The Blood of Belshazzar as a Sword & Sorcery RPG Premise

Sword & Sorcery is experiencing a bit of a comeback in rpging these days.  I've mentioned two very excellent games previously: Barbarians of Lemuria and Jaws of the Six Serpents.  Thulsa has done some amazing Hyborian Age conversions of classic adventures, such as Shrine of the Kuo-Toa and Vault of the Drow, as well as some well-regarded original works, such as The Spider-God's Bride and Song of the Beast-Gods (neither of which I have, but intend to rectify that soonishly).  And that's just the tip of the sword, not including the mood among the OSR that now leans toward S&S scoundrels and highjinks and away from the Epic Fantasy heroes and grand destinies.

But S&S as a literary genre does present some problems for gaming.  I'm speaking here of what might be called "the high end" of the S&S protagonist spectrum; that is, those stories that are about powerful, capable Heroes (in the original, Hellenic sense of the word).  This is as opposed to those protagonists who congregate about "the low end" of the spectrum; that motley assortment of ne'er-do-wells and crooks who populate the thieves' quarters of the imagination and who, one might say, descend from Clark Ashton Smith's Satampra Zeiros (spiritual father to D&D adventurers everywhere), rather than Robert E. Howard's King Kull of Valusia.  

It's relatively easy to find a gaming premise for this second sort and, indeed, most of the OSR has rediscovered it: a bunch of desperate chaps face magic and monsters in pursuit of loot.  The former group is trickier.  Imagine trying to play a game where you have King Conan, Elric of Melnibone, and Kane the Killer as your party.  Fascinating, yes, but what the hell do they do together?  Whatever they decide to do, they do not meet in a tavern and decide to bash the local dungeon for profit.

One solution is to drop the idea of "the party" as the part of the protagonist in the literature is more usually a one- or two-man show.  Conan never called for a cleric and Fafhrd and the Mouser are pretty-much a three's-a-crowd act (except Oort the Mingol, I guess).  That's fine but pretty much requires losing most of your players (assuming you have a regularly-sized group). And it still doesn't actually give you a premise.

Thus I was struck the other day as I read, for the first time, REH's The Blood of Belshazzar, originally published in 1931, but which I read in the excellent Lord of Samarcand and Other Adventures Stories of the Old Orient.  I consider myself a Howard fan, and have read all the Conan, Kull, and Solomon Kane stories, but I had never read any of his Oriental Adventures tales; a situation which I have gladly changed.  The Blood of Belshazzar is actually one of the weaker stories in the collection; a not-too gripping murder mystery which does not even have the advantage of The God in the Bowl's giant snake.  Which may show, once again, that literary merit is not identical with gaming merit, because it seems to me a wonderful premise for a "high end" S&S game.  

Without going into too much detail, the story is set within the lair of a notorious bandit chief, who has collected together the worst of the worst as his lieutenants.  None of them trust one another, but all try to retain the good graces of the chief for one reason: the lust after the fabulous gem he owns.  Howard writes:

"How do you hold supremacy over these wolves?" asked Cormac bluntly. 

Skol laughed and drank once more. 

"I have something each wishes. They hate each other; I play them against one another. I hold the key to the plot. They do not trust each other enough to move against me. I am Skol Abdhur! Men are puppets to dance on my strings. And women"--a vagrant and curious glint stole into his eyes--"women are food for the gods," he said strangely.

The story of the gem is perhaps the high-light of the tale and the thing is described in terms startlingly reminiscent of the One Ring in Tolkien:

"Then Belshazzar's lords entreated him to throw the gem back into the sea, for it was evident that it was the treasure of the djinn of the sea, but the king was as one mad, gazing into the crimson deeps of the ruby, and he shook his head. 

"And lo, soon evil came upon him, for the Persians broke his kingdom, and Cyrus, looting the dying monarch, wrested from his bosom the great ruby which seemed so gory in the light of the burning palace that the soldiers shouted: 'Lo, it is the heart's blood of Belshazzar!' And so men came to call the gem the Blood of Belshazzar. 

"Blood followed its course. When Cyrus fell on the Jaxartes, Queen Tomyris seized the jewel and for a time it gleamed on the naked bosom of the Scythian queen. But she was despoiled of it by a rebel general; in a battle against the Persians he fell and it went into the hands of Cambyses, who carried it with him into Egypt, where a priest of Bast stole it. A Numidian mercenary murdered him for it, and by devious ways it came back to Persia once more. It gleamed on Xerxes' crown when he watched his army destroyed at Salamis. 

"Alexander took it from the corpse of Darius and on the Macedonian's corselet its gleams lighted the road to India. A chance sword blow struck it from his breastplate in a battle on the Indus and for centuries the Blood of Belshazzar was lost to sight. Somewhere far to the east, we know, its gleams shone on a road of blood and rapine, and men slew men and dishonored women for it. For it, as of old, women gave up their virtue, men their lives and kings their crowns. 

"But at last its road turned to the west once more, and I took it from the body of a Turkoman chief I slew in a raid far to the east. How he came by it, I do not know. But now it is mine!" 

Skol was drunk; his eyes blazed with inhuman passion; more and more he seemed like some foul bird of prey.

It is my balance of power! Men come to me from palace and hovel, each hoping to have the Blood of Belshazzar for his own. I play them against each other. If one should slay me for it, the others would instantly cut him to pieces to gain it. They distrust each other too much to combine against me. And who would share the gem with another?

The plot kicks into gear as our protagonist enters as a new lieutenant, the bandit chief is killed, the gem disappears, and all hell breaks lose.  

I think that this would make a fantastic starting point for a game, providing a shape of what stories could be told, but giving the players fairly free reign to take that story wherever they wish.  Do they team-up and try to keep the gang together, perhaps establishing themselves as true political powers in the region?  Do they play the other villains (including, potentially, the other PC's) off one another?  Or do they bring the whole situation crashing down in blood and fire and ride off, laughing, into the night?  And, as each PC would have his or her own reasons for being there in the first place, the players and GM both would have this great stew of motivations, both complementary and conflicting, with which to play.

You needn't be restrained by the device of the gem - anything could serve as The Most Fabulous Thing in the World.  I'd be tempted to do more with foul rituals hinted at by Skol in his likening of women to food for the gods (if this had been a Conan tale, I'm pretty sure that Howard would have done so too).  Maybe the Thing is occult knowledge and what the PC's learn might set the stage for the next phase of the campaign.

Anyway, this is the sort of thing I think could work wonderfully well for games that aren't trying to do Ye Auld Game.

Quite Distracted By: The House on the Borderlands

Perspicacious, hypothetical readers will note that finial "s" on the last word of the title.  But what does it mean?  Mysterious, eh?  Much like the work of the authour being referenced: William Hope Hodgson.

I came to W.H. Hodgson only comparatively recently.  It might have been from seeing his name in conjunction with that of Arthur Machen, love of whom I have discussed before.  Or, it might have been the excellent use of his ideas in the great World of Thool setting.  In any case, I've only begun reading him in the last few years.

A few minutes ago, I completed The House on the Borderland.  If you have read it, you probably know the strange space-time in which my head reels.  But whatever cosmic vista lurches forward, I am a gamer.  Which means that I am thinking, "how could I use this in a game"? And the answer that occurred to me was this:

What if you combined W.H. Hodgson's The House on the Borderland with E.G. Gygax's The Keep on the Borderlands?

Well, what I get anyway, is "The House on the Borderlands".  Essentially, it's the Keep, but with the House taking the place of the fortress.  And set in the 19th century.

The set-up follows the novel right up to where the Swine-Things cease their attack.  In this version, instead of investigating the Pit and then going all 2001 about a century before 2001, the Recluse engages in the great Victorian lit tradition of sending word to London for his chums from the old College / Club / Army days.  Enter the PC's.

As with the Keep, the House serves as the (sorta) secure home-base. From there, the intrepid adventurers descend into the Pit, into the tunnel opened up by the land-slide (or land-slip as W.H. has it), and thence into - what else - the Dungeon.

Some reasons why this is so great:

1.  One of the hall-marks of Ye Auld Game is that the Dungeon, at its iconic best, makes no obvious sense.  It is, as Philotomy has so well put it, the Mythic Underworld and operates according to its own, generally obscure rules (doors close on their own; monsters can always see in the dark except when they work with the PC's).  Not only does it seem that the Pit in our story is a real Mythic Underworld, but the Fantastic in Hodgson never makes sense, by which I mean that it adamantly refuses mundane, logical explanation.  That's bloody perfect for a Dungeon.

2.  There is no clear resolution.  One of the great problems in using stories as fodder for YAG is that stories usually have an recognizable, narrative structure, while story in old-school gaming is emergent from play.  But the story of the House resolutely resists any acceptable, narrative structure.  We never learn why the Swine-Things attack or what they really are or why the House has a trap-door to Hell in the cellar or why the Floating Hog-Face wants the Recluse to open the Door or anything.  It's a story that should make your High School English teacher sob in frustration.

But that makes it great for gaming.  There may be immediate problems and solutions to them, but there isn't actually any single mystery to solve or act to be performed.  Adventures under the House could go for years; generations of explorers could come, level up, and go; and that would all be fine.

3.  Swine-Things.  Seriously, have orcs ever seemed this creepy?  W.H. seems to have had a thing about pigs (see The Hog for another great example) and, just as his fan, H.P. Lovecraft could do with his fears, old W.H. could make his fear seem totally justified.  I mean - man! - I have to think twice about eating bacon after reading this story (note: I ate it anyway).

There are lots of games that would work for this (I just realized the other day that there are a number of Victorian age adventure games in print now), but I immediately thought of Engines & Empires, of which I have written before.  As I discussed then, I would forget the whole alternate-Earth deal (at least at first), and set it securely within cozy little Britain. So no demi-humans and also no steam-punk stuff.  Just old India hands, cockney pugilists, Van Helsing-like scholars, and counter-cultural Black Magicians (what a world we gamers live in when those things can be discussed as "just such" and be seen as a limitation).  Into the Pit they go and we all see what happens from there.

I mentioned Britain above.  I know the novel is set in far western Ireland, bit that doesn't sit entirely right with me.  It may just be my own lack of Hibernophilia, but I want to place the House on an old borderland; the west Ireland isn't any kind of borderland in the same sense.  I'd prefer to use the border-countries with Scotland, Cornwall, or Wales; of those three, I favour the later.  Maybe because of Machen?  Maybe because it gives you a great excuse to bring old mines into the equation?  I don't know and it doesn't really matter that much I suppose.

My mind is definitely turning on the Swine-Things.  Obviously, they play the orcs in this scenario, but they need to keep their weird mystique to preserve the feel of the setting.  I'm focusing on the hints W.H. keeps dropping about how the Recluse never finds any corpses in the morning and his occasional wonder if the things are even mortal at all.  There's a lot of ways you could play that, but having brought up Van Helsing, my minds turns to vampires, specifically the Hammer Studious version of vampires.  What if the Swine-Things are some kind of anti-life (they are described as having corpse-like flesh)?  They can be seemingly killed as any other creature, but will also decompose in the sunlight, collapsing into dust within a matter of minutes.  This is why no evidence can ever be found.  However, should the body be kept out of the light , probably by being dragged back into the Pit - it will reform within 24 hours, good as new.  

This actually doesn't have much impact on the PC's - not at first anyway. After all, who can tell one Swine-Thing from another?  The disappearing bodies may be annoying if the characters are hoping for some kind of proof, but this isn't really that sort of game anyway.  It only really maters if the PC's begin to wonder why they can't thin out the population.  Or maybe if a particular Swine-Thing with some kind of distinguishing mark (a half-chewed off ear perhaps) seems to reappear every time it gets killed.  That's the kind of thing that sends players into paroxysms of paranoia.

One last thought for the night: it might be useful to increase the population of the House in a long-term game.  If the group is going to set-up camp here for a while, it may prove useful to have some opportunities for events to occur within the House.  Perhaps the owners has the full complement of servants he should have.  What if he had a family with his lost-love, perhaps a beautiful daughter who is initially aloof but ends up falling in love with one of the PC's (the first to reach a certain level?) just in time to get kidnapped?  What if we the inhabitants of the House slowly go wacky, as is suggested in the novel?  Is sister Mary deliberately trying to open the House to the Swine-Things before the Recluse stops her; and, if so, is she under the malevolent influence of the Floating Hog-Face?  The potential parallels to the Cult of Evil Chaos from the Keep are right there if you want to use them.

I'm not going to get to play this game any time soon and it may just remain an idea.  But, if so, it's out there if anyone wants to try it.

Tales of Arthur Machen and the Supernatural

One of the big trends over the last few years in the Old-School Renaissance is the turn towards Weird Fantasy.  Carcossa, Athanor, Planet Algol, and the late, lamented, World of Thool just to name a few.  That last one, Thool, was uniquely interesting in that it's creator passed on some of the most famous sources of inspiration (paging Mr. Lovecraft!) and drank from a less well-known literary well.  Thool's drawing from William Hope Hodgson was particularly well-done: the existentially-creepy Weed Men from The Boats of the Glen Carrig.

In that spirit, I'd like to turn my attention to Arthur Machen.  Machen was a fascinating writer: a devoted Catholic and a Grail Quester, a Monarchist and a passionate lover of his native Wales, a Victorian born some 50 years too late who repeatedly wrote about horrid sexual practices, and a craftsman of ornate prose who was unexcelled (in my opinion) at evoking nameless dread from seemingly-ordinary reality.

I first became acquainted with Machen at second-hand back in a previous existence as a professional scholar of medieval heresy, magic, and witchcraft.  There, I found his name repeatedly linked to the bete noir of witchcraft historians, Margaret Murray.  Unless you sturdy such things, you may never have heard of Ms. Murray, but you have almost certainly encountered her central thesis: that the phenomenon labelled "witchcraft" in the medieval and early modern periods was a dimly-glimpsed survival of a pre-Christian, Northern European religion, which survived in an organized form as a sort of medieval conspiracy or counter-Church.  Once upon a time, this idea was so accepted that Murray was allowed to authour the Encyclopedia Brittanica entry on "Witchcraft".  More lastingly, she was one of the founding mothers of the modern Wicca movement.

Murray's idea incorporated the notion, both attractive and repellent, that the past haunts the present.  Machen worked with that idea as well, but rather than pretend to scholarship, he used it to inform his fiction.  In The Novel of the White Powder he presents something like Murray's Witch-Cult, but the the result is something so dreadful that it is never quite described.  This is a favourite technique of Machen's wherein suggestive phrasing not only adds to the horror (that is, the reader is left trying to wonder what could be so horrible), but alludes to the insoluble mystery of existence (the real world, lying just under our imagined ordinary one, is ineffable).

In stories such as The Novel of the Back Seal and The Shining Pyramid, Machen worked out an idea that had some popularity among the folklorists: British stories of "the Little People" are cloudy memories of short-statured, pre-Celtic inhabitants of the Isles.  And in Machen's stories, these ethnological dead-ends are terrifying.   Even if you have never read those stories, you might know the idea from Robert Howard's loving tribute, The Worms of the Earth (Howard was a happily acknowledged fan of Machen's work).

Machen's most famous horror story is probably The Great God Pan (his most famous story period is undoubtedly The Bowmen, a tale of a war-time miracle that was so convincing to his contemporaries that it supposedly came true).  It's one of his earliest and most Decadent (in the technical sense) and displays his core ideas: a mystical reality invisibly underlying our own own, contact with which lets out the evil within Man.  Perhaps his best story, though, is The White People, which may not be horror per se, but which is an amazingly creepy journey into the mystical world through the mind of a little girl.  If you have ever wanted to make Faeries the scary, alien things that the ancients thought of (as opposed to Tinkerbells), you must read The White People.

Although both Machen and Lovecraft were writers of Weird Horror and both ably used similar techniques of suggestive allusion, they were also quite different.  At the risk of reductionist psychologizing, it is worth noting that Machen was a High Church Anglican, who vehemently disapproved of the stolid, Puritanism to which Lovecraft was heir.  In any case, Lovecraft's vision is cosmic and his terror comes from the realization of man's essential, pitiful smallness within the vast cosmos.  Conversely, Machen's vision is decidedly terrestrial and terror proceeds from the realization of the horribleness that resides within Man.  It is humanistic, but in a strangely distorted way.  Although the actualization of Man's inner evil might provoke a physical transformation (the stunting of the aboriginals or the indescribable bodily alteration in The White Powder and The Great God Pan), these things are still human - are still us - in a way that no Old One ever could be (you might argue that HPL was doing something the sort in The Shadow Over Innsmouth, but I think that would be wrong).  

If you haven't read any of Machen, then shame on you.  It's not too easy finding copies of his works as he has not been republished in the manner of Lovecraft, or given the limited, but royal treatment afforded to Hodgson.  Still, Machen is worth the effort.  Even though the revelations contained therein may...change you.