#StayAtHome: "Outlaws of the Marsh"

 

One quarter of a lifetime achievement unlocked: I finished the first of four volumes of Outlaws of the Marsh aka Water Margin aka the Marshes of Mt. Liang aka All Men Are Brothers. Only 1500 more pages to go!

Outlaws of the Marsh is 14th Century Chinese novel about events at the end of the Song Dynasty in the 12th century. The state is corrupt at every level. Honest people cannot make a living without bribery, and are forever at the whim of officials. A group of bandits and people who have fallen due to various crimes take to the slopes of Mt. Liang, and to the vast wetlands surrounding the mountain (the so-called water margin) and the greatest assemblage of thieves, swindlers, and martial artists come together.

The novel is episodic, with a cast of 108 heroes. If you intend to run a martial arts RPG, this really is the ultimate source material. I'm looking forward to starting the next volume. I have an RPG campaign in mind, eventually.

Character Generation

 

Everway's Silver Anniversary Edition offers two ways to access the images that drive the game: there will be actual cards for the Vision Deck, Season Deck (a new feature), and Fortune Deck, and a huge chunk of Book 1 - Player's Book also reproduces the Fortune Deck and the Vision Deck (which includes more images than found in the original Everway boxed set). 

Since I am running my new campaign using the Silver Anniversary Edition, and we are playing online, I was pretty worried about how character generation was going to go. We play online in two hour sessions, weekly. Would that be enough time to generate characters? Would the players be able to understand the basics of setting and mood for such a visually oriented and reflective game in the virtual environment?

I decided to run in Zoom, rather than our usual home on Discord, because video quality is better. (Or at least I have more confidence in that platform with respect to screensharing and video interaction.)

One of my four players DOES have the original edition of the game (which he purchased online recently), so not surprisingly he got the furthest with character generation last night. For the Vision stage of character creation he was able to use his own set of Vision cards to select five that resonated with him for creating a character. He did the same with selecting his Virtue, Fault, and Fate using the Fortune Deck.

For the other players, I did a screenshare of the Vision Card chapter of the new Player's Book, so that they could see all the cards - and the questions associated with each Vision card. I also walked players through  the setting chapters of the Player's Book to give them a sense of the game environment: the much expanded map of Roundwander, the City of Everway, and various images in the book. This helped the players to "get" the mood of the game: mythic fantasy. I also showed players the cards in the Fortune Deck, and the various images of deities that are included in the deck. This was a useful anchor as well. 

As we began character generation we also explored a Premise for the campaign, which the new edition brings into stronger focus. What brings the characters together? What kind of group are they?

The players decided that their Spherewalkers have come to Everway after learning that they have a shared ancestor - some relation has invited them to visit the City of Everway. I thought this was a great idea. We agreed that this might be come kind of crazy uncle. When I explained the matriarchal-matrilineal family structure of Everway, they speculated that their relative might be a "crazy aunt" instead!

The visually rich review copy to which I have access gives me confidence that GMs will be able to create an authentic Everway experience online. The range of Vision card images did what they always do: they gave the players some ideas about other cherished card collections that they might raid for the Vision stage of character development! That was another "win" for the session, and very consistent with my experience running the RPG face-to-face and play-by-post in the past.

We did about two hours of discussion and exploration, the players will do a bit of image selection sessions, and will finish characters and begin the campaign in the next session.

While Everway doesn't have character classes or levels (the original of course came in a white box, so comparisons to D&D are both inevitable and illuminating), but the characters emerging seem to fall into the following categories:

• A wizard who is a spirit medium/channeler
• A bard
• A fighter
• A cleric (pretty sure)

So this promises to be a well-rounded party. I am looking forward to their adventures together!

Starting A New Everway Campaign!

After I bought the first edition of Everway, I dropped it off at my friend Amon's house. I came back later, after I had purchased some dinner, and saw that he had filled a dining room table with Vision Cards from the box set. It was such a splendid array, and he was quite impressed to see Ogun on one of the Fortune Deck cards, as back in the early 1990s, there were still relatively few depictions of characters or beings of African descent in RPGs! Everway was probably the first truly multicultural and inclusive RPG in that respect!

Twenty five or so years later, I am so thrilled to be beginning a new campaign for Everway with the new Everway Silver Anniversary Edition which is about to go on Kickstarter. Tonight we will step into character generation, which feels like returning to the source!

To learn more about what's going on with the Silver Anniversary Edition, you can join the Everway Facebook group here. To get notified about the launch of the Kickstarter, you can sign-up here.

The Everwayan blog was created to celebrate everything Everway, so expect updates about how character generation and the campaign are going!

#StayAtHome: "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" by H.P. Lovecraft

It's still racist toward immigrants after all these years. The last time I read H.P. Lovecraft's* "The Shadow over Innsmouth" was back in the mid-1990s. Twenty five years later, the narrative is still fueled by horror at miscegenation between traditional New England seafolk, and South Pacific islanders (and marine Deep Ones). Innsmouth is shunned by its neighbors. Their racial alterity makes them a threat. It's no wonder the residents of Innsmouth are so vigilant about visitors to their town.

I reread the short story because I am playing in a Delta Green RPG campaign which deals with the matter of the Deep Ones. Our P.C.s were preparing to return to Innsmouth to see if there were any remaining traces of the Deep Ones and their human-Deep One hybrid progeny. The GM was ok with me reading the short story for background, because my character had uncovered the military accounts of the Innsmouth Raid. I did pick up a few relevant details, so it was worth rereading.

This time round, I read the short story in the three volume hardcover "variorum edition" published by the Hippocampus Press. (That edition has a fourth volume of short stories that Lovecraft edited or ghostwrote for other people, and it is unfortunate that the fourth volume is only a trade paperback.) The hardcovers were much anticipated as the "definitive" edition of Lovecraft's work, with significant (and insignificant; they're mostly insignificant) textual variations exhaustively footnoted. However, this set of books is far from "definitive": the only other story I have started to reread in the collection, "Dreams in the Witch House" has a horrible multiline typesetting/editing botch! I don't know how this got past the editor, S. T. Joshi. The Library of America edition of the same short story is not similarly botched, so this error must have been induced in the publication of the variorum edition. Not good, especially at its price point.

So here is the really interesting textual variation in the story: there is a whole paragraph toward the end that was excised, in which the narrator, after escaping Innsmouth, expresses his anxiety about the possibility that he will experience progressive somatic changes that will reveal him as a Deep One. This anxiety has more than a little of the Epistemology of the Closet about it. 

*My first attempt to write the author's name in this post, I wrote his name as H.P. Innsmouth!

#StayAtHome: Michael Moorcock's "Daughter of Dreams"

 

This weekend, I finished the third of the later Elric novels, Daughter of Dreams (2001), published in the  U.S. as the Dreamthief's Daughter. I took turns reading the novel in the bulky-but-lovely Gollancz omnibus, The Moonbeam Roads, shown above, as well as in a U.S. paperback edition with a cover by Robert Gould. Part of that cover is shown in the leftmost of the three miniatures up above.

The primary point of view character is Ulric von Bek, and as the story opens, Hitler is consolidating power in Germany. The novel may have reflected the times in which it was published (the early years of Bush's post-9/11 power grab), but it certainly felt relevant to the swift decline our democracy is experiencing in the Trump era. We no longer have to read fiction to imagine tyranny or how to oppose it.

The von Bek family of Germany have been the custodians of the Grail since the Thirty Year's War, when Ulric's ancient namesake encountered Lucifer and the Grail. The Nazi's want the Grail, but that isn't the sole reason they appear at von Bek's castle: their initial demand is for a black sword of great mythic resonance, Ravenbrand, another heirloom of the von Bek family.

Ravenbrand is indeed a sister-sword of Elric's Stormbringer, and soon enough Oona, the daughter of Oone (the Dreamthief from The Fortress of the Pearl) and Elric arrives, and later Elric himself. Jerry Cornelius makes an appearance, as does Oswald Bastable. Quite a chunk of the novel takes place in the bizarre cave-world of Mittelmarch. Later, there are even Melnibonean dragons, and it turns out these played a role in the Battle of Britain!

It's an extraordinarily good novel, combining historical fiction and fantasy, the myth of the Eternal Champion and the madness of Nazism. The novel will be less rewarding for readers seeking adventures in the Young Kingdoms, but it isn't far from here to something like Inglourious Basterds. 

And then there's the Runestaff...

#StayAtHome: Michael Moorcock's The Fortress of the Pearl

"An All-New Novel of Elric" is the comic book-like subtitle for Michael Moorcock's The Fortress of the Pearl (1989). This was the first Elric novel after the original series of books that culminates (in Elric's lifeline) with Stormbringer. It is set earlier in Elric's wanderings around the Young Kingdoms, with his cousin Yyrkoon sitting on the Ruby Throne as regent while Elric learns about the world outside Melnibone.

The action is in the deserts of the northeast, in and around a city-state called Quarzhasaat, which was the capital of an empire that was an early rival of Melnibone. The Bright Empire defeated the Empire of Quarzhasaat, which was swallowed by the desert, with the exception of this wicked, insular city-state.

Which makes it a rather intriguing mirror image of Melnibone, in some ways.

This will give you a clue what happens to the city. 

Elric spends most of the novel on a quest in a layered "Dreamlands" of sorts. He discovers a new magical discipline, that of the Dreamthieves. Elric seeks to free himself of an addiction he acquired through Quarzhasaati treachery, but even more to free a boy from physical captivity in Quarzhasaat, and a girl from spiritual captivity within the titular Fortress of the Pearl.

This first of the "late" Elric novels is much more focused than the second of the "late" Elric novels, The Revenge of the Rose. I started the third of the "late" novels, Daughter of Dreams (aka The Dreamthief's Daughter) last night, and am really impressed by that one as well. 

#StayAtHome: Secret Murder

 

Ellen Kuhfeld's Secret Murder: Who Shall Judge? was the August 2020 selection for the North Country Gaylaxians' Book Club. It is an alternate history novel set in a 14th Century Minnesota which has been settled by Norsemen in the north, English in the south, with an ongoing presence of indigenous people elsewhere. Technology is Dark Ages. 

Not surprisingly perhaps, where Minneapolis is in our world, is where the English host trade fairs. This short novel features the murder of a Norse trader, the suspicions directed against a rival Northman, and the investigation of the murder by the English bailiff.

It's a really fun story, very immersive, written in a terse style similar to Eleanor Arnason's (her own style based on the Icelandic epics). Candidly, I am quite tired of "Viking" roleplaying games, but this short novel made me think it might be quite fun to run something like Kevin Crawford's Wolves of God: Adventures in Dark Ages England.

Ellen is a local author, and she was able to join us for the book discussion, which was as delightful as always.