The Scrolls of Lankhmar

Fafhrd & Gray Mouser eBook Collection Deal

Srith of the Scrolls — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 16:52:50 +0000

For those who like to do their reading on Kindles and the like, Baen Books through their webscription.net is offering a deal on the entire Fafhrd and Gray Mouser eBook collection. The entire seven book collection is on sale for $35 instead of the normal $62 price. The Lankhmar books are not new to this format, but readers may be interested in the special deal. Thanks to the folks at The Cimmerian for breaking the news.

What to do with Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser in a Campaign?

Srith of the Scrolls — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 16:00:43 +0000

One question that is bound to come up when starting a Lankhmar campaign is what to do with Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser? Sure, it’s fun to read about their exploits, but will they overshadow the player characters if you have them in your game? So what are the options?

Running the players’ adventures concurrent with the stories:

Fafhrd & the Gray Mouser

Having the PC’s timeline coincide with the stories is a natural option. One decision you’ll have to make is when in the stories do you want the PC’s adventures to sync up with. What can be fun here is the chance to either relate to the players events from the stories that the public would be aware of–you could even twist the events with rumors and mis-tellings–or to involve the players somehow in the stories even if only peripherally.

There are dangers here. If the PCs hear too much about Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, their own adventures may become overshadowed. Also, by involving the PCs with the established stories, those storylines risk being altered. As a GM, you will need to decide how much change you are willing to allow.

On the other hand you can use the news of the two to help build the world in your players’ minds. Perhaps the characters are tailing a cultist through the market when they overhear some gossip about Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser leaving Illik-Ving equipped with some mountaineering gear. Perhaps the gossipers even start to talk about glowing mountain gems and the dangers of Ice Gnomes.

It can be tempting to have the PCs meet up with Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser. There is nothing wrong with this, but questions do arise. Are they peers or are the PCs their juniors? What role will the twain play? How does everyone relate? Does a meeting make the game more enjoyable for the players? Does it add to the story?

Another way to run things is to never have them meet. Simple enough. Hopefully the players do not decide to meta-game and force a meeting!

Playing it for laughs!

One potentially entertaining option would be to have the PCs always coming close, but never quite meeting Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser. There could be chance sightings across a market with plenty of pedestrians in the way. They might be spotted jumping from roof to roof one evening. On another occasion, they could be seen aboard a ship landing in the royal docks away from public access. And so on and so forth. Given enough permutations this could become a running gag and a way to lighten things up on any given night!

Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser retire to Rime Isle:

At the end of book six, Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser sail off on a mission to Rime Isle where they end up in semi-retirement and mostly living the lives of responsible and monogamous men, even if the Lankhmarian public doesn’t want to part with its two entertaining heroes.

Rime Isle is sufficiently out of the way–never mind being a mythical island that most sailors swear does not exist–that the two are also out of way of our new heroes, the player characters, and their adventures. This is a most convenient option that not only has Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser out of the way, but also has the bulk of the story history already established. From here, everything the PCs do is new history.

Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser never existed:

Say it isn’t so, but it is a viable option. You could just take the world, pretend Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser never existed, and replace them with the PCs. You could either run entirely new adventures with the world as just a background or run the PCs through some of the Fafhrd and Gray Mouser stories and see what they do with them.

Whatever you do, hopefully you’ll find something that will work for your game and makes a fun time for you and your players!

Ning’s Cave: Vampires, Mousers, Masks, & Pandorum

Srith of the Scrolls — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 16:00:08 +0000

I’m going to try something different here and start up a regular feature. Every now and then I come across blog posts related to Fritz Leiber and his stories. Most are just minor references, but sometimes someone has an interesting take on something and I want to share. Typically I don’t have enough to say about any single item to warrant a post of my own, but if I collected them altogether it might just be worthwhile.

From my experience, I don’t expect to come across enough references to post very often, but if I find enough to for once a month, I will be happy.

In The Wrong Branch[?], Ningauble’s cave leads Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser out of Nehwon and onto Earth near Tyre in the time of the Seleucid Empire. Ning’s Cave connects all possible worlds to Nehwon so I think it would make a fitting name for this semi-regular feature.

Enough with the preamble and on with the first edition:

David Petersen of Mouse Guard fame has some pencil drawings of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser. Hey, I like his take on them. How about some more, David!?

Taliesin Meets the Vampire has a review on the 1995 film, The Girl With the Hungry Eyes, which is very loosely based–loosely apparently being the key word–on Leiber’s 1949 story by the same name.

From what I can tell from his review, the movie–although it gets its inspiration from the titular girl of Leiber’s story and never mind how unorthodox the movie’s vampire is–cannot escape being traditional at its core with its use of a blood-sucking vampire and a haunted house or at least a haunted hotel.

The reviewer moves on to Leiber’s vampire: Thus the girl represents consumerism, eating the richness of life and destroying us, body and soul, for a disposable lifestyle sold by advertising agencies. An interesting take on the vampire. As such, it seems a shame that the movie opted not to fully realize Leiber’s vampiric girl.

It has occurred to me that the story may have been better served by being adapted by a show like the Twilight Zone for instance. As it happens, with a little bit of research I discovered that it was made into an episode of the Night Gallery in 1972.

Nettertainment is struck with how in Lady Gaga’s video Bad Romance, the face masks she wears make her a girl straight out of Leiber’s story Coming Attraction. In the story, all American women wear a mask over their faces even if the rest of their bodies are not so covered and because of this, the face of a women has become sexualized.

Mark Netter: There’s something womanish, something girlish, something funny and something downright scary about this Lady Gaga, at least how she’s portraying herself here. The eyeless masks, the lower face masks, they’re straight out of science fiction predictions from the 1950’s (see Fritz Leiber’s “Coming Attractions”) and Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth.

Finally, Jim Wright in his movie review of Pandorum has this to say: It’s a strange movie. More than anything, it reminds me of something Fritz Lieber would have written, a cross between Ship of Shadows and 28 Days Later maybe. I haven’t seen it, so you’ll have to decide for yourself.

Strange Wonders: A Collection of Rare Fritz Leiber Works

Srith of the Scrolls — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 05:04:27 +0000

Strange Wonders by Fritz Leiber and edited by Benjamin Szumskyj.

Subterranean press has just announced a new collection of Fritz Leiber’s writings due to be released in October of this year. As the title states this is a collection of rare works and as far as I can tell most of them unpublished writings until now. This is definitely a volume for enthusiasts and scholars of Fritz Leiber. It contains fragments, drafts, early works, and poetry.

It is edited by Benjamin Szumskyj who has edited previous books of critical interest to Leiber fans, Fritz Leiber and H.P. Lovecraft: Writers of the Dark and Fritz Leiber Critical Essays.

Two editions are available, a limited edition of 150 numbered leatherbound copies, signed by the editor and a trade edition of 2000 fully cloth bound hardcover copies.

Change War Glossary

Srith of the Scrolls — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 16:00:51 +0000

Sean Holland made a great suggestion to use a rotating GM for a Change War campaign. As soon as I read his comment, I knew that the Change War would be perfect for a rotating GM! To that end here a glossary of Change War terms for anyone who wants to take a turn running a Change War adventure.

Big Time – the space-time that exists outside the Cosmos through which one can travel to any point in normal time.
Change Death – the death of a Doubleganger caused by his Lifeline’s death being shifted before his resurrection.
Change Winds – the propagation of a change in real time throughout real time and the Big Time.
Conservation of Reality – Time or history’s natural resistance to change. When the past is changed, the future changes only enough to adjust.
Cosmos – normal space-time.
Demon – a self-aware or awakened Doubleganger.
Door – a temporary connection between the Cosmos and the Big Time.
Doubleganger – someone who both exists with a Lifeline in the Cosmos and outside the Cosmos in the Big Time.
Express Room – a Place used for deploying soldiers into the Cosmos.
Introversion – a method of disconnecting a Place not just from the Cosmos but from the rest of the Big Time. Used as a form of scuttling.
Ghost – an unaware or unawakened Doubleganger.
Ghostgirl – a female ghost kept at Recuperation Stations to pair up with soldiers.
Lifeline – the time between a person’s birth and death in the Cosmos. A person’s Lifeline is not immutable.
Little Time – normal time.
Major Maintainer – a device that maintains the existence of a Place inside the Void. It also controls the Door.
Minor Maintainer – a device that maintains all the life support systems in a Place, including sectional gravity.
Place – a Place is a pocket of Big Time that exists in the Void. It can connect to the Cosmos through a Door.
Recuperation Station – a Place where soldiers go for R&R.
Resurrection – the point in time where a Doubleganger has been separated from his Lifeline.
Unborn – a person in the Cosmos whose Lifeline is in the future.
Void – the space between the Cosmos and the Big Time.
Zombie – a person in the Cosmos whose Lifeline is in the past.

… But the Place is strictly on the Big Time and everybody that should know tells me that time traveling through the Big Time is out. It’s this way: the Big Time is a train, and the Little Time is the countryside and we’re on the train, unless we go out a Door, and as Gertie Stein might put it, you can’t time travel through the time you time travel in when you time travel.

- from The Big Time by Fritz Leiber

How About a Change War Campaign?

Srith of the Scrolls — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 16:00:23 +0000

The Big Time by Fritz Leiber

The Change War by Fritz Leiber

Lankhmar is a natural for a role-playing game, but Leiber has another series that would make a great campaign, The Change War!

The Change War is about time travel and changing history. The two sides in the war, the Spiders and the Snakes, are constantly sending agents to various points in time to alter history to their advantage. Confrontations with the enemy often occur as each side tries to ‘win’ a point in time.

Time travel is a simple matter in the Change War. There is time and then there is the Big Time. The Big Time lies outside of time. Pathways can be created between the two and then it is a simple matter of traveling from the Big Time to a point that you have selected in real time.

Changing history is a different matter altogether. There is something that the scientists call The Conservation of Reality. Essentially time resists change. To use a popular analogy, instead of thinking about a butterfly that causes a hurricane across the world with the flapping of its wings, the Conservation of Reality basically says that the currents caused by the butterfly wings would be dampened out by the surrounding environment before they could travel very far. It takes more than a mere butterfly to get anything done!

Recruitment happens at death. When a potential time-soldier is about to die, an agent will intervene and pull the recruit out of time to witness his or her own death. The recruit is then given a choice to either fight in the Change War and live out of time or to stay in time and die. Becoming a soldier is a popular choice. It doesn’t matter which side picks you as Spiders and Snakes are just names for the unknown powers with unknown motives that are behind the war.

As recruits are selected from throughout history and from all over the world–and off-world to boot!–a company of time-soldiers can be quite a motley group. Roman legionaries, foot grenadiers, Chicago mobsters, and Martians can all be together.

I would imagine that players would love the chance to create a character from any era and place and then role-play off of the other players’ choices. So what would it take to get a game running?

One of the nifty things about running this sort of campaign would be the ability to set individual adventures in any time and place. Every session can be set in a completely different setting. On the other hand this could be challenging to run. GMs that love and know their history should have a great time with this.

Planning individual adventures could still be tricky. The PCs are essentially in the military so you could just give them their marching orders and hand them their assignment for each session. However if you wish to give the players more freedom, you could have the players choose at the end of each session a time and place for the next adventure. Then you could spend the week setting up for the next game.

One question that I think needs to be answered is how does each side go about changing history? This is not addressed in the stories as all the time-missions take place off-stage. For the purpose of a game the action would naturally occur on the missions. As such the GM would need to come up with details for individual mission objectives.

What events need altering to change history? Are there any key events that each side keeps fighting over? What roles do the PCs fill for these missions?

History is not one of my strong suits so I’m a little reluctant to start up a Change War campaign myself. Although you never know. I find the idea very intriguing and I think someone out there needs to run this. If you do, let me know. Also, I’d be curious if anyone has any answers to the questions I posed or any other ideas for making this work.

Reading the source material is not strictly necessary but highly recommended. The series includes the short novel, The Big Time, and the collection of short stories, The Change War.

Nehwon Ritual Magic

Srith of the Scrolls — Sun, 17 Jan 2010 16:00:10 +0000

In order to develop a magic system that truly captures the feel of the Lankhmar stories in play, I’ve been looking at the common threads of invoked magic in the stories. The most consistent thread is ritual. In this case a ritual is an established or prescribed procedure performed to invoke magic.

Another commonality–and one that I think is key–is that the sorcerers, witches, etc. are tied down to a single spot, figuratively speaking. They will typically have equipment set up that they must manipulate and maintain to perform the magic. As such they cannot move away while casting, nor could they quickly set up and break down their equipment to travel between spell-casting.

From Ill Met in Lankhmar:

In the midst of the table an alembic was working. The lamp’s flame–deep blue, this one–kept aboil in the large crystal cucurbit a dark, viscid fluid with here and there diamond glints. From out of the thick, seething stuff, strands of a darker vapor streamed upward to crowd through the cucurbit’s narrow mouth and stain–oddly, with bright scarlet–the transparent head and then, dead black now, flow down the narrow pipe from the head into a spherical crystal receiver, larger even than the cucurbit, and there curl and weave about like so many coils of living black cord–an endless, skinny, ebon serpent.

…and a little later:

Abruptly the incantation peaked and broke off, like a drum struck very hard, then instantly silenced by palm and fingers outspread against the head. With a bright flash and dull explosion, cracks innumerable appeared in the cucurbit; its crystal became white and opaque, yet it did not shatter or drip. The head lifted a span, hung there, fell back. While two black nooses appeared among the coils in the receiver and suddenly narrowed until they were only two big black knots.

This suggests a mode for RPG spell-casters in Nehwon, both player character and NPC alike. Typically RPG adaptations of the Nehwon setting simply use their own magic system and either limit the power or availability of spells in an attempt to emulate the story magic. Why not have a clean break and use this form of ritual magic?

This works well for NPCs, especially NPC villains. NPC spell-casters would have an area with their equipment set up to perform their magic rites. It would be in a place of safety for the NPC, and the PCs would have to confront the wizard on his terms. Away from this environment he would be just an ordinary person, albeit one with a dread-inspiring reputation befitting a wizard.

This would probably not be a natural state for player-characters. Players are too used to slinging spells on the move and in combat. It would be a truer representation of a Nehwon spell-caster, and offer some interesting role-playing opportunities for any player willing to try this style of a spell-casting character.

Spells can be scaled. More powerful spells would simply be more complicated, require more time, more equipment, and along with that are less mobile and carry a greater risk of failure and danger. Less powerful spells can be simpler and more mobile.

So what are the game implications?

Wizards will want to set up in a secure place before casting.
No one will be walking around in public and throwing spells.
Wizards are forced to prepare and plan.
PC magic will be more behind the scenes and not in the middle of combat, unless the combat comes to the PC.
Does not limit how powerful magic can be.

I do not think this would work in a high-fantasy campaign as it does constrain the options of the PC. However, for a sword & sorcery campaign the emphasis is typically on the heroes being swordsmen and rogues with the villains being the sorcerers. That being said, the player could still play a swordsman or rogue that also knows some magic thus allowing the PC to have fun in either situation.

Swords & Dark Magic — a New S&S Anthology

Srith of the Scrolls — Sat, 16 Jan 2010 03:08:33 +0000

In June of this year a new anthology of Sword & Sorcery fiction comes out featuring a mix of long-established authors such as Gene Wolfe, C.J. Cherryh, Michael Moorcock, Robert Silverberg, and Tanith Lee mixed in with newcomers such as Joe Abercrombie who announced the book on his site.

I mean no offense, but I have never heard of Joe Abercrombie–but that’s the point. I love reading anthologies to discover new authors and to read stories by authors that I have heard of but hadn’t gotten around to trying out yet. With short stories being typical, there is no huge commitment.

My first foray into Science Fiction–a long, long time ago–was with Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series. After devouring every Asimov book I could lay my hands upon, I started reading some anthologies that he had a part in editing, such as various Hugo winner collections. It was here that I first read Fritz Leiber’s Ill Met in Lankhmar and Gonna Roll the Bones. Also in the collections I got a taste of authors such as Harlan Ellison, Poul Anderson, and Phillip José Farmer.

I may just have to give his story and others a try when this book comes out. Here is the Amazon entry. I look forward to some good Sword & Sorcery reading!

Explicit vs. Implicit Spell Effects

Srith of the Scrolls — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 15:00:06 +0000

Voldemort vs Dumbledore

Gandalf vs Saruman

The way magical effects are presented in a game can have a profound effect on the overall feel of magic in that game.

Magic can be explicit — eyes full of light and wonder, flame and fury, and electric fireworks showering down on all around. Magical effects are seen and obvious.

Magic can also be implicit with no visible connection between the caster and target. All that is seen is an initial cause then the following effect. Perhaps there is a gesture from the caster then some sort of ill effect is noticed upon the target.

In the two movies, The Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, we have two pairs of wizard rivals and two climactic magical combat scenes.

The fight between Dumbledore and Voldamort uses explicit magical effects. You can see the streams of light connecting the two casters. It is a magical spectacle full of awe and raw energy.

The fight between Gandalf and Saruman uses implicit effects. There is nothing visible connecting the two. When one caster pushes forth with his hands and staff, the other goes flying. An invisible force is implied to exist between them. Instead of a spectacle, the combat has more of the feel of a boxing match–simple violence, but with the contact being magical instead of physical.

One way of presenting magic is not better than the other. It is more of a matter of the feel you wish to create for either your game overall, or for a particular scene. Explicit spell effects can be used to create excitement or wonder, implicit spell effects used to create a sense of menace, dread, or foreboding.

Personally, for the Lankhmar setting, I believe that implicit magic is more in keeping with the feel the stories overall.

Warehouse 13 episode Duped

Srith of the Scrolls — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 17:00:04 +0000

Warehouse 13 is a new show on the SciFi–oops, I mean Syfy–channel about a government warehouse where supernatural objects are collected. Think of the warehouse from Raiders of the Lost Ark with equal parts The Librarian, X-Files, and Friday the 13th: The Series for story.

I caught an episode called Duped and was pleasantly surprised with how Leiberesque the objects of the story were. The story begins with Lewis Caroll’s Mirror in which is trapped the vengeful spirit of Alice Liddell–I’m sure some liberties were taken here. Carelessness causes Studio 54’s Disco Ball–yes, that is there too!–to come crashing to the floor and an explosion of light–disco ball style–and music fill the warehouse. One of the main characters, agent Myka Bering is caught between the mirrored ball and Caroll’s mirror and a mind or spirit transfer occurs between Myka and Alice.

I was instantly reminded of Leiber’s Midnight in the Mirror World where the protagonist finds himself standing between two mirrors as the clock strikes midnight and remarks upon the diminishing infinity of reflections of himself. He is struck by horror when he notices that all the reflections are the same except for the eighth. His eighth reflection is not alone and a dark figure has a hand laid upon his reflective shoulder. When the twelfth bell of midnight strikes, the abnormality disappears.

Every night the dark figure reappears, but is a reflection closer. Soon, as the reflections get bigger as they get closer, he discovers the figure to be that of a women. After a few days of research and of racking his brain to remember any women in his past that might want to cause him harm, he remembers a women that he once knew who had committed suicide.

An account in a newspaper clipping read as follows:

Mrs. Winters said, “She was hanging between the tall mirror on the closet door and the wide one on her dresser. She could almost have reached out and kicked them, if she could have kicked. I could see her in both of them, over and over, when I tried to lift her up, before I felt how cold she was. And then all those bright lights. It was horrible, but like the theatre.”

Either of these two related ideas could be fun to use in a RPG. Either the use of the mirror world to travel from place to place, or using a mirror or mirrors to switch a PC with his or her mirror-doppelgänger. Now wouldn’t that be a downright sneaky and spooky way to introduce a dopplegänger!?