Urban Decadence Made Easy

There are a lot great urban settings in fiction--Lankhmar, Shadizar the Wicked, Valkis, the Sprawl, and New Crobuzon, to name a few. As evocative as they are, these dens of iniquity pale against other colorful cities, made all the more interesting because they were real. Lankhmar never had prostitutes that advertised the particular fetish services they offered by various color combinations of boots and lacing, nor does even New Crobuzon sport boy-gangs with costumes like the Indian Chief in the Village People. Weimar Berlin had both. Want a place where adventurers roam streets run by crime-lords with sobriquets like Big Ears Du and Pock-Marked Huang? Look no further than 1930s Shanghai.

These two cities and more are found in two nonfiction resources, which will no doubt inspire in number of details for gaming cities and adventures to have, therein:

1920s Berlin is detailed in all its decadent, cabaret glory in Voluptuous Panic by Mel Gordon. Essentially an R-rated coffee table book (for people with R-rated coffee tables, I suppose) Gordon provides a lot of interesting text, too. He gives, for example, brief dictionaries of underworld slang, and a catalog of types of prostitutes (divided by indoor and outdoor) that's halfway to random encounter table. The focus is mostly on sex, but the expanded edition also has a chapter on the occult underground of the era.

Legendary Sin Cities is the DVD collection of a three-part, 2005 Canadian Broadcasting Corporation documentary. It lacks the detail of Voluptuous Panic, but makes up for it in scope. The three segments cover Paris, Berlin, and Shanghai, roughly over the 1920s and '30s. All three cities were, of course, drenched in vice, but each has its own character--Paris is jazz and art, Berlin is the last party in the looming shadow of Nazism, and Shanghai is a a crime-ridden cultural crossroads. At 210 minutes, the whole series is pretty short but enough to get a feel for the cities it profiles.

There are any number of ways either of these resources could be used to inform gaming. The context and character of the cities could be ported over to a fantasy world with only a little translation, or details could be yanked to add color to an already existing locale, or as a springboard for an adventure.

Regardless of their considerable inspirational value, they're fascinating windows into some interesting places and times.

The Marsh God

The Marsh God is a Sword & Sorcery graphic novel written by Bruce Durham and illustrated by Michael "Mikos" Mikolajczyk.  It's the story of the mercenary, Dalacroy, who's the sole-survivor of an ambush.  In making his way through the marsh, he picks up an escaped slave-girl as a companion, and they soon find themselves facing the sort of dangers that Sword & Sorcery protagonists are called upon to face, including the titular god.

When a friend sent me the link to the graphic novel, I didn't realize untl I began reading the sample that it was an adaption of Durham's short-story I'd read way back in the late, lamented Flashing Swords e-zine, when it was under the editorship of Howard Jones, now of Black Gate Magazine.  "The Marsh God" appeared in issue 2 (one of my humble efforts, "God of the Catacombs," appeared in issue 6--there were a number of "gods" and "marshes" in Flashing Swords).

"The Marsh God" is classic Sword & Sorcery in a Howard-esque vein--no big deviations from the formula, but it does what it does well.  Mikolajczyk's art stumbles at times, but when he's on he's got a nice style more illustratorly than most current comic book artists--somewhat reminiscent of Barry Windsor-Smith in his Conan days.  He obviously put a lot of work into the panels.

If the above sounds good to you, you should check it out.  I recommend it.

Warlord Wednesday: The Secret of Skartaris

Let's enter the lost world with another installment of my issue by issue examination of DC Comic's Warlord, the earlier installments of which can be found here...

"The Secret of Skartaris"
Warlord (vol. 1) #5 (February-March 1977)

Written and Illustrated by Mike Grell

Synopsis: Morgan and Tara bid farewell to Machiste, and head out for Shamballah with other homeward bound former freedom-fighters. An encounter with a tyrannosaurus forces Morgan and Tara to climb a cliff in hopes of escape. They manage to dislodge a boulder, which crushes the carnosaur, and in the process, they discover a hidden doorway.


Inside, they find a massive computer which, when accidentally activated, reveals the history of Skartarian civilization. Before the sinking of Atlantis, many fled the impending disaster, and one expedition finding its way through the arctic to the entrance to Skartaris. There the Atlanteans built a new civilization, which in time surpassed their previous one, due to eternal daylight unchaining them from sleep/wake cycles based on the sun.

Unfortunately, the city-states they built went to war. In only minutes, their civilization was in ruins. Generations later, the Skartarians began to climb back to "various stages of barbarism," but there also emerged bestial humanoids that had been mutated by lingering radiation. The computer discovered by Morgan and Tara had remained dormant until Deimos' use of the hologram apparatus had activated it.

Further explorations are cut short by the sudden attack of a pack of hyenadons. The animals are dispatched, and the melee leads to the accidental discovery of another tunnel--this one containing a train or shuttle. Morgan theorizes that it once connected all the Atlantean city-states and wants to investigate, but Tara is afraid. Morgan steps inside the train and the door shuts behind him. Neither he or Tara can open it.

The train pulls away, and Morgan is knocked unconscious. When he awakens, the shuttle has reached his destination. He stumbles out...into moonlight. Travis Morgan has returned to the outer earth!
Things to Notice:

• Machiste makes a sly hint as to his fame in Kiro.  This will be dealt with in future issues.
• The Atlantean computer has apparently been recording history since the fall of the civilization that built it, and making a nice documentary on it--for whom?
• Like a lot of pulp heroes, Morgan is easily knocked out, but never has any lasting neurologic damage.

Where It Comes From:

In a way, this issue marks the end to the first "book" of Travis Morgan's saga. Warlord, at least at first, is an adventure narrative following very much in the footsteps of the works of Edgar Rice Burroughs. The usual plot outline, as established in A Princess of Mars, has a hero from our world meeting a princess from the fantastic world where he now finds himself, losing her, then regaining her after overcoming the villain(s). Just as their about to settle down as a happy couple, circumstances contrive to take the hero back to our world, separating him from his love. Burroughs uses this outline again in the first Pellucidar novel, At the Earth's Core. It's repeated in heavily Burroughs-inspired works like Warriors of Mars and Tarnsman of Gor, too.

The next "book" on the Burroughs map will have the hero returning, probably meeting new companions, and questing to find his lost love again. Which is exactly what happens in Warlord.

Returning to the details of this issue, the design of the Atlantean computer center seems to be inspired by some classic film and TV science fiction. Some of the details in the first panel echo the set design of Star Trek: The Original Series and Forbidden Planet. The computer core on page 8 seems an homage to this scene from Forbidden Planet:

The fall of Atlantean society and the degeneration of some of its descendants in non-human forms, echo themes found in pulp fiction, but also common to the post-apocalyptic genre in films (the Planet of the Apes films, Teenage Cave Man), and comics (Mighty Samson).

The dog-like animals that attack Tara and Morgan are referred to as hyaenadons. Grell is correct in dating them, as animals in the hyenadon family were extant from the late eocene. However, he suggests that they were the ancestors of wolves, which is incorrect. Hyaenadons belong to an extinct order of mammals known as creodonts.

Scum and Villainy

"She had to remind herself that he was not much more evil than most evil men."

- Fritz Leiber, "The Cloud of Hate"

Here's a hand full of villains involved in criminal enterprise from the streets of Terminus, last outpost of the fallen Thystaran empire, in the south of the continent of Arn:

Pnathfrem Lloigor: Vintner and boss of dives on the east of the city, between the River Fflish and Lion Street. He’s immensely fat, and balding, but also a dandy, given to dressing in ostentatious silks and gaudy jewelry. His high-pitched voice leads to rumor that he is a eunuch, but it’s an affectation. He enjoys putting off visitors of both sexes with leering glances, and suggestive quotes from his extensive collection of Zycanthine erotic literature.  Physically weak but shrewd, Lloigor might have long ago been displaced, except that he has a cousin in the Thaumaturgists Guild who has been known to come to his aid.

Sodmos Jasp: Bald, jaundiced, and skeletally-thin but for a pot-belly, he suffers from a metabolic malady no doubt caused by alchemical experimentation. He owns fourteen brothels and six pleasure dens on the west side, south of the river and north of Courtesan Street. His hated enemy to the east is Pnathfrem Lloigor. He made his start as a back-alley alchemist, and still carries on a side business selling cheap poisons, noxious contraceptives, and dubious aphrodisiacs. He is protected from enemies real and imagined by his dear, deadly, Saatha.

Saatha: An Amazonian woman in a silken veil and little else. The greenish tint to her skin and the vertical slits of her pupils in her jade eyes suggest otherwise. She wields twin, ornate scimitars which look like they're made of bronze, but are not. Their swift and deadly in her hands. It has been said that she is from a distance world--the Place of the Blood Red Sun, and that she has been bound to the service of Jasp. That's what rumors say. Saatha never speaks.

Tyrus Vaanth: Prominent slaver, and sophisticate. He's well-dressed, cruelly handsome--and just cruel. But never should it be said that he's impolite--unless one's at the end of his rapier. He's called "Whitehands" after the pristine white gloves he habitually wears. He fears contagion and sickness of all kinds. In times of stress he holds a perfumed cloth over his mouth to ward off miasmas. He seldom goes anywhere without his personal physicker, Doctor Panggiss.

Elrood Panggiss: Serves Tyrus Vaanth as both physicker and torturer. He's accent is foreign, but vague. He's rumored to be exiled from the court of some foreign potentate for unspecified crimes. His usually rigid and controlled demeanor hides a heart of sadist. He's addicted to analeptic zauphur which he carries in a silver snuff-box. His use of the stimulant feeds his growing paranoia, and fuels his cold depravity.  He's as proficient with a dagger (always envemoned with an exotic and efficient poison) as he is with scalpel, but considers it beneath him to use it except in direst need.

Handsome Sclaug: Half-ogre enforcer whose scarred visage is the opposite of his nickname.  He made a name for himself as a pit-fighter, but gave that up for for a more lucrative career working for various crime bosses.  He disdains weapons, preferring to use his ham-sized fists, augmented by (perhaps ensorcelled) cesti.  He does talk much, but is said to a pleasant singing voice.

The Gnoll Truth, or, Yeenoghu Looks Like a Lady

Maybe OD&D gnolls were a cross between trolls and gnomes, but the gnolls that have entered the collective gaming unconscious are the anthropomorphic hyenas from AD&D.

It's not a big leap to think that hyena-like qualities should therefore inform gnolls' characteristics. It's been done to varying degrees before, starting back in Roger Moore's article in Dragon #63. I've never seen anyone work through all the implications of this, though. Certainly, it doesn't seem that's anyone's ever given much consideration to the folklore and historic beliefs regarding hyenas.

There are four species of hyena, but gnoll art tends to most commonly make them resemble the spotted hyena. Maybe there are more than one gnoll species, too? Perhaps there's a rare, gentle and insectivorous humanoid aardwolf. Or maybe they're not so gentle and they dine on formians?

Anyway, spotted hyenas are hunters and scavengers. They have powerful jaws and specialized dentition to crush bone--they are reported to outclass brown bears in this regard. They bring down game in packs, but they also follow other predators and steal their kills. They've also been known to dig up recently buried bodies from graves. Hyenas possess the ability to digest all the organic material in a carcass, including bone.

Male spotted hyenas are slightly larger than females, but otherwise there's very little to distinguish the sexes. Interestingly, even the external genitalia is similar due to the female's clitoromegaly (How's that for a conversational factoid?). Hyena clans, in fact, are matriarchal--led by an alpha female with high levels of androgens (male sex hormones).

Hyenas compete from birth. Particularly in same sex litters, neonatal fratricide (siblicide?) is common. Clans are hierarchical, with the pups of dominant females outranking the adult females subordinate to their mother--unless she dies.

Study of the spotted hyena gives us gnolls in matriarchal clans, who are fairly indistinguishable in terms of sex. There are probably some unusual--uh, physical characteristics of female gnolls--I'll leave it to individual GMs to work out the implications of those and how much game time they gets. On firmer ground for a game about killing things and taking stuff, gnolls probably eat their slain foes--bones and all. Also, competition is fierce within the clan, and only the strongest make it to adulthood.

So that's the current state of hyena knowledge, but there are some interesting things to be gleaned from outmoded/folkloric ideas. Take a look at this quote from T.H. White's translation of a twelfth century Latin bestiary, The Book of Beasts:

"[the hyena] is accustomed to live in the sepulchres of the dead and to devour their bodies. Its nature is that one moment is that it is masculine and at another moment feminine, and hence it is a dirty brute...it frequents the sheepfolds of shepherds and walks around the houses of a night and studies the tone of voice of those inside with a careful ear for it is able to do imitations of the human voice."

Again there's the link between hyenas and the dead; between gnolls and ghouls, both under the demon-lord Yeenoghu's purview. But how do we make sense of the rest of it?

Well, maybe all gnolls are skilled vocal mimics. Perhaps their shaman's are gifted by their god to imitate the voices of others?

And the sex switch? Given the unclear separation of sexes among his people--and their matriarchal nature--I suspect Yeenoghu is a hermaphrodite, or perhaps genderless, but probably referred to by gnolls with a feminine pronoun (if their language has such a thing). Yeenoghu is a consummate trickster then, not even willing to stick to one gender. Possibly, gnoll shamans follow their god's/godess' lead and go by the pronoun of the other sex, symbolically becoming like their deity. Maybe hermaphrodites are especially holy?

There you have it: gnolls informed by hyenas in fact and folklore. Who'd of thought hyena-men could so easily out weird troll/gnome hybrids?

Wizards Three and the Apportioning of Loot

Amid the works constantly updated in the Library-University of Tharkad-Keln is an encyclopedia of famous, or infamous, mages. In its pages, one may find the likes of Kulu, Urthona, and of course, Yzorddathrexes.

Among the lesser--but no less interesting--arcane practitioners are the three wizards from the tavern tale "The Apportioning of the Loot." While we'll not concern ourselves with a recitation of that tale here, the strange events in the life of its principles are worthy of consideration, if for no other reason than they underscore the dangers of the thaumaturgical arts.

Kodos Nharn: Youngest of the three wizards, Nharn was a voluptuary, or (self-proclaimed) aesthete of worldly pleasures. He and Elberond Turms had quarrelled over a wand of exquisite workmanship and obvious sorcerous potency, and might have come to violence over it, had not Yrrol Othus interceded with a compromise. Turms got the wand, and Nharn two other items--a scroll and a jeweled bracelet. The bracelet he sold to pay off the debts accrued from his extravagant lifestyle. The scroll he kept, as he found it to be an item unchronicled in any catalog of arcane antiquities he consulted.

It was only seen once by anyone other than Nharn, as far as is known. A servant reported it to be a painting of an audience room of a sort, well-appointed, wherein a voluptuous, darkhaired woman in diaphonous green robes reclined on a great couch upon a dais. She was attended by beautiful youths of both sexes, also attired in diaphonous tunics. There was a sorcerous aspect to the painting in that, the servant averred, it looked like a scene from life somehow frozen in time rather than an artifact of brush and paint.

Nharn took the painting to his private chamber and it was never seen again. Nharn seldom emerged from his chamber thereafter, except to call from something from his servants. It was said that sounds of feasting and merriment, and strange music could be heard coming from the room, and sometimes unmistakably, more--primal--sounds of pleausure emerged. Yet no one but Nharn was ever admitted to the room.

This went on for a year. Then, on the night of midsummer, in the small hours, a beautiful, darkhaired woman emerged from the room. In a strange accent, but unmistakable tone of command, she released the servants from their duties. Then, she disappeared into the night. Nharn's creditor's took the house and all his belongings, including a weirdly realistic painting of a thin and dissipated Nharn, lolling drunkenly on a great couch, surrounded by sunken-eyed youths. This last item was purchased at auction by an anonymous collector, and has never been seen again.

Elberond Turms: A wizard of middling talent, but of some renown for his highly developed sense of fashion. Thanks to his wit and style, Turms was frequent a guest of the nobility. Turms was given a wand of exceedingly fine make from the haul. This wand increased his abilities several fold, and with its powers, combined with the patronage of his social connections, Turms established himself in Zycanthlarion. Turms was quit successful for many years, and the wand was seldom out of his hands. He was seen to talk to it at times, perhaps even argue with it. This eccentricity did little to harm him socially, but not so an ill-considered comment made publicly.

Perhaps under the influence of too much Trosian wine, Turms compared himself favorably with Yzorddathrexes. Though the archmage had not been seen for centuries, his Eidolon Tower still appeared above the city, and at intervals its base appeared in its streets. The tower and its master evoked a good deal of superstitious dread. Fearing sorcerous retribution for the insult, high society began to shun Turms, who soon turned to mind-numbing drugs to ease his own anxieties. First ostracized, then reclusive, Turms had vanished from Zycanthlarion altogether within months of the comment. A ragged street mountebank meeting Turms description (if one allows for the ravages of self-abuse) drowned (or was perhaps fatally bitten by a river-shark, accounts differ) in the town of Eelsport, after a lengthy argument with the fancy scepter he gripped tightly, even into death. Zycanthlarion society is still divided on whether the great Yzorddathrexes ever redressed the insult or not. The wand presumably lies in an unmarked grave still held in a moldering hand.

Yrrol Othus: Oldest and wisest of the three, it is said, Othus was not given to weaknesses of carnality, vanity, or over-ambition. To Othus, the supreme pleasure of the arcane arts was in acquiring knowledge. He chose from the treasures a potion--transparent in color, but given to producing prismatic eddies and oil-slick iridescence when shaken or swirled. The substance in the vial is now know by alchemical sages to have been phantasmagoric ahlzo. Uncharacteristically rash ingestion of the liquid led Othus to be able to perceive the noumenal planes and their denizens intersecting our own world unseen. Leading to even greater disorientation, he began to perceive the seething, chaotic maelstrom which arcane philosophers hold forms the multiverse's substratum. Alternately driven to horror and ecstasy by these visions, Othus eventually sought out the Harlequin Mage, and with that insane dwarf as a guide is said to have descended into a green-lit subterranean realm where the roiling, gelatinous dream-fragment of a dead, chaos god-thing was to be found.

No one knows, of course, what became of him, but two schools of thought predominate. One holds that he was there subsumed into the insane godhead and exists now only as a ephemeral fancy in that unfathomable mind. The other theorizes that he retains his form and individually and stays as the deity's sole worshipper, receiving its whispered, incoherent pronouncements for eternity.

Of Weird and Wonder

Media of the fantastic, it seems to me, has two primary modes for evoking encounter with the numinous. I've been thinking of these, of late, as "weird" and "wonder."

Okay, in one sentence that's probably more lit-theory words than a guy with a biology degree should be allowed to use in a day (even on the internet) but indulge me, dear reader...

"Weird" we sometimes think of as a genre, as in "weird fiction" or "the weird tale" (or Weird Tales). HP Lovecraft adopted the term from Sheridan le Fanu, and defines it in his essay "Supernatural Horror in Literature":

"The true weird tale has something more than secret murder, bloody bones, or a sheeted form clanking chains according to rule. A certain atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread of outer, unknown forces must be present; and there must be a hint, expressed with a seriousness and portentousness becoming its subject, of that most terrible conception of the human brain--a malign and particular suspension or defeat of those fixed laws of Nature which are our only safeguard against the assaults of chaos and the daemons of unplumbed space."

As ST Joshi points out--and as a review of weird fiction reveals--weird can pervade several different traditional genres: horror (of a couple of different stripes), fantasy, ghost stories, and science fiction. A related form is the French literary genre of fantastique which is about supernatural incursion into realist narrative.

I think this gets at the key to weird. It's about things which are unnatural (or perhaps suggest a radically different interpretation of nature). The occurrence of these events is often transgressive or surreal. They can be used to evoke horror, or unreality, or decadence --maybe all three--depending on the context. I think this is perhaps succinctly analogized by one of the character's in Machen's "The White People": "...how awful it is. If the roses and the lilies suddenly sang on this coming morning..."

Weird is the Garden of Adompha, the city of Xuthal, the Horla, and The King in Yellow. It's also the Gray Caps, fungoid overlords of Jeff VanderMeer's Ambergris, and the red-curtained room with the oddly speaking dwarf in Twin Peaks.

"Wonder" encompasses what, in the discussion of science fiction, is called "sense of wonder," and in comic books is called "mad ideas." It's about the rush of understanding--or often just confronting--a novel concept, or an old concept in a radically new context. It's a response to encountering the sublime--at its purest its the sense of awe. It's an experience of the supernatural in a context of reverence, in the literal sense of greater than nature. As Damon Knight wrote, it's "the widening of the mind's horizons, in no matter what direction."

Wonder hasn't been identified as cleanly in the literature as weird. It really comes into its own in film where visual effects (special and otherwise) combine with calculated musical selection to push us in its direction.

Wonder is Lothlórien, Shai-Hulud, and "My God--its full of stars!" It's Jack Kirby's New Gods, Avatar's flying mountains, and Gaiman's Dream confronting Lucifer Morningstar in Hell.

While weird evokes the paranormal and "negative" qualities, wonder evokes the transcendent and "positive" qualities.

An interesting question, I think, is can these sensations be evoked in gaming?

Certainly, I feel like weird can. I think since the earliest days of the hobby, adventure writers and creature designers have groped for it. The blogosphere is full of efforts to bring it to bear, many successfully. I think its more than a matter of aping nineteenth century gothic lit, or 1930s pulp fiction, though. Some of those elements are too familiar. Borrowing of ideas from newer sources like fiction of the New Weird, the films of David Lynch, or some foreign horror films (euro- or j-) will probably do the trick. Kenneth Hite's works on gamemastering horror would also probably prove instructive.

Wonder is a bit tougher. Without visuals, it hinges on appropriate description--which is tough to do off the cuff and without knowing where the audiences' heads are going to be at the moment the description is delivered. The comic book approach of "mad ideas" where there's less focus on the centerpiece scene, and more on a flood of the "impossible" (or at least the kind of trippy) to create a similar effect. If you can't describe the city in overview in such a way that your player's are in awe, you can whittle them down with a lot of "smaller" amazing things as they're coming into town. The risk, of course, is in overdoing it, and making the interesting things too common-place.