The Tyrant's Hand

The Ruins of Fantasy

Every fantasy RPG world I know, or more certainly every one I want to run a dungeon crawl game in is filled with huge ruins.  Above ground, underground … that’s just an aesthetic choice… The question always comes up though about the source of these ruins.  Why is a usually pseudo-medieval world filled with massive abandoned structures … mostly haunted or infested by fell beasts. Of course crumbling ruins weren’t absent from the medieval world, and the fall of Rome - either the Western European, or mostly English conception of a sudden and apocalyptic collapse or the slow apocalypse and decline of Byzantium is the model for this idea.  Given that though, what are these ruins?  What are they filled with treasure and what does it say about our game worlds?

A golden dictator
stands atop this,..

The biggest and best ruins of both the medieval world and pulp fiction are the legacies of tyrants …  The pyramids of ancient Egypt, the ruins of Rome … both represent the legacies of absolute power and the compulsion it can levy to produce monuments.  I find this explanation of dungeons and haunted ruins for RPGs compelling, and it’s about the extent of politics and elegiac tone I want to put in my games and settings … not didactic, but perhaps inevitably political as it’s illustrative of the way I see history and the world.  This idea that bad stewardship and sick societies create enduring, if ruinous monuments is not absolute, everyone creates monuments of some kind … religious monuments for example tend to be created from far more positive and collective impulses … but the monuments of tyrants lend themselves to abandonment and fear, becoming adventure locations.  Likewise some of the most egregious of tyrant’s constructions are just so dungeon like! The goals of megalomaniacal building … maximalism, “ruin value” and building on an anti-human scale are useful ones to keep in mind for dungeon construction.

Tyrants (and of course good rulers, good systems) always fall.  Sometimes they manage to stick around for a long time, but let’s take the optimistic approach here … tyrants fall and their monuments become ruins because no one cares to preserve them. They become markers of past evil … shunned, even haunted, likely literally in a fantasy context, and are a convenient place to hide treasures and artifacts of the past … they aren’t systematically often disassembled (though blowing them up has a few fans in the 20th century).  Usually they are defaced and abandoned, broken in war or revolution, and ignored as much as possible by the survivors of their makers. It follows that years later disreputable tomb robbers, the kind of antisocial degenerates that like to call themselves “adventurers”, would come along and loot them - it’s not something polite society necessarily approves of, but by that time the treasures of the tyrant aren’t something to destroy and owning them isn’t necessarily worthy of punishment … so the market for loot exists, even if the looters aren’t welcome in polite society.

The monuments of tyrants also provide us plenty of real world examples to start from.  Here are several with their Crystal Frontier version…

A FEW CRYSTALS MORE 2 - IMPERIAL NOBLE CLASS

 A FISTFUL OF CRYSTALS SUPPLEMENTARY CLASS

NEW CLASS - IMPERIAL NOBLE

Note: Imperial Nobles are a sort of  “advanced class”, a substitute form the traditional “elf” and reference to OD&D’s confusing fighter or Magic-User method of leveling elves.  Creating a noble is a more complex task than creating most characters, and even requires a light form of “character building” … a decision or two  and a few extra rolls, both at creation and during advancement. Don’t worry though, neither these choices or the character creation process will take more than a few minutes of time. The PDF for the details of the Imperial Noble class is found here: IMPERIAL NOBLE For a more complete explanation of how the rules for this class work please see the "Fistful of Crystals" document in this post: A FISTFULLOF CRYSTALS

To be a noble of the Successor Empire is to stand at the pinnacle of human achievement: half god, half human. You are the product of thousands of years of marriages and liaisons, aimed towards perfection of the bloodline… though admittedly the results are still less than godly... The lucky are broken gods in the sickly, warped, frame of frail humanity. A nobility burdened by thousands of years of incomprehensible rituals, strictures, and courtesies. Nor does wealth remain and the young will only inherit an  eccentric education, a handful of trinkets, and the magic poisoned blood that is the legacy of an unwholesome, eldritch lineage.

While Imperial nobles have some advantages over regular people, the “craftsmen” and “toilers” of lower Imperial orders, and the subjects of the vibrant resurgent Kingdoms, few of the nobility are capable of coherent speech or normal movement. Most are at the edge of destruction from the excesses of their ancestors: wracked by strange, unique disease, minds subsumed by the screaming demands of ancestral  generations, or teetering on porcelain brittle bones. The majority remains immured in the great mansion spires of the capital, suffering for the magical transgressions of distant ancestors and dreaming of fortunes and privileges now illiquid, untouchable, and useless.

Few nobles venture beyond the walls of their curse shrouded compounds, but those that do, find the world unforgiving, and even if they have valuable skills, a code of honor and family strictures forbid them useful work. War, genteel theft, or magical exploration are the Imperial Noble’s only available paths through the world beyond rakish debauch -- choices that drive most  into adventure.

Despite the disadvantages of their class, Imperial Nobles are well suited to the dangerous lives of tomb robbers. Most have been trained from birth in some form of combat, most often dueling or hunting with exotic or heirloom weapons, and almost all have an innate faculty with sorcery. Many have also been tutored in esoteric knowledge and skills such as: arcanism, engineering, chemics, dead languages.

Every Angel is Terrifying...

Reskinning the Beholder

This is an attempt to reskin Dungeons & Dragons classic weird and terrifying monster the Beholder in a way that works for less generic fantasy settings… Instead of a floating arcane eye with stalks that each shoot magical rays, I’ve written the creature up as a Galagalim, the strangest of the order of angels… The “wheels within wheels” of biblical tradition.  Angels in RPGs are best if they are the angels of Rilke … “Every angel is terrifying […] almost deadly birds of the soul, [who] perilous, from behind the stars, [takes] even one step down toward us:  our own heart, beating higher and higher, would beat us to death.”

I don't hate beholders as a monster - they are incredibly charming, but like most of the original D&D monsters they are themselves a meme, or at least iconic enough to be very well-known, and so more likely to create furious flights of metagaming rather then wonder among players who encounter them. This is itself an interesting theory question - "what do we want players to experience from monsters?" On the one hand there is the excitement and fear of the novel ... and on the other there is the joy of learning the game, of players able to develop a set of knowledge about creatures and their abilities, because D&D monsters are shared and known phenomenon.

I still remember many of the statlines (or at least the special abilities, weakness, HD and AC ranges from pouring over the 1E monster manual as a child, and having this sort of knowledge was valued as part of player skill by some parts of the OSR and continues to be in the POSR, especially among those aiming for "revival", or playing RPGs as closely as possible to the RAW or the the playstyle "intended" in the 1970's or 1980's. This is an interesting exercise, and an interesting approach to player skill - where knowledge of the game's rule text is essential for character survival and player success. I suspect it is very close to the way that old games were played in the first few decades of the hobby (at least it is similar to how we played them as children), and it does offer an interesting approach to challenge, where player knowledge of monsters (also magic items and spells) acts as a sort of substitute for character knowledge of the game world. Personally though I have always followed the other OSR approach, the idea that challenge should be novel and unknowable to the players without their characters' observing, scouting, listening to rumors , guessing and trying out schemes. Monsters should inspire fear and wonder, with the limitation that their special abilities and weaknesses should be discernible, or at least not contrary, to their description and appearance. In the case of "Biblically accurate angels", they make good stand-ins for the more terrifying and dangerous D&D creatures. In this case the weirdest o these, Ezekiel 1:15–21's "ophanim" or "galagalim " the beholder is ideal.

Below are the stats and description of a Galagalim, a celestial wheel or sphere, written up for OSE or similar B/X D&D clones.

Galagalim (Celestial Wheel)
A servant of the Celestial Thrones, pulled from the eternal choir to serve the Imperial war machine. This divine being has escaped its entrapment, but it remains here - lost in the painfully protean terrestrial universe. To approach it is to inflict pain on it through change and disorder. It will respond in kind, sating its hunger for beauty through destruction.

Natural History of the Mantichora

A HUNTER OF THE VERGE AND WASTE

At the heart of all violence, atrocity, and suffering is fear, and a mortal's greatest fear is death. Some will do anything to avoid it, face any indignity, make any compromise, or commit any crime. The metamorphosis of the Mantichora requires all three: transformation into the ungainly and bestial, a pact with the foulest of demons, and crimes unending.

This is why the Mantichora is shunned, why he hunts the waste, desolation, and the verge ... and why he preys on man. The cursed diet of the Mantichora is pain, fear, suffering, and panic. He laps it in with the blood and flesh of his victims to thrive, heal, and endure - immortal unless murdered. It takes an evil heart to become a Mantichora, and the size and ferocity of its monstrous form is in proportion to the malice of the man who becomes one. Past crimes and cruelties offer the initial sustenance to the demon who shares and changes the Mantichora's human body to monstrous mien. A passionate murderer will only grow to the size and shape of a wolf, while the true Mantichora, winged, spike tailed, or spitting fire rise from souls so vile no mere catalogue of crimes can plumb the depth of their wickedness and spite.

Mantichora are thus of two kinds in proportion to the crimes of the men who become them. The lesser of the foul breed is subservient to the greater.  Both retain the twisted minds of twisted heartless men, though all human desire is subsumed by the demon’s hunger for the flesh and pain of others. The distinction between lesser and greater is one of size and pussiance not mind or demeanor. 

In strength and appearance, Pards, the lesser Mantichora are like predatory beasts while the greater I are akin to demons: winged, gigantic and enhanced by foul sorcerous features. All Mantichora share the head of a man, swollen or shrunken to fit their beast’s body, with features recognizable beneath usually unkempt beards and manes. However, the bodies of Mantichoras differ dramatically, always that of a quadrupedal predator or scavenger, but beyond that there is no pattern. The Mantichora’s form is stolen from whatever creature devoured the host’s dying, demon wracked body, the scavenger corrupted and subsumed to become the basis of the Mantichora’s new flesh. The lizard, the dog, the lion, the wolf, the rat, and the pig all lend their forms to the Mantichora, but even among the lesser Pards further transformation is common as the demon within shapes the animal and man after its own perverse whims. These demon boons are more common and dramatic in the greater beasts, and they begin with the creature’s wings and enormous size, but include numerous other horrific and dangerous transformations, with each greater Mantichora’s form warped in some significant way by its demonic symbiote.

Crystal Frontier - Ongoing Campaign - The Mud Isles

"Vpon the Seuentene Daye of the Seconde Moneth, that same daye were all ye fountaynes of the greate depe broken vp, and the wyir of ye heauens cast wyde."

- Late added marginalia in the Codex of Lead 7:11

Joseph Grady - The Bank of England - 1830
Imagining One's Capital in Ruins...

When the sky is clear and the rain breaks on the coast of Blackacre a brown smudge beneath dark clouds mars the horizon... The Mud Isles are scant miles away over the Silt Straits and Narrow Sea but they are a lost land. Now only known as home to the raft-borne raiders - bands of dozens or hundreds of “Ghouls” - who crash onto the shores of Blackacre almost every Fall. A watchword for cannibal horror and mindless barbarity, the Ghouls of the Mud Isles worship a vile devoured god beyond the understanding of any in the Empire or Resurgent Kingdom — except as a mirror reflecting the dark years of the Demon Emperors. The Ghouls are anathema, even more than the Blackheart cults they resemble and which still infect the Empire. Yet the the Mud Isles are not the waste of bone idols, stinking sucking mud, and festering midden of chewed bones that most imagine them to be. The Mud Isles were once a civilized place. A kingdom that traded with the Empire in ancient times, noted for its devotion to decorum, mercantile avarice, and delicate decor. Some few and foolhardy … or perhaps those who have made dark pacts allowing them the favor and acceptance of the rulers of the Mud Isles … trade there even now, pulling antiquities and treasures from the sunken ruins of the City of Lead.

Crystal Frontier - Ongoing Campaign Note: Templars of Blackacre

To the North and East of the Crystal Frontier, beyond the Bay of Fallen Stars or across the Maiden Tombs over the Road of Dead is the Province of Blackacre, sometimes known as the Blackmash. Grey salt marshes rising from the Silt Straights and beyond deep, wet forests of colossal evergreens and ancient malice. Blackacre was the last Imperial Province settled, and never much beyond wilderness. A wealth of lumber, fish and the rare dyes of found in the vast tidal pools along its shores provided impetus for settlement, but the climate, old sorcery and (according to heretic scholars and false prophets) the dogged resistance of the “old people'' who once lived in its forests has made it difficult to find voluntary settlers. The majority of residents in Blackacre are prisoners or the descendents of prisoners, sent to toil in the lumber towns fisheries and dye pools.Even the Imperial soldiery abhors Blackacre, long considered a dangerous punishment posting, and its 5th “Battle”, the Larks, who have been charged with Blackacres’ defense since before the rise of the Successor Empire, now exist only as a few hundred residents of canal and border forts subsisting on transit taxes. With the typical logic to Imperial governance, Blackacre, one of the few provinces that produces a surplus of wealth, trade goods, and raw materials is almost devoid of official protectors and most in need of them. The shores of Blackacre are directly across the murky shallows of the Narrow Sea from the Mud Isles … the Ghoul Kingdoms, now almost united under vile White God.

Bickering over resources between the elite of Dawn Rill and the Imperial Cult, mean that no colossi or lesser war machines have been redeployed to Blackacre, and the Cult’s fear of increasing the power of the military means that recruiting the 5th up to strength cannot even be discussed. Instead Blackacre’s coasts are protected from the raft fleets that come each autumn to reave and kidnap by penal templars. Sects of “Sword Saints”, devoted to Emperor Isacco Hydria, saint of tribulations and protector of the imprisoned, falsely accused, and repentant.

From five huge monastery-prisons, geomantically sculpted spires of sea basalt, and numerous smaller gaol hermitages, the penal templars watch the sea. An army of fanatics and felons that defend the shoreline’s dyers and fishers, but also extract dues and taxes in the form of food and raw materials. Those who have lived in the spires describe them as hellish. A cruel hierarchy, layered from top to bottom, where the newest prisoners or those of the lowest status live on a diet of kelp and barnacles in the half flooded galleries at the base. The cold seas seep and flood regularly into these dark vaults and the threat of drowning is as constant as that of the predatory gangs. Children of the galleries and the strongest fighters who survive the yearly gladiatorial contests are allowed into the dry stone above, where thousands of rock cut cells are home to a cruelly excessive creed of asceticism and martial training. When the training monks deem these unfortunates properly tempered and disciplined, they become part of the templar host, and move up to the temples, meditation halls, arenas, refractories, training halls, forges, and armories of the spire’s upper levels.