Barbaric Texas

“Vast treeless plains swept away to merge with hazy horizons. In the distance, to the south, a great black cyclopean city reared its spires against an evening sky, and beyond it shone the blue waters of a placid sea. And in the near distance a line of figures moved through the still expanse. They were big men, with yellow hair and cold blue eyes, clad in scale-mail corselets and horned helmets, and they bore shields and swords.”

- Robert E. Howard, Marchers of Valhalla

Marchers of Valhalla (1977) cover by Ken Kelly

I will forgive the reader for thinking the prose above is a scene from a lesser known Howard tale set in a Hyboria or Atlantis or other time-forgotten exotic place, strangely its setting is something much closer to home, Texas. Obviously it is neither the Depression-era Texas of his time nor the cartoonish trainwreck Texas that I live in, but an antediluvian mythically-projected Texas.

The deeply odd short story, which was rejected by Weird Tales and first published as late as 1972, is a strange melange of Swords & Sorcery adventure tale and creation myth. Reading it is an uncomfortable experience, the idea of blue-eyed Aryans swooping down to destroy a brown-skinned city of decadents seems too close to the well of bizarre race-based occultist ideas that the Nazis would also be drawing on in this period.

But there is a deep level of mythic resonance to the tale and some compelling fantasy touches, as there is to much of Howard's writing, something that has been explored here before. The semi-famous old school Texan historian (you know the kind that used to write histories as great sweeping narratives) T.R. Feherenbach once wrote that there was a “vast residue of violence leftover from the making of Texas” a theme that heavily inspired Cormac MacCarthy's masterpiece Blood Meridian.

Weirdly reading Marchers this weekend it made me want to game it. Well not “it”, not the actual story itself, but a early medieval fantasy version of this state.

It's an idea I have flirted with before. You can see some throwaway, jokey references in the Tree Maze of the Twisted Druid to the Duke of High Brazos, the Big Thicket and the Free City of Houston. That all reflects a weird transition time circa 1981 for me when my dungeon-focused Holmes campaign was busy morphing into AD&D. I hadn't bought the World of Greyhawk yet (or the Players Handbook for that matter) where the campaign would eventually find its home and was too intimidated about creating my own world whole cloth. What I had instead was a thinly-veiled and vague place set in the cedar-covered hills and plains around my birthplace Austin Texas.

Coming back to this is a deeply broken idea from the get go, but hey bear with me as I try to exorcise this idea-demon to stay focused on the current campaign.

Barbaric Texas

The campaign would open a 1,000 or so years after a less horrific version of the Marchers of Vahalla. Somehow it is a place stuck out of time tens of thousands of years ago but with reflections of today.

The vast big plateau sundered and flooded by Poseidon and Ishtar's wrath at the end of the story has been broken and reborn as the tiered tablelands and hills of Texas's current biomes. I would use an actual bioregion map of the state to fill out a large-scale hex map.

The dark-spired city of Khemu exists as taboo set of ruins mired on flats of one of the long Texas barrier islands (read ruined city pointcrawl). Private in-jokes make me want to put it right where Port Aransas sits today.

The current majority population of the region—those afraid of miscegenation can piss off back to their Stormfront forums--are now mostly the mixed descendants of the blue-eyed raiders from Nordheim and the presumable Native Americans of Khemu. “Purer” descendants of both people exist but are in the minority.

These “Old Texans” live in a patchwork of early medieval-like (read Dark Ages) petty kingdoms with nothing more than rough palisaded towns as seats of power. Longhorn cattle raids, bloody feuds and other border violence are weekly occurrences. It is a violent rough place.

Religion is a bizarre syncretisic mix of Norse, Mesoamerican, DDG Native American and Hyborian deities (so you'd have Snake Man rubbing shoulders with Ymir). I am tempted to throw in a Pecos Bill equivalent and other dumb Texas tall tales but that line perhaps should not be crossed.

The residue of violence has some actual existing supernatural manifestation. Driven mad by it beserker bands roam around and the undead are fueled by sheer hate.

Megafauna from Pleistocene Texas abound. You've got Columbian mastodons, gylptodons (giant proto-armadillos), giant sloths, giant bison, dire wolves, sabre-toothed cats and the like. Hell maybe there is a lost valley of dinosaur critters in Palo Duro canyon out there.

A Comanche equivalent rules the high plains and raids the hell out of the Old Texan settlements. These horse nomads aren't the brutal savages of Texas Anglo myth nor noble savages, just some highly dangerous folks with their own thing going on. Part of me wants to go goofy and say they are the wolf-riding Elves of Elfquest (this whole tone being way, way grimmer than what I enjoy in the Hill Cantons).

Rules? Hmm...Stormbringer first edition or full circle back to an uneasy and ungodly mix of Holmes Basic and AD&D.

Idea-demon exorcized, back to writing about Slumbering Ursine Dunes.

Random Character Generation for a Hyborian Age

I just couldn't leave well enough alone. Give me a game, even one that I love and mostly works for me and within a couple weeks time I am already bolting on flashy bits of chrome or trying to kit out his engine.

I swore great blood-sealed oaths to grim Ymir that I would just play Conan/ZeFRS straight out of the box, but here I am doling out some variants. It's probably not a great surprise to longtime readers that the first thing I would take a sharp chopping instrument to is the point-buy system (a particular and persistent dislike of mine), and that I did.

See below for a random character generation system to be used with TSR Conan rpg or its lovable, free clone ZeFRS . Because it spills out over a few pages, I will only present part of the subsystem blogside. You can find the full PDF download here.

As always this is a work in progress and I would greatly appreciate feedback (no seriously, please drop me at least a line about it). Does it work? Is it clear?Tweaks? Or do you just want to hit it with your axe?

Design Goals:

Speed up character gen. Should take 5-15 minutes with the subsystem.

Reduce min/max dithering. Characters will have a decent, sensible spread of talents. And removing the min/max impulse means that players can be surprised by what they may get. Some choice still exists with the election to take rolls on the weakness charts (any talent points there can be freely assigned).

Provide color. The background charts provide some decent REH archetypical characters with a light touch that allows for them to figure out most real details of their character at the table.

Bolster the power range a tad. Characters generated here get an extra talent point and five extra talent points per weakness to compensate for being bound by the almighty die.

Google+ Pickup Games (And Getting Some Conan On)

Back in my days behind a coffee-stained editor's desk in the smoking post-industrial hole that is Detroit, I would frequently pack six solid days of jagged stress around the high-tide parts of the editorial cycle.

As soon as that unremittingly bleak long winter would break even a bit on a morning off I would jump in the car cleats in hand and drive over to the freakishly great soccer fields erected for the city's brief World Cup moment in the sun. Without fail there was always enough critical mass of other stir-crazed players to get a full-teamed game on. Those games went a long way in keeping me sane those eight years.

Plugging away this morning at a balance-sheet analysis of the Google+ gaming boom, one of the greatest strengths (for me) just jumped right off the page: the ability to drop in or run a game at just about anytime of the day or night with less than a couple hours notice.

I don't think I need to spell out the advantage of that to this audience over much, I would hazard a guess that the single biggest X-factor holding many of us back from playing tabletop rpgs as much as we is that ugly beast called Adult Life Scheduling interfering at each and every turn. Having the ability to waltz into a pick-up game, not surprisingly is just an amazing boon, another perhaps unintended, but welcome outcome of the energy around Constantcon.

The only wrinkle I have encountered is that we are still fumbling around with how to actually run these games. To date, the sessions I have played in have been campaign-like games where the GM is clearly trying to spin out something less fleeting and ephemeral. I have had a blast playing them, but with my own standing commitments to running the Domain Game II and EPT Jakalla sessions really make me a kiss-and-dash-on-the-first-date kinda guy.

Punchline: it would be really sweet to have actual one-shots hand-tailored to be played at a moments notice.

Here's my part, I am going to put together 1-2 one-shots specifically designed around the TSR Conan rpg. A game that seems pitch perfect in supporting episodic, action-packed, lite sessions with a small cast (say like 1-3 players).

Here's your part, tell me what you want if you were going to play in said pick-up (better would be design some pick-up games of your own, but I am fresh out of pithy exhortations for the morning.)

Namely:

1. Show of hands of people who want to play. Good also to say your rough windows of opportunity if you know them. Encircle me on Google+ if you haven't already, or set up a dummy account and do so if you are all shy like.

2. What would you prefer playing: pre-gens (based on actual REH or imaginary characters) or swaggering S&S ne'er do wells of your own?

3. Would you prefer playing a session based on actual REH stories or something completely original? (The question really is whether you think you'd know them to well for them to work with a few twists.)

Game on?

Conan: TSR's Lost Game

Two days journey, north of Kulalo, off the Black Coast....Up the river Zikamba...through the Valley of Darkness you'll find a Ruin, ancient and nameless. Whatever cult of man lived there, they are long vanished and only dead men guard it's treasure. In my youth when I still had eyes to see, I worked as a sailor on a ship that went into the Black Kingdoms bringing back hoards of Ivory.

A jade crocodile with emerald eyes as big as a man's hand. The natives talked of in whispers after their tongues were loosened on our skins of fortified wine. The ruins are thought to be cursed by the locals and are forbidden entrance. A village lies just to the south of the ruins along the River.

So went the lead up up for the one of the more rocking—and rare—chances to actually play a rpg, in this case an obscure “Silver Age” entry, the Conan rpg designed by Dave “Zeb” Cook. Between that evocative opening set up by my buddy and GM Scott in Seattle (aka Scalydemon), the chance to play the brooding REH Pictish hero Bran Mak Morn (pictured above in that Jeffrey Jones cover), and the fast and furious fury of the session, I was impressed by the game.

It was a grudging respect admittedly. I had quite simply never heard of it and when Scott floated some barebones description at first I had a fair share of skeptical internal groaning. A color-coded Marvel Superheroes-like unified resolution system? Groan. Skill-based system with point buy? Groan, groan.

It felt also strange to think that TSR could have put an entirely new fantasy rpg game in 1985 without me ever noticing. My first thought was it must have been as big as a steaming pile of offal as that other TSR turkey of the time, the Indiana Jones rpg.

Back then, even with the drift that would lead me out of the hobby picking starting up, I tended to still be highly focused on things revolving around that ill-fated company. Dragon magazine was the first periodical I ever had a subscription to and receiving that rag in it's porn-like plain paper wrapper was a cherished monthly ritual.

But that's exactly what happened. Sure I remember the release of the much disdained (even by my friends at the time) modules featuring the muscle-bound Governator of California, but the game itself until last year I had heard nary a hide nor hair about. This morning I (virtually) flipped through all the issues of Dragon from that time, outside of a short blurb in upcoming products in a single issue not once did it grace an article—let alone a promotional ad. Strange.

Perhaps TSR decided that it didn't need to create a competitor to its own monolithic entry into fantasy roleplaying game; ran afoul of IP restrictions; or simply got lost in the mismanagement and excess of post-Gygax TSR. There is a backstory there that I have yet to hear. (And would be worthy the telling, shot-in-the-dark plea to the Internet cough cough).

Cover art from Boris Vallejo

The tragedy of its obscurity is that it's a fast-paced, mechanically-elegant, mercifully-lite Swords and Sorcery game. It quite simply played very well--and had any number of elements that jived with my prissy sensibilities.

Although it has skills, called “talents”, they are thankfully short, immediately sensible, and completely lacking the subjective mental skills that I tend to grognardly despise as cheap substitutions for player skill. (You know the kind, the “Persuades” and “Sees” and others that were replete even in my favorite Chaosium games of that time).

The sorcery system is dangerous to its user (magical talents increasingly raise an “obsession” score), open-ended and mysterious in a satisfying way. To gain spells you must not only design your own but must quest through Hyboria for scraps of time-forgotten eldritch books and arcane objects to make it happen.

And best of all is that it supported a wider range of crazy Howardian action antics. The system quite naturally lends itself to kicking over tables, grappling/tossing ape-beasts down yawning pits, jumping over the backs of opponents to stab them from behind, etc.

In other words, some good shit.

You will note the frequent use of the present tense back there, it so happens thanks to the beauty of this free-wheeling age that this game is not only kept alive, it's kept alive as a virtually untouched freebie. Called Zeb's Fantasy Roleplaying System (ZeFRS) it's pretty much the most faithful retro-clone around as it's virtually the same system verbatim only lacking the explicit Conan IP property (still owned by anyone but the Howard family, Gigantacorp...err Conan Properties).

If you haven't acquainted yourself with the system a quick mosey over here to the ZeFRS website can set you up at the right price.

Conan Country

If you corner me and tell me about the “really weird dream” you had last night, chances are you will  see me smile and nod a lot doing your recounting. Every once and a while you might notice that the nod is at an off time, the smile a little too quick.

I'm not listening.

Last night I had this really weird dream. No, no wait stopping nodding and hear me out. Last night I dreamt that I was running this convocation in the sleepy little West Texas town of Cross Plains, home of “Two-Gun Bob” Howard.

In part it was a gaming convention, in another seemingly inexplicable part it was some manly man contest. I'd finish running a gaming session (who knows what, maybe that TSR Conan rpg from the 80s I like so much) and then run off to ref a Fight Club-like bare-fisted slugfest. I think your grandfather was in it too and then he turned into an artichoke.

It's not the first time Cross Plains has crept into my dreams. It's not because I am a raving REH fan—I have an on and off again love/hate thing over the years with the writer—but because I had a personal connection there for a time in my life.

Back up to the early 90s, my gaming—nay my entire geeky—past was buried and covered over with six solid feet of Austin slackery (seriously my friends and I were straight out of central casting of a Richard Linklater movie). For about five years solid I played on a city league team with a group of guys I mostly knew from alternative journalist rags and other DIY projects.

About two weekends a month, late on a Friday night we'd jam pack a couple cars, crank up the maudlin AM country stations and head out to one of our friend's family ranch right off the road between Cross Plains and Brownwood.

The ranch's guest house was a rough limestone and timber business, charming even in its rustic simplicity and 50's cowboy kitsch. By day we'd spend our time walking the ranch, shooting at old bottles, swimming in the lake, and sleeping off hangovers. Nights were spent slow grilling steaks, drinking, dancing (if we brought the girls), making bonfires, and more drinking.

There were a lot of quiet moments too. Quiet moments spent reading and feeling something primal and Texan out there. Many of those moments, when they weren't spent just watching the heavens free of light pollution slowly mosey by, were spent reading through a dusty stack of books at the house.

Those books were almost to a copy, cheap vanity press affairs. The kinds of local histories where the town amateur historian weaves half a book of deadly dull genealogical type material in with half a book of pure lurid mythology. And when you are in a place like Cross Plains, where the sheer violence of frontier life stuck around later than many places, that kind of local history is amped up really loud.

There were countless tales of Comanche abductions, scalpings, and small-scale massacres. The more honest (and less obviously racist) books also recounted the massacres and raids from Anglos that egged those incursions. 

Those tales didn't just stop with the point after the Civil War when the Comanches were finally defeated as people in the area, it kept marching forward with the account of a gunfighter here, a massacre there over the barb wiring off of common grazing lands. Later you'd hear about the brawls and murders of passion of the oil men.

Reading all that it was impossible not to think of Howard's life and writing. Not to think of the frontier, not that far distant from the time of his writing, that so many others have talked about as his greatest influence. The haunting influence of the ghosts of the land around you—and the titillation of those stories.

From those moments on for me, Conan, Kull, Solomon Kane and the others became characters that had one foot in the wildest flights of fantasy and another in a very real and earthly place that I seen, touched, and ruminated on. It has made those books a bit rawer and more uncomfortable in my mind, but something closer and more visceral.

And isn't that what the best and deepest of fantasy should do?

Cimmeria by Way of the Hill Cantons

It may be the fever of the chest cold talking...

But driving through the clinging, chilly mist of the Texas Hill Country today I was reminded of that long past master of the pulp who brought the world Conan's Cimmeria through a vision of these same hills.

“Written in Mission, Texas, February, 1932; suggested by the memory of the hill-country above Fredericksburg seen in a mist of winter rain.”

Cimmeria

I remember

The dark woods, masking slopes of sombre hills;

The grey clouds' leaden everlasting arch;

The dusky streams that flowed without a sound,

And the lone winds that whispered down the passes.


Vista on vista marching, hills on hills,

Slope beyond slope, each dark with sullen trees,

Our gaunt land lay. So when a man climbed up

A rugged peak and gazed, his shaded eye

Saw but the endless vista - hill on hill,

Slope beyond slope, each hooded like its brothers.


It was a gloomy land that seemed to hold

All winds and clouds and dreams that shun the sun,

With bare boughs rattling in the lonesome winds,

And the dark woodlands brooding over all,

Not even lightened by the rare dim sun

Which made squat shadows out of men; they called it

Cimmeria, land of Darkness and deep Night.


It was so long ago and far away

I have forgot the very name men called me.

The axe and flint-tipped spear are like a dream,

And hunts and wars are shadows. I recall

Only the stillness of that sombre land;

The clouds that piled forever on the hills,

The dimness of the everlasting woods.

Cimmeria, land of Darkness and the Night.


Oh, soul of mine, born out of shadowed hills,

To clouds and winds and ghosts that shun the sun,

How many deaths shall serve to break at last

This heritage which wraps me in the grey

Apparel of ghosts? I search my heart and find

Cimmeria, land of Darkness and the Night.