Compromise and Conceit

Infernal adventuring…

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An Australian statistician and role-player living in Japan, interested in the theory and practice of role-playing…

  • The Shock of the New and the Benefits of the Familiar

    I remember playing a few sessions of Talislanta when I was much younger, and feeling confused and underwhelmed for most of it. I think this was largely because the Talislanta setting is so alien and rich with new ideas that unless one has done some kind of pre-development work of some kind it’s impossible to feel like you know the place. In Talislanta, there are 20 or 30 character classes, each essentially a different (often completely alien-seeming) race. All the animals are different to earth, the geography is different, and the history is a kind of magic-science mishmash. From memory it seemed like a great place to role-play but when one actually did join the game, it was confusing and felt remote and story-like, because there was nothing familiar to hook onto.

    I was reminded of this, compared to the alternative of setting an adventure in a world known intimately to all the players, when I read recently one of the Dresden Files stories, in which Harry Dresden animates himself an undead T-Rex from a Chicago Museum. This event, pivotal in the story, came from out of the blue when I was reading it, and I was struck at the time by how this is exactly the sort of thing my players would do if they were adventuring in a modern city whose museums they themselves knew; and it is exactly the sort of thing they don’t do when playing, because they don’t know where the graveyards, museums, zoos, etc. are.

    I think this is why a lot of groups settle for role-playing in elf- and dwarf-rich Lord of the Rings style campaigns. There are a lot of things they’re familiar with, and with that familiarity comes the ability to use the environment, the flaws of the enemy, etc. to ones’ own advantage. One can’t do that in fantasy worlds that are either very unusual (like Talislanta) or straight from the DMs own imagination. I have got around this in the past by setting campaigns in fantastic versions of our earth, so for example in the most recent Compromise and Conceit campaign, players quickly started to have their own ideas about what to do next based on their knowledge of the existing history and geography of the Earth. One, for example, suggested a spirit walk to investigate the history of a certain problem – he made this suggestion based on his own understanding of Native American myths. This is much harder to do if one doesn’t know the world.

    I was struck when reading the Dresden Files by how rich in role-playing opportunities the world Jim Butcher has created is. Not only does it have magic and all the monsters we know and love, but it is in a setting completely familiar to all of us – like Buffy too, I suppose – so if one plays around in that kind of world, it will be easy for the players to think about where to go and what to do to solve problems. Even if, like me, your DMing style is very story-focussed, the setting is automatically a type of sandbox, and people can have a lot of fun disrupting the plot. The real challenge – and one I don’t think can be pulled off easily given modern players’ time constraints – is for a DM to make players feel that comfortable and familiar with a world of his or her own creation. This is difficult to do in anything except the longest campaigns, I think.

    So for my next face-to-face campaign I may try this, playing in a world everyone is intimately familiar with – possibly even the town where we all live – and see where that takes us. Maybe a Cthulhu-style rural Japan could be fun…

  • Current reading: The Court of The Air

    Before moving back to Japan I bought an eBook Reader (more on which later) in hopes of reducing the size of my bookcases (they aren’t so portable, really). I then stumbled on the horrendous problem of choosing books to read, since doing so no longer involves browsing a bookshop. This is challenging. So in the end I downloaded The Court of The Air by Stephen Hunt, which is an interesting mixture of steampunk, Victoriana and high fantasy, set in a kingdom called Jackals that is obviously modelled on Victorian England (“a nation of shopkeepers”, in fact), if England were built on the ruins of an ancient Aztec-styled Insect-god-worshipping society of infinite evil, were powered by magic and steampower, and restored the monarchy only as prisoners to be jeered at by a “free” populace.

    So pretty much like modern England.

    The story follows the separate paths of two vagrants, Molly and Oliver, who become entangled in a very nasty communist plot to take over the country by calling back the ancient Insect-Gods. This is exactly the sort of steampunk story I love (though of course I would have the catholic church doing the demon summoning). Molly and Oliver, of course, have special roles to play in helping or hindering this plot, and rest assured that the plot is extremely diabolical so they have their work cut out. In the process of doing so they get help from many different sources and run afoul/afriend of the mysterious Court of the Air, which are kind of like Cromwell’s secret police in space.

    My characterisation of the story here is a bit unfairly glib, because all the fundamental components of it are great. The country of Jackals is a very nice little Steampunk version of Victorian England, the magic is interesting and fits the steampunk setting well, and the various technologies in use – transaction engines, steam-powered vacuum tubes for trains, rifles made with explosives from tree-sap, etc. – are very nicely done. It’s like Perdido Street Station if the latter were done in a quaintly Victorianesque manner, and very specifically tailored to be set in London rather than just any old megalopolis. The Steammen – a race of sentient machines with their own gods – are very very cool, and the feeling of a politically corrupt and personally dangerous 19th century London is very good, like Oliver Twist meets Lord of the Rings. In some instances there is, however, too much to digest and the book could perhaps have left a little of the detail out, for use in subsequent novels. Sometimes the amount of steampunk/magical innovations on offer in a single page can be a little dizzying. But I’m not going to complain about over-innovation in a steampunk novel, given how rare good steampunk novels are!

    However, the novel suffers from one significant flaw: it has multiple overly contrived deus ex machina moments. On at least 5 or 10 occasions I think the plot must have been forced to its next stage only by judicious application of divine or semi-divine intervention. I don’t mind that the plot was all clearly building up to a divine intervention at the end – the purpose of the story was to manoeuvre certain elements of the plot into place to enable this to happen, so that’s fine – but there were too many occasions in the build up when things only proceeded due to divine, machine or extra-planetary intervention. It left one feeling a little robbed of purpose at times, even though in many instances the intervention was consistent with the overall plan of the story. A little more free will on the part of the protagonists would have been nice.

    Still, overall it was a fun story and I’ll be reading the next couple!

  • Player-driven campaigns

    I’m not a fan of sandbox campaigns – I think plot and links between sessions make a campaign more fun, I don’t like wandering monsters and random encounters, and my experience of players’ attempts to navigate even small detail-rich worlds is that they flounder without a lot of guidance. However, at the end of my recent campaign, one of my players proposed essentially the whole outline for a follow-up campaign:

    • We liquidate and then disguise ourselves (magically) as the inquisitors who are to be set on our tail.
    • Disguised so, we seemingly proceed with the Church’s mission,  gaining their  aid in entering hell to rescue Cantrus and also collecting the amulet.
    • On returning from hell, we sacrifice the Pope himself (ought to be worth a bob or two!) to the demon of knowledge for a ritual to magically fragment the amulet so we can all benefit and then reverse the area of effect on the amulet so instead of granting anyone wearing it immunity to us, it grants us immunity from everyone else ! This would leave us vulnerable only to each other’s attacks  (but we’re a team right – non of us would pick off the other to be left an invulnerable ruler of all he surveyed right ? Right ? 🙂
    • Cantrus for Pope !

    This constitutes the entire plot of an ongoing campaign, set up by the players and very structured in its goals. All that remains for the DM to do is to fiddle around with the details of the challenges as set out above. In fact, I would argue that if the players told me they aimed to set out down this path, I would be very leery of changing the direction with ideas of my own unless I thought they were guaranteed to improve the players’ enjoyment of their own campaign. I’m not sure where this leaves the DM, who in this case has often complained about the hassle of creating a story for witless players but has never considered the possibility that the players would relegate him to the role of dice-roller and scene writer.

    I’m not sure that many DMs have actually worked in this fashion that often – usually they’re the masters of their own world, after all. Such a campaign needs to be run in a way which maintains the challenge for the players but enables them to keep an eye on their own goals, and – if it offers different goals at all – offers new opportunities in a way which tests the players’ resolve without undermining their original scheme. I’m really eager to run such a campaign, but not so sure that it’s going to work out… we’ll see…

  • When Denmark is full, the dead shall walk the earth…

    I had this fantastic moment of lego madness pointed out to me today: Zombie Apocafest 2009. It’s creativity such as I thought lego was no longer capable of sustaining. I particularly like the starbucks under zombie siege. The photos are on flickr so I can’t put an example here directly, but there is very creative use of modern lego pieces for flamethrower effects, and many homages to the famous zombie and apocalypse movies. Brilliant!

  • Current reading: The Elfish Gene

    Before I left England I was reading this book, The Elfish Gene by Mark Barrowcliffe, which I was given by my flatmate, but for some time I couldn’t get very far into it because it was so nasty. The book is essentially the biography of a man who grew up as a role-playing nerd during the first wave of fantasy gaming in England in the mid- 70s. He begins the book buy explaining why he’s writing it, which essentially leads into a long rant about how Dungeons and Dragons ruined his social development and turned him into a wanker. There follows a couple of hundred pages of description, in excruciating detail, of how this happened.

    Initially I put the book aside, but after my computer was shipped off to Japan and I was snowed in with 5 days of nothing to do, I set to work on it. The book is interesting for two reasons: it describes faithfully the tedious and horrible nature of life in the lower classes in England in the 70s, and it shows some of the commonest ways in which young nerdy boys interact. Both aspects of the book seemed painfully accurate to me – particularly the descriptions of working class england, and school in the 70s, were painfully familiar to me – getting caned for running in the halls, being subjected to ludicrous rules by parents, living in really daggy and rundown homes and having nothing, nothing at all, to do. It’s a really interesting description of the time.

    Where the book goes wrong, though, is its attempt to pin a lot of the main characters social problems on his obsession with D&D. Given the massive social barriers he was already facing – raised in an ignorant environment, going to an all-boys school where students were caned for running in the playground[1], with only brothers at home, and peers who admired the nazis – is it any surprise that he didn’t know how to deal with girls? This isn’t D&Ds fault. It’s not D&Ds fault that when he was 15 he carried a spanner in his pocket to impress the girls with when he went on dates. That’s just grade A stupid kid. It’s also easy to tell from his descriptions of the role-playing he and his friends did that there was a lot of juvenile, nasty behaviour going on in his friendship circle which had nothing to do with D&Ds influence. He himself says at the beginning that the school system and society of lower working class 1970s England is a wanker factory – I think perhaps he has underestimated the power of that wanker factory, and overestimated the negative influence of the hobby which, really, he was turning to in order to escape the pressures of that society and its wankerisms.

    Unfortunately I don’t know how all this is resolved because I didn’t finish the book before I was due at the airport, and I had to leave it behind for my flatmate. I think it’s worth reading just to remind oneself of how completely awful 70s England was, and how lucky we all were to be role-playing then rather than doing something truly horrible like hanging around in the mall[2]. It’s also interesting to read about peoples’ first experiences of the original game, and how much nerd culture can be the same over long years. The book may be a little overstrong in its willingness to blame D&D for the social consequences of being British in the 70s, but it provides a really interesting historical document about the time and the early development of the hobby. I strongly recommend it.

    —

    fn1: The Daily Mail will have you believe that this is a consequence of the “‘elf and safety” people gone mad. But here it is, written in the book, that Mark Barrowcliffe was subjected to caning if he ran in the playground, during the reign of Thatcher…

    fn2: I was actually wandering malls unsupervised in that era, and some frankly very dubious things happened to me. If only I’d been inside wargaming…

  • Current Gaming: The Witcher

    I received The Witcher for christmas 2 years ago from my Australian friend and his Polish girlfriend, who live in Amsterdam. At the time my laptop couldn’t handle it so I put it aside, but since I completed the dark ritual of invoking the elder gods, I seem to have developed strange new powers of speed and graphical ability, such that the game plays reasonably smoothly. It’s still a bit clunky at times but the graphics are still really pretty, and I’m willing to put up with occasional jerkiness in order to enjoy the game.

    This game so far is great. It’s about a washed-up rock god, Geralt the Witcher, who seems to have lost his memory in a bad moment of slaughter, and is running around his world trying to figure out why some bad guys want to steal his secret society’s mutagenic magic. Geralt is a freak and not necessarily a very nice man, but the world he is in is harsh and he has to get up to some nasty business to survive. He’s also got a nasty sense of humour, he’s cynical, and he speaks in short, pithy sentences which drip with sarcasm or threat. He’s a womanizer (I’ve had 3 women already and I’m still on Chapter 1!) and everyone around him is a misogynist, a racist and a prick. It really is mediaeval Europe!

    The gameplay is also fun. Geralt is largely a fighter, with some small spells (so far, a knock-down/stun spell and a fire spell) to help him in combat. He makes lots of potions which can help him, and he has a couple of different combat styles. At the start of combat you choose his style to suit the opponent – strong, fast or group – and you have to click for him to hit, with the possibility of lethal combos. The myriad fascinating ways in which he murders stunned opponents are particularly entertaining, and in fact you can’t really get through this game without regularly using your magic to stun people so you can cut their throats. It’s particularly fun to take the Blizzard potion, which slows down the game and surrounds the battle in strange glowing colours, as if you were fighting in an acid flashback. The slowed movements enable you to better pick your combos, and you get to see the brutal murder of your opponents in great detail and slow motion. Heads roll, blood spurts, people make horrible noises, and Geralt grunts. It’s visceral, man.

    The plot is a bit too loopy at times but I don’t care. The game really reminds me of the books it is based on, which I have read (that is, The Last Wish and it’s sadly mistranslated sequels), and it is well worth playing. In fact, I’m off to slay a beast right now…

  • Current Reading: The Dresden Files

    In two months I’ve managed to fly through the series of books called The Dresden Files, by Jim Butcher. I’m up to book 9 already, and it’s been a ball. This series of books is about a Wizard called Harry Dresden, in modern day Chicago, who advertises himself in the yellow pages and takes on cases involving mysterious beings, Faerie, Vampires, and all manner of other nasties. The first book starts fairly light, with Dresden taking on a mysterious case with links to the criminal underworld and a vampire. But over the series of books it becomes clear that something much bigger is on the move, and Harry Dresden is at the centre of it.

    The books are done in a generally pulp detective/ film noir style, a kind of Maltese Falcon meets Harry Potter sort of writing which is easy to read, very plot-heavy, and self-consciously deals in stereotypes and plot twists you are meant to guess. The plots are clever but never so complex as to be misleading, and Harry Dresden is a likeable and funny chap who is just imperfect enough that you are willing to believe it when his emotions lead him astray, or he makes silly mistakes. Like every good private Eye, he has his own dark past which is continually coming back to bite him, and he isn’t always on the side of the righteous – and all the “good” powers in the book are pigheaded and silly, just like they should be. Every story is a tale of an ordinary man with ordinary flaws, overcoming extraordinary challenges to ultimately triumph because he is, ultimately, a good man.

    These books also remind me of the Flashman Papers, in that the anti-hero is immediately likeable, and they mingle the pulp writing of the genre with some really nice writing. In the first book, for example, the scene where Dresden traps a faerie by a lake using pizza, in order to get information, is both very pulpy, very funny and eerily otherworldly. It is well written and classically pokes fun at every genre it is part of, while self-consciously revelling in the details of those genres. Even in the later books, when the challenges facing Harry Dresden are much greater, the books remain light-hearted and well aware of the rules of their genre, without being bound by them. This makes them both entertaining, engrossing and very impressive. And, at the same time, just as with the Flashman Papers, the reader (well, me at least) is confronted with that most artfully constructed of characters – someone whose beliefs and motivations you don’t necessarily agree with or support, but whose humanity and believability cause you both to support him through thick and thin, and to challenge your own views and assumptions. This is, I think, a rare and well-written character.

    So, having consumed 9 of the buggers in 2 months, I strongly commend them to you, dear reader.

  • Compromise And Conceit 21: At The Last

    Being the report of Bishop Julius Morninghope, emissary to the Pope for the New World, on the mysterious events in the American plains of winter, 1755. This report was sent to the Congregation for the Causes of Saints by Morninghope on the request of a small group of catholic colonial (white) residents of the New Red Empire, who believed the events of that fateful day should be better broadcast through the old world, which was at that time locked in debate over the spiritual rightness of what they called the “Renouncers”, that is, people who renounced English sway over the Americas and turned to the New Red Empire for protection. The Holy See was believed to be taking a position against the Renouncers, with the threat of mass excommunication, and the canonization of Father David Cantrus would serve to make such an excommunication extremely difficult.

    The New Red Empire, having freedom of conscience as one of its central principles, was happy to allow Bishop Morninghope into Albany to investigate in more detail, and to send this missive to Rome.

    Your Holiness

    Please find below the full report on the matters which occurred on the Great Plains in winter, 1755, in support of the case for canonization of the priest Father David Cantrus. This information was gathered in Albany in early 1756 on the request of the local parish of Albany, who constitute the Actor Causae pursuant to this case. Investigation was performed by myself and a single Inquisitor, Hendrick Heim from Bern.

    Initially, gathering information on the events proved difficult, but eventually I persuaded the survivors of the battle to speak to me. I was uncertain as to the veracity of their account; however, a survivor, one Dave Black, agreed eventually to submit himself to a mental Inquisition by Hendrick Heim. Heim was somewhat unusually affected by this mental Inquisition, but his sanity survived long enough to give a mostly lucid account of the events as they were witnessed by Dave Black. Although the unfortunate consequences of intruding on Dave Black’s mind have rendered the details a little hazy, I assure your holiness that the account is correct in all significant particulars (and especially Father Cantrus’ end).

    Father Cantrus is most certainly not the only hero of this process, though he is the only one to have performed a miracle, so I refer to the group of actors as “the Heroes” for the duration of this report. They arrived in Albany in possession of significant information concerning the intentions of an organisation called The Iron House, which had invaded the Americas with the intention of finding and opening an ancient gate to hell, which the Heroes refer to as “The Red Gate”. The characters had a message from an Indian Sorcerer begging them to come to his aid and, being important figures in the New Red Empire, had decided to do so.

    They were met at Albany by two old Indian witches referred to colloquially as “Coyote’s women”, presumably due to their manners and odour. They led the heroes to the Prophet, who was staying near Albany, and he informed them of the salient particulars of the matter: that a powerful wizard of the Iron House, one Alastair Crow, had landed in the Great Lakes region with a band of enslaved Irish soldiers and some British mercenaries, and was raiding the inland in pursuit of the Red Gate. The Prophet’s war chief, a heinous traitor and murderer known only as “Magua”, had led a warband to the scene of the Iron House’s arrival, but superior European magic prevented the savages from finding the intruder. As always happens at these times, the weak Indian Sorcerer turned to white folk for help. They told him that they knew what the Iron House sought, though not where it was, and upon discovering that the Iron House had the Thorntree as its objective, he offered to send the characters there quickly. He opened a gate to what he knew as the Spirit World, undoubtedly some outer part of hell, and they agreed to journey through it to the location of the Thorntree, shaving many weeks off the journey should they survive. Coyote’s women would aid them as guides in this spirit world, which sounds from their account like a greater and even emptier version of the real world of the Indians.

    Within this spirit world all humans take an alternate form, and those of the heroes were (by their own account):

    • Father Cantrus: An angelic figure comprised only of sharp angles and flat planes wearing a formerly alabaster robe that’s now filthy with all manner of foul things. The being’s left arm is translucent and leaves shadows in the wake of its movements. Wings made of a combination of feathers and blades sprout from its back in an array of white glow and steely reflections that are marred by the blood that they have been dipped in
    • Dave Black: a great black badger
    • Anna Labrousse: a beautiful woman being slowly constricted to death by a dragon coiled around her
    • Merton St. Helier: a powerful centaur, bow in one hand, wine glass in the other, and very well hung
    • Brian the Hunter: A roughly human shape, but made of thorns… the longest nastiest thorns you’ve seen… the between the fronds of thorns light just disappears and the result is unnaturally deep shadows between the branches of thorns.  Out of the shadows thick, half-congealed blood slowly seeps, leaving constant blood trails behind him that after about 10m of walking seem to evaporate into thin air.  On close inspection, and with the aid of bright light, you can see that all Brians human organs are underneath the thorns in their relevant places, including his oversized heart!
    • Russell Ganymede: eleven foot tall, naked, super-short legs (stumps!), massive belly and arms; bleached, oozing skin (translucent!), and a stench of rotten eggs: like an ogre had been lying in sulphuric acid for too long. Recessed chin, chiselled forehead, “walks” using much of its arms, and exhales sulphuric vapour; drooling problem.

    Coyote’s women took the form of coyotes in this spirit world. This world has many strange properties which make it difficult for the living (let alone the pious!) to travel through. By the account of our heroes, the spirit world is a strange land, indescribably vast, with some of the features of the real world massively exaggerated, and others strangely subdued. It doesn’t seem to have temperature or weather, but in the distance there are always storms. The heroes occasionally saw distant creatures, including:

    • Rolling rock (an Indian superstition, undoubtedly a demon)
    • Vast herds of buffalo, but strange and horrific and seemingly shrouded in shadow
    • Ancient battlefields, over which haggard coyotes pick, and through which ghosts and undead wander
    • Occasional great animal spirits – a huge boar, or a massive eagle
    • Forests of ancient, vast trees

    The journey seems to take a long time, but simultaneously everything seems to have flicked by quickly, so that when they look back on things past they are already far away, and the detail not remembered clearly as if not much time was spent in them. Even the number of nights that has passed doesn’t seem to be clearly recalled or understood.

    However, the heroes survived this land and emerged at the far side into a canyon, just after dusk. They emerged into a narrow culvert, and could see into a wider canyon which sloped down to enter an even wider, deeper canyon. In front of them they could see that the smaller canyon was blocked by a ring of wagons in a circle, which they would have to pass. Wandering about in dazed confusion between them and the wagon circle was a sick, weak-looking Indian brave, and in the distance they could see another figure wandering about in front of another part of the wagon circle. Beyond the circle at the juncture of the smaller and the larger canyon they could hear screams, and see a distant shadow.

    The heroes attacked the wagons, but as they approached someone inside threw a bundle out of the circle. This manifested itself as a large and nasty Autonomous Sentinel Cannon, which immediately attached itself to the confused brave, and began shooting at them. They were also attacked by three riflemen hidden behind the wagons. Anna Labrousse summoned a monster in the form of a small version of Rolling Rock; this overwhelmed the cannon while Cantrus healed the Indian Brave which was feeding it, and the remainder of the party attacked the hidden riflemen. Merton opened fire on them with a pair of barrage pistols, which missed; then Ganymede, Dave Black and Brian’s dog Matilda took apart the remaining three.

    They approached the other dazed figure and found him to be an Irish soldier, one of the soldiers they had freed from a curse about a month earlier, and this soldier told them the full details of the Iron House’s journey to America. He told them that the force that arrived had successfully fought all Indian attackers with powerful magic and military might, but when the Heroes enacted the ritual to free the Irish Mercenaries of their curse, the remaining Iron House soldiers turned on them. Their remaining Irish soldier had been sick with dysentery at the time, and so was not killed; when he recovered he had entered the stage of being suggestible, and had been brought along as food for the Autonomous Sentinel Cannon. In the battle between the Irish and non-Irish mercenaries much of the force had been killed, and they evidently had no healer; after that they had to rush through enemy lands, and had lost the remainder of their force. Only Alastair Crow and the 3 riflemen remained. The Irish mercenary knew they had set out in possession of 5 Myrmidons, but he did not know how many remained.

    The heroes took this information and headed into the canyon. At the point where it entered the larger canyon they found the Thorntree, and with it Alastair Crow in the midst of enacting a great and powerful ritual. The Thorntree itself was a great, twisted monolith of wood and bark, so large it blotted out some of the stars of the early winter sky. It was dotted with thorns, the ones at its base as large as trees and the higher thorns only the size of elephants tusks or pillars in a small church. Hanging from the larger thorns and impaled on the smaller ones were Indians – women, braves and shamen impaled on the higher thorns, and children hanging, bleeding and tortured, from the lower ones. At the base of the tree, surrounded by a magic circle drawn in the sand of the canyon floor, was Alastair Crow, his back turned to the party of heroes. He was engaged in a ritual, and had open before him a small box.

    The characters attacked. Brian the Hunter called forth walls of entangling thorns linking the walls of the canyon to the thorntree, in order to prevent attacks from within the canyon. Anna Labrousse summoned another monster, this one made of thorns and shadow; and they all charged forward. However, they were attacked immediately by two Myrmidons, one each side, which leapt over the thorn barriers and charged to attack. These were larger than previous Myrmidons they had fought – 12 feet tall, and much faster and fluid in their movements. Flying down from the canyon wall there also came two fly demons, the same sort that the heroes had fought at the Iron House’s headquarters in Bodmin. Battle was joined.

    While Russell, Dave Black and Brian the Hunter took on the Myrmidons the Fly Demons swooped low, spewing vomit on the party. Merton fired on the Myrmidon fighting Russell, and Anna Labrousse attempted to rip off its limbs, while Cantrus healed those near death and banished the demons alternately. The Demons had soon been torn back to hell by giant angelic chains, but the battle against the Myrmidons was much harder. Brian the Hunter conjured another entangling patch of thorns, which held one of the Myrmidons long enough for Dave Black to kill it, though not before it had slain Brian, its captor. At this point a wizard hidden nearby cast a spell on Russell, forcing him to attack his party members; Anna Labrousse was then occupied casting magic to undo this spell while Merton and Cantrus attempted to kill Alastair Crow. Unfortunately, Crow was immune to all their attacks, magical or otherwise – even appeals to his chivalric nature to make him consider a duel against Merton failed.

    This was a dangerous situation, for while the battle with the Myrmidon raged Alastair Crow had partly opened the gate to hell, and the heroes could hear the coming hordes of darkness. Father Cantrus realised that there was only one solution remaining to the party – he ran forward, grabbed Crow by the shoulder, and attempted to lock him in a soulgaze. He realised as he did the reason for Alastair Crow’s immunity – he wore around his neck a pebble the characters had used once to kill him, which he had turned into a charm against all their attacks! However, Cantrus’s soulgaze is no magical or physical attack, merely a revelation of the fate which awaits all sinners, and no mage is immune to it. Alastair crow, trapped in the vision of his own inevitable fate, screamed hollowly, but the gate remained open. In desperation, Cantrus pushed him in; but as he did so the remaining Myrmidon teleported over to his side and cut him in twain with its massive blade, before any could stop it.

    In his death, Cantrus fell into the gate with the wizard, and with his dying wish invoked the miracle by which his supporters request his canonisation: He sealed the gate shut, forever, with his soul. The gate slammed shut, sealing wizard and Priest’s soul inside hell but protecting the mortal world forever from any infernal incursion through this ancient gate.

    I should note that objectors might point out the local Indian tale which says the gate was opened with the bones of a priest, and can be closed the same way; I do not credit this story as anything but native American ramblings, probably peyote- inspired, and instead I argue that this was a miracle, invoked directly by Cantrus through his faith. It is rendered all the greater in its power by the sacrifice he made – taking a place in hell to prevent hell coming to us – and the nature of his own faith, which in previous confidential reports to the Inquisition has been described as “shaky” and “flexible, to say the least”. I present this miracle as evidence that the Lord has judged Cantrus’ faith to be sound.

    On this basis I recommend that Cantrus be considered for canonization.

    On this basis, and with the full support of the Inquisition, I also should like to point out that the remainder of the Heroes are a dangerous and unstable group, with few morals, fewer links to the New World, no loyalty to divinely appointed laws or rulers, and great power. I have seen what happened to Inquisitor Heim after he attempted to read the mind of Dave Black, even though Black had submitted willingly, and I have heard tales of all their deeds.

    On this basis I recommend that Cantrus’ allies be considered for liquidation.

    Finally, I note that traditionally a soul becomes a Saint by being reborn in a new, more powerful form, in service to the Church, on this mortal plane. This is impossible for Cantrus, since his soul is trapped in hell. He can only be canonised if his soul is rescued from hell to be returned to the service of the church. In the place of his death we should also be able to find the pebble which the wizard Alastair Crow wore, and which completely protects the wearer from Cantrus’s allies.

    On this basis I recommend that a team of Inquisitors enter hell as soon as possible, to recover the pebble and Cantrus’s soul, the latter to enter into service to the church as a Saint, and the former to be used in completing the destruction of Cantrus’s allies.

    Yours in holy observance

    Bishop Julius Morninghope

  • Compromise and Conceit 20: Past and Future Visions

    This found in a glass case in Alastair Crow’s study, written in blood on a scroll made of the skin of an angel. It is obviously very old and very evil…

    They fell

    Weakened by battle and His Betrayal

    Weakened, they could not hold their form

    It must pass

    Down down down

    Into the Underworld

    Such passion has no equal

    It must return

    With it they placed gates

    It must return

    It must return

    Here here here

    In this world

    They will return

    They will return

    Their return they willed

    Their return they willed

    For when their power is greater

    Their form permanent

    They placed gates

    Like falling stars they hit this world

    They placed gates

    Like rising shadows they will consume this world

    Oh Servants, Find the Gates!!!!

    Oh Servants, Find the Gates!!!

    Oh Servants, Open the Gates!!!

  • Compromise and Conceit 20: The Undiscovered Faustus

    Being the lost verse from Dr. Faustus, with no credit to Marlowe…

     

    Satan
    How am I glutted with conceit of this?
    Shall I make mortals fetch me what I please,
    Resolve me of all infirmities,
    Perform what desperate enterprise I will?
    I’ll have them seek in India for it,
    Ransack the Ocean for a watery gate,
    And search all corners of the new found world
    For obscure lore and forgotten secrets;
    I’ll have them read me strange philosophy,
    And tell the secrets of all foreign kings;
    I’ll have them wall all Germany with tears,
    And make swift Rhine circle run Vermillion;
    I’ll have them fill the public schools with death,
    Wherewith my students shall be bravely clad;
    I’ll levy soldiers with the coin they bring,
    And seek the Gates of Hell in every land,
    And reign sole king of all their provinces;
    Yea, stranger servants for the ancient quest,
    Than crows and bats in the mortal night,
    I’ll make my servile mortals to invent.
    Come, German Valdes and Cornelius,
    And find my ancient door to your mortal world.
    Valdes, sweet Valdes, and Cornelius,

     

    Enter Valdes and Cornelius.
    Know that your words have won me at the last,
    To practice magic and concealed arts:
    Not for my gain only, but your own intention,
    That will deceive my object and my deed,
    And infiltrates my necromantic skill.

     

     

     

    Also found in a glass case, obviously very old, and perhaps written in blood…