The Art of Illusion

Beyond the “scientific” sorcerers of the Thaumaturgical Society and the hedge hex-workers and folk conjurers, there exists another group of magic-users in the City. Illusionists (as they style themselves) bridge the gap between real magic and stage performance.

The origins of the arts of illusion are obscure. Thaumaturgical scholars suggest it developed as a way for low-skill sorcerers to earn a living, while illusionists hold it developed from ancient mystery ritual practices in Ealderde given to mankind by a pagan trickster god. Illusionists claim (much to the irritation of their thaumaturgical rivals) that several historic mages revered by thaumaturges were actually illusionists who pulled off big tricks. However it began, illusionism seems to have first been practiced as a form of thievery, usually as part of a confidence game, but gradually developed into a performance art.

Illusionists know powerful spells, but their repertoire is mostly limited to those that deceive the senses in one way or another. They combine the use of real thaumaturgy with the use of sleight-of-hand and other stage tricks. Economy of magic is their goal; They look down on the obvious displays of thaumaturgists.

Illusionists, it's said (by illusionists), take a solemn oath not to reveal their secrets (magical or legerdemain) to non-illusionists. They claim that there exists an international Brotherhood of Illusion which enforces this pledge--though evidence for the existence of this organization is hardly above suspicion as fabrication. Certainly, an Illusionists Guild exists in the City, but the theatrics and misdirection surrounding it make it impossible to know its true size or influence.

Warlord Wednesday: Sorceress Supreme

Let's re-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 Sorceress Supreme"

Warlord (vol. 1) #54 (February 1982)

Written by Mike Grell (Sharon Grell); Penciled by Mark Texiera; Inked by Mike DeCarlo

Synopsis: Returned from their sojourn in the Arctic, Morgan, Tara, and Shakira approach Castle Deimos, unaware of what’s been going on inside. An exhausted Ashiya slumps in a chair and complains to Faaldren how Jennifer’s insatiable hunger for magical knowledge has been taxing her to the limit.  As if on cue, Jennifer calls “Mother!” again--for that’s the guise Ashiya has employed to gain her trust.

Jennifer is trying a variation on a spell and wants her "mother’s" aid. Ashiya tells her she would like to do some learning herself. She wants to know more about the Atlantean machines in the laboratory. Jennifer assures her she already knows all of that--and again insists on her help with the spell.

They’ve only just finished the ritual when Ashiya’s raven spy flies in to tell her visitors are approaching the castle. Ashiya goes to prepare a welcome.

Morgan rushes across the draw bridge and into the castle, eager for news about his daughter. Instead, he’s surprised to be greeted by Rachel, his dead wife. Morgan goes to her, so caught up in the moment that he doesn’t bother to question how it could be. He pays for his credulousness when Ashiya blasts him!

The portcullis falls. Shakira pushes Tara inside to get her out of the way, and quickly changes to cat form. Her head is caught, but she avoids being skewered.

Though knocked to his knees by Ashiya’s blast, Travis Morgan isn’t down. Gritting his teeth, he rises to face the woman in his wife’s guise. She blasts him again and again, but he staggers forward until his left hand is around her throat and his sword is in his right.  Morgan squeezes:

Morgan raises his sword, swearing Ashiya will pay for her charade. At that moment, Jennifer rushes in with a cry. She blasts her father aside. Ashiya yells for her to kill Morgan.

But Jennifer smiles wickedly and summons her powers. “I didn’t save you from him,” she says. “I saved you for me.”

Ashiya intends to serve no mortal, and so the two engage in a magical duel. In the direct contest, Ashiya soon bests her former student. But before Ashiya can finish her, Jennifer fires one last blast which appears to miss. In fact, she’s energized the Atlantean machinery around the old witch. When Ashiya gathers her power, she's engulfed by the machinery’s energies.

Morgan gets to his feet, wondering what the hell just happened. Jennifer causes the portcullis to rise, freeing Shakira. Morgan goes to his living wife, Tara, and takes her in his arms.

After everyone has exchanged stories, Morgan and companions prepare to leave. Jennifer says she won’t be joining them. There’s much learning left for her to do in this place, and Faaldren has agreed to stay with her. She tells her father to content himself that she’s found a place in this world of his. Tara reminds him that Jennifer is no longer a child--he gave his time with her to someone else. Morgan knows she’s right.

And so, father and daughter part again--each taking up a new life in Skartaris.

 
Things to Notice:

• This is the first issue Jennifer appears "in costume" within the issue.
• Shakira's near brush with portcullis-death isn't even commented on. 
• Jennifer seems to know before Ashiya's betrayal that she isn't her mother.  She seems more calculating in this issue than she will later appear.

Where It Comes From:
This issue's alliterative title was probably borrowed from Marvel's Doctor Strange, who's known as the Sorcerer Supreme.

WARLORD WEDNESDAY BONUS: Check out this Warlord fan art from Felt.

The Gore Between the States

I’m off work today for that most archaic of state holidays, Confederate Memorial Day. So in honor of the day, I thought I’d highlight one of the most gameable of movies alluding to the Civl War. I refer, of course, to Herschell Gordon Lewis’ Two Thousand Maniacs!

For all of you who’ve ever said to yourself: “It’s too bad Brigadoon isn’t a gore film”--well, this move's for you. In brief, a group of Yankee tourists head down to the South, but get tricked into the out of the way town of Pleasantville. There they find themselves the guests of honor at the centennial commemoration of the town’s destruction by Union troops. “Guests of honor” in this case meaning victims of torture in the hayseed townsfolk’s sadistic picnic games. Two of the tourists manage to escape and return with the local sheriff, only to find the town has disappeared.  It was destroyed 100 years ago! The townsfolk, meanwhile, wait elsewhere and look forward to their next celebration in 2065.

Beyond the obvious horror usage, towns that appear on schedule can be used in any sort of setting. Fantasy surely, but science fiction could work as well with a suitable technobabble explanation. The inhabitants could be pleasant--but really, what would be the point in that?  Orcs, vampires, zombies, Confederate zombies--all good candidates.

Of course, there’s another fun group that returns “when the stars are right.” There’s no reason why New England should get all the Lovecraftian fun. Adding a touch of Cthulhu gives extra meaning to “the South shall rise again!”

Black School

photo by Geoffrey Dunn

In the days when the City was only a village crowding a fort at the end of Empire Island, there were rumors of a sprawling house, beyond the glow of the village lights, built in single night by devils at the command of a cabal of evil Ealderdish sorcerers. The sorcerers came to this place in a swamp in a wild land to open a Black School--a Scholomance--to tutor what students would come in the dark arts.

Some stories say some natural disaster (an act of God) destroyed the school, while others say a group of righteous adventurers razed it, and a few hold it just disappeared, as if hell reclaimed it. No one really knows for certain.

What is known is that the place where the Black School once stood was eventually engulfed by the growing City and became the area called Scholo. Whatever industries that have tried to take hold there--from farms, to brothels, to sweatshops--never seem to last for long. The area seems strangely prone to fires, and strange accidents.

The only thing that lasts in Scholo is magic. As other enterprises have dwindled, magic book shops, alchemical supply stores, and the offices of cut-rate thaumaturgist-for-hire have thrived and grown to crowd Scholo’s streets. Thaumaturgists live here, too--mostly young would-be up-and-comers, and old has-beens and never-wases. They practice their arts in small, threadbare apartments, and congregate to trade secrets (and lies) in a few small cafes and bars.

On almost any night, if you sit in one of the bars long enough you’ll hear mages talk about the Black School. They’ll say it appears some nights of the new moon, in that old park where nothing has ever been built and nothing but twisted and blighted tress grow. Some brave souls have gone in, the story goes, and found it bigger on the inside--and growing larger all the time with creaks and groans. Amid its many rooms are libraries full of occult and sorcerous lore.

It’s a tempting destination for those young up-and-comers, but the old timers remind them that most who go in never come out again, and those that do have emerged haunted, shattered men, prone to suicide, and unable to remember any but barest details of what they experienced there.  What fragments can be gleaned from them suggest malign ever-shifting architecture, sadistic traps, strange hauntings, and halls stalked by a half-real creature--never fully manifest on this plane--that pursues intruders.

Thor and Wonder

I saw Thor yesterday and thought it was good--though I wonder if “good” superhero films have gotten common enough that I’m no longer impressed by mere competence. I do know that the formulaic elements of the “successful comic adaption” are beginning to wear thin.

So anyway, Thor drapes the Iron Man frame with interesting enough characters, a von Daniken-Kirby "gods from space" rift, and some cool action. It was in this second part, though, I was a little disappointed in their choices, given the source material they were working with.

One of the most interesting things about Thor the comic (and one of the things I think would be most interesting to steal for gaming) is the mixture of mythological elements and Jack Kirby’s crazy sci-fi-ish design. The preponderance of evidence in the comics doesn’t make the Asgardians just extraterrestrials (or even extradimensionals) who were mistaken for, or gave rise to, legends of the gods of Norse myth--they're people who we’re told and descended from a guy who got licked into existence from ice by a giant cow and who endure repeated cycles of the end of the world. And it’s a world where Odin zaps Jane Foster with a fairly technological looking wand to turn her into a “goddess.”

What Kirby started with the Asgardians in Journey into Mystery--and developed to its fullest “are they aliens, gods--or both?” fullness in the New Gods at DC--is a science fantasy blurring of traditional definitions, a thread only Grant Morrison, among all of Kirby’s successors, seems particularly interested in exploring. Kirby seems to be saying that in this modern world, tech should be as much part of a god's trappings as ever-full flagons and flying goat-chariots were in the past.

Check out this scene:

A somewhat bug-eyed monster alien-looking troll captured and carried in some mechanical contraption, guarded by warriors in retro-futuristic armor, against a backdrop of strange planetoids.

Or how about Kirby’s vision of Asgard:

A pulp sci-fi future city on an asteroid floating in a romanticized cosmos with a very literal rainbow bridge connecting it to the rest of the universe.

Obviously, some of this stuff might have come across as silly on film--maybe some of it teeters on that edge as it is. The movie makes some gestures in this direction with some of its design, but it also is very insistent about Einstein-Rosen bridges and its implication that the Nine Worlds can be seen with Hubble. The point (well worth remembering for gaming I think) is that the oft-quoted Arthur C. Clarke line that "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” doesn’t have to mean that the wonder and strangeness must be stripped from either.

Sounds of the City

A soundtrack sampling for the City and the Strange New World:

Bright Lights & The City: "Sing Sing Sing" by the Benny Goodman Orchestra

A dust-up in a gin-joint: "Odd Ones" by the Seatbelts (Cowboy Bebop)

Magic-usin' dames is always trouble: "I Put A Spell On You" by Nina Simone

Foreboding in the Dustlands: "Ben Searches the Junkyard" By Jeff Beal

Here they come--get ready: "Tiger Tank" By Lalo Schifrin

A cheerful traditional in the Smaragdines: "O Death" by Ralph Stanley

Nothing ever happens out in the sticks: "Murder in the Red Barn" by Tom Waits

Entering a mound in Freedonia: "White Lightning" by Charles Bernstein

There's an old preacher who they say can perform resurrections: "Ain't No Grave" by Johnny Cash.

I guess we all knew it would come down to this: "The Verdict (Dopo la Condanna)" by Ennio Morricone

Also, I'd like to take this opportunity to thank Canageek who nominated my blog for Stuffer Shack's "Rpg Site of the Year" contest.  It was an honor to have even be nominated in the company of a number of great sites.

And--while I'm at it--thanks to everyone else for following, commenting, and reading.

Don't Eat the Worm

In southern Zingaro, bottles of cheap local liquor are often garnished with a worm. More accurately, this is a larva of the astral moth, an insect (if the stories can be believed) with a peculiar life cycle.

The succulent whose juice nourishes the larva and is used to make the liquor is said to be the remnant of a goddess that pre-Ealderish Natives believed fell from the stars. It’s juice was believed to enhance fertility and passion, and bring vivid dreams.

Legends suggest that the larvae that make it into the distillate aren't dead but merely quiescent, waiting to begin the next stage in their life cycle. Eating the worm produces a pleasant, mildly hallucinogenic experience--but also allows the larva to continue its metamorphosis inside the etheric body of the consumer.

The astral moth will emerge from the host in d100 hours (saving throw halves duration). From a few hours after ingestion until that time, the host’s suffers a different effect from the following chart every 2d6 hours:

1 - Wisdom temporally reduced 1d4 points
2 - Character becomes convinced they have obtained some deep insight into the nature of the universe, but find it impossible to convey in words to others (15% chance they actual have)
3 - Character experiences 1d4 paroxsyms of uncontrollable laughter (similar to hideous laughter) lasting 1 round, interspersed with periods of relatively normal behavior.
4 - Character experiences visual hallucinations like scintillating pattern (as they had 7 hit dice)
5 - Character goes on an ethereal jaunt--or perhaps (50% change) they only believe they have.
6 - Character experiences powerful deja vu giving an insight bonus of +5 similar to moment of prescience.

Once the moth emerges, the host returns to normal, though is quite fatigue and not good for much of anything for a period of hours.  The moth, its etheric wings shifting through colors and patterns like a liquid projection lightshow, flies off to the Astral, taking some imprint of the character's psyche with it...

And a Happy Cinco de Mayo!