The Thaumaturge

Most of the time, what's marketed as fantasy is anything but fantastical. Fantasy movies are too often singularly lacking in magic, jokey romps with the visual styling of a medieval theme park. Fantasy novels, steered by imagined trends that publishing executives might just as well derive from staring at birds, are cookie-cutter remixes of the Last Big Thing*. And CRPGs? Face it, they're usually just D&D under a different label.

In such times, who would admit to liking fantasy? Tentatively my hand goes up. I'm a fan of fantasy fiction in the same way that Diogenes was a fan of honest men. So finding something really, really good in the genre is sweet water to parched lips. And that's The Thaumaturge, developed by Fool's Theory, which Jamie and I have been playing obsessively this month.

The game is set in Poland in 1905 and involves the experiences of Wiktor Szulski, who is one of a clandestine group of mages who derive their power by binding unseen beings called salutors. After the violent death of his father, from whom he was estranged, Wiktor returns home to Warsaw and investigates the possibility of murder while getting embroiled in family tensions and the politics and social intrigues of the day.

Twin pique

The sense of atmosphere is superbly evoked, both for the historical period and the feeling of uncanny magic deriving from Eastern European folklore. The occasional black humour is nicely judged and doesn't rely on anachronisms. The characters -- including some famous names you'll have heard of -- are rounded, complex and believable, and in investigating the stories of their Flaws (the character traits that led to a salutor attaching itself to them) you'll often find that your first or even second guess is wide of the mark. The story unfolds in surprising ways, always richly inventive, and with plot twists that are more interesting and make more sense than you'll find in many a movie or TV show.

Hello, Darkness, my old friend

Add to that the resonance with modern real-life events, which pervades the story without ever being hammered home, and you have what is not just the best CRPG for several years but the best fantasy story in any medium. The actors nail these characters. Listen to Maciej Nawrocki's pitch-perfect aristocratic drawl as Wiktor, Filip Lipiecki delivering Abaurycy's edge-of hysteria braggadocio (Richard Widmark couldn't have done it better) or Ewa Prus blending Ligia's heartfelt concern for her brother with the needling urge to scold him.

The writing team comprises Paweł Nowak, Magdalena Bialek, Alicja Korzewska, and Paula Mejsner, and this open-world game is so story- and character-centred that I'm bound to emphasize their work, but the credit goes not just to the writers but to the visual designers and the other developers who built up the meticulous details of the game world. Just look at the personality conveyed by the macabre and silent Upyr, oldest of your salutors, a nightmarish presence who feels also like a faithful companion and by that contrast draws you into what it feels like to be a thaumaturge with one foot in reality and the other in a different world. There is real creative genius here. My faith in fantasy, at least for another year, is restored.

* The other day a friend was telling me about a bestselling series set in a school for teen dragon-riders. "Of course it's just Anne McCaffrey meets J K Rowling," they said, "but with a TikTok vibe for readers who've never read a Pern or Harry Potter book."

The Poughkeepsie problem

It turns out I need to set the record straight about my attitude to The Lord of the Rings. As I confessed in an earlier post, I haven’t read it. When I tried the first book, back in my mid-teens, the cosy Little England prose style didn’t grab me. I was more into Elric and Conan and the whole sword-&-sorcery side of fantasy. It might be different now, but the intervening years have made the plot so familiar that I’m not sure when I’ll get around to it.

All of that doesn’t mean I don’t respect Tolkien’s craft. I’m sure he knew what he was doing, and he did it with imagination and elegance. It’s much like my opinion of the Earthsea and Discworld books. I’ve dipped into them, I can see they’re done well, I admire the authors; the books just aren’t for me. And that’s a very different thing from disdaining them.

This cropped up recently when a friend told me he was planning a roleplaying campaign about defiance and resistance in the face of political repression. “There’ll be difficult compromises and harsh moral choices,” he promised. “And it’s all set in a brutalist industrial landscape.”

Sounded intriguing. I was almost hooked. But then he added: “And it’s got elves!”

Instant heartsink. "Oh," I said. "You had me until the elves.”

“It’s a long way from traditional D&D,” he protested. “The elves aren’t the Tolkien kind. It’s mysterious. It's dark and gritty urban fantasy.”

Imagine you were an HBO exec in 2016, you'd just heard Jesse Armstrong's story pitch for Succession, and then he'd concluded with: "And they're all orcs!" 

I'm against torture, but...

So -- disgust, obviously. But what really gave me pause was that my friend must have got the impression I despise Tolkien’s use of elves. Not a bit of it. From what I’ve seen, Tolkien put a lot of thought into them, and given that he was attempting a European (indeed, British) flavour of fantasy their presence makes sense. It’s worlds always from a recent bestselling fantasy polylogy I had the misfortune to come across, which had elves with guns and mobile phones in a Middle-Earth meets Blade Runner setting. Why elves? The author might as well have called them Romulans or Vikings or Cossacks, all equally out of place in an urban fantasy environment. This is using the surface styling of a fantasy trope without any of the context that forms its roots. It’s cosplay masquerading as storytelling. Ursula K Le Guin would have plenty to say about it -- and did, in her essay “From Elfland to Poughkeepsie”:

"The lords of Elfland are true lords, the only true lords, the kind that do not exist on this earth; their lordship is the outward sign or symbol of real inward greatness."

Le Guin is not talking about moral greatness, by the way. The elves she refers to aren’t angels. In at least one of her examples the elf is being petty – but grandly petty, gloriously self-centred, whining as only a silver-tongued immortal can.

Talking of the stir-it-all-in approach, the modern mangling of myth, she says:

“It is not fantasy, for all its equipment of heroes and wizards […] A writer may deploy acres of sagebrush and rimrock without achieving a real Western. He may use spaceships and strains of mutant bacteria all he pleases, and never be anywhere near real science fiction.”

Le Guin recognized that Tolkien had the genuine fantasy touch. When I say that I haven’t read The Lord of the Rings, that’s not a judgement on the quality of the work. I could have mentioned Dune, another series I never got into only because it doesn’t happen to chime with me. That doesn’t mean it isn’t good. There are plenty of absolute stinkers in the fantasy & SF genres (Sturgeon’s Law tells us that) but also some gems, and those gems are worth celebrating, so I just wanted to be clear where I stand.

More about elves next time. The proper kind of elves, I mean.

A vessel for the finer

I'm no fan of the brand of fantasy popularized by Dungeons & Dragons and Fighting Fantasy, but a book featuring the art of that genre will include magnificent work by the late, great Martin McKenna (above) and Russ Nicholson (below), along with lots of other talented folks obliged to earn their crust by continually depicting a world of cannon-fodder goblins, ale-quaffing dwarves, and vatic old men in taverns. So any wealthy gamebook collector is going to want a copy of Magic Realms: The Art of Fighting Fantasy and next month there's a launch party where you can get a copy signed by the author, Jonathan Green, and Sir Ian Livingstone.

A pretty butterfly

The British Library's Fantasy exhibition ends on Sunday, so if you're able to get to London it had better be now. It's a little disappointing as it focuses on quite a narrow patch (faerie-filled, English language, heroic) of the vast field that is fantasy literature. The curators should try dipping into Borges's Antología de la Literatura Fantástica, Alberto Manguel's Black Water collections, or The Irreal Reader. Just because fantasy gaming presents such a restricted view of the genre is no reason why the British Library should. Still, it's worth a trip.

As part of the exhibition's programme of events there was an interview with Alan Moore (pictured above) and Susanna Clarke (below), both giants of the fantasy field. You can watch that interview here.

Asked in another interview by Pádraig Ó Méalóid about belief in fairies and magic, Alan Moore said:

"I do not believe they are real outside the world of ideas and the mind, but then they have no need to be real beyond that realm, because in that realm they’re completely real, and they can affect us profoundly, as with any of the other denizens of the imaginary terrain, the angels and demons and monsters."

That's exactly how I feel about fantastic ideas, and if you follow the whole discussion you may notice it touches on a lot of the same territory as my Mirabilis comic. Hardly surprising, really, as Moore was one of my biggest inspirations in that medium.

Susanna Clarke spoke to Alan Moore about his Lost Girls comic back in 2007, but that's behind a Telegraph paywall and I'd sooner take a left-hand path in Jewelspider wood than go there.

Strange encounters on Surrey lanes

"It was true that there were fences and gates to be seen, so someone must have been by to place and repair them. However, apart from these tokens, if one faced the right direction, the land was free of life, and looked fit to remain so forever. The motorway had cut off these fields from what they had been before and turned them into obscure borderlands. Now they were visited only with difficulty, by those with strong reason to go there -- or else flotsam and jetsam of the road like me.

"I considered what strange things and evil deeds might be hidden in such a landscape - as remote and unwalked in its way as any Scottish mountain. There were great caverns of darkness amidst the trees capable of holding any enormity, just a few yards from Mr and Mrs Average, driving from normal A to normal B."

 
There is no greater author of English weird tales alive today than John Whitbourn, and "Waiting For A Bus" is perhaps the eeriest of all his short stories. It has won a slew of awards and if you read it on Christmas Eve with the lights turned low, I think you'll see why. And after that, when the goosebumps go down and you can steel yourself to get up from your chair, take a look at the rest of the Binscombe Tales series.

I'm glad to see that the Binscombe Tales are winning a whole new following in the States -- particularly in the South, perhaps because of the strong roots connecting our American cousins there to the old country. A case in point: this in-depth review by a lady in Alabama, but beware spoilers. And you should read John's own account of the landscape we love and which inspired the stories. I grew up nine miles away from Binscombe, in much the same ambience and environment, the main difference being that Binscombe admits to being overlooked by the Domesday Book whereas my own village, Mayford, lays spurious claim to a mention. (My roots there, or even in Surrey generally, are by no means as deep as John's in Binscombe, though it's nonetheless the foundational territory of my imagination.)

And in the same vein of goosebumps and cold grue, take a look at Tanya Kirk's collection of seasonal ghost stories for British Library Publishing, Haunters at the Hearth, with contributions by D H Lawrence, A M Burrage, James Hadley Chase, L P Hartley, Mildred Clingerman and others. If only she'd included a Binscombe Tale it would have been perfect.

Binscombe Tales can be bought in the US from Amazon or Barnes & Noble,

and in the UK from Amazon or Blackwell's.

Elves as cosplay

“My name is Eildonas of Hulda Hoo,” I tell him as we walk. 

“I take you to be one of the Grey Elves,” he says with a sidelong glance, provoking in me a short laugh, since such categories have meaning only to mortals.

I recently quoted that (a line from the elf’s story in Heroquest book one, The Fellowship of Four) when somebody was telling me about their game: "The other players assume my character's an imp, which is funny because actually I'm playing a sprite."

It’s the sort of distinction that probably makes sense in a D&D campaign, where the Monster Manual is treated as a diegetic text. (“It’s a ghoul.” “No it’s not; it’s a shade. Ghouls have red fingernails and regenerate.” Something like that, anyway.) It would make no sense in Legend, the setting of the Dragon Warriors and Jewelspider RPGs, where the peasant warning you about that damned thing out on the moors might call it an imp, pixie, sprite, goblin, redcap or elf all in the same breath.

Another gamer I know, after reading the blog post in which I elaborate on that theme, singled out this line:

“The point is: you don’t need player-character elves or dwarves.”

He asked the other players in his campaign:

“What's your take on the tendency to play 'furries'? I include the Dragonborn (half man, half dragon playable creatures in D&D) and the Tieflings (humans tainted by demonic heritage in D&D) in this. I think it's the same impulse. It's a very millennial thing, perhaps? How does everyone feel about playing nonhumans? Does it appeal? What's the appeal? Does it repel? Could there be a race that would be enticing to play? What would that be like?”

By the way, the faerie folk in Legend never say “human” or “nonhuman”. It’s a bit too Desmond Morris, that. They say “mortal”, stressing their own point of superiority but perhaps also betraying their envy of the part they don’t share, the immortal soul.

Naturally, like for anything else in roleplaying, everyone's mileage is different. For me, those elves and dwarves and trolls aren't “races” in the D&D sense. They are the very embodiment of the Other. So it makes no sense in a Legend game to have player-character elves or whatever. Elves don't have souls, nor goals that we could ever relate to. There's nothing about them that's human except in the glamour that clothes them in a form we can perceive.

But lots of people like playing exotic aliens and races, and if that's the style of fantasy they enjoy then why not. I guess it's a kind of role-cosplaying. They do then get tied in terrible knots over issues like “Drow -- oh dear, are they racist?” Well, maybe, if you're interpreting them as another Homo racial line, ie a sort of mutant humankind. But if they are simply manifestations of how we conceive these debased and residual spirits called faerie folk, then no.

One of my gaming friends likened it to picking avatars in computer games. Avatars (and an avatar is clearly not the player; think Gordon Freeman or Geralt) must have influenced players’ choice of character types over the last few decades. I notice that players very often refer to their characters in third person these days, as though they were avatars that the player controlled rather than personas that they put on. Roleplaying has become the middle-aged man's version of playing with dolls. But as for those dolls being nonhuman, there were plenty of halfling thieves scampering about in D&D games back in the ‘70s, so maybe the trend was set by Tolkien rather than by World of Warcraft. 

I also discourage players in my Tekumel games from taking nonhumans, even though those are simply alien species and not mythical beings. The reason for that is they always end up bring played as stereotypes, extreme versions of human types. Then the game almost becomes an allegory with characters standing for Aggressiveness, Greed, Pedantry, etc. Now if a player could portray a truly alien mindset then I'd be intrigued to see them explore that, but it would have to be a lot more out there than the likes of Worf or Spock.

David Kajganikh, creator of The Terror, said he wanted to appeal to the viewers “who would watch the show if it didn’t have monsters”. That’s where my hand goes up. Unfortunately, Mr Kajganikh meant those who would watch whether or not it had monsters. For me, there’s a fascinating story of ambition, egotism, stupidity, bravery and resourcefulness in the Franklin expedition. It’s not only quite unnecessary to tart it up with Eskimo demons, it’s an insult.

Eliot believed that “anything that can be said as well in prose can be said better in prose.” He wasn’t against poetry (obviously), nor am I am against fantasy when I say that whatever can be done as well with human characters is better done using human characters. Legend is a low-fantasy world not because I want to sweep fantasy under the carpet, but because fantasy is a powder worth keeping dry. That way it counts for something when you do use it. High fantasy adventure is a different style, and in a long-running campaign it leads to diminishing returns; eventually even mainlining the pure stuff isn’t going to give you a kick.

But now I’m mixing metaphors, so perhaps it’s time to wrap up and hand over this over for discussion. Let's close with a typically thought-provoking line by Ursula K Le Guin:

“Fantasy is the language of the inner self.”

At its best, fantasy isn't taking us out of ourselves into dressing-up and escapism. It's taking us deep into our dreams where logic cannot go.

Jewels from mire and mud

It's odd what can convince you to read a book. I'd listened to Paul Mason explaining why I should try The Wasp Factory, and he'd made a good case, but it was only when he read the blisteringly hostile reviews in the front ("filth", "should be banned", "the literary equivalent of a video nasty") that I realized I had to grab it off him and read it right away.

Paul also introduced me to the work of James Branch Cabell, of one of whose novels (The Silver Stallion) a contemporary reviewer said this:

“The malignity and malevolence of this monstrous literary sacrilege cannot be pardoned. Its banality is no excuse for its brutality. Its stupidity is no extenuation for its blasphemy. The author has in this book committed the unpardonable sin of art,– hooliganism. He may not be capable of understanding the vision of good that raises man above the level of vermin. He may not be able to feel the mystery of faith. He may not possess the power of reverence or the grace of humility. But he ought to love fellow creatures, and to respect their ideals and their dreams. He may find it amusing to hurt and wound the lowly and the simple, but he should not trample on their highest and holiest imaginings, even if he cannot soar out of his literary mire and mud.”

That's got to whet your appetite, surely? Technically I think Cabell is still in copyright for a few more years, but most editions of his works are long out-of-print or else are modern amateur-press copies, so why not try these online works (The Silver Stallion and others on Gutenberg) and then buy the books if you find them to your taste.

A devil's bargain

Image by Pulp-O-Mizer

Not many fantasy stories are more often cited as thought experiments in moral philosophy than as fiction. I’m thinking of “The Space Traders” by American lawyer Derrick Bell. In a nutshell: super-powerful beings arrive on Earth and offer the United States money, energy and technological advances if all the non-black people agree to hand over all the black people to the angels/devils/aliens.

The Trolley Problem it ain’t. We can’t know what other people will do when faced with an ethical question. It’s hard enough to predict what we’d do ourselves; look at all the people who are convinced they’d have stood up to the Nazis if they lived in 1930s Germany. Derrick Bell takes a misanthropic view -- in his story there’s a referendum and the black Americans are handed over. If Germany had held a referendum in 1940, would the majority have voted to exterminate the Jews? They certainly colluded with that policy, but it was framed in a way that allowed the average citizen to tell himself that he didn’t actually know what was going on. Being confronted with the stark truth and voting on it – morally pulling the trigger, so to speak – would be a different story. We hope.

And the Jews had been demonized in Nazi propaganda for years. Posters claimed they’d betrayed the country, hoarded gold, spread disease – all sorts of conspiracy nonsense, and (as now) there are always idiots who’ll believe it. But for citizens to turn against a group of fellow citizens out of a clear blue sky – whites against blacks, or blacks against whites, even given the dire racial history of the Confederacy -- would be a whole other matter, surely? We cling to the hope humanity is better than its worst moments.

And yet… Islamic State threw gay men off rooftops and then stoned them if they survived that. The people who flocked to join IS presumably condoned it. Even so, it’s not the same as voting within a normal society to murder a group of people. IS was a self-selected band of extremists; we’d expect them to behave like rabid fanatics.

It seems like it might be easier to turn on a subgroup if belonging to that subgroup is a matter of choice rather than an accident of birth. The English in Tudor times might have voted to round up Catholics, if voting had been a thing. The Khmer Rouge, in common with many populist movements, hated intellectuals and was happy to persecute them. Crusades and holy wars throughout history have been all about exterminating people who don’t believe in your big guy in the sky.

Derrick Bell’s story would be more interesting if, instead of making his fictional citizens outright monsters, he’d presented them with a choice that was more honestly and credibly tempting. “We want all your incarcerated criminals,” the aliens/angels could have said. “No harm will come to them but we’re taking them away from Earth.” Even without the offer of extraterrestrial super-tech, getting rid of those inmates immediately saves the US about a hundred billion dollars. Tempting yet?

It’s still an absolutely appalling scenario. With no idea of what fate those exiles are going to face, a vote to hand them over is heinous self-interest and nothing more. However, until very recently a referendum on capital punishment in the UK would have voted in favour of sending some criminals to their death. That’s a lot worse than being banished to space. As a society we don’t make serious efforts to address the root causes of crime, nor to rehabilitate the criminals we have. In a sense we’re already consigning them to exile from humanity, and we’re not even getting fusion power in return.

How might this sort of ethical Gordian Knot be presented in a roleplaying scenario? An example from our Last Fleet game: the war has been going badly for the fleet, and the Corax offer a deal. Humans can live in peace, but they will be settled on one world and they have to give up all their technology. Effectively it would be a return to a primitive Eden. The Corax undertake to watch over the human planet, ensuring no disease or asteroid impact would ever be an existential threat -- but also to make sure we never develop science that could get us off the planet. The deal in a sense is that the Corax are offering to become humanity's gods. Immediately it gets interesting because some will want to take the deal ("We get to live. Our descendants will know peace, not endless war.") but others will bitterly oppose it ("So the human race becomes the pets in a Corax zoo?") If it's presented as a genuine and tempting option, it could cue a lot of gutsy inter-party conflict. I should add that in our game the Corax were not interdimensional fungi (wtftm) but creations of humanity ourselves. A war against your own rebel children is obviously more interesting than one against a genuinely alien Other.

Or it could be a bargain like the one Clark Ashton Smith postulates in his story "Seedling of Mars". The alien's offer ends up dividing humanity into two warring camps -- which might well have been the intention all along.

Going back to "The Space Traders" idea, the choice needn't hinge on an entire racial or ideological subgroup. People in the millions are abstract. What if it's a single individual? You can have all these wonderful things: free energy, unlimited resources, miraculous medicine, nobody goes hungry… and in return you give us one person. One human being for the lives of billions yet to be born.

What would you do?

Commuting by catapult

Mirabilis, my fantasy graphic epic with Leo Hartas and the late Martin McKenna, originally appeared in The DFC, a short-lived forerunner of The Phoenix comic. A friend of mine read it on the sleeper train out of Moscow as he was travelling home just before Christmas -- pretty much the perfectly immersive experience.

You can read Mirabilis online here and dive into the background here and here and here. As you can probably tell, it was a labour of love and if I could finish it I would, only the world doesn't owe me a living. (Sadly.)

As part of the very extensive world-building for Mirabilis, I wrote the correspondence of the Royal Mythological Society in a little booklet called A Minotaur At The Savoy. So that's fifty whimsical vignettes of green comety weirdness that, if you're starting to think about gifts, would fit quite neatly into a stocking. But then, I would say that.

The stories range from a mysterious giant hand found in a wood in Yorkshire to the best way to deal with a dragon that's taken a shine to the gold reserves of Fort Knox, and although it's hard to pick one that can be described as typical, this will give you a taste of what to expect:

Dear human savants 

Following a motion of no confidence in the prime minister, I find that my Martian Party has enough seats in the House of Commons to form a new government in coalition with the Liberal Unionists. The only sticking point is that, as you may know, my prospective allies are committed to a very specific agenda. Their three-point plan entails establishing a minimum wage, giving women the vote, and maintaining the unity of the British Isles - whereas the Martian Party is pledged to subjugate the planet Earth, replace corn with red weed as the staple carbohydrate dietary supplement, and ship a million slaves to the helium mines of Phobos. 

As a compromise, I have agreed to defer mass enslavement for the term of the current Parliament, concentrating instead on domestic transport policy as an area of common ground on which our two parties can agree. For example, to alleviate the growing problem of “rush hour” congestion at the major London rail terminuses, we propose loading commuters onto massive catapults which will fling them across the city to land in collection nets near to their place of work. We estimate this would save at least seventy thousand man-months of labour per year. However, some of our advisors believe that it will not be a popular measure and could lose us votes at the next election. What do you counsel? 

Yours, the Right Honourable Xangovar the Merciless, OBE, c/o the Palace of Westminster

Prof Bromfield replies: It would be very popular with small boys. Unfortunately, they don’t have the vote. Might be a better world if they did, if you ask me. 

Dr Clattercut: Oh yes. Because resolving international disputes with conkers matches is obviously the way to go. Pulling girls’ pigtails when they demand enfranchisement. Declaring the whole of January a national tobogganing holiday. Making marbles the official currency of the Bank of England… 

Prof Bromfield: You think you’re being wittily scathing, Clattercut, but in fact you’re just proving my point. So that’s what I’d suggest, Mr – er, Xangovar: shake up the Cabinet a little. Bring in some schoolboys and artists and poets and whatnot. Be more radical with your reforms, if anything. This is the Year of Wonders, so what’s wrong with sprinkling a bit of magic on the tired old machinery of politics? Trust me, the electorate will thank you for it. 

Dr Clattercut: Those that land in the nets, anyway.

Have a great Samhain/Halloween! And if you're looking for strange stories in a very different vein from Mirabilis, don't forget to take a look at the Binscombe Tales.

Fantasy with bite

A lot of what goes under the banner of fantasy isn't really all that fantastical. Quaint half-timbered taverns filled with half-elf barmaids and dwarves with Scottish accents where you go to be given your latest quest. My own experience of these games is that the players tend to sit knitting or stroking the cat while saying things like, "My halfling thief asks the innkeeper if he's seen any strangers passing through." There will be a dark lord, and an item you must destroy to defeat them and fix everything. It's made up, but it's not exactly fantasy. Where's the wonder? Where's the weird?

Good fantasy isn't cosy. It isn't a safe space. It takes you somewhere new and unpredictable. In Wightchester you're sealed up in a walled city where the plague is turning people into undead. What are you going to do now? "My drow ranger-witch hides in the shadows and listens for rumours" isn't going to cut it. No theme-park retread of Tolkien's tropes, this, but a dark and exciting roleplaying setting that'll immerse you like quicksand.

The crowdfunding has just hours to go. If you're looking for real fantasy, drop the knitting and get over there now.

Popes & Phantoms

If you're a regular visitor to this blog you'll know the high regard I have for the work of John Whitbourn, who is possibly the leading author in the field of the English New Weird. And, full disclosure: John also happens to be one of my oldest and dearest friends. Not that I'd allow that to sway my judgement; I have lots of author friends and I don't recommend all their books with the same unforced enthusiasm I have for works like the Binscombe Tales and Babylondon.

This one is a special treat. It's John Whitbourn's second ever novel, originally published in 1992, which has finally been released in its complete version. I read it in manuscript more than thirty years ago and there are still scenes that are so vivid in my memory that I have to remind myself it wasn't a movie. To quote from the publisher's website:

"Admiral Slovo was a man of his time, but of more than one dimension. In his sixteenth century, a pirate might be followed by the corpse of his victim, walking across the ocean, until putrescence claimed it. Or an interview with the Pope might be mirrored, exactly, by one with the Devil. Reality shifts could cause a king to see his capital city shimmer into another realm entirely. 

"Through such scenes of macabre hallucination, mayhem and murder, Slovo is a man alone, set apart by his stoic beliefs from the rigours of human fears and passions. As such, he was a valuable find for the Vehme, a clandestine, subversive society that ensnares its members from an early age, securing loyalties by the expedient methods of blackmail, bribery and barbarism.

"But Slovo is more than a Vehmist puppet, and whether as a brigand on the high seas, or emissary to the Borgias, or as the Pope’s Machiavellian Mr Fix-it, he plots a course that suits his own ends as much as those of his paymasters. He knows that, in the words of his mentor Marcus Aurelius, 'in a brief while you will be ashes of bare bones; a name, or perhaps not even a name'. And there are few things that cannot be solved by a stiletto in the eye."

Our next gamebook (part two)

So here's the other half of the Greek-influenced world Jamie has been creating for his Vulcanverse computer game. In these two regions (the world is divided into four rectangular quadrants) he takes us up into the mountains and out across the deserts. When Jamie sent me this material he mentioned gamebooks, and my first thought on reading it was that it would make a great setting for a gamebook -- or even for a series of four linked books, Fabled Lands style. 

And then the Vulcanverse raised $1 million in virtual land sales in one morning (yes, really) which makes it all possible. So Jamie and I are now hard at work at a couple of new gamebooks to tie in with the virtual world and we expect those to be on sale by spring 2021. Fabled Lands players, don't think we've forgotten you. These Vulcanverse gamebooks are going to use a variant of the FL rules and, if we can figure out the legal issues, there will be a way to enter them from FL book 10. More on that as we progress.

Anyway, here's Jamie's description of the oroi and eremoi of the -- I suppose it would be the Klytotechneschora (Κλυτοτέχνηςχώρᾱ)? Greek scholars, feel free to correct me!

THE MOUNTAINS OF BOREAS

Boreas is the god of the north wind and the borders of Boreas are mountain ranges: tall, white-maned, slate grey mountains that reach up to the heavens. Crossing them directly can be hard but many mountain passes have been carved through their towering walls. Tunnels have been dug into the mountain sides that lead into subterranean city complexes where minotaurs and other fell creatures dwell. If the outer edges were transparent, like a cutaway ant’s nest, you would see that the mountains are riddled with such passages. Many lead up and in to the high sierra of the interior, through underground cities, mines, burrows, pits and shafts. It is easy to get lost in these labyrinthine passages – safer to take one of the high passes.

If you go up through a pass and down the other side, you will descend into the table-top plateau beyond, a great alpine steppe, bounded on all sides by silver-capped, cloud-bound mountain peaks. The plateau is where Boreas, the winter wind, dwells.

Unlike the other gods, Boreas does not sleep. He cannot sleep for he is bound to blow for all time. Once, as a god, he could choose when winter came, whether it be early or late, whether to bring rains for crops or to drown them with floods, or to unleash storms upon ships at sea or relent and let sea-soaked sailors live or die. Boreas delighted in the sacrifices made to him by those who sought to appease his terrible power. But now he is bound by mankind’s science. Science that has decided how the world works, how he shall work. As the divine power of the gods declined so did the inevitable, inescapable power of reason rise to eclipse everything that had gone before. Now he must follow the rules and strictures of man’s ineluctable logic. He must blow when unknown forces he will never understand impel him to do so, rest when he must rest according to a system he is incapable of comprehending. Gales, hurricanes, tornadoes, gusts, breezes or soft zephyrs are not his to decide. He is no longer the master of his own destiny, and so he rages across the high steppes, screaming his incoherent anger at the empty skies.

In the middle of the plateau is a tall column of granite that spears upward into the clouds. Upon it rests the Fortress of Winds where Boreas himself lives. But he rarely resides there now for he spends most of his time shrieking in rage, rushing across the frozen flatlands or ‘working’. Boreas hates ‘working’.

Elsewhere, there are four mountains that rise up out of the plateau, separate from those at the edges. Mt Helikon, Mt Atos, Mt Othri and Mt Nysa. These were once home to the Oreads, members of the Ourea, young minor goddesses of the mountains, the children of the earth goddess Gaia. These mountain nymphs, the rulers of Boreas, have not been seen in aeons. It is said they sleep inside their mountain fastnesses awaiting a time when mankind may turn to them once more. They once ruled this land but now all that is left is Boreas, mindless, raging, howling, not much more than the rush of the wind unlike the old days when he and the Oreads would banquet in the Fortress of Winds or soar across the sky, shrieking in delight as Boreas, laughing, wafted them gently over the clouds.

Much of the plateau itself was once rich, terraced mountain farmland, now it is little more than wind-scoured tundra.

Cyclopes living in their mountain-side cave lairs, would climb up to the peaks and hurl boulders at each other for sport, or drop enormous rocks on unwary travellers below to crush them for their great cauldrons. Tenderized human flesh and crunchy bone stew was the height of cuisine as far as a cyclops was concerned. Now only a few cyclopes are left, scattered across the peaks, eking out a tired, lonely existence.

Many mountain peaks were used as eyries or nests inhabited by harpies and hippogriffs. They struggled against each other for control of the mountain peaks for thousands of years, a bitter war of hatred and blood. But now, as only a few harpies and hippogriffs remain, there is plenty of space to share, their glorious kingdoms of the sky reduced to abandoned nests, shattered rocks and broken, cliff-top pillars.

In ages past, minotaurs ruled in their subterranean cities dug into the mountains, emerging only to raid the lands of the Amazons who ruled most of the steppes that made up the high sierra of Boreas. These warrior women bred magnificent horses, riding across the steppe tundra, warring with the minotaurs, and tending to their nomadic herds, moving around from tent city to tent city. They would meet for great conclaves at their temples on holy days.

Harpies and hippogriffs, giants and cyclopes were always trying to steal away their cattle, the Amazons always trying to prevent it. It was a vibrant land of warring tribes and creatures. But now the Amazonian temples lie in ruins, their great yurts are no longer pitched ‘neath starry skies, their horses wander in small herds, searching for what little roots and grasses are to be found in the frozen earth, the cattle have long since been hunted to extinction. A handful of Amazon women linger on, trying to preserve their old ways. The tunnels and subterranean cities collapse untended, as the number of minotaurs that dwell below can be counted on the fingers of a single hand.

How can Vulcan restore this magnificent land to its former glory? He cannot do it alone, he needs the help of the mortals, those once feeble humans who have mastered reason and logic, created technologies inconceivable to the minds of the gods, save Vulcan himself. To the ancient gods,, mankind's craft is like a new kind of magic that has empowered them in ways the old gods never imagined possible. Only the mortals can rejuvenate the white capped mountains, the crumbling hill top forts, the Fortress of Winds and the underground cities. Only they can awake the Oreads to rule again, only they can restore the creatures of Boreas to greatness once more.

Landmarks and places of interest

The High Steppes
Most of the interior of the Boreas is a steppe plateau. Here and there hills rise up out of the flatlands. Where once the land was tilled and farmed, now it is mostly frozen tundra. The Amazons once roamed these lands, leading their herds of cattle and horses in search of pasture, growing crops and tending the land. They built temples and a few hilltop forts, but mostly they moved around living in great tented cities.

Hilltop Forts and Temples
Where a hill rises up out of the steppes, the Amazons built a fort upon it, the better to store their goods and defend against raids by the minotaurs, harpies, hippogriffs, cyclopes and other fell creatures of the mountains. Mostly they lie in ruin but one or two are still inhabited by Amazon warrior women, eking out a sparse life amidst the ruined glories of their past.

Mts Atos, Helikon, Nysa and Othri
These four mountains are the abodes of the four Oreads, the Mountain Nymphs that once ruled over the land with the North wind, Boreas. They rise up from the plateau near the four corners. They sleep in their mountain top palaces (like Parthenons), waiting to be woken once more. From each mountain, a river of the same name, runs to a large abyssal sink-hole near the centre of the High Steppe. The waters cascade down great waterfalls to disappear into unknown lands far, far below. Some say the rivers flow to Neptune’s realm of endless seas, like a celestial drain, others that they flow to another plane entirely.

The Great Sinkhole
Here the four rivers that run from the mountains of the Oreads spill down into the endless depths of an enormous sinkhole near the centre of the high steppes. Some say that if you fall into the Great Sinkhole, you will fall and fall, and die of thirst and starvation before you reach the bottom.

The Fortress of Winds
This is a pillared hypostyle fortress of porticoes and pillars. It rests atop a solid column of stone that rises up from the High Steppes to scratch at the clouds. It is the home of Boreas, the Winter Wind, but he has long abandoned it, in favour of hurtling about his realm shrieking like… well, like the wind, creating havoc, trying to throw off the bonds that bind him.

Lair of the Cyclopes
In the mountainsides that border the interior of Boreas are many caves, dug out by the one-eyed giant cyclopes. Here they would hurl boulders down at unwary Amazons below or play catch with their friends and enemies on nearby mountains using great boulders as balls.

Hippogriffs’ Eyrie
Here hippogriffs (half eagle, half horse) made their homes, high up in the mountains. They would war against the harpies whilst also trying to raid the herds and settlements of the Amazons below.

Harpies’ Nest
Harpies (half woman, half bird) made their nests from bones and skins high in the mountains. They would war against the hippogriffs for control of the skies, while also raiding the Amazons below. A risky business as the Amazons became adept in making sky-ballistae that could take down a harpy or a hippogriff with a single shot.

Minotaur Labyrinths
Below the ground, minotaurs have dug complex tunnel systems, creating living spaces, mines, passages, underground temples and stores. Much has fallen into rack and ruin but their great pillared portals and gargantuan gates still dot the landscape though most are sealed through rockfall or massive locks the keys for which have long been forgotten or lost. You might still catch sight of a lone minotaur lurking at one of these gates from time to time but sightings are rare.

THE DESERT OF SPHINXES

Somewhere in the sands of the desert, three sphinxes slumber in eternal repose, awaiting the next age of the gods, should it ever come. They are the Androsphinx, (human head, lion body), the Criosphinx (ram’s head, lion body) and the Heiracosphinx (hawk’s head, lion body). In that bygone age, mortals would seek out sphinxes in search of wealth or knowledge. If they could answer the riddle that the sphinx would set them, then the sphinx would allow them a single question that had to be answered truthfully. If they failed the riddle, well then, the mortal’s life was forfeit and they were devoured on the spot. Now the three sphinxes rest in small pyramid mausoleums, dreaming of riddles and tasty morsels of mortal flesh. Perhaps there dreams will soon be over, and they will once again stalk the hot sands of the desert.

Once, the Great River rushed from the first Cataract of Oceanus, the father of rivers, in the far north, through the second Cataract of Tethys, down to the Shores of Psamathe at the southern edge of the desert, and into the sea. In that delta stood the mighty city of Iskandria. Here the Myrmidons lived, a warrior race armoured like ants, who fought for Achilles in the Trojan wars. Iskandria teemed with life, commerce, arts, and crafts. Ships plied the Great River, its banks were home to farms and fisheries, vineyards and breweries for the making of fine wines and barley beer. Irrigation canals ran from the Great River into the deserts, creating farmlands and oases to feed the Myrmidons. The land was blessed by the gods, and filled with abundant life, fed by the Great River.

But now the gods have departed to their divine divans, to sleep the ages away. Where the waters cascaded down in raging torrents at the Cataract of Oceanus, now there is only a trickle that evaporates into empty air before it can reach the parched and dry riverbeds of the once Great River. Where once a river flowed, there is nothing but a long, winding ditch that cuts through the desert, slowly filling up with wind-blown sand. The canals that branched out to either side, once swollen with waters of life, are choked with dust and rocks, and dry, white bones.

The second Cataract of Tethys halfway through the Great River’s journey to the sea, was used to divert waters into the irrigation canals. Huge water wheels were set up to capture the power of the raging torrents. Tethys, a goddess, was mother of rivers, springs and streams, but she has long gone to her rest. Now the waterwheels lie baking in the hot sun, grime and dirt clogging their cogs, rust eating away at their metal brackets, their wooden spokes as dry and brittle as bleached bone.

Iskandria, the city at the Shores of Psamathe (goddess of the beach), once a thriving metropolis crumbles ‘neath the sun’s hammer. A handful of Mymirdons scratch out a living from the dusty fields, living amidst the cracked houses and shattered streets like the ghosts of once mighty warriors of legend.

Elsewhere, the desert has spread like a tsunami of sand. Lost cities and sunken forts are buried beneath tons of desert dust, waiting to be rediscovered, filled with ancient wonders and long lost treasures.

Dragons have crept back into the wilds, untamed, unchallenged, to take up residence amidst the pillared temples and cities of old, even in the Great Pyramids of the long forgotten kings of ages past. Even the Valley of the Kings where the ancient Myrmidon lords were buried is lost to time, the desert and dragons.

And where dragons roam so do the Spartoi. When a dragon’s tooth falls to earth, up springs a skeletal hoplite with spear and shield. Over the years, many dragon’s teeth have fallen. These Spartoi have formed themselves into regiments of undead hoplites, appointing their own lieutenants and commanders, taking over the forts that the Myrmidons once built to control these lands. Now the Spartoi range up and down the desert in search of blood or battling amongst themselves for supremacy.

And as if that were not enough, out in the western edges of the desert, in an empty quarter now called the Land from which None Returns, there dwell cockatrices whose touch is poison and whose breath is death. Yet their blood is said to cure all ills, so it is that desperate men and women will sometimes seek them out.*

Landmarks and places of interest

Pyramid Mausoleum
Three of these are hidden in the sands of the desert awaiting discovery. Much smaller than the great pyramids of Egypt these mausoleums each house one of the sphinxes of ancient times. They slumber, awaiting a new birth. Will it be mortal men who free them from their sleepy shackles?

Cataract of Oceanus
This is the origin of the Great River that runs through the Desert of Sphinxes. Oceanus was the god of rivers, the well of all the fresh waters in the world. But now he sleeps, no longer needed, discarded, set aside. So the wellspring of the Great River has dried up, and the once fertile lands, fed by the river, have been reclaimed by desert sands.

Cataract of Tethys
This second cataract, half way on the Great Rivers journey to the sea, was used to divert waters into the irrigation canals. A shrine to the goddess Tethys was regularly tended, to ensure the free flow of waters but that too has fallen into rack and ruin. Tethys herself has long since departed.

The Great River
A river that meanders through the two cataracts from the north to the delta and the sea to the south. It is now dried out and is slowly filling up with sand. It fed a fertile land, but now it is a barren wasteland of dust and sand.

Iskandria
A once great port at the mouth of the Great River where it spilled into the sea. Now the delta is silting up, and the great city is a shadow of its former self, slowly falling apart as the sun beats down upon it.

* ‘Where are you off to, dear?’
‘Just popping out to the Land from which None Returns.’
‘I suppose you won’t be home for supper, then?’
‘Umm… probably not.’

Our next gamebook (part one)

After I mentioned his Vulcanverse project a while ago, Jamie shared some of the background material he's been developing for it. As he puts it:

"I quite like what I've written  as it's in classic gamebook prose, which I haven't really done for a long time, so it was fun. It's all Graeco-Roman which I have unashamedly mixed up together (which once would have outraged me, but nobody cares anymore). It's kind of interesting in the sense that this kind of mythology was ten a penny in our day, so much popular fiction revolved around those myths (Hercules, Clash of the Titans, Jason, etc etc). But since the rise of Lord of the Rings and Warhammer and their ilk, goblins, green-skinned orcs, Alien rip-offs, elves, dwarves, chaos demons and so on have taken over the majority of fantasy. So now this Graeco-Roman stuff comes across to the gamer of today as new and original -- or at least a nice change. The wheel forever turns."

I read all the mythology books when I was a kid. The ones I really liked were the Norse myths. Greek and Roman never really did it for me. And in creating a world I'd always go for Tolkien's goal of a full subcreation. Abraxas, for example. But see what you think. Fans of the Dirk Lloyd books will appreciate Jamie's distinctive authorial voice at work here:

Vulcan, god of fire and the forge, speaks:

“List, O ye mortals. The old myths are dying. We Gods fade from the world, as mankind turns to their machines, their magic-killing science, their virtual worlds, filled with new gods and monsters. They do not need us any more and we are forgotten. The old myths are dying...

“We sleep. We dream. We fade into eternity.

“But I, Vulcan, the god they once entreated to gift them their machines, their science, their god-forged weapons, will not go quietly. No, I will embrace their new myths, their invisible worlds, their gods who speak in code of webs and nets and chains. I will forge a world that will be greater than the mundane ambitions of you mere mortals! I will use your science to create a virtual world born of a God, a world beyond the fickle, ephemeral dreams of mankind.

“I, Vulcan, will create a new Olympus!”

THE VULCANVERSE

The god Vulcan has chosen to bestow his blessings upon mankind. That means you, a mere mortal, can acquire plots of land in his New Olympus. The Vulcanverse is divided into four quarters around the Palace of Vulcan in the centre of Vulcan City. Each quarter has its own terrain. Players can build upon their land, recruiting creatures (vulcanites) improving their land, eventually adding buildings that give new functionality, produce goods, trade with other players and with Vulcan City, create their own games, palaces, objects, art and so on.

The Four Quarters

The Vulcanverse is divided into five areas, the central Vulcan City and around it four areas that have been opened up to humans.

• The Underworld of Hades: the land of the dead, filled with shades, swamps, tombs etc
• The Gardens of Arcadia: a bucolic paradise of farmlands, groves, orchards, centaurs, druids and dryads.
• The Desert of Sphinxes: desiccating winds blow across these dried up lands. Dunes, lost cities, salt-flats, sphinxes and scorpions.
• The Mountains of Boreas: ice-bound mountains, eyries, crag castles, hilltop towns, and mines inhabited by cyclopes, harpies and minotaurs.

THE GARDENS OF ARCADIA

Arcadia, the garden of the Olympians. Once they walked its sylvan paths, sipping ambrosia, plucking the golden apples of immortality, drinking the wines of Bacchus, and filling the elysian groves with their laughter. Hera plotted vengeance against her husband, Zeus in dusky glades, Aphrodite seduced many a mortal, even a god or two, in its sweet smelling bowers, lovers embraced in candle-lit forested walkways. Ares, lord of war, rested here after bloody battle, and Ceres sowed her seeds of plenty in its lush farmland. Satyrs and centaurs gambolled in the sunlit groves, druids and sprites tended to the trees and flowers. Even mortals, those chosen of the gods, attended the revels. Everywhere life blossomed with joyous abandon.

But Pan plays his pipes no more, Diana hunts not in the deep forests-green, dryads and nymphs dance no longer in dappled moonlit glades to the music of the spheres. Silence reigns over the weed infested garden walkways. Ancient trees, long untended, clog the forest trails, roots rise up from the ground to topple the statues, fountains and sundials, cracking open the conservatories and summer houses. The babbling brooks and streams have long since dried up, nothing sleeps in their beds now but desiccated earth and bleached bones. Its bathing pools and lily gilded ponds are filled with rot and decay. The bowers and arbours are overgrown with the thick, fibrous vines that once yielded up the grapes that Bacchus used to make his celestial wines, drunk with joyous abandon in every nook and corner. Now they twist and turn, choking the life out of the land.

In its wilder regions, the Sons of Lycaon wander the deep forests, wolves by night and men by day. These werewolves feed on the unwary and the lost. It is said that King Lycaon himself, father of wolves, still lives somewhere, in the deepest, darkest dens of the forest.

Elsewhere, Arcadia is not entirely abandoned. Faerie folk can still be found in the weed choked gardens, sprites too, though their magic is fading. A druid or two can still be seen tending to half-forgotten woodland shrines, perhaps a wanderer may catch a glimpse of a centaurs’ hind quarters as it flees into the safety of the forest or catch the mournful sigh of a dryad wandering alone through the glades, but mostly, Arcadia sleeps.

Chiron, greatest of the centaurs, tutor of Hercules and Achilles, and the god of medicine himself, Asklepios, once walked Arcadia’s leafy trails, and galloped across its verdant fields. But where is Chiron now? Does he slumber somewhere in an abandoned stable, lost and forgotten? Can mortal men free him from his long sleep of oblivion and restore him to greatness? Only time will tell.

The gods may sleep but Vulcan will not. For what is to be done? It is now the Age of Man, so it must be the mortals, feeble though they may be, pitiful even, to whom the task must fall. Though it breaks immortal hearts, Arcadia must be given*  to those who would restore it to its glorious, arboreal splendour.

Landmarks and places of interest

Rivers of Arcadia
The river god Ladon once lived in the gushing waters, but now the rivers of Arcadia run dry as Ladon slumbers. Perhaps they can be restored to their former glory.

The Verdant Farmlands
Once tended by centaurs these farmlands have fallen into disarray. Bucolic farmhouses and sacred stables, home to centaurs, still litter the land, waiting to be put to use once more.

Wineries of the Nectar of the Gods
Here were grown Olympian vines, tended by satyrs, whose hooves juiced the grapes from which the heady wines of Bacchus were made, called the sweet nectar of Olympus.

Woodlands of Ambrosia
Much of Arcadia is covered in sculpted woodland, given a veneer of wildness but in fact crisscrossed with trails and paths, dotted with arbours and bowers, statues, fountains, flowered gardens, gazebos and gardener's huts. It was a bucolic paradise, now overgrown and semi wild. Ambrosia, the food of the gods that imparts immortality on those who eat of it, was also harvested here from the mushroomed shadows of glen and glade. Yet a few dryads still live in leaf-thatched tree houses, some nymphs still dance in sunlit glades and swim with wild abandon in the streams and pools.

The Deep Forest
These are the truly wild parts of Arcadia, found at its remoter edges. The deeper you go, the darker it gets until you reach Lycaon’s Den. Do not assume you will ever leave that place alive though. Safer places along the way are the dryads’ groves, so long as you treat them with respect and honour. Dryads still tend a grove or two. Do not anger them for they have mastery over root and branch, leaf and stream, and can ensnare the unwary or those that desecrate their sacred charges.

Dales of Leaf and Stream
Here dwell faeries and sprites, playing in the waters and tree lined glens, or banqueting on elderberry wine and mushrooms, roots and nuts. Beware, mortals, for to disturb the fae at play is to risk much, perhaps even your very soul!

The Summer Palace
This lies at the centre of Arcadia, so called because there is only one season in Arcadia – eternal summer. The Palace is where the gods once stayed but long has it stood empty, its murals chipped and flaking, its rooms empty and dust-bound, its windows shuttered and its kitchens closed, the banqueting halls and bedchambers silent and empty, begrimed with the filth of ages. The Palace is surrounded by ornamental gardens long since fallen into ruin and decay. Weeds and creepers fill the flower beds, hedge thorn and nettles block and bind the garden paths.

THE UNDERWORLD OF HADES

The underworld was once ruled over by Vulcan’s uncle, Hades, but he sleeps in his immortal tomb, ignored, weakened by centuries of neglect. What is to be done with his realm now? Who will refurbish its sepulchral halls, sweep away the corpse dust that coat its tenebrous terraces, and reawaken the dead that once walked its cheerless cloisters? Who else but the mortals of earth? Those same souls who have turned their backs on Olympus, who have found new gods to worship, virtual gods of silicon science. But what choice does Vulcan have? He must sell all to mankind, for only they can rebuild hell itself.

And what is to be found in Hades? Bone chilling winds sweep across desolate plains, carrying the despairing moans of lost souls to every corner of the realm of the dead. Swamps fester in the pale nacreous glow that rises up from the decaying earth, tombs litter the landscape like broken teeth, shadows walk the land, muttering in the darkness. It is home to the Spirits of the Dead and… other things.

There are bloated swamps, full of mangrave (sic) trees and the drowned dead. Some swamps, left untended for so long, are choked with slime. Swamp spiders spin their webs out of the glutinous putrefying mire making their webs particularly sticky and difficult to get out of.

The two rivers of Hades, the Acheron and the Styx, flow like arteries of black blood across the land. Where the rivers widen bayous have formed. Some say hydras live in the bayous, their many heads arguing among themselves over the spoils of harvested souls and the fruits of putrefaction and decay.

Away from the rivers of hell lie the Plains of Howling Darkness, home to lost souls, wandering in the miasmic shadows, who wail and groan, shambling aimlessly, lamenting their fate in the pale, decaying light. Ashes fall like rain. Mysterious sink holes, ash-filled wells and rune-written trapdoors in the ground lead to subterranean crypts and caverns where vampiric lamias lurk, ready to burst forth and drain the souls of the unwary.

Elsewhere, crumbling towers rise up out of the plains like long dead skeletal fingers groping their way out of the stifling grave-dirt upwards to the long-forgotten light of life. Lost souls are drawn to the high ramparts, their cries of wailing despair spreading across the land, filling all who come there with a fearful melancholy. Other towers have been turned into the nests of the strixes, blood-drinking bat-like birds with razor sharp beaks of bronze.

In the middle of hell lies a sprawling necropolis, the City of the Dead, the capital of Hades.

In its glory, the river Acheron flowed through the city, as if it were some kind of sepulchral Venice of the dead. Funereal barges of silver and ebony floated along the canals of dark water, manned by shades and souls. Now a handful of begrimed, rusted barges ply its dark, greasy waters.

Cerberus, the three headed hell-hound of Hades, who kept watch at the eternal portals of Hades, sleeps in his everlasting kennel too. Can mortal men wake him? Restore him to his old post as guardian of the gates of hell? Can the royal necropolis be restored to its former grandeur? Can the plains and swamps of this ancient hell be renewed? Can Hades be rebuilt? It is up to mortal men and women to decide, to rebuild Hades in their own image, should they so choose.

Landmarks and places of interest

Rivers of Hades
The Acheron and the Styx run across the land. They come from sources in the mountainous southern edge of Hades where it abuts the mountains quarter (The Mountains of Boreas). The Acheron runs through the central city. Both join up after the city to merge in the Delta of Darkness at the northern (or western) edge of the map.

Swamps
A bloated swamp, full of mangrave trees and the drowned dead. Flies feast on sunken corpses, twisted beasts feed on the fetid fruits of that land, and gigantic snakes feed upon them in turn, dominating the interiors.

Giant snakes and hydras wander the swamps. Mangrave trees – trees that are half bark, half twisted dead body, grow across all the swamps and bayous of Hades, nourished by the souls of the dead.

Slimeswamp
The Slimeswamp is a congealed morass of putrefaction with spiders littered about. Giant swamp spiders, so like a swamp but with webs.

Black Bayou
Those swamps that are on the course of the Styx and Acheron end up as Black Bayous. Riverside dens and watery graves line the dark, oleaginous lakes. Punts and flat bottomed boats ply the waters, manned by the souls of those drowned at sea.

The City of the Dead
The necropolis, the capital of the Underworld. At its centre a single, tomb smothered hill, rises up over the city like a gravestone. Upon its peak is the now empty Palace of the Dead, where Hades once ruled. Round and about its foothills, tomb complexes spread outward like the suburbs of a living city. Statues of the long dead seem to stalk its streets like thieves in the night, their deeds in life long forgotten.

Plains of Howling Darkness
The Plains are home to lost souls, wandering in the miasmic shadows, who wail and groan, shambling aimlessly, lamenting their fate in the pale, decaying light, hence the name. Mysterious sink holes, ash-filled wells and rune-written trapdoors in the ground lead to subterranean crypts and caverns. There are ancient broken towers scattered across the land. Strixes, bronze beaked blood-drinking birds, circle some of them. Elsewhere, lamias (half woman, half snake) lurk, waiting to pounce on the unwary.

Delta of Darkness
The two rivers finally join and run into the Delta of Darkness at the coast. On the delta can be seen the barge of Charon, who leads the souls of the dead upriver into Hades. Charon himself is long gone though, sleeping in his tomb somewhere. Also at the end of the Delta is the abode of Cerberus, the three-headed watchdog of the underworld, the Guardian at the Gates of Hell, now empty.

Houses of the Dead
Scattered about are small graveyards or cemeteries with small tombs and mausoleums. Here the lost souls have Hades dwell in kind of half life.

Corpse Copses
Little clusters of blasted trees, half tree, half dead body, litter the land.

*  *  *

We'll be back with the other half of Vulcan's new realm in a fortnight, when I'll explain what all this has to do with gamebooks. Next week, though, there's a real treat for roleplayers: the annual Legend winter special. The player-characters arrive in an isolated coastal town with dark secrets and its own solstice rituals. That's "The Gifts of the Magi". Don't you miss it!


* Vulcan uses the Olympian word for ‘given’ here which translates in human terms as ‘sold’. This can be a traditional sacrifice of a goat and suchlike, but these days, Vulcan prefers a bank transfer.