Inspiration is everywhere: Day 3

I moved to another bookcase to look for further inspiration. These are the upstairs bookcases, which are just general nonfiction: 

They are a little disorganised at present, as you can see. Anyway, I came away with this: 

I am pleased that there is a Murder Club, but I don't think I want to be a member. 

What this contains is mostly contemporary newspaper accounts and so on, most of them horribly sensational. I flipped it open to the Cambridgeshire section and immediately saw this 1876 murder ballad (click to embiggen):

Now, most fantasy settings probably don't have the printing press, but if you're playing anything like WHFRP, you are missing a trick if your countryside isn't infested by hacks selling ballad sheets and crudely-printed chapbooks full of alarmist stuff about the Devil being abroad. These are exactly the kind of strolling dirtbag that should be part of any good grubby fantasy setting. They could tell stories of horrible murders, weird monsters, lost treasures and the sorts of things that get fantasy characters motivated. They might even choose to include your characters in their grubby hackwork. 

(Shoutout to Sven the Dwarf.)

Itinerant Ballad-Seller Ballad Table (D12)

1. More or less accurate account of fools seeking treasure in regional landmark being dismembered by horrible monsters. D6: 1-3 monster scariness overestimated, 4-5 underestimated, 6 grossly underestimated. 
2. Seemingly innocuous ballad which contains veiled references incomprehensible to outsiders but savagely insulting to inhabitants of next town over. 
3. Garbled retelling of something the PCs did which paints them as foes of villainy. May upset local villains. Bonus points if the PCs fucked it up in the first place (this is the "Town Called Jayne" variant). 
4. Garbled retelling of something the PCs did which paints them as bloody-handed reavers and advises locals to lock up their daughters, sons, livestock etc. 
5. Seemingly intricate collection of references is actually gibberish. 
6. Rousing good murder ballad beloved of local drunks. 
7. Ballad recounts legend of gruesome murder; ghost of hapless victim is attracted to sound of song retelling piteous end. 
8. Plagiarised copy of work by PCs or acquaintance. 
9. Ballad accusing actually innocent person of cruel murder; may contain clues to real identity of killer. 
10. Seditious ballad accusing local magnate of crimes. Possible trouble for those found carrying it. 
11. Pious ballad praising martyrs faithful to local god. 
12. Half-remembered retelling of ancient crime contains partial clues to location of treasure, invites hostility of thugs involved in local treasure-hunting industry if pursued. 

Tomorrow, I may watch some cartoons. 

Review: Forgive Us

So another thing I picked up while at UK Games Expo was Forgive Us by Kelvin Green, a supplement for the Lamentations of the Flame Princess RPG -- although like pretty much everything for LotFP, it should work super-easily with anything based on old D&D, and pretty easily with more or less any similar RPG system. There's not a whole lot of mechanics.

It is both written and illustrated by Green, and it looks superb. It's in a little A5 paperback, and the layout is just so clean and smooth. Observe: 

The really clever thing is that the main scenario (there are three in total, one big one and two little ones) has its "dungeon" in the form of a complex of connected buildings -- so it's effectively broken up into modular chunks, each of which has just enough map and text to fit a two-page spread. It's really readable. Check out the little indented sections on the right-hand page up there: the top one is the stat block of a character encountered in the building, and the bottom two are specific descriptions of the numbered locations on the map. So easy to look up! 

OK, so the book looks terrific. What about the scenarios themselves? I'm not going to go into too much detail, because I intend to use these in my game and I expect that at least one of my players periodically reads my blog. I will say that it's nominally set in Norwich(!) in 1625, and that it deals with scoundrels, theft, secretive cults and grotesquerie. 

Yes, Norwich. Why not?

"Hmmm," you say. "Scoundrels, thefts and grotesquerie in a 30 Years' War setting? I wonder where I've heard that before." And it's true -- this scenario is very WHFRP-ish. In fact, you could run it in WHFRP with about 15 minutes' prep (figuring out spell lists for spell-casting NPCs would be about it). Green even says in his intro that he was inspired by White Dwarf scenarios from the golden age, and the influence is very clear. Which is a good thing. 

My own campaign is scumbag-heavy and magic-light, so Forgive Us is perfect for me. I think I will probably invest about half an hour in changing the scenario to be more consistent with my own game (oh, and I will probably half to come up with some D20 stats for the monsters, so maybe make it 45 minutes). Even if your campaign doesn't dovetail so well with the way this one is presented, there's a lot of good material in here that you'll be able to use. 

I paid £10 for this book, which seems like a lot (by my standards anyway) for such a small book, but when I consider that I'll probably get 3 sessions out of the main scenario and one each out of the remaining two, that's pretty good value for money. You can also (if you like) buy the PDF on RPGnow for under £5. As a side note, the A5 format of this book would probably display really well on a typical computer monitor with two pages side-by-side, considering that most game book PDFs are a pain to read on a laptop. And a single page should display cleanly on a tablet, although you'll lose the cool side-by-side presentation, I should think.

So, yeah, it is good quality. 

Honestly, the only thing I didn't like about it was when he talked about the White Dwarfs of that era and that made me feel a stab of regret at selling off all of mine at a flea market about 11 years ago. I did really need the money, though. I bet the good scenarios are all on the internet somewhere, though. 

The Three Burials of Dark Lord Zergathrax

I have written on my proper history blog about the crazy shit that people have historically been willing to do to a dead body. Some of these have pretty good monster potential from a gaming standpoint. You not uncommonly find burials that have had some kind of "protective" measure applied to them -- buried with a big rock on them, feet cut off, head cut off, something jammed in the mouth (at least, this is a common explanation for these practices; obviously you can't say with total certainty). But these, to me, seem like things that happen at the end of the scenario -- our heroes beat Dark Lord Zergathrax and make sure he's buried with a bucket on his head or whatever.

Consider the following story:

“That very same day on which they were interred they appeared at evening, while the sun was still up, at Drakelow, carrying on their shoulders the wooden coffins in which they had been buried. The whole following night they walked through the paths and fields of the village, now in the shape of men carrying wooden coffins on their shoulders, now in the likeness of bears or dogs or other animals. … When these astonishing events had taken place … for some time, such a disease afflicted the village that all the peasants fell into desperate straits and within a few days all except three … perished by sudden death in a remarkable way.

… they received permission from the bishop to go to their graves and dig them up. They found them intact, but the linen cloths over their faces were stained with blood. They cut off the men's heads and placed them in the graves between their legs, tore out the hearts from their corpses, and covered the bodies with earth again. They brought the hearts to the place called Dodecrossefora … and there burned them from morning until evening. When they had at last been burned up, they cracked with a great sound and everyone there saw an evil spirit in the form of a crow fly from the flames.”

- Geoffrey of Burton, Life and Miracles of St Modwenna

Or this one!

“At this time in the county of Buckinghamshire … a certain man died, and his wife, an honourable woman, and his family took care to bury him with full customary rites on the feast of the Lord's Ascension. But the very next night he entered the bedchamber of his sleeping wife. … When the dead man came back, he was greeted by the alarmed shouts of the watchmen, and, unable to cause any more mischief, went away. Repelled in this way by his wife, he became a nuisance to his brothers … 

Still the dead man arrived each night, making as if to seize those who were sleeping, but the vigilance and strength of those on watch kept him away. Then he took to prancing among the animals in the byre and the fields around the house … 

The bishop was just as amazed as everybody else, but was told by some of his advisers that such things had often happened in England (emphasis mine), and that the usual remedy (which gave comfort and reassurance to a frightened community) was to dig up the body of whichever miserable person was causing the nuisance and cremate it. 

Such a solution seemed to the bishop both unseemly and sacrilegious, and so instead he prepared a scroll of absolution and gave it to the archdeacon with the instructions that the dead man's grave should be opened, the scroll placed on his chest, and the grave closed up again. … All was done according to these instructions, and with the scroll placed upon the cadaver … the dead man never wandered again … “. 

- William of Newburgh, Historia Rerum Anglicarum

This one's my favourite:

“... the next night, destitute of Christian grace, and a prey to his well-earned misfortunes, he shared the deep slumber of death. A Christian burial, indeed, he received, though unworthy of it; but it did not much benefit him: for issuing, by the handiwork of Satan, from his grave at night-time, and pursued by a pack of dogs with horrible barkings, he wandered through the courts and around the houses while all men made fast their doors, and did not dare to go abroad on any errand whatever from the beginning of the night until the sunrise, for fear of meeting and being beaten black and blue by this vagrant monster. But those precautions were of no avail ; for the atmosphere, poisoned by the vagaries of this foul carcass, filled every house with disease and death by its pestiferous breath.

… While they were thus banqueting, two young men (brothers), who had lost their father by this plague, mutually encouraging one another, said, "This monster has already destroyed our father, and will speedily destroy us also, unless we take steps to prevent it. Let us, therefore, do some bold action which will at once ensure our own safety and revenge our father's death ..."

... hastening to the cemetery, they began to dig … they suddenly, before much of the earth had been removed, laid bare the corpse, swollen to an enormous corpulence, with its countenance beyond measure turgid and suffused with blood; while the napkin in which it had been wrapped appeared nearly torn to pieces. The young men, however, spurred on by wrath, feared not, and inflicted a wound upon the senseless carcass, out of which incontinently flowed such a stream of blood, that it might have been taken for a leech filled with the blood of many persons. Then, dragging it beyond the village, they speedily constructed a funeral pile; and upon one of them saying that the pestilential body would not burn unless its heart were torn out, the other laid open its side by repeated blows of the blunted spade, and, thrusting in his hand, dragged out the accursed heart. ”

- William of Newburgh, Historia Rerum Anglicarum

Not all weird burials are to do with stopping someone from coming back to life. For some people, they were just a matter of practicality. For instance, Richard the Lionheart's guts were buried where he died, but his body was transported from there to be buried next to his father, presumably because they wanted to preserve him for the journey. However, his heart was also sent to be buried in Rouen, the capital of Normandy. Similarly, Robert the Bruce had his heart removed from his body; it's buried at Melrose Abbey.

Richard I's heart in lead casket. 

Some hearts were kept in heart-shaped reliquaries or cists: here's an example from Ireland, now in the Pitt-Rivers Museum in Oxford. If you're interested in hear burials in general, there's a fun article here.

OK, so people were sometimes cut up and had different bits buried in different places. You can read more about it on my history blog. But what can you do with this in a game? I think there are a couple of interesting options.

• Robert the Bruce's embalmed heart was supposed to be taken on crusade to the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem to fulfil a vow he'd made while he was alive. It never actually made it, because the guy who was supposed to take it died along the way. But in a game, a heart like this could make a fun quest object -- deliver the heart to such-and-such a place (or prevent it being delivered), particularly if the vow is punished or rewarded in some supernatural way. I quite like the idea of finding a party of paladins or whatever who have all died and this heart in a casket is among their belongings. 
• Of course, in a modern horror game a mummified heart in a heart-shaped reliquary makes a great item, particularly because you're going to have the absolute hell of a time explaining what it is and where you got it. Obviously, if it's the heart of a saint or something it makes a great weapon against the forces of darkness, but you could also have some evil cult types going around murdering people to feed the reliquary. The PCs are sitting there looking at the grave of Zergathrax, totally baffled about why he's getting stronger when they've been guarding it the whole time. 

Reliquary containing the heart of St Vincent de Paul, Lyons.
Baller cleric weapon: you could club a vampire to death pretty good with that thing!

• I'm particularly enamoured of the idea of some guy getting resurrected, only he's in pieces -- so you have his head somewhere telling blasphemous secrets, his body stumbling around looking for its head, and his entrails ... probably not doing a lot. I guess that's arguably the guy from Re-Animator. Or Vecna. 
• To kill a vampire, you destroy its heart, but an interesting variation would be a creature where you actually have to restore its heart in order to kill it -- like a mummy with its organs in canopic jars or something, or anything where the restoration of the heart sort of rehumanises it. 

Gamers like weapons, and gamers like mashups. It's surprising, therefore, that you don't see a lot of combination weapons in RPGs or wargames. I think it may be because most fantasy games take their inspiration from medieval settings and combination weapons, which include both a hand-to-hand weapon of some kind and a firearm, are really a Renaissance phenomenon.

Let me show you the kind of thing I'm talking about. These two examples are from Poland, where pistol/axes seem to have survived particularly late as cavalry weapons. I guess the idea is that you do that one-shot charge thing that 17th-century cavalry were so fond of, then shift your grip down to the handle of the axe and start busting heads. The first one in particular seems like a pretty robust piece.

I think it wouldn't be hard to get gamers hyped for this type of thing -- in particular, I can see it as something that you'd see in WHFRP, either as just a particular local specialty or as the kooky invention of some weirdo. Of course, mechanically in WHFRP (2nd ed, anyway) hand weapons aren't distinguished, so there's not much point. Still ...

 Anyway, most combination weapons, as far as I can tell, are not like this. They're more like wealthy people's playthings. Take a look at this example from the Tower of London.

This is an example of a charmingly brutal Renaissance polearm called a "holy water sprinkler," and for added comedy value it's got three pistols built into it, the idea being, I guess, that if you really don't like somebody you can shoot 'em three times, stab them with the pointy bit, and then bash them round the head with the mace part. It's known as "Henry VIII's walking-staff," which is pretty good. But somehow it seems kind of impractical, or at least impractically expensive. It's not clear what advantages it really has over a plain head-beating club and a couple of pistols. 

I do like the idea of weapons designed along these principles -- or, heck, not even weapons, anything. An old D&D joke is "a wizard did it," but I think "a rich idiot did it" is equally plausible. I know my players have recently spent a lot of time looting the homes of rich idiots, and I do sort of like the idea of giving them some comically implausible weapon that's so valuable they can't pass it up but so distinctive they can hardly fence it: "oh yeah, it's a halberd, but it's got, like, a crossbow built into it and then when you push this button knives pop out...". 

Likewise, I can legitimately see characters wanting one of these gun-shield things. People used to think these were just another armourer's fancy, but there is some new thinking that suggests they were actually used -- the examples in the V&A, for instance, have some powder burns and stuff, so they must have at least been test-fired. 

Some of them were probably intended for naval use, the idea being that you run up to the gunwale, slot the shield over it, and bang away, which I guess is fair enough. Others were probably for hand use, which is less practical-seeming. Might have been hard to aim. I can definitely see this in the hands of a WHFRP character. 

If you look at the modern version of this, of course, you can see the problem -- once you have relatively modern technology, there's not much point in having a gun-shield rather than a gun and a shield if you happen to want it. But more broadly, I think these combination weapons are actually really well-suited for gaming because they have all the problems that games typically don't account for -- clumsy, unwieldy, a pain in the ass to carry everywhere, and expensive. 

I suppose if you're really committed to the idea of emphasising the clumsiness and so on, you could do it Paranoia-style, and have the PCs be issued a bunch of clumsy, malfunctioning combo-weapons by some head-in-the-clouds R&D jagoff. "Hey guys, we've attached a chainsaw to this plasma generator. Now you have a mixture of close-combat utility and ranged firepower."

Obviously, that isn't a joke in all games.