In such wise Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser returned flat against their oaths to the city they despised, yet hankered after…in any case Lankhmar seemed no worse than any other place in Nehwon and more interesting than most. So they stayed there for a space, making it once more the headquarters of their adventuring.
— Fritz Leiber, The Circle Curse

My Nehwon campaign is – frighteningly – over twenty years old. In that time many characters have come and gone through the gates of Lankhmar City, but only two have ever called it home*. (That is why it is my Nehwon and not my Lankhmar campaign). In this post I will talk about some ways to make your players want to stick around. I’m concentrating on the City of the Black Toga, but of course much of this post could be applied to any fantasy urban setting.

In the early days I think I overplayed the ‘city of thieves’ bit. Characters would be robbed mercilessly almost as soon as they stepped through the gate. In retrospect, this was the wrong approach. It left characters with the worst taste of the city; they would conclude whatever business they had and get out of town as soon as possible. If you have ever had a bad experience in a foreign city on your first and only visit, it is likely to have similarly darkened your opinion of that place forever.

Lankhmar is undoubtedly a city of great interest and with many hooks to adventure, as well as a multitude of available goods and services. Centrally located in Nehwon it can be a base of operations as well as an adventure locale in its own right. But it is important in a game to get the balance right between adventure and rest. Here are some ideas.

Bolt-hole

Don’t underestimate the lure of free rent. If players have a place they know they can come back to; maybe even store some stuff safely (perhaps in a hidden nook), it can be very reassuring. This can be an abandoned building, or a friend’s house or shop, even an unused tower above the walls or a former enemy’s abode. Or of course, something more exotic, like the Mouser’s Bones Alley nook or the stolen house of Duke Danius. A safe-house is a good way to make Lankhmar more palatable as a permanent base. If offered as a reward for an adventure, it can be even more effective in enticing players to put down some roots.

Guilds and Cults

Lankhmar is full of guilds. Every profession is represented. For a few rilks you can be off the streets, surrounded by colleagues who understand you. (Not like that other guild on the seedier side of Carter Street, maybe that’s something you could help with? For a suitable reward of course.) Perhaps you need help finding your way around, or you get into an unfair fight; your guild might back you up.

Similarly every known (and some unknown) religion can be found somewhere on the Street of the Gods. Which god does your character worship? Where in the Street is their temple? Can the priests of your cult help you in the city, or perhaps you could do them some small service (perhaps in exchange for a bolt-hole as described above)?

The trick with these I think is to make the guilds and cults active recruiters. So, unlike modern bureaucratic and unresponsive trade organisations, these people would be out on the streets actively looking for new members/cultists, taking especial note of any newly-arrived but possibly like-minded individuals in the city. Once the characters have joined a few guilds or cults for their own benefits, the organisations can become sources of both aid and adventure, and help to establish the characters in the social fabric of the city.

Unexpected friends

Lankhmar is a cosmopolitan city, with strangers from all parts of Nehwon regularly rubbing shoulders in the streets. Not everyone in the city should be out to get the player characters. Many people may even be particularly friendly (though usually with some kind of ulterior motive – it is Lankhmar, after all). Most of this comes out through roleplaying, but people who view the players favourably might be folk of the same ethnic background or even clan; the guild and temple recruiters mentioned above; potential lovers (the Overlord’s bored niece or the swaggering sailor just in from Kvarch Nar with a pouchful of cash – or Hisvet, looking for a new pain-puppet to toy with) or just those who have been favourably impressed by the adventurers’ deeds. Certainly Lanhkmar can throw up unexpected allies as well as foes. The trick is, I think, to let the friends be a bit more forthcoming early on if you want your players to like the city and want to stay.

To sum up, characters (and players) will like a place more if they have some positive experiences there, preferably early on. Positive social interactions with the inhabitants as well as a bit of City real estate, no matter how small, can encourage characters to set up their base in Lankhmar. Once they have made an emotional investment in the city, it enables them to participate in much richer and more ongoing urban adventures.

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* One of these, a freelance thief named Fritz the Pulverizer had just one adventure; after acquiring a chest of jewels from the catacombs beneath the city he married a local girl called Annelle and retired in a mansion opposite the Park of Pleasure. He didn’t quite live happily ever after and his wife became a feared river pirate of the Hlal, but that’s another story.

Wow.  I’m really behind on keeping up with Lankhmar sightings across the ‘net.  I need to catch up, and I don’t want any of these items to slip by.  Perhaps Ning’s twisty passages will allow for time travel in addition to inter-world travel?  There is a lot to cover, so I’m going to do two editions of Ning’s Cave in rapid-fire order.  I’m going to start by covering the Nehwon-based games that have been happening this year:

In the months of April and May, Risus Monkey and friends ran themselves through an adventure using Risus and Mythic: GM Emulator.  Their game sure had a lot of good Lankhmarian flavor and I’m pretty impressed with the character banter.  I can only surmise that the players were inspired by the material to come up with such great lines.

. . . His henchmen begin looking more concerned than angry as the stairs begin filling up with smoke.

“By the Leviathan, man! We all die here if we stay!” The barbarian’s roar draws all eyes. “So either ply your steel, or let us continue this outside!”

The bulk of the action occurs in one of Lankhmar’s many brothels.  That is to say, combat and plot advancement, ahem.  You know come to think of it, even though Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser had a great number of romantic encounters with girls aplenty, I don’t think they ever had any adventures take place inside a brothel . . . at least not published.

Read the adventure for yourself starting with Risus Lankhmar: Scene 1.

I liked how this adventure played out so much that I’ve gone ahead and ordered a copy of Mythic Game Master Emulator for myself.  I’m in the middle of reading it.  Maybe I could get some good use of it too.

Fusion RPG Concepts has been working on quite a grand project for some time now, which Docfusion calls the Hydra Project.   Docfusion says, Take all the systems you’ve ever learned as a GM/DM . . . and what if you could extract the best bits of them all? Docfusion is mashing or fusing all these systems together for his Hydra Project.

So where does Nehwon come in.  Well Docfusion has chosen Nehwon for the setting for this stage of his Hydra Project.  I had a conversation with Docfusion back in February and asked him why he choose Nehwon as a setting, especially as he hadn’t read any of the stories as of that time.  Here is what he told me:

Plus, my players know little about Nehwon, so, as a result they will have more to discover and explore – which is something they particularly enjoyed when they discovered RPG’s back in the day. Just to finish things off I like the ‘dark fantasy’ aspect of the writing, and I love running cities in particular, so it all seemed a pretty good fit of system, world, player and DM preferences and helped to get the game running nice and quick.

I am having to read a lot, and I’m sure it would be fair to say that early on the games will not be as true to Leiber material as it could be, but I’m reading the books as fast as I can to get as good a flavour of the world/setting as can be. So the play-testing will also be a phase of me as a DM implementing what I know of the world, but if a real Leiber afficionado sat down to play they may well take issue with my relatively naive interpretations.

Docfusion says he has a liberal approach to Lankhmar.  Indeed he has.  He has dwarves in his game, and I’m sure you all know how I feel about that!   I admit that I’m a purist when it comes to creating a Nehwon game.  I’m more interested in a simulation approach.  After all, why not emphasize and make use of what makes Nehwon unique?

However, I have no interest in criticizing someone’s game just because it doesn’t fit my vision of Nehwon.  Instead I find that there is almost always something that you can take away from their game.  Whether it is something learned or inspiration that you can use for your own game.  And Docfusion already has plenty of material built up from playtest sessions, that it is well worth going through his material.

You all be happy to know that The Scrolls has been on a new server for a couple of weeks now and all is going well.  So no more mishaps in the future! (Knock on some wood at the Silver Eel.)

When I made the move, I also changed the look and layout of the site.  I had recently been told that the old layout did not load up very well in smaller devices such as tablet PCs.  I think this two-column format should do the job, plus it was time for an updated look.  I’m always welcome to suggestions.

OK, time for some more Nehwonian goodness.  I’m working on a new Ning’s Cave that should coming up around the corner, and I have an idea for a new regular series designed to be more interactive.  It’ll involve all those one-off references sprinkled throughout the stories and how we can use them for our games.  Hopefully folks will get into that.

Until then, happy gaming!

Many, many years ago I made a random name generator for DOS.  I had it set up to import letter files for different cultures including Nehwon, of course.  Well I finally got around to converting it to PHP and setting it up on The Scrolls.  Actually, I took one look at my old code and said ‘No way!’ and proceeded to start from scratch.  The important thing was that I still had my Nehwon letter file to create Nehwon names from.

Like all things random, you’re going to get a lot of junk.  But with 100 names on every reload of the page, you should find a few that you can use or draw inspiration from.  I think it’s great for NPC names on the fly!

With any luck, everyone will be able to get some use out of this.  So follow the link to the Nehwon Name Generator!

I’ve been looking forward to this day for a couple of weeks now.  Some of you may have noticed that the Scrolls of Lankhmar site has been down for a while.  Well, I finally got access to everything again and the site is up and running.

I want to apologize to everyone for the site going down in the first place.  The Scrolls have been on a friend’s reseller server space for years now.  Unfortunately as is the way with life, our paths have gone in different directions and as a result I could not get a hold of him when disaster struck.

So sometime this month I plan on moving everything to a new server.  So if anyone has any recommendations as to what is a good company to buy space from I would be grateful.

Thanks,

Charles

John Miller has just written an article about Fritz Leiber in the Wall Street Journal.  Yes you read that correctly, not Fantasy and Science Fiction, not Realms of Fantasy, not even Asimov’s or Analog . . . but in the Journal.  Nice, huh?

It’s called He Tackled the Oil Spill First.  Keeping things topical, Miller ties in Leiber’s story The Black Gondolier:

Yet things could be much worse, at least in the vivid imagination of the author Fritz Leiber (1910-1992). In his 1964 short story “The Black Gondolier,” petroleum threatens humanity not as a mindless environmental hazard but as a sentient menace. As one character speculates, what if man hadn’t found oil, but “oil had found man”? What if the dark ooze “had thrust up its vicious feelers like some vast blind monster, and finally made contact”?

Miller then goes on to give a synopsis Leiber’s works, including his influences, impacts on the fantasy and horror genres, and autobiographical elements.  In addition to reading Conjure Wife as mentioned on his own site, Hey Miller, Fafhrd and Me was certainly part of his research.

He mentions Leiber’s centennial and wraps up with the effort by small publishers to keep Leiber’s writings in print.  Thank you Mr. Miller for helping out.

The Blog of Holding has a three part series discussing the Nehwon mythos in Deities & Demigods and the Lankhmar board game.

In Lankhmar Levels it is pointed out that many of the characters of Nehwon are statted up in Deities & Demigods.

Yeah, I remember the Nehwon mythos in the book back when I was a kid first starting to play D&D.  I remember wondering what sort of weird religion this was?  I was also a little horrified to note that pretty much all the gods and even the heroes had neutral or evil alignments!  I didn’t think that I would ever want to play D&D in that evil world!

The curator of the Blog of Holding wonders about one entry–that of  Pulgh, a hero.  His entry states that he does not appear in any of the stories.  So where did Pulgh come from?

So if the Blog of Holding is puzzled by Pulgh, I too am puzzled by the entry of the Cold Woman, some sort of feminine looking white-pudding monster!  So where did she come from?  There is the story, The Snow Women, but they are something entirely different and definitely human.  I don’t however, remember a Cold Woman from the stories.

In Lankhmar Levels 2, the Blog of Holding solves the mystery of Pulgh!

It turns out that Pulgh is a character from the LANKHMAR board game, designed by Fritz Leiber and published by TSR in 1976. The game is from 2 to 4 players, where each player takes either Fafhrd, the Grey Mouser, Pulgh, or another hero, Movarl. So that’s where Pulgh comes from – he’s a board game piece from a game published by TSR four years beforehand. Since Leiber wrote the board game, Pulgh is in the peculiar situation of being author-created canon who is not referred to . . .

So how about the Cold Woman?  Is she from the board game too?

Finally in Lankhmar levels 3: the first RPG we’re told the original Lankhmar board game was created in 1937 by Fritz Leiber, Harry Otto Fischer, and Martha Fischer.  Dr. Franklin C. MacKnight was also involved in the development of the game and writes his account along with extra rules in a series of articles for Dragon magazine starting with Dragon #30.  Gary Gygax and TSR adapt the game for publication in 1976.

The Blog of Holding goes on to say that the game from all accounts sounds like a proto-roleplaying game with its emphasis on the pieces being characters instead of units and on the basis of this statement from Dr. MacKnight:

LANKHMAR (LAHKMAR) is a game of personal involvement with individuals. It is also a game involving verbal banter, bombast and braggadocio on the part of the players.

So how did the characters come about before Leiber and Fischer started working on their board game?

Fritz Leiber and Harry Fischer were good friends and they would exchange letters . . . playing fiction games . . . ¹ and . . . game[s] of imaginary worlds . . .  . ² As part of one of those “fiction games”, Leiber received the following fragment in a letter from Fischer in 1934 quoted in full in the foreword of Night’s Black Agents of which I’ll quote partially here:

For all do fear the one known as the Gray Mouser. He walks with swagger ’mongst the bravos, though he’s but the stature of a child. His costume is all of gray, from gauntlets to boots and spurs of steel. His flat, swart face is shadowed by a peaked cap of mouse-skin and his garments are of silk, strangely soft and coarse of weave. His weapons: one called Cat’s Claw, for it kills in the dark unerringly, and his longer sword, curved up, he terms the Scalpel, for it lets the heart’s blood as neatly as a surgeon.

and . . .

Anyhow, they met, and the saga of how the Gray Mouser and Fafhrd of the Blue Eyes came to the innermost vaults of the City of the Forbidden God and there met death in the moment of victory in no common fashion, was begun.

In the essay Fafhrd and Me Leiber observes that:

Authors, of course, inevitably put much of themselves into their characters.  So in a sense Harry Fischer is the Gray Mouser and I am Fafhrd.

It seems to me with all this talk of “game[s] of imaginary worlds” and “fiction games”, character backgrounds being written to each other, and then creating a board game based off of their characters and in which they could play them in real-time, that one can make a strong case that roleplaying games can trace their roots at least as far back as 1934!  The Blog of Holding makes it, and I second it!

¹ Fafhrd and Me in The Second Book of Fritz Leiber
² Not Much Disorder and Not So Early Sex in The Ghost Light

I’m probably going to make a few enemies, but I thought that I ought to let you know something . . . I hate elves.  I’m not too keen on dwarves either.  I’ve never seen a hobbit–not outside of Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit–so that’s good.  That’s where they belong.  D&D has halflings–their copyright workaround for hobbits–but have you ever gamed with anyone who played a halfling?!?  I haven’t.  So I guess I don’t have them in my sights yet, but they sound like they have the potential for being annoying.

So why all this vitriol you might ask?  Well I guess my reaction is due to their overuse.  Is it possible to write a fantasy epic without elves?  Then again, is it possible to write fantasy without it being a fantasy epic?  I guess that’s what the market demands, but still…  Is it even possible to create a RPG fantasy world without them?

The lot of them are tired, clichéd, overworked, boring, insipid husks of their original selves.

Recently on the Black Gate, John Fultz wrote the article, ON WRITING FANTASY: The Quest for Originality.  He doesn’t dwell on this, but he does make the following point:

The problem is that many fantasies simply recycle ideas from J.R.R.Tolkien and those who have already recycled Tolkien (or fantasy games that emulate his works). Yes, J.R.R. is a fundamental cornerstone of the genre, and yes his work is brilliant and should always be read and remembered. But so is the work of Lord Dunsany, Clark Ashton Smith, Robert E. Howard, Fritz Leiber, Edgar Rice Burroughs, E. R. Eddison, Jack Vance, and many more writers I could name.

Hear, hear!  I would extend that point to role-playing and RPG fantasy world-building.

I have had several gaming buddies create these unique and clever worlds that are just teeming with brilliant ideas–only to mar their otherwise pristine creations by populating them with elves . . . and dwarves . . . and so forth.  Just having different races of humans would have been more original.  Or they could have invented something new.

One of my buddies had Sea Dwarves in his game.  Now this was playing against type!  And it was a fun idea.  Can you imagine a ship full of dwarves scurrying across the deck and trimming sails and such?  We made enemies of the Sea Dwarves and at one point had to evade several dwarf vessels giving us chase across the ocean.  Now that was a fun game.  His Water Elves could just have easily been mermaids though.

Elves are everywhere!  The Vulcans on Star Trek are elves, right?  They have pointy ears and are eminently logical.  They’re from Rivendell, right?  At least Roddenberry called them Vulcans. Now the Babylon 5 elf equivalent would have to be the Minbari. (BTW, Babylon 5 is one of my all-time favorite Sci Fi TV shows–next to Doctor Who of course!)  So Narns and Klingons are dwarves, and I guess that makes the Centauri the Ferengi . . . hang on . . . I’m getting my races mixed up!

Now I like the elves in the movie Hellboy II.  Guillermo del Toro manages to restore the old-world mythical mystique of the elves–and it works.  (I do look forward to more Hellboy movies.  I hope there are more to come.)

My apologies to my good friend Quest Bird and his most excellent Nehwon campaign, but do you know what I hate more than elves?  Elves in Nehwon.  Oooooooow, don’t get me started!

If you look at the menu bar at the top of the page, you’ll see a link to the newly installed forum–just right before ‘Nehwon Gazetteer’ and after ‘Contact’.  Adding a forum to the Scrolls is something that I’ve been wanting to do for a long time now.  Finding software that I could be happy with was the main obstacle, and then getting it all working correctly!

There have been two Yahoo Groups dedicated to Lankhmar, but the first one succumbed to spambots and the second one languishes in inactivity.  As such, I think it is time to start up a forum dedicated to Fritz Leiber, and I am happy to host it here at the Scrolls.

The blog can get a little one-sided since I pick the topics.  The forum, however, belongs to everyone.  You can talk about subjects as focused as Fritz Leiber and gaming in Lankhmar, or very general topics of role-playing and all the genre literature that Fritz wrote in such as Sword & Sorcery, Fantasy, Horror, and Science Fiction.

I look forward to meeting many more Leiber-fans so feel free to register (have to keep the bots at bay ) and start posting!