The Mountain Monastery Murder Mystery

Christine de Pisan

My bet is that any gamemaster who has read Umberto Eco's Name of the Rose has considered running a scenario featuring a murder mystery in a monastery. Rachel Kronick, the author of the gritty medieval RPG, Blade & Crown, did just that this weekend at Con of the North. Her session was the high point of the con for me, so I thought I'd blog about her game before I proceed with accounts of the scenarios I ran (which will post to FATE SF starting on Wednesday).

Rachel chose to set the game in an all-female monastery: one dedicated to the Earth goddess on the island of Morensia (a land about the same size as Wisconsin) set in her world of Calteir. One interesting aspect of the Sisters of Faenwitha is that all the women in the order had been assigned a male gender at birth. Each member of the order seeks in her own way to complete a Great Work in service of the order and the Earth goddess, a Great Work which will result in the goddess conferring on them the gift of a complete physical transition to having a female body.

It's worth noting that Calteir is very low-magic world in which you cannot just ask the local sorcerer, witch, or mage to affect a permanent change in your gender. In that sense, life for trans folk has similarities to our world - a transition entails a process of discernment, as well as self-commitment and significant resources.

Now you don't ordinarily expect to see murders happening in a monastery dedicated to a peaceful Earth goddess, but by the session's end, there were two. It was the PCs job to investigate them. We were all members of the order (that is, we were all playing female trans characters ranging from a lowly cellarer to an archbishop), a delegation that had arrived after significant time on the road to be part of a convocation to determine the future political direction of the order.

The convention book had called-out this event as involving LGBT themes, so the players all knew to expect this to come up in the game. Except for Rachel, the GM, all the players were males. The players really immersed themselves in their roles and characters they were playing. (This was easy to do as Rachel had created brief but memorable bios for each of the characters.) I have no idea if any of the other guys at the table identifies as LGBT, but I can say as the gamer who for years was the only queer person at the gaming table that the GM and players worked together to create a space where everyone took the story seriously and had fun together.

The only disconcerting thing about the game was the very LOUD GM running a B5 game at the next table. Trying to solve a medieval murder mystery while hearing Londo imitations at a million decibels was a bit disconcerting, to say the least!

"The Mountain Monastery Mystery" was a VERY satisfying event, and once again showed off Rachel's eye for detail and preparation.

The Realm Of Vortex

Pieter Bruegel the Elder, "The Hunters in the Snow" (1565)

Vortex is a realm with six months of brutally frigid winter and six months of insufferably humid summer - and there is scantly more than a week or so between these two seasons. People in this realm are convivial and social during the winter months. Villages suffer the cold together, with much fellow spirit. But in summer, people become vindictive and aggressive. Each village is torn apart by multiple feuds. It is a war of all against all until the first winter snows fall.

Spherewalkers should plan their sojourns in Vortex accordingly.

• Virtue: Fearing Shadows, Reversed - Recognizing Safety. This Fortune represents the people of Vortex in winter; communities are united, because people turn to each other for friendship and support.

• Fault: War, Reversed - Effort Misspent. This Fortune represents the people in summer; communities are divided because people turn against each other in petty feuds.

• Fate: The Smith - Productivity vs. Evil Effort. In most years, communities are able to set aside enough food produced in the summertime to feed everyone when the season turns to winter. But what would happen if the crops failed one summer? Would people turn on each other in the winter? Might they even become cannibals? Or would they pull together somehow and find a solution that avoids violence and starvation? Recent auguries have people worried...

Dollar Store Dungeons: Serpent-Tapirs

The enormous Serpent-Tapirs aren't native to the Sixth World; they are survivors of the worlds destroyed in past ages. Because their stride is like thunder, they are favored by gods associated with fire, thunder, and lightning, including the fearsome Django-Tlaloc of the Olmeca.

In ancient times, the lords of the Forest of Kings made war on each other's city-states astride these great beasts. Today, only a few of the Mayan city-states still have a Serpent-Tapir. Those who do no longer use their beast for warfare but instead to clear jungle and forest areas and ready them for agriculture. After all, the creatures' enormous bodies give them enormous appetites. And the Serpent-Tapirs not only clear land; they fertilize it as well with their prodigious amounts of excreta. 

The Olmeca have four of the beasts which they use for warfare. From enormous war-howdahs astride these beasts, the Olmeca archers and spearmen can rain down iron-tipped death on their enemies, or use great grapple hooks to tear down the steep stone walls of a fortress or city. The mere threat of these creatures is sufficient to keep the tribute flowing from Xochiquetzatlan and the city-states of the Maya folk into the coffers of the Olmeca king.

Unfortunately, the Olmeca are dependent on others to heal these great beasts when they fall ill; the Olmeca retain healer priests from the Forest of Kings for just this purpose, as they have a great deal of ancient lore on care of the Serpent-Tapirs. Another problem the Olmeca have is that the beasts do not breed well in captivity. The Olmeca have sought the help of the sorcerer-priests of the ever-fecund city of Xochiquetzatlan to devise a magical remedy for this problem. 

The Olmeca are pursuing other alternatives as well. One is to summon Serpent-Tapirs from the stone-bones of their kind who perished long ago. Discovering these often requires lengthy and expensive rock hunting expeditions to the deserts, hills, and badlands of the great continent to the north, as well as the cooperation of the few sorcerers among the Xochiquetzatlani and Maya who know the ancient summoning spells. 

Finally, the Olmeca are also commissioning Serpent-Tapir egg hunts in the jungles in the deep south of the isthmus, and to the great southern continent beyond there. Their shamans have had visions of large herds of the beasts still alive in the wilds of these far lands... 

This post is part of the cross-blog community project Dollar Store Dungeons. It is but one example of how a $1 plastic dinosaur - and a plant eater at that - can be put to good use as a gaming prop and inspiration for world-building. Other uses for this beastie might be in games of Hollow Earth Expedition, Rocket Age, or the forthcoming Ubiquity game system implementation of Space: 1889. We know that both the Hollow Earth and Venus have creatures like these. Hopefully humans do not hunt them to extinction.

Dollar Store Dungeons: Creatures

If you are going to run a game of Heirs to the Lost World, the New Fire, or are planning a Xeno-Meso or Hollow Earth Expedition adventure, you'd do well to pick up a $1 bag of creatures from the local dollar store. The Aztec and Mayan Underworlds are filled with bug-like creatures - especially centipedes. You may actually want a few bags of them.

For example, on Saturday, I played in one of Jeff Berry's wonderful Tekumel miniatures games where a big collection of bugs from dollar stores came in quite handy. I was playing a high-level priestess of Ksarul, up in the howdah of one of these wonderful Sro dragons:

At a certain juncture in the battle, it became necessary expedient amusing to summon some of Lord Ksarul's spider-like demon servitors in order to dispatch some of the Pe Choi and Shen who were harassing us. I didn't do too well on the roll, so Jeff told me I had summoned 13 demons who were not spiders. So out of the huge bug supply box came all kinds of other demons: centipedes, ticks, beetles, scorpions, a dragonfly, even a squid (freshwater/ambulatory/arboreal).

So don't leave home without your dollar store demons!

Warriors of the Steppe - Myn Bala

A scene from Myn Bala - Warriors of the Steppe

Nothing says Christmas quite like a handsome bowman defending his steppe and mountains against the Dzungar horde. This week, we're watching films about the Mongols, their offshoots, and enemies. No shortage there.

And yes, The Everwayan is back from the dead. We're still not completely sure of our future direction, but we're feeling re-energized by many things these days that are Central, South, and Southeast Asian.

You'll see.

Sunday night we watched the Russian film, "The Horde". It certainly tells the Russian side of the story about the Mongol Yoke, and we had some experience of this a number of years ago in my friend Boris' medieval Russian AD&D campaign.

A very grim and gritty movie. Unromantic. It makes all that crybaby stuff about "Blood Weddings" in A Game of Thrones sound like wedding reception precedence kvetching.

Still and all, I am not sure I would recommend "The Horde" except for die hard Mongol fans. It's definitely not this Horde:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:TSR1055_The_Horde.jpg

That being said, we watched a very fine movie last night. "Warriors of the Steppe - Myn Bala". Myn Bala is a Kazak film set on the steppes in the 18th Century. It's about the resistance and gradual unification of the Kazak peoples against the Dzungar horse nomads. It was much more enjoyable, and managed to portray the Dzungar as black armored baddies without dwelling in the horrors of their everyday atrocities.

I think this film falls into a more Central Asian "Steppes and Minarets" genre. We're reading a novel in a similar vein called "The Pet Hawk of the House of Abbas" by Dmitry Chen, the first novel in his Silk Road Trilogy. Recommended.

Oleletletl

Today we started our formal read through of the New Fire RPG, a game set in a world inspired by the peoples of pre-Colombian Mesoamerica. The image above is of the fire god Oleletetl. He was one of the five gods involved in the primordial struggle against the Ur-caiman Sipaktli, a crocodilian mega monster living in the primordial chaos sea at the dawn of the world.

First the gods fought Sipaktli individually. That did not go so well.

Then, the Earth god came up with a strategy that involved teamwork. Oleletletl bravely confronted Sipaktli, and sacrificed his foot to the beast as a distraction, so that two other gods could strike the monster. This teamwork was successful. The elements can work together.

When the gods slew Sipaktli, its skin became the land covering the primordial chaos-sea, and its back spines became the world's mountains.

This is how the first land was created for people to live on.

The gods of the New Fire are recognizably Mesoamerican, but they are unique to the game. Author Jason Caminsky explained to me recently that he didn't want to use the real world deities since people continue to worship them. Jason also wanted to create his own deities and myths based upon the ones he had learned about the Aztec gods. Myth creation can be very satisfying, and I think he did a good job with this in his efforts to create an original game world that is very much in the spirit of historical Mesoamerica.

You can see the traces of the historical deities and myths in the game. For example, the historical deity Tezcatlipoca played this foot-sacrificial role in the real world version of the confrontation. He's often depicted as missing one foot, like the deity Oleletletl above.

http://archaeology.asu.edu/tm/pages2/mtm21A.htm

A very mysterious jaguar-associated deity, Tezcatlipoca is also linked to some of the core mysteries of our own Xeno-Meso setting.

Tepeyollotl jaguar aspect of Tezcatlipoca

A Bit More On The New Fire

Image by Ryan Lord

This is one of the numerous, lavish images in Jason Caminsky's New Fire RPG, which is set in the pre-Columbian Aztec world. My hardcover full-color copy of the game arrived today; the art is just amazing to behold. The artists really did their homework, but I suspect they also received strong, focused art direction from Mr. Caminsky.

The artistic feel of the book is quite unified. There are three types of illustration:

• Individual portraiture for important character types (for example, the illustrations of Eagle and Jaguar Warriors)
• Scenes (such as the one pictured above depicting a battle) as well as many depicting common aspects of everyday life (e.g., chinampa agriculture, temple interiors, modes of transportation, the Patolli game, and the Mesoamerican ball game)
•  In-culture illustrations such as might be found in one of the Aztec codices

The three types of illustrations work together to convey how the world looks and how people saw it themselves. This is also reinforced by many small details in how the book was arranged. Each text box providing additional context on the game world is bordered on the left by a Vision Serpent, a very classy and appropriate touch that promotes immersion.

The details help one get inside the culture. I also like the fact that on page178 all the glyphs for the day signs are arranged in a column with their corresponding English name just to the left of the glyph.

More to come as I start reading the book