann. Strange is competing, but the contests keep getting won by the same stranger in suspicious circumstances. Strange figures out the guy is somehow solar powered and confronts him. It turns out he's a shape-shifted alien who for some reason thinks he will conquer Rann by winning the contest, but when Adam Strange defeats him in one on one combat his species gives up the attempted conquest.

House of Mystery #288: The "cover story" hear is a riff on "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" by DeMatteis and Speigle. A skeleton in a top hat playing a bone flute shows up in an idyllic town once a year to lead away some mentally challenged townsperson. A young man is determined to get his friend back and tracks the Piper to a cave where he is torturing the man he took away. The Piper shows the young hero the River of Souls, where the dark elements of human nature are held--and kept away from the town--so long as they give up one innocent soul a year to be tortured and corrupted by the Piper. Our hero attacks the Piper to free his friend, then the River of Souls is released. The town begins to destroy itself in a frenzy of concentrated badness. Our hero's uncle joins him and the former victim in leaving town. He explains as they go that he had once confronted the Piper over the hero's father but had been too frightened to do anything after seeing the River.

The other stories aren't as good. Barr and Jodloman deliver a short story about a big game hunter shooting a guide in an argument over shooting an endanger wolf, but then it turns out the guide is a werewolf. "Blood in Sand" is a weird story by Gwyon and Redondo about a young matador who wants to win enough to pay the rent on his mother's grave, but his girl's unhappy with the dangerousness of his chosen profession. She's also being pursued by the wealth bull breeder. An old wise woman warns the matador that the next bull he fights will not be as normal bulls, but doesn't quite believe her. In the arena though, he realizes his rival's spirit is somehow guiding the bull. He manages to kill it but dies in the process. No one pays the rent on his mom's grave or his grave, Cain helpfully informs us. The last story by Kanigher and Cruz  is a tale of doomed love and jealous in an Irish fishing community, and is the sort of bland stuff I expect from Ghosts.

Unknown Solider #247: Haney and Ayers and Tlaloc have the Solider infiltrating the Warsaw Ghetto to get information from a Jewish scientist whose "gas diffusion" work will aid the development of the atomic bomb. The old man is dying, but he will only give up the information if the Soldier takes his granddaughter out of the Ghetto. They are on their way out, but they're captured by Jewish resistance fighters who at first thinks the Soldier is a Nazi spy, but won't let them go even after they find out otherwise, fearing that under torture the girl would give away their hiding place. One of the fighters helps them escape into the sewers for the promise of a lot of money, but a German patrol nabs them. The cowardly fighter turns traitor, but the Solider stuffs a cyanide pill in the guy's mouth! He and the girl get away, hiding in a wagon of corpses being removed from the ghetto. Outside, they are again caught by German troops, but the Soldier fakes a heart attack to grab a soldier's rifle. With help from the resistance fighters on the walls, they kill the squad, and he the girl make good their escape. 

Kanigher and Mandrake follow that up with a tale of ancient Greece. After the Battle of  Thermopylae,  a brave shepherd boy kills a Persian commander. The coda remarks that the Persians are now called Iranians and suggests the possibility that their "fanatical leader" might fall to a single blow from a defiant boy. The last story by Burkett and Ayers/Celardo continues the travails of the "Ruptured Duck" from last issue, where the old, worn out plane keeps somehow saving folks' lives--and still breaking down a lot. Part one seemed kind of pointless and part two definitely was.

Dark Sun: The Bandits of the Crimson Oasis

The last two sessions of our Forbidden Lands Dark Sun campaign saw the party (now having made the acquaintance of the dune peddler Egon the Honest) taking yet another job from the dwarf merchant Urum ath Wo. Urum believes he has reliable information regarding the rumored treasure of the merchant prince Darom Madar said to be hidden in the remote Canyon of Golothlay.

Urum plans to do this deal separate from his work for House Zawir, hoping to strike out on his own. Egon negotiates the party not just decent pay, but a share in future profits.

The arrangements made, the small caravan heads out for the Silver Springs Oasis with the party acting as guards and scouts. At Silver Springs they plan to palaver with Chief Toramundi of the Silver Hands, the elven tribe that holds the Springs. Urum believes he has specific knowledge of the desert that might be helpful.

Along the way, they avoid an erupting swam of baazrag, and notice a halfling spying on them. Eowen the Elf tracks the halfling back to a small oasis, but finds whoever was there has already left. Fearing an attack, she heads back to the caravan, but is waylaid by the halfling. She kills the halfling, but hears that a fight has begun in the arroyo the canyon the caravan was passing through. 

The others are set upon by a dwarf ornamented like a sun priest, and three human bandits. After a short battle, the dwarf and one of the humans are dead. The other two surrender. Looting the bodies, they take studded leather armor and find a pouch with two potion fruit.

Putting some distance between themselves and the canyon, they decide to stop for the the night and make camp.

The Sword & Sorcery Paperback Renaissance

 Likely touched off by the success of the Lancer (and Ace) Conan paperbacks, the '70s was a Golden Age of Sword & Sorcery paperback fiction. Okay, most weren't that good, admittedly--but there was stuff like Karl Edward Wagner's Kane, Charles Saunders' Imaro, and a number of works by Tanith Lee that were good, just to name a few. Also, even books that weren't all that great were often graced with Frazetta covers.

These gradually disappeared in the 80s. Sword & Sorcery was a genre born in short fiction, and while perhaps workable in slimmer novels, the multi-volume, thick fantasy series was ill-suited to telling tales of wandering swordsmen or rogues. The small press magazines that published this sort of fiction were already rare and soon disappeared entirely.

Amazon and ebooks have provided an avenue for the genre's return in something resembling its 70s glory. A number of small presses (and self-publishers) put out this sort of material with suitable, throwback covers. I confess to not having read many (well, any) of these volumes yet, though I do have a couple on my list. What's more exciting, though, is some new collections of stuff I already like.

Sorcery Against Caesar: The Complete Simon of Gitta Short Stories collects all of Richard Tierney's Sword & Sorcery tales of his version of Simon Magus of New Testament fame. He mostly fights Lovecraftian menaces cloaked in pseudo-historic references. Chaosium had a collection a couple of decades ago, but there's wasn't complete.

Charles Saunders has passed on, but his Imaro novels are back in print, and then there's Nyumbani Tales, a collection of non-Imaro stories in the same setting.

Westernesse

While traveling some for work, I listened to Vance's Suldrun's Garden as an audiobook. It gave me an idea for a setting:

Westernesse (the historical place, not the one in Tolkien's legendarium) is first mentioned by that name in the 13th Century chivalric romance, King Horn, though there is little truth of the place in that work. The Greeks knew the isles by many names: the Hesperides and the Fortunate Isles chief among them. The unusual apples, tended by priestesses of such power they were believed by the Greeks to be goddesses, were known to the Celts as well. The Irish spoke of their source as Emain Ablach. Geoffrey of Monmouth would call it Insula Avallonis and noted that Arthur's half-sister Morgan was one of nine sisters who ruled there, though Geoffrey's information is a distorted echo of past political arrangements, not the status quo of the 12th Century.

Homer knew it as Scheria or Phaeacia. The Phaeacians were perhaps the isles' original inhabitants, besides the fairy, and were themselves of part fairy ancestry. They would later be called elves, and perhaps still later be mistaken for extraterrestrials, if what is said about the abilities of Phaeacian ships is to be credited.

Greek, Celtic, and Phoenician peoples and religions found the islands at some point and left their mark. Brendan of Clonfert introduced Christianity to them, though only heretical forms chased out of Europe have ever had any real purchase, and they always existed side by side with paganism in a pragmatic pluralism.

Merlin is said to be entombed there, somewhere in the ancient forest of Broceliande, home to fairy creatures and prehistoric animals long extinct elsewhere in the world--though there were persistent accounts of encounters with a living, and mad Merlin in those woods. A certain Duke of Milan was shipwrecked on a smaller island of the archipelago and managed to make of himself a great wizard with the aid of a trove of Merlin's lore.

What became of these wondrous islands in the mid-Atlantic? Certainly they appear on some old maps, though their multitude of names make their identification uncertain and their placement on these charts often fanciful. Irish legends of Hy-Brasil (yet another name for Westernesse) suggests that they are cloaked in a strange mist save for one day every seven years. Stories of the Bermuda Triangle (not the islands location most likely, but not far off either) are full of strange appearances and disappearances. Eventually, like so many other Phantom Islands, Westernesse was merely dropped from the map entirely.