The march of empire

I've mentioned before that the setting of ATWC is loosely pegged to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which for the peoples of Central Asia were an era of imperial encroachment. Equipped with new gunpowder weaponry and a greatly improved logistical base, the Eurasian empires of the early modern period - Romanov Russia, Ottoman Turkey, Safavid Persia, Mughal India, and Qing China - were able to project force into the steppe, mountains, deserts, and taiga much more successfully than their predecessors. By the time the Nerchinsk Treaty of 1689 was signed, many once-impassible regions such as Azerbaijan, Sibera, Mongolia, and Afghanistan had been more-or-less carved up between them.

In ATWC, this hasn't happened yet. The steppe and taiga khanates still enjoy an uneasy independence, but every observer of current affairs can tell that change is on its way. Travel down the Great Road and you'll find foreigners everywhere: some southerners and some easterners and some westerners, but all carrying splendid-looking documents from far-off imperial courts and flanked by serious-looking men wearing strange military uniforms and carrying guns. They are always on the move, these foreigners. They study local languages. They map and survey and observe and inquire. They preach new religions, or disturbingly unfamiliar interpretations of old ones. They hold secret meetings with local princes that go on long into the night. Their horsemanship is comically terrible by steppe standards, and they possess a knack for starving to death in deserts that the locals find quite astounding, but despite these failings they carry themselves with a strange confidence. They seem convinced that the future belongs to them.

For the Tsar!

Wherever you go in the steppe khanates, or in the oasis kingdoms of the Great Road, you can bet that agents of foreign empires are there too. (They haven't made it very far into the taiga yet, but they're working on it.) Roll on the tables below to find out what they're up to.

Who is here? (Roll 1d8)

1. Merchant-adventurers, scouting out the region's goods and markets on behalf of some far-off trade consortium, watched with loathing by local traders who have operated in this area for centuries. 
2. Missionaries for some foreign faith, armed with official letters from a distant emperor, scornfully surveying the local temples.
3. Negotiators come to arrange a treaty between a nearby ruler and some distant imperial state, speaking the local language very badly and looking extremely pleased with themselves.
4. Explorers on horseback accompanied by local bearers, making notes and checking compasses, steadily filling in the blank areas on their maps.
5. Scholars affiliated with a far-off university, surveying local customs and monuments and nodding sagely to themselves. 
6. 'Archaeologists and antiquaries' (read: grave-robbers with fancy licenses), poking around in the ruins outside of town and casually asking where exactly your ancestors are buried.
7. Military advisers decked out with the very latest in modern firearms technology, offering to help the local rulers modernise their pitifully outdated cannons and fortifications in exchange for a little quid pro quo.
8. Roll again, but they're actually spies from a completely different foreign empire, here in disguise to watch over the activities of their rivals as part of some complicated game of international intrigue. 

For the Sultan!

Who leads them? (Roll 1d8)

1. Bright-eyed true believer who genuinely believes that absorption into the greater imperial polity is the best thing that could possibly happen to a benighted backwater like this one.
2. Dead-eyed veteran of the imperial war machine, whose utterly impersonal brutality makes even the most savage khans shiver.
3. Long-term field agent who went native years ago, and now identifies more with the khanate they're posted to than the distant empire they supposedly serve.
4. Embarrassing failure from a minor imperial house, sent out to the back of beyond with strict orders not to return home until they've actually accomplished something.
5. Disgraced courtier who knows full well that they've been sent out here as a punishment, and resents it bitterly.
6. Bookish academic convinced that their years of study in the archives have allowed them to understand the region much better than the people who actually live there.
7. Enterprising merchant who sees the whole region as a series of mouth-watering opportunities for economic exploitation. 
8. A member of a local ethnic group with a painstakingly acquired imperial education, who has carved out a precarious place for themselves as an intermediary between their country and the empire while feeling painfully out of place in both. 

For the Shah!

What is their true objective? (Roll 1d12)

1. To lay the groundwork for the conquest and annexation of the region by the empire they serve.
2. To change the region's culture and religion in ways that will align it with the empire.
3. To gain revenge on the descendants of the nomad warlords who terrorised their empire generations ago. 
4. To suppress the bandits and raiders based in the region, who are disrupting the empire's overland trade.
5. To gain access to the natural resources of the region and exploit them for everything they're worth. 
6. To turn the local rulers against their imperial rivals, who are also active in the region.
7. To establish new trade routes and markets for the empire's merchants and manufacturers. 
8. To bring down the local regime and replace it with one more amenable to their empire's interests.
9. To establish a military alliance with the local rulers, in the hope of securing troops to fight in some distant imperial warzone. 
10. To loot all the valuable books, treasure and antiquities they can get their hands on, on behalf of some far-off imperial archive or museum. 
11. To establish covert diplomatic ties with the Wicked City. (All the empires insist loudly that they would never bargain with a state so obviously impious, but many of them do so anyway, albeit in secret. Empires always have uses for another delivery of cut-price muskets and clockwork soldiers!)
12. Roll again, but the second roll is just a cover story: they're actually part of a rebel faction within the empire, secretly gathering allies and resources for a planned uprising. (Yes, if you also rolled an 8 on the first table, this means they're actually spies posing as rebels posing as something else. Welcome to the Great Game!)

For the Shahenshah!

How much backing do they have? (Roll 1d8)

(All imperial representatives travel with fancy letters declaring that anyone impeding their mission will face the wrath of the entire empire, but ink is cheap and armies are expensive. If push comes to shove, will anyone back home really care?)

1. Less than zero. This mission has been deliberately set up to fail, as a deniable way of getting rid of someone inconvenient. No matter what happens to it, the empire will do nothing to intervene.
2. Zero. This mission is essentially a punishment assignment for people who've made the wrong enemies. No-one in power will care if they don't make it home alive.
3. Minimal. This mission is a gamble by some minor minister or provincial governor, who would very much like it to succeed but doesn't really have the resources to properly support it. Minor levels of military and/or financial reinforcement will be sent if they are in truly desperate need.
4. Local. No-one really cares about this mission back in their distant imperial capital, but one local faction (roll 1d4 - 1 = religious group, 2 = ethnic group, 3 = political faction, 4 = merchant consortium) would like to see it succeed for private reasons of their own, and is willing to commit substantial resources to bring this about.
5. Financial. This mission is being financed by someone with extremely deep pockets, and carries letters of credit that allow them to call upon staggering amounts of money on demand. 
6. Military. This mission is being backed by someone with a lot of soldiers at their disposal, who is perfectly willing to send a whole lot of men to their deaths if it will help ensure the mission's success.
7. Covert. Although only minimally supported by its notional patrons, the mission is actually being backed by another imperial power, for nefarious reasons of its own. They are willing to offer it substantial support, but only in indirect and deniable forms. 
8. High. This mission has the full backing of the imperial government, which regards it as a strategic priority and are willing to launch large-scale military or diplomatic reprisals against anyone impeding or threatening it.

For the Son of Heaven!

Bringing Down the Hammer, part 7: Terror in Talabheim, Tome of Corruption

More than halfway through, now!

Terror in Talabheim (July 2006)

The fifth book in the 'location plus adventure' series that started with Ashes of Middenheim. This one is about Talabheim, which I don't remember ever being described in any detail for first edition. Fantasy cities often take just one theme and run with it: so Altdorf is The Great Capital City, Middenheim is The Rugged City on the Rock, Nuln is The Rich And Filthy City of Industry, and so on. Talabheim is interesting in that is has three different themes going on: it's a city in a forest (and thus full of druids and woodsmen), and a city of laws (and thus full of lawyers and prisons), and a city built inside a giant crater (and thus full of paupers living in cavern-homes dug into the rock and smugglers carrying goods through hidden tunnels). Its the kind of combination of traits that is often found in real and historical cities, but is much rarer in their fictional counterparts, which tend to be much more one-note. At 29 pages the city write-up is needlessly lengthy, and many parts of it are very similar to the equivalent sections from the books on Middenheim, Altdorf, and Nuln: apparently all Imperial cities have a filthy and lawless slum district, a temple district with one temple per god, giant fortifications with cannons on them, unmapped mazes of tunnels beneath the city streets, etc. It's still a pretty colourful location, though, and one I can easily imagine using in a game.

The adventure that follows is weird. The best way I can describe it is that it's written like a movie: this is the bit where the PCs escort some refugees, this is the bit where they're stuck inside a quarantined town during a plague, this is the bit where they're conscripted into the city watch, this is the bit where they try and fail to prevent a skaven invasion of the city, this is the bit where they organise a resistance movement against the skaven occupation, etc. They're often given a fair bit of freedom about what they do within each of those situations, but the module is very heavy-handed about forcing them from one to another, even though the prescribed path involves all three of the things that PCs usually hate most: being forced to stay in a location which they can't leave, being forced to join an organisation and obey NPCs, and being forced to participate in a battle they can't win. It keeps passive-aggressively insisting that technically the PCs can try to do something else, but if they do then everyone hates them and totally forces them back on track on pain of death.

Over and over again, the module casts the PCs as passive observers rather than active agents. While they're escorting the refugees, some of them are murdered in the night, and what the PCs do about it is up to them... but the idea that the PCs might have been keeping watch over their charges during the night, and actively intervened to prevent the murders, doesn't seem to have occured to the authors. At one point a mob of refugees try to force their way into Talabheim, and get blown to bits by cannons, and any PCs who see this have a chance of gaining an insanity point... but what if the PCs intervene, and persuade the mob not to attack the city? What if they come up with a different plan? What if they decide to lead the mob - does that mean they all get blown up, too? There's an appealing gutsiness to how thoroughly the adventure trashes its setting, but the way in which it forces the PCs from set-piece to set-piece is very clumsy, and its attempts to turn the clock back at the end - 'everything gets rebuilt and everyone forgets!' - are just embarrassing.

Now for some speculation. When I first read the Pathfinder adventure path Curse of the Crimson Throne, my first thought was: 'this is a rewrite of someone's WFRP adventure'. (The temple full of Nurgle Urgathoa cultists with a leader that turns into a chaos spawn Daughter of Urgathoa was the real giveaway.) Now that I've read this adventure, which features many of the same elements - a city stricken by an artificial plague, plague cultists, a crazy necromancer unleashing undead in the middle of a disease outbreak, ratmen in the sewers, the PCs organising a resistance movement against a brutal occupation - I suspect that Curse of the Crimson Throne was at least partly inspired by Terror in Talabheim, which had been published just two years earlier. I think Curse handles the material more successfully, though. My condensed version of it is available here.

Tome of Corruption (October 2006)

This is the 2nd edition chaos book, and thus the successor to the 1st edition Realm of Chaos sourcebooks. The Realm of Chaos books are classics of Games Workshop's golden age, but from a WFRP perspective they're rather odd beasts, as they were produced during the years when the company was turning away from RPGs and towards the more profitable tabletop wargaming market. As such their primary focus is on providing rules for playing chaos warbands in WFB and 40K, with only occasional concessions to the role-playing game.

The original Realm of Chaos books are classics because they're crazy. The creative energy is off the charts. Windmills grind cargoes of corpses. Deformed human faces grow from trees. A cowled figure blocks the way to the Inevitable City. A flying castle drifts through the air, scattering tattered scraps of flags across the land below. Nightmare horsemen made from heaving masses of worms burst from the graves of plague victims. In doomed villages, the demons of Nurgle dance, singing, through the streets. ('The flies! The flies! His eyes! His eyes! Before the Burgomaster dies!') Every page just throws so much stuff at you, as though the writers and artists had so many ideas that they were struggling to fit them all into the space available. The Tome of Corruption can't match that, and for the most part it doesn't even try.

The main thing that struck me about the version of chaos presented here is how much less, well, chaotic it was than the old one. The nature of chaos is much more clearly defined here, as is its relationship with magic, the gods, and human belief. The four major chaos gods are now the chaos gods, rather than just four examples with the suggestion for you to design your own if you feel like it, and even they have lost some of their old complexity: there's no suggestion here that Nurgle, for example, embodies both 'the hidden fear of disease and decay' and 'the power of life which that fear generates', which is how he was described in his much more nuanced and sympathetic write-up in The Lost and the Damned. Mutants are now doomed to just carry on mutating until they ultimately devolve into chaos spawn, which greatly reduces the moral complexity of the setting by confirming that the Empire's continual anti-mutant pogrom is actually more-or-less justified. (1st edition more closely followed its 2000 AD inspirations in showing that at least some mutants were weird but harmless, and certainly not deserving of being burned alive.) [EDIT: An anonymous commentator points out below that the book is far from consistent about this. The description implies inevitable degeneration, but the rules imply that most mutants will actually stabilise harmlessly at the 2-3 mutations mark.] The Chaos Wastes described here don't come close to the baroque insanity of their first edition counterparts. (The lack of Ian Miller's illustrations is keenly felt.) In 1st edition, the chaos armour worn by champions of Khorne was forged in red furnaces beneath the throne of the Blood God, where captive seers laboured eternally to create enchanted armaments in fires fuelled by burning souls. In 2nd edition, they just buy it off the chaos dwarves. Something of their unholy majesty appears to have been lost along the way.

Now that's the Realm of Chaos!

As well as cultists, mutants, demons, and beastmen, The Tome of Corruption also details other followers of chaos who have never previously appeared in WFRP: the Norscans, the Chaos Dwarves, the Kurgan, and the Hung. For the poor old Norscans this is quite a demotion, as in 1st edition they were described as allies of the empire and enemies of chaos. Given the setting's 17th-century flavour I imagined them as stalwart Gustavus Aldophus types, grimly holding the line in the far north: but The Tome of Corruption describes them instead as straightforward chaos vikings, complete with a culture straight out of the Dark Ages. [Edit: Nirkhuz points out that this was wishful thinking on my part, and that they've always been medieval Vikings. I'd still note that they've gone from being enemies to chaos to servants of it.] The Chaos Dwarves are fine, though they're dealt with very briefly. The Kurgan are bloodthirsty chaos-worshiping Proud Warrior Race guys based on the peoples of the Eurasian steppe (and, let's be honest, on the villain from Highlander), which kinda travesties the actual cultures they're inspired by, but is probably pretty close to the way they were regarded in Europe: the Mongols weren't called the Devil's Horsemen for nothing. But the Hung... good grief, the Hung. They're a race of humans based on the steppe nomads (the Huns, most obviously), who are described as being sly, greedy, treacherous, ugly, cruel, filthy, demon-worshipping cannibal rapists. They are apparently so utterly awful as to be unsuitable as PCs even in games where all the PCs are chaos cultists, because 'their essential character is one of betrayal and treachery'. (Not because of any kind of supernatural curse, you understand: simply because they're just that horrible.) I found this much more objectionable than the one-dimensional depiction of the Kurgan or the national stereotyping of the Norse as Vikings, especially as the ways in which the Hung are described overlap so heavily with the ways in which the steppe nomads have historically been dehumanised by surrounding sedentary populations in order to justify their exploitation and/or extermination. I mean, I'm sure they were just going for a generic 'degenerate tribe' set-up, but still...

The book does have some strengths. The discussion of cults makes clear that most chaos cultists don't actually know they're chaos cultists, which is a definite advance on the near-mindless drones of evil that such cultists tend to be portrayed as in many WFRP adventures. The section on beastmen features a description of what I've come to think of as the 'big Empire' interpretation of the WFRP setting, in which the Imperial government only actually controls a fraction of the land within its borders, as between the pockets of arable land and the roads that connect them lie vast unmapped forests full of weird monsters and isolated settlements cut off from the world outside: a very different version of the Empire to the 'small Empire' interpretation in Heirs of Sigmar, and one that I find much more imaginatively compelling. The new version of the famous d1000 mutation table has even more stuff on it than the original, allowing you to introduce your players to heaping helpings of body horror with just a few rolls of the dice. Overall, though, I strongly prefer the version of chaos (and the version of Norsca) presented in the original edition.

Horse-hair and pine-needles spill from their frozen hearts

The other thing I managed to do over the Christmas vacation, aside from playing intermittently-disturbing games with my three-year-old son, was visiting the Scythians exhibition at the British Museum. Most of the items on display barely ever leave Russia, so it was an opportunity I really didn't want to miss.

One thing I learned from the exhibition was that many of the most famous examples of Scythian art were found in what was essentially a tomb-robbing gold rush in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Buried in the frozen earth of the Altai mountains, many Scythian kings and chieftains had been preserved by the ice, along with all their grave goods, for millennia - until the locals discovered, by chance, that there were hauls of ancient gold buried up in the hills, some of which found its way back to the court of Peter the Great. Believing that the only proper place for such rarities was in his new cabinet of curiosities (which would one day form the basis of the original Hermitage collection), the tsar sent out archaeological expeditions to search for more of these ancient tombs, along with decrees that anyone finding Scythian gold would be richly rewarded if they handed it over to the tsar, and harshly punished if they attempted to keep it for themselves. Soon the golden treasures of the long-dead kings of Scythia were flowing north to St Petersburg, where they have largely remained ever since.

Lost tombs in the wilderness... preserved corpses... ancient treasures from forgotten civilisations... the whole set-up is absurdly D&D-friendly. The fact that it began at almost the exact historical moment that the ATWC setting is pegged to is just a gratuitous bonus.

So: for the last few years, there's been a new rumour travelling up and down the Great Road. They say that the distant Western Emperor, the ruler of all those hairy foreigners with guns who are currently carving up the taiga, has gone mad: that someone brought him a beautiful gold carving from some long-lost tomb, and he fell in love with it, and swore that he would not rest until he had gathered together all such treasures that still exist upon the earth. They say that he thinks of little else, now; that he sits all night long in his treasury, caressing the ancient faces of his golden stags and tigers and monsters, and dreaming of what new acquisitions his messengers may even now be carrying back to him across the endless steppe. Anyone who owns such items and is willing to sell them to the Western Emperor's agents can make a quick fortune. Anyone who owns such items and refuses to sell them is likely to suffer either a very precisely-targeted robbery or a premature death.

Who were they, these ancient goldsmiths, whose skillful workmanship has so bewitched the mind of the emperor, thousands of years after their own deaths? No-one knows: the steppe has devoured them, along with their name and their language and their history, just as it has so many peoples before and since. They lived long before the Wolf Khans, and left no script to be decoded: only scratched pictures of horses and chariots, and carved stone men standing in endless vigils on hillsides, with three diagonal lines cut where their faces should have been. Those who have seen the bodies which lie within their icy tombs call them the Frozen Ones, or the Tattooed Folk, or the Pale Riders. But there are few who can truthfully claim to have seen such sights - and fewer still who like to talk about it.

They built their tombs in the frozen earth, high up in the mountains; and there the ice has preserved them, age after age. Imagine a row of sturdy log cabins, lowered into pits, covered with mounds of earth, and left to freeze: that's what their royal tombs are like. Within lie the bodies of men, women, and horses, their skin dried and frozen into icy leather, their weapons and clothes and harness still intact despite the passage of so many centuries - but cold, all of it, so deathly, deathly cold. Sometimes the corpses are just corpses, and any daring hand can loot them, plundering all their valuables - their golden buckles and armbands, their bowls and brooches and earrings, and all those other precious things of which the Western Emperor dreams. Sometimes even their beautiful beaded clothes can be stripped from them, revealing the fantastical tattoos on their bare and frozen limbs, and their long-dead wearers will simply loll, and crack, and not resist. Sometimes a fortune in old gold can be pulled from the earth with almost no risk at all.

Sometimes. But sometimes not.

For sometimes they rise, these old ones, these pale riders. Sometimes they lift their ancient war-picks in anger against the intruders in their tombs. Sometimes would-be looters will find themselves impaled by volleys of millennia-old arrows, launched out of the subterranean darkness by icy fingers which have forgotten how to miss. Sometimes the adventurer who reaches down to take a golden buckle from some withered corpse will find their arms suddenly grasped by a dead man's hand. They never speak, these frozen guardians. If their bodies are cut open, horse-hair and pine-needles spill from their wounds instead of blood.

Here is a secret that no-one knows yet: the bizarre creatures depicted in the gold jewellery of the Pale Riders were not mythical or imaginary, but real monsters of the ancient steppe and taiga, which their heroes hunted to extinction in the dim and distant past. The preserved and frozen corpses of a few of them still stand in certain undiscovered tombs, buried as trophies with the great hunters who slew them. Such a specimen would be worth a fortune to any scholar or collector; but their mighty spirits do not rest easy, and if taken from the tombs of the mighty men and women who defeated them in life, their bodies are liable to reanimate as soon as they feel the wind and sun once more upon their faces.

Here is a another secret which no-one knows yet: although the Western Emperor isn't nearly as mad as the rumours claim, he is becoming increasingly obsessed with his collection, and his obsession is not an accident. The gold really is calling to him, calling in a voice that feels like snow and smells like hemp and horses. The more of these ancient treasures he brings together, the louder the voice becomes. He feels he can almost understand it, now. He can almost make out the words.

Surely, surely, just a few more pieces will suffice...

• Animated Pale Rider Corpse: AC 13 (frozen, leathery skin), 3 HD, AB +3, damage 1d6+1 (war pick) or 1d4+1 (claw), FORT 10, REF 13, WILL 10, morale 12. Each round, roll 1d3: on a 1, the corpse exhales a cloud of ice crystals onto any one target within melee range, who must then make a FORT save or take 1d6 cold damage and be at -1 to all rolls until properly warmed up. (Penalties from multiple freezings stack.) Take only 1 damage per hit from piercing attacks such as daggers, arrows, or bullets.

Leathery, pale-skinned corpses with tattooed limbs, these ancient warriors defend their tombs using the antique war-picks they were buried with: these weapons are fragile with age, however, and will break on an attack roll of 1 or 2. In life they were expert archers, but there is simply no way to preserve a compound bow for two thousand years in a useable state, so they have to rely on melee weapons instead. If anyone intrudes into their tomb carrying a bow, their first priority will be to kill that person and take it. A Pale Rider corpse with a functional bow shoots with AB +5 and +2 damage.

• Monsters of the Ancient Taiga: AC 14 (agility and tough skin), 6 HD, AB +6, damage 1d8, 3 attacks per round (a combination of goring, biting, kicking, clawing, and trampling), FORT 8, REF 8, WILL 10, morale 8. 

These bizarre creatures resemble odd combinations of features from elk, wolves, lions, tigers, and predatory birds. One might have a lion's body, an eagle's head, and feet ending in hooves; another might have the body of a tiger, a wolf's muzzle, spreading many-tined antlers, and a lashing tail that ends in a snapping bird's head. All are huge and savage. They de-animate at once if the corpse of the hunter who originally killed them is brought into their presence, or if they can no longer feel the sun and wind on their skin.

• The Ice Maiden, Witch-Queen of the Steppes: AC 15 (semi-corporeal body), 5/10 HD, AB +4, damage 1d10 (freezing touch), FORT 10, REF 10, WILL 8, morale 10. Each round, she can exhale a cloud of ice crystals onto any one target within melee range, who must then make a FORT save or take 1d6 cold damage and be at -1 to all rolls until properly warmed up. (Penalties from multiple freezings stack.) Takes half damage from non-magical attacks.

The Ice Maiden loved worked gold more than anything else, so much so that when she died a fraction of her spirit passed into each of the golden treasures that she loved the most, which were then divided among the various kings and chieftains of the Tattooed Folk. Once more than three of these are gathered together in any one place, their owner will begin to feel a nagging desire to own more; this desire will grow stronger the more such treasures are brought together, gradually reaching the level of an obsession. Once half of them have been collected, she will be able to manifest herself at will as an 5 HD spirit. Once all of them have been assembled, she can manifest at 10 HD, instead.

The Ice Maiden manifests as the ghostly figure of a woman in a high conical hat, her arms and legs covered in fantastical tattoos of taiga animals being devoured by predatory beasts and monsters. If she wills it these beasts can spring to life, uncoiling themselves from her limbs and dilating into full-size predators within seconds: each round, in lieu of attacking, she can summon one such creature, up to a maximum of four. These have the statistics of the Monsters of the Ancient Taiga, above, but they cannot act in the round in which they are summoned. They vanish instantly if she is defeated.

Once manifested, her first objective will be to regather all her original treasures, and her second will be to start hoarding together as much gold as possible. She will find modern cities extremely confusing, however, and if she manifests in such a city - the capital of the Western Emperor, for example - she will venture forth only at night, when it's quiet and there aren't too many people around. She speaks only her own long-extinct language, but is capable of basic telepathic communication with whoever owns her treasures, and can also be contacted like any other spirit through the use of shamanic trance rituals.

Killing the Ice Maiden banishes her for 1d100 days, but she will always return as long as her treasure collection is intact. The only ways to permanently get rid of her are to break up the collection, destroy more than half the treasures, or get every surviving treasure blessed by a man or woman of great holiness (which sends her spirit on to the afterlife). Alternatively, if all her treasures were taken to one place and buried, she would become a spirit of the land, who could be contacted and bargained with by shamans like any other. Her favour would bestow skill in metalwork, prowess in hunting, and resistance to cold, but - unsurprisingly - she would demand offerings of gold in return.

We dance for the spirits and yet they are not appeased.

These are Tsam dancers.

The Tsam or Cham ceremony is a ritual of Tibetan origin, in which masked performers enact symbolic dances in order to spiritually purify themselves and the surrounding environment. Like much of Tibetan Buddhism, it bears a strong resemblance to the indigenous shamanic traditions which were incorporated into local Buddhist practise: and it may have been this shamanic heritage which helped it to catch on in Mongolia, where Buddhist monks began performing Tsam dances of their own in the eighteenth century. To a population familiar with Tegriist shamanism, with its use of ritual masks and dances, it probably seemed logical that Buddhist clergy might also achieve their spiritual objectives by putting on masks and dancing: and the Mongolian Tsam rituals quickly became even more elaborate than their Tibetan originals.

The setting of ATWC is mostly pegged to the seventeenth century, which is before the flowering of Mongolian Tsam traditions: and in any case, I'm extremely wary of turning real religious ceremonies into gaming fodder. Still, I like the idea of the having something similar to the Tsam ritual - let's call it the Great Spirit Dance - as an exciting new ceremonial technique, knowledge of which is just starting to filter into the steppe khanates from some half-legendary mountain kingdom in the south. For the steppe peoples, the Great Spirit Dance is still something daring and experimental and dangerously foreign, which many people have heard of but which very few actually know how to carry out. As such, the performance of such dances is only likely to be attempted by the truly adventurous - or the truly desperate.

Here's how it's supposed to work: through ritual supplications, powerful spirits are drawn down into the masks, which become their temporary homes. The ritualists then don the masks and perform their ceremonial dances, symbolically enacting the cosmic order of the universe. The spirits inhabiting the dancers are reminded of their place within the cosmic system, and at the end of the dance they depart from the bodies of the ritualists in a state of harmonious contentment, meaning that the chances of them deciding to unleash plagues and famines and other disasters upon the people will be drastically reduced in the year to come. They might still do those things, of course: but if they do, it's likely to be because they have a good reason for it, rather than just because they woke up feeling spiteful that day.

Here's the harmless way to get it wrong: if you mess up the construction of the masks, or the initial ritual preparations, the spirits won't be called down into the performers. You can still do the dances, and if your human audience is paying attention to the symbolism they might even learn some useful religious lessons - but the spirits won't be influenced, because the spirits won't have turned up. As a result, they'll be no more or less likely to send a murrain on your cattle than they would be in any other year.

Here's the really dangerous way to get it wrong: if you get the ritual masks and preparations right, but then mess up the dance, then the spirits will arrive... but they won't leave. You've called them here, into your masks and your bodies, and you're dancing for them... but the dance isn't telling them anything, or at least not anything that makes proper sense. They get confused. They get frustrated. They won't let you stop dancing. They won't let you take the mask off. They want you to do it right.

Thus it sometimes happens that travellers on the steppe chance across a ragged band of dancers, arrayed in the tattered remains of once-fantastical costumes, leaping and stomping their way across the empty lands. Their huge, heavy masks sway and nod to the beat of inaudible music, and through their open mouths can be glimpsed the wild eyes of the dancers, spirit-ridden, gleaming, and crazed. They move in great wheeling circles, their feet tracing intricate mandalas across the featureless grasslands of the steppe. They never eat. They never sleep. They never stop.

It's best to avoid them, which is easily done on horseback: they move faster than any man, but never in straight lines, so a horse will always outdistance them over time. But if they come upon you by surprise - if they burst upon your camp during the night, for example, for their dance continues in darkness just as it does in light - then almost anything could happen. To determine the disposition of the spirits, roll 1d6:

1. The spirits want you to join the dance. They will each grab one dance-partner and whirl them away, carrying them off over the steppe for 2d20 hours before releasing them and pirouetting off. If resisted they will become forcible, first grabbing and grappling, then escalating to actual violence. They'll dance with unconscious bodies or lifeless corpses if they have to. 
2. The spirits want musical accompaniment. For 1d6 hours, they demand that you play for them, with whatever instruments you have available: if no-one has any musical instruments, then they'll accept beatboxing and drumming on nearby objects instead. They're not picky about performance quality, but will grow agitated and violent if you can't keep the beat.
3. The spirits want new bodies: these ones are becoming quite worn out. They will try to grab victims and force their masks over their heads, using whatever degree of force is necessary to do so. Anyone who has such a spirit-mask forced over their head must pass a WILL save each round or suffer spirit possession. The mask's previous wearer will be freed from the spirit's influence once the new victim has been possessed, but they will be in a terrible physical condition, and will die in 1d6 hours unless they receive immediate care. 
4. The spirits want an audience. You have to sit and watch them for 2d12 hours, cheering and applauding whenever any of them does anything especially athletic: after this time is up, they bow and dance away. They will use force, and if necessary violence, to compel continued attention. 
5. The spirits have questions, and they want you to answer them. The imperfect symbolism of their dance has puzzled them rather than placated them, and now they surge towards you, roaring out theological queries like challenges: 'What is the nature of heaven? What is the purpose of suffering? Of what essence are the Men of Bone and Iron? What is the true homeland of the soul?' If your answers are good enough to give them something to think about, they'll whirl away and dance around contemplatively in a circle for a while, giving you a chance to leave. (For these purposes, clever-sounding wordplay is just as good as something genuinely profound.) If they receive obviously unsatisfactory answers, or no answers at all, they will become frustrated and attack.
6. The spirits believe they are engaged in a ceremonial re-enactment of some primordial battle... and that you are the enemy. They attack furiously, yelling out the names of antique war-gods as battle-cries, and forcing their luckless hosts to fight until they have been hacked to twitching pieces.

PCs confronted with such possessed individuals may try to free them by pulling their masks off, but these unfortunates are not so easily saved: while the spirit rides them, the mask is effectively their actual head, and cannot be removed by any means short of amputation. (The exception is if the spirits themselves will it - see 3, above.) Aside from killing them, there is only one way to end their possession, which is to identify what is wrong with their dance and then demonstrate to them how it should actually be completed: if this is accomplished, then the spirits will be satisfied and depart, and their hosts may yet be saved with the aid of prompt medical attention. (They will remember their possession only as a blurred and interminable dream.) For anyone other than a Spirit Dance expert, understanding the flaw in the dance's symbolism requires a 1d6 x 10 minutes of close observation, a specialised religious education, and successful Intelligence check; demonstrating what the correct version should look like requires a great sense of rhythm, 3d6 minutes of dancing, and a successful Dexterity check. Both are likely to be challenging under combat conditions.

• Possessed Dancer: AC 15 (superhuman agility), 3 HD, AB +3, damage 1d4+3 (inhumanly strong kicks and punches) or grapple, FORT 8, REF 8, WILL 8, morale 12.  Possessed dancers are immune to all mortal magic, as well as to fear, exhaustion, and pain. They can never stop dancing for any reason until they are either cut to pieces or freed from the spirits that drive them. 

Khanates of the Endless Steppe

North of the Great Road, the steppe stretches out for what feels like forever: hundreds and hundreds of miles of emptiness, of tall grasses swaying in the endless wind. There are very few trees, and very little cover to shelter travellers from the heat of the day or the cold of the night, or to stand between them and the winds and rain. In most places the soil is too poor and dry for farming, and so the people of the steppe khanates live by herding, and by hunting, and by war.

Each khanate is composed of an alliance of clans, usually united by their shared membership of some larger ethnic group. They are defined by continuity of culture, rather than of territory: being nomadic, the steppe peoples can (and often do) perform heroic migrations over the course of their history, and it is by no means uncommon for the people of a given khanate to live hundreds or thousands of miles from the lands inhabited by their ancestors. Each individual is part of a clan, and each clan is part of a confederacy, with a single khan at its head. Some of these confederacies have held together for many centuries, and are now so tightly bound together by alliances, intermarriages, and shared history that only the direst emergencies would break them apart, while others are much more recent creations, likely to fissure as soon as an incompetent or divisive khan takes over the duties of rulership.

In the real world, the early modern period was a transitional moment for the people of the Eurasian steppe. For a thousand years, from Attila and his Huns in the fifth century to Timur and his Turco-Mongol followers in the fifteenth, the periodic risings of the steppe peoples had terrorised (and occasionally obliterated) the surrounding empires: but by the eighteenth century technological innovations in Europe and Asia had allowed the empires to reverse the situation, with Russia and China carving up most of Eurasia between them. The genocide of the Dzungar people by Qing China in the 1750s may be taken to mark the definitive point at which mass violence ceased to be something which was exported from the steppe into the surrounding empires, and started to be something imported by those empires as they expanded their reach into the steppe. The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries thus formed a period of queasy near-equilibrium, during which the steppe khanates no longer possessed the power to snuff out entire civilisations, but were still resilient enough to mostly resist imperial encroachment - and it's this moment in their history which I want to evoke with ATWC.

To generate a steppe khanate, use the following tables:

Size (roll 1d4)

1. A minor confederation, composed of 2d3 constituent clans. If the khan called all his horsemen together, they could overrun a city.
2. A small confederation, composed of 2d6 constituent clans. If the khan called all his horsemen together, they could overrun a province.
3. A large confederation, composed of 4d6 constituent clans. If the khan called all his horsemen together, they could overrun a small nation.
4. A very large confederation, composed of 8d6 constituent clans. If the khan called all his horsemen together, they could overrun a large nation.

Degree of Integration (roll 1d6)

1. Very loose. The clans barely co-operate, each pursuing their own interests independently and frequently clashing with each other. Only a major threat or opportunity will bring them all together, and one major crisis is likely to tear the confederacy apart.
2. Loose. The alliances between the clans are firm enough for them to co-operate in important matters (such as waging war or mutual defence), but in more everyday matters they mostly pursue their own paths.
3. Intermediate. The clans take their shared ancestry and oaths of loyalty seriously enough to mostly work together, but each clan still has a strong sense of independent identity, and strongly resists attempts to curtail their independence. Getting them all to cooperate requires exhausting bouts of compromise and diplomacy.
4. Strong. The clans have fought beside one another so often that they regard one another with mutual respect, and generally cooperate with one another for the good of the khanate. However, the confederacy is divided along some kind of dividing line (usually religious and/or ethnic), and in times of strain the clans tend to group together accordingly. If a major disaster ever befell the confederacy, it would probably fissure along this dividing line. 
5. Very strong. Generations of intermarriage has softened the barriers between clans, and they generally regard each other as branches of the same people, bound together in loyalty to the same khan. Only in times of severe difficulty will the divisions between the clans begin to show.
6. Extremely strong. The clans have so much shared history that they consider one another as brothers, and will stand together to the last. Khans may come and go, but only the most extraordinary crisis will break the confederacy itself. 

Animals which they are famous for breeding (roll 1d10 1d3 times - duplicates mean that they're just really, really good at breeding that animal)

1. Yaks.
2. Reindeer.
3. Goats.
4. Sheep, famous for the quality of their meat.
5. Sheep, famous for the quality of their fleece.
6. Cattle.
7. Horses, famous for their speed.
8. Horses, famous for their stamina.
9. Horses, famous for their beauty.
10. Camels.

Accomplishment for which they are famous (roll 1d10)

1. Archery. All the steppe peoples are great archers, but the people of this khanate are amazing.
2. Horsemanship. All the steppe peoples are great riders, but the people of this khanate are unbelievable.
3. Wrestling. All the steppe peoples are great wrestlers, but the people of this khanate would snap you like a twig.
4. Shamanism. The people of this khanate are famous for the number and power of their shamans.
5. Hunting. 
6. Eagle hunting. (That's hunting with eagles, not hunting of eagles.)
7. Slave-taking. 
8. Felt-making.
9. Trading.
10. The making of high-quality kumis.

Religion (roll 1d6). 

1. Traditional shamanism. The religions of the Great Road have made no inroads amongst them.
2. A syncretic fusion of traditional shamanism with one of the religions of the Great Road.
3. An influential minority of the people have been converted to one of the religions of the Great Road, but most still follow the shamanic traditions of their ancestors. 
4. An influential minority of the people still follow the shamanic traditions of their ancestors, but most have been converted to one of the religions of the Great Road.
5. The people are divided between two different religions of the Great Road, which serves as a powerful source of tension within the khanate. Shamanism is on the decline.
6. The entire khanate has been converted to one of the religions of the Great Road, and are now among its most zealous followers. Their shamanic traditions persist only in secret.

(NB: Religions of the Great Road can be generated using the tables here. Information on shamanism can be found here.)

Relationship with the nearest empire (roll 1d8)

1. The emperor still fears the khanate due to the terrors that it once inflicted upon his ancestors, and leaves them alone as much as possible.
2. The khanate engages in opportunistic raiding and slaving along the imperial frontier, retreating back into the steppe whenever a punitive expedition is launched against them.
3. The khanate and the empire are linked together in a tenuous alliance, characterised by deep mutual suspicion. 
4. The empire views the khanate as a convenient source of mercenary cavalry, and tolerates it so long as it remains willing to send horsemen to fight in its wars. 
5. The khanate is currently playing a very dangerous game, attempting to prolong its independence by playing the empire off against its rivals. 
6. The khanate has recently been forced to cede control of important territories or trade networks to the empire, and its current khan is scheming how best to recover them. 
7. The khanate has come under steadily-increasing pressure from the empire, forcing its clans to migrate deeper into the steppe.
8. While still notionally independent, the khanate has suffered the indignity of having to swear allegiance to the emperor, a humiliation which its current khan finds almost unbearable.

The current Khan is... (roll 1d12)

1. A skilled diplomat, expert in persuading the often fractious clans he leads to pursue the same course of action.
2. A heroic warrior, famous for his personal prowess on the battlefield, who has no respect for anyone incapable of holding their own in a fight.
3. A devout convert to one of the religions of the Great Road, in which he has been trying to interest his people, with mixed success.
4. A devotee of the traditional shamanic practises of his people, who lives in awe and fear of the spirits and seeks the advice of his shamans before every major decision.
5. A bloodthirsty warlord who sees the rest of the world as nothing but a source of slaves and plunder.
6. A staunch traditionalist, who is convinced that his people have gone soft, and that if only they returned to the old ways then they could rebuild their former glories.
7. A learned and civilised man, whose yurt is full of books and mechanical marvels imported from the cities of the south.
8. A charismatic visionary who dreams of leading his people in the conquest of empires, just like their heroic ancestors.
9. An embittered realist who has realised that the great days of the steppe khans are over, and is trying to find a new path to guarantee the future of his people.
10. A drunken thug who spends most of his time blitzed out of his skull on arak and/or kumis.
11. A moderniser, eager to experiment with the military potential of firearms and artillery. 
12. A weak and indecisive man, the last heir to what was once a great dynasty of conquerors whose armies once terrorised the world.

Random Encounter Tables: The Steppe

This is the first of a bunch of wilderness encounter tables to complement the ones I wrote last year for the Wicked City itself. I'll do one each for the desert, steppe, and taiga, and then maybe one for the tundra. After that, I'm really not sure there's much of ATWC left to write. Maybe something about hirelings?

The main thing to remember about encounters in the steppe is that it's very, very big and has very, very little cover. You are going to see them coming. They are going to see you coming. Evasion is going to be about speed rather than stealth nine times out of ten. Consider investing in a very high-quality telescope and you might just see them before they see you...

Random Steppe Encounters (Roll 1d12)

1. A band of evil spirits are camped out on the steppe; they look mostly human apart from their very long noses, but closer examination will reveal both that they have no shadows and that their horses have no tails. They are eating a horrible tarry black sludge of indeterminate origin, which they cook up in a huge pot over a fire, and invite travellers to share it with them. They will interpret outright refusal as an insult, but will accept polite excuses if they can't think of a plausible-sounding reason not to. Actually eating their food will induce vomiting, sickness, and spirit possession, in that order.
2. A shaman from one of the steppe tribes, riding with her apprentices to make offerings to a powerful spirit of the land. She has a deep knowledge of the personal histories, likes, and dislikes of all the nearby spirits, but will be reluctant to share it with outsiders unless bribed with high-quality drink or tobacco from the city, for both of which she has something of a secret weakness. Anyone who harms her can expect furious retribution from both the local spirits and the local tribes. 
3. A warband of steppe warriors looking for a chance to do some opportunistic raiding. They're heading in the direction of the Great Road, hoping to shake down a few caravans for 'tribute' and maybe steal some horses from rival clans along the way. Their leader is one of the sons of a minor local khan, and is keen to achieve some deed that will help him to stand out from amongst his many brothers. Wise PCs will want to persuade him that helping them with their mission will be a better route to glory than robbing them of their treasure or besting them in combat. 
4. A team of wrestlers on their way to a major competition. (They'll take part in the horsemanship and archery events too, which they're also pretty good at, but for them the wrestling contest is the main event.) They are always looking for chances to show off their prowess and will challenge people to wrestling matches on the slightest of pretexts. PCs who demonstrate high levels of skill and sportsmanship will be rapidly befriended and invited to attend the next tournament for a rematch. 
5. A headless clockwork giant, 14' high, stumbles across the steppe with a distinctive lurching gait: one of its legs is slightly longer than the other. Creaking windmills rise from its shoulders, allowing it to partially power itself with the wind that blows across the steppe. Its pilot, a middle-aged woman from one of the far-off Rust Clans, steers it from her seat within its torso, peering out at the world through the ancient bullet holes which riddle its armour plating; a chain around its waist attaches it to a sturdy cart, in which her two brothers bump along behind it. The three of them have heard of the Cogwheel Sage, and are midway through an epic pilgrimage to find one of her holiest shrines, in which they hope to be initiated into her faith. They regard any non-initiates they encounter along the way as completely fair game for raiding, especially if they happen to be carrying supplies of spare parts or coal.
6. A band of treasure seekers from a nearby city, accompanied by local guides. Their leader is a scholar who believes that he has discovered the approximate location of the tomb of one of the Wolf Khans, and maybe he has; but his knowledge of their empire comes entirely from books, and he's now riding back and forth across the steppe, eagerly examining every grassy mound in case there's a ruin under it. It is worryingly easy to persuade him that just about any vertical stone of man-size or larger was originally a balbal. He is willing to pay for information about any ruins or monuments the PCs come across in the area. Each month after he is encountered, there is a 10% chance that he finds the tomb he's looking for and promptly gets beaten to death by its guardians.
7. A clanking caravan of brass men on bronze horses, stomping their way slowly across the steppe. They wouldn't normally come this far from the cities, but a wealthy local khan has commissioned them to make guns for his warriors and clockwork toys for his children and they don't want to pass up the opportunity to earn some of his gold. The greatest artificer among them is an enthusiastic advocate of the benefits of logician implants, and will offer to bolt clockwork computers onto people's skulls at very reasonable rates. (Weirdly, none of the nomads he's met so far have been interested.) He dreams of building a new generation of brass men to serve as his 'children' and apprentices, and hopes that the khan's gold will help him to achieve this.
8. A group of Blood Man mercenaries wandering across the steppe, looking for a good war to get stuck into. They ride big, angry, poorly-trained stallions, and are constantly getting bitten and kicked by them, which they mostly think is hilarious. In the last town they stopped in, someone tried to steal their enchanted cauldron; as a result of this their chief is extremely paranoid about its safety, and never lets it out of his sight, going so far as to sleep inside it at night. Anyone behaving remotely suspiciously will be assumed to be in league with the thieves.
9. A murderous band of skull wearers haunt this part of the steppe, preying upon anyone who looks weak enough to ambush, loot, and eat. Their victims are littered all around the area, buried in dozens of shallow graves. They avoid anything resembling a fair fight, and much prefer to attack at night. They are strong, skilled, and ruthless killers; but they all hate each other, and only barely manage to function together as a group. It would only take a very small amount of provocation or frustration to set them at one another's throats.
10. A large grassy mound with a few stones sticking out of it is all that marks the fact that this was once the site of an ancient city. The local inhabitants are members of a wizard-cult, who believe that the sorceress who once ruled the city will one day return to rebuild it. In the meantime they worship a bejewelled statue of her which they believe to be inhabited by her spirit, but which is actually just haunted by the ghost of a child who starved to death nearby on a cold night two thousand years ago. Their 'goddess' demands constant offerings of food and fire, but in truth she is nothing but the spirit of a scared little girl whom any sympathetic shaman could probably lay to rest if given the chance. 
11. A nomadic clan is encamped here. Fearing that their enemies may attack them at any time, they have decided to activate their greatest asset, a skull chieftain: so now the spirit of one of their great warrior-ancestors is wandering around the camp, giving the young men archery tips and watching out for raiders, while everyone around him does their very best to avoid reminding him that he's actually been dead for a couple of hundred years. Enemy scouts lurk nearby, and will offer substantial bounties to any outsiders willing to enter the camp and get rid of the skull chieftain in order to clear the way for an attack.
12. The grave of a recently-deceased heroine of the steppes, complete with newly-erected balbals and a modest shrine in case she returns as an ancestor spirit. Her faithful Kergerden mount refuses to leave the side of its mistress, even in death, until it meets someone else worthy of riding it: until then it simply grazes the land around her tomb. So far everyone who has attempted to mount the beast has been impaled or trampled for their troubles. Anyone riding it would win enormous prestige among the heroine's clansmen, who are much the most powerful clan in this region of the steppe.

The Kergeden, or Siberian Unicorn

You all saw the news report at the end of March, right? Elasmotherium sibiricum, previously thought to have died out in the middle of the Ionian Stage of the Pleistocene Epoch about 350,000 years ago, actually seems to have survived in what is now Kazakhstan until about 27,000 BC, which in evolutionary terms is pretty much yesterday. That means they lived alongside humans. People probably met them. People probably ate them. That's probably why there aren't any of them left today.

They looked like this. Probably.

Given how late populations of woolly mammoth and woolly rhinoceros survived in Siberia in the real world, I've just kinda assumed that they're still around in ATWC, being domesticated and ridden by nomadic clans in the depths of the Deep Taiga. After this, the Siberian Unicorn - or 'Kergeden', to use the Turkic word for 'unicorn' or 'rhino', which is presumably what the people of the area would call them if they were actually still alive - is totally getting added to the list. The only unicorns that exist in the setting are now 7' tall, 15' long, shaggy-coated monsters with a horn the length of a sword.

They are rare, of course. They are so rare that many people believe them to be mythical. But in a few remote areas of the steppe and taiga, the kergeden still live: huge, ill-tempered beasts, fearsomely strong, with great horns on their heads easily long and strong and sharp enough to impale a grown man right through. No ordinary man or woman can ride one, and they disdain domestication: but something in their fierce natures makes them warm to the bravest and hardiest of warriors, and to these and these only will they submit themselves as mounts. Folklore says that they can smell both courage and fear, and that if their rider should ever disgrace them by some act of cowardice, the kergeden will immediately toss them up into the air and attempt to catch them on their horn, goring them to death in order to wipe out the dishonour of allowing themselves to be ridden by such a dastard soul.

Or maybe they looked like this? No-one actually knows how big their horns were...

In game terms, kergeden are mounts for higher-level characters. It's not enough to be a generally courageous person: only when your bravery has been proven in the face of severe adversity, not just once but many times, will the kergeden allow you to use it as a mount. (You also have to be a highly skilled rider and animal handler, of course: but as I've mentioned before, I take for granted that all ATWC PCs will fit that description.) This doesn't mean screaming and charging all the time, no matter the odds, which all the steppe peoples recognise is the mark of a stupid warrior rather than a brave one - these are the people whose signature battle tactic was the false retreat, after all - but it does mean that whenever things got rough, your focus must always have been on achieving your objectives as best you could rather than on saving your own skin. Anyone whose record of courage under fire has been less than exemplary can expect to be gored to death instead. Because it is widely known that only the bravest of warriors may ride such a beast, actually doing so will grant you a +1 reaction bonus from anyone who cares about martial prestige: this includes just about all steppe peoples, and most inhabitants of the desert and taiga, as well.

The kergeden eats lots and lots and lots of grass. Trying to ride them into the desert is probably a bad idea unless you have a lot of fodder.

• Kergeden: AC 14 (very thick, tough hide) or AC 20 (hide plus metal barding), 7 HD, AB +4, gore and trample (1d8+4 damage), FORT 6, REF 10, WILL 7, morale 9. Inflicts double damage when charging. Anyone charged by a kargeden must make a morale roll to hold their ground; if they do, even if its charge attack misses, then they must make a REF save or take 2d6 damage from being smashed and trampled underfoot.

War Masks of the Wolf Khans

I've written before about how the Eurasian steppe eats history. Nations lie lightly upon it, crossing the plains like wind or shadows, leaving few traces: and even when they do build cities or monuments, it only takes a few generations of neglect to reduce them to a handful of grassy mounds scattered across a million square miles of wilderness, difficult to find even if one happens to know where to look. The once-great Confederacy of the Cuman and Kipchak Khans, known to the West simply as Cumania, is a case in point. For more than three hundred years they ruled an empire the size of Western Europe, stretching from Hungary to the shores of the Irtysh River; but then the Mongols rode west and, well, everyone knows what happened to people who tried to get in the way of the Mongols. Soon there was very little left to show that Cumania had ever existed at all.

Like many Central Asian peoples, the Cumanians revered wolves - 'Wolf' was a title of honour amongst them - and so, in ATWC, I'm simply going to call the fallen empire based on them the Realm of the Wolf Khans. Every D&D setting needs a great lost empire, and they fill this niche nicely: everywhere you go was probably ruled by the Wolf Khans, once, until a newer and hungrier empire tore them down. Where did this ancient tomb complex come from? The Wolf Khans probably built it. Why is there a ruined city out in the middle of nowhere? One of the Wolf Khans probably used it as his court. Why are we going into this insanely dangerous dungeon? In order to find the war mask of one of the Wolf Khans. You do want his war mask, don't you?

You see, the Cumanians wore masks into battle.

Modern replica of a 13th-century Kipchak helmet with war-mask.

In ATWC, these masks are the one thing about the Wolf Khans which everyone still remembers. Everyone other than scholars might be very unclear about where they came from and which language they spoke and whether they were good kings or bad kings; but everyone knows that they wore masks, and that these masks contributed to their prowess in battle. The secret of making them was lost when the Wolf Khans fell (although it is speculated that powerful spirit-pacts were involved), and an intact war-mask which once belonged to a Khan or to one of his Wolves can now command very high prices.

The simplest of these were soldier's war-masks, which the Wolf Khans mass-manufactured by the thousand. These look pretty much like the mask in the image above, and so many of them were made that they're not that uncommon, even today; they're the kind of thing you might find being worn by a prosperous mercenary captain or bandit chief. They fill the wearer with wolfish agility and ferocity in battle, granting them +1 to-hit and damage. Long-term usage tends to leave the wearer with a strong craving for a meal of raw, red meat.

Cumanian warrior in 13th century wargear. Note the mask.

Much rarer, and much more valuable, are the officer's war-masks, which resemble more elaborate and decorative versions of the war-masks used by common soldiers. Officers were less expendable than the men they led, so their masks were also provided with defensive enchantments; they grant a +1 bonus to-hit and damage, just like the soldier's masks, but also grant a +1 bonus to AC and all saves. They are much prized by steppe chieftains and other individuals of high net worth who must, none the less, occasionally expose themselves to the rigours of battle.

Another Kipchak helmet with war-mask. Note the crazy moustaches.

Rarer still, and worth a small fortune, are the war-masks of the Khan's Wolves. 'Wolf' was a title bestowed by the Khans upon their greatest war-leaders and champions, and upon their most faithful bodyguards and companions; their masks were suitably magnificent, decorated with silver and gold, and forged with stern and majestic expressions to inspire reverence amongst their followers and strike fear into their enemies. These have all the same effects as officer's war-masks, but they also grant +1 morale to any soldiers personally led by the wearer, and impose a -1 penalty to the morale of all enemies able to see its terrible steel visage. Anyone who wears one for any length of time will find themselves responding to challenges with growls and staredowns, and gains a quite unnerving ability to emit blood-curdling howls, audible for miles across the steppe.

This one's actually Iranian, but you get the general idea.

Rarest and most precious of all were the war masks of the Khans themselves. Only twenty-three of these were ever made, one for each reigning Wolf Khan; each was buried with its wearer, and as the Wolf Khans, like most steppe kings, took great pains to keep the locations of their tombs secret, most have never been found since. Each is worth a king's ransom, for as well as all the abilities of a Wolf's mask, the war-masks of the khans blessed their wearers with the ability enter a trance state in which they could perceive and communicate with the world of spirits at will; furthermore, all but the mightiest spirits seem to regard their wearers with respect bordering on awe, and always offer them advantageous terms on spirit bargains. Before he vanished into his tower, the Wicked King often wore a mask which at least looked very much like the war-mask of one of the Wolf Khans, and possibly its powers helped him to establish his reign over the Wicked City. Then again, perhaps he just wanted people to believe that he could command the spirits at will...

One final note: the Wolf Khans, like the historical Cumanians, took it for granted that whenever a great man was buried, his most trusted lieutenant would commit ritual suicide in order to accompany him into the afterlife. So, along with the inevitable balbals, anyone planning to rob one of their royal tombs had better be ready to take on one hell of an undead guardian first...

The Manly Skill of Mongolian Wrestling

The Mongols recognised three Manly Skills: horsemanship, archery, and wrestling. Of the three, it was wrestling which provided the purest test of Manliness. The wrestler has no horse or bow to help him, or to take the blame for his failure. He stands nearly naked, with nothing to rely upon except his own strength, skill, agility, and guile.

Here's how it works: two men dance towards each other, their movements imitating the motions of birds or tigers, in the hope of calling the qualities of the chosen animal down into their body during the struggle ahead. Then they grab for one another and attempt to pull each other down. No punching, kicking, or throttling is permitted; just grips and holds, trips and throws. The loser is the first one to be forced to touch the ground with any part of his body other than his feet. There are no time limits. Matches can go on for hours.

The existence of Mongolian wrestling is handy for ATWC, because it gives an easy excuse for non-lethal physical confrontations. If someone insults you, or humiliates you, or makes a pass at your boy- or girlfriend, there's no need for guns or swords to be drawn: just challenge them to a wrestling bout, and prove in front of everyone that you're more Manly than they could ever be. Because the rules are so simple, and so universally regarded as an authentic test of Manliness, there's no reason why even a random encounter in the middle of the steppe (or, indeed, the middle of a dungeon) shouldn't be resolved by a wrestling match rather than actual combat. Two groups of heavily armed strangers encounter one another, point guns at each other, trade insults... and then their leaders step forwards, strip off, and wrestle, with the loser's group ceding ground to the winner in recognition of his superior Manliness. Courage is proven and worth tested without anyone having to get their brains splattered all over the floor.

For this to work, it's important to emphasise that virtually everyone in the steppe regions (and for hundreds of miles around them) is a massive wrestling fan. That Pig Man you just encountered in a cave someplace? Totally up for a wrestling match. That ancient clockwork warrior you just accidentally reactivated in some half-fallen ruin? You bet he'd be willing to wrestle you! There are limits, of course - drop into your best wrestling stance in front of the Secret Police and they'll just shoot your kneecaps off - but, in general, wrestling is everyone's go-to form of non-lethal conflict. Your PCs should totally be getting into wrestling matches all the time. 

Besides, it gives them an excuse to take their clothes off. Every romance narrative needs an excuse for gratuitous male toplessness.

Wrestling Rules

• Your basic Wrestling Rating is equal to the sum of your Strength bonus, your Dexterity bonus, and the melee to-hit bonus granted by your class level. 
• Example: A 3rd-level fighter (to-hit +3) with Strength 13 (strength bonus +1) and Dexterity 11 (dexterity bonus 0) has a base Wrestling Rating of 4. 
• If you're a trained wrestler (as most inhabitants of the steppes will be), add an extra +1 to your Wrestling Rating. If you actually spend a substantial chunk of your life practising and working on your wrestling technique, this bonus rises to +2. 
• If you've had a chance to study your opponent's technique, either from wrestling them before or carefully watching them wrestle someone else, you can add your Wisdom bonus (if any) to your Wrestling Rating.
• If you are substantially larger and heavier than your opponent, add +1 to your Wrestling Rating.
• In traditional Mongolian wrestling, it is expected and encouraged that each wrestler's best friend should stand just a couple of feet away from them, yelling advice and encouragement and dispensing all-purpose smack talk to the audience. If your supporter (called a zasuul) has a positive Charisma or Wisdom bonus, you may add an extra +1 to your Wrestling Rating. 

To resolve a wrestling bout, each wrestler rolls 1d6 and adds their Wrestling Rating. If one wrestler beats the other's score by 3 or more points, then they score a quick victory and their opponent goes down within minutes. If not, then the match goes long. Each wrestler adds their Constitution bonuses to their Wrestling Rating, to represent the importance of stamina in the long bout, and unless the initial rolls were tied, the loser reduces their Wrestling Rating by 1, to represent their dented confidence from getting the worse of the initial exchange. Each then rolls 1d6 a second time and adds their modified Rating. Highest score wins: the larger the difference between the scores, the quicker the victory. A tie indicates a draw, probably because someone bungled a throw and ended up hitting the ground at the same time as their opponent.

Wrestlers as Characters: If you want to play a wrestler, just treat them as Fighters, with the following changes:

• In a wrestling match, wrestlers always get the full +2 bonus to their Wrestling Rating for training and experience.
• When serving as someone else's zasuul in a wrestling match, wrestlers can grant them an additional +1 bonus by shouting specialist advice on how they can best defeat their opponent.
• In any fight in which a wrestler wears light armour (chain shirt and lighter) and is able to spend at least one minute immediately before battle doing his warm-up dance, he receives a +1 bonus to AC and REF saves for the duration of the battle.

These abilities replace the battlefield first aid ability of the regular fighter.

War Mounts of the Plains of Rust

So, in my last post, I described the Plains of Rust: an area of the steppe which was once a battleground between ancient armies of clockwork automata, and which is now roamed by nomad clans who ride around on cobbled-together bits of ancient war machines. Now, on the face of it, riding on a semi-functional clockwork soldier seems a big step down from riding a horse: the horse is faster, the clockwork robot either needs to be wound up (which takes ages) or powered by shoulder-mounted windmills (which are unreliable and inefficient) or coal (which is much harder to find than fodder), the horse doesn't require specialised tools and training to keep it running from day to day, and so on. Probably, in the beginning, the Rust Clans used their makeshift clockwork mounts only for the purposes of war and display, and employed horses for their daily travels and tasks. But the great advantage of such machines is their durability: as long as they are properly maintained and repaired they can potentially run forever, and with so many ancient battlefields to scavenge from, the Rust Clans have no shortage of spare parts. With each generation, each individual Rust Clan added a few more machines to their collection; and, over the centuries, they have come to have so many of them that almost everyone can ride from place to place on their creaking, clanking shoulders, or inside the hollowed-out cavities of their chests. Now, having sunk so much work into repairing and restoring them, they are reluctant to abandon them except in times of great difficulty; and, being able shrug off entire volleys of arrows or musket-fire, they do have certain advantages when employed in war.

(They still use horses for all the day-to-day stuff which robots would be wildly impractical for, though.)

I miss City of Heroes.

A Rust Clan on the move, or riding into battle, is a bizarre sight. Any piece of clockwork machinery that can move is likely to be pressed into service, no matter what it was originally meant for; indeed, the Rust Clans pride themselves on their ingenuity in such matters. Here, then, are a few possible war mounts of the Plains of Rust:

1: A huge pair of clockwork legs, 5' high, which must originally have belonged to some fallen clockwork giant. Their rider straps a light wooden seat to their metal hips and rides them back and forth across the plains, controlling them with a simple pair of levers. When both levers are jammed forwards, the legs charge as fast as they can, which if they've been fully wound can be very fast indeed; they are thus favoured by Rust Clan lancers, who use them to hurtle into battle with their enemies.

2: The arms and torsos of three man-sized clockwork soldiers, all welded together at the waist, and walking beetle-fashion on their six clockwork arms (now re-purposed as legs). Their rider sits on top, in a lightweight wooden seat lashed to a metal turntable; by yanking the control lever, she may cause her mount to start walking in any direction she chooses, swivelling her seat to match. They are used by Rust Clan archers and gunmen, who use them as mobile firing platforms.

3: An armless clockwork giant, almost 12' tall. The complicated clockwork machinery which once allowed it to operate independently has been scooped out of its chest cavity; now a Rust Clansman rides inside its body, controlling the pace and direction of its march with levers, while two or three more balance on its shoulders, scanning the horizon. As they have no way to manually control the movements of its arms, these have been sawn off and discarded to reduce its weight.

4: A headless clockwork beast, 8' long, walking on all fours. A wide platform has been lashed to its back, on which up to eight people can ride, cooking or sewing or sleeping as the clockwork monster tirelessly plods along. In times of war, wooden screens are erected around the edge of the platform, and the metal beast is used as a makeshift tank.

5: A huge pair of tank-treads supporting a bulky metal torso, nearly round and almost 6' across. It must once have been a formidable war machine, but now the top half of it is missing and the bottom half has been mostly hollowed out. Four people ride inside, poking the barrels of their muskets over the metal rim of their 'mount'.

6: A rare prize: an intact clockwork soldier, 7' tall and almost fully functional! It is ridden by some brave and high-status warrior of the clan, who sits balanced on its shoulders, with his legs around its neck; in battle, while the clockwork soldier lays about itself with its metal limbs, he will swing down from his perch to strike at the heads of his enemies. The soldier walks with a bit of a limp, which just adds to the challenge of staying balanced for its rider...

Aside from number 6, all are Complexity 1 to operate and maintain, and complexity 2 to repair; they can thus be maintained indefinitely by any Rust Clansman of ordinary ability. When not in military use, all of these will also have bales of baggage strapped to every available surface, and will be festooned with small windmills, their sails spinning in the near-ceaseless wind of the steppe; this use of wind power to wind their springs helps to reduce the amount of wood, coal, or charcoal required to keep them in operation.