The march of empire

I've mentioned before that the setting of ATWC is loosely pegged to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which for the peoples of Central Asia were an era of imperial encroachment. Equipped with new gunpowder weaponry and a greatly improved logistical base, the Eurasian empires of the early modern period - Romanov Russia, Ottoman Turkey, Safavid Persia, Mughal India, and Qing China - were able to project force into the steppe, mountains, deserts, and taiga much more successfully than their predecessors. By the time the Nerchinsk Treaty of 1689 was signed, many once-impassible regions such as Azerbaijan, Sibera, Mongolia, and Afghanistan had been more-or-less carved up between them.

In ATWC, this hasn't happened yet. The steppe and taiga khanates still enjoy an uneasy independence, but every observer of current affairs can tell that change is on its way. Travel down the Great Road and you'll find foreigners everywhere: some southerners and some easterners and some westerners, but all carrying splendid-looking documents from far-off imperial courts and flanked by serious-looking men wearing strange military uniforms and carrying guns. They are always on the move, these foreigners. They study local languages. They map and survey and observe and inquire. They preach new religions, or disturbingly unfamiliar interpretations of old ones. They hold secret meetings with local princes that go on long into the night. Their horsemanship is comically terrible by steppe standards, and they possess a knack for starving to death in deserts that the locals find quite astounding, but despite these failings they carry themselves with a strange confidence. They seem convinced that the future belongs to them.

For the Tsar!

Wherever you go in the steppe khanates, or in the oasis kingdoms of the Great Road, you can bet that agents of foreign empires are there too. (They haven't made it very far into the taiga yet, but they're working on it.) Roll on the tables below to find out what they're up to.

Who is here? (Roll 1d8)

1. Merchant-adventurers, scouting out the region's goods and markets on behalf of some far-off trade consortium, watched with loathing by local traders who have operated in this area for centuries. 
2. Missionaries for some foreign faith, armed with official letters from a distant emperor, scornfully surveying the local temples.
3. Negotiators come to arrange a treaty between a nearby ruler and some distant imperial state, speaking the local language very badly and looking extremely pleased with themselves.
4. Explorers on horseback accompanied by local bearers, making notes and checking compasses, steadily filling in the blank areas on their maps.
5. Scholars affiliated with a far-off university, surveying local customs and monuments and nodding sagely to themselves. 
6. 'Archaeologists and antiquaries' (read: grave-robbers with fancy licenses), poking around in the ruins outside of town and casually asking where exactly your ancestors are buried.
7. Military advisers decked out with the very latest in modern firearms technology, offering to help the local rulers modernise their pitifully outdated cannons and fortifications in exchange for a little quid pro quo.
8. Roll again, but they're actually spies from a completely different foreign empire, here in disguise to watch over the activities of their rivals as part of some complicated game of international intrigue. 

For the Sultan!

Who leads them? (Roll 1d8)

1. Bright-eyed true believer who genuinely believes that absorption into the greater imperial polity is the best thing that could possibly happen to a benighted backwater like this one.
2. Dead-eyed veteran of the imperial war machine, whose utterly impersonal brutality makes even the most savage khans shiver.
3. Long-term field agent who went native years ago, and now identifies more with the khanate they're posted to than the distant empire they supposedly serve.
4. Embarrassing failure from a minor imperial house, sent out to the back of beyond with strict orders not to return home until they've actually accomplished something.
5. Disgraced courtier who knows full well that they've been sent out here as a punishment, and resents it bitterly.
6. Bookish academic convinced that their years of study in the archives have allowed them to understand the region much better than the people who actually live there.
7. Enterprising merchant who sees the whole region as a series of mouth-watering opportunities for economic exploitation. 
8. A member of a local ethnic group with a painstakingly acquired imperial education, who has carved out a precarious place for themselves as an intermediary between their country and the empire while feeling painfully out of place in both. 

For the Shah!

What is their true objective? (Roll 1d12)

1. To lay the groundwork for the conquest and annexation of the region by the empire they serve.
2. To change the region's culture and religion in ways that will align it with the empire.
3. To gain revenge on the descendants of the nomad warlords who terrorised their empire generations ago. 
4. To suppress the bandits and raiders based in the region, who are disrupting the empire's overland trade.
5. To gain access to the natural resources of the region and exploit them for everything they're worth. 
6. To turn the local rulers against their imperial rivals, who are also active in the region.
7. To establish new trade routes and markets for the empire's merchants and manufacturers. 
8. To bring down the local regime and replace it with one more amenable to their empire's interests.
9. To establish a military alliance with the local rulers, in the hope of securing troops to fight in some distant imperial warzone. 
10. To loot all the valuable books, treasure and antiquities they can get their hands on, on behalf of some far-off imperial archive or museum. 
11. To establish covert diplomatic ties with the Wicked City. (All the empires insist loudly that they would never bargain with a state so obviously impious, but many of them do so anyway, albeit in secret. Empires always have uses for another delivery of cut-price muskets and clockwork soldiers!)
12. Roll again, but the second roll is just a cover story: they're actually part of a rebel faction within the empire, secretly gathering allies and resources for a planned uprising. (Yes, if you also rolled an 8 on the first table, this means they're actually spies posing as rebels posing as something else. Welcome to the Great Game!)

For the Shahenshah!

How much backing do they have? (Roll 1d8)

(All imperial representatives travel with fancy letters declaring that anyone impeding their mission will face the wrath of the entire empire, but ink is cheap and armies are expensive. If push comes to shove, will anyone back home really care?)

1. Less than zero. This mission has been deliberately set up to fail, as a deniable way of getting rid of someone inconvenient. No matter what happens to it, the empire will do nothing to intervene.
2. Zero. This mission is essentially a punishment assignment for people who've made the wrong enemies. No-one in power will care if they don't make it home alive.
3. Minimal. This mission is a gamble by some minor minister or provincial governor, who would very much like it to succeed but doesn't really have the resources to properly support it. Minor levels of military and/or financial reinforcement will be sent if they are in truly desperate need.
4. Local. No-one really cares about this mission back in their distant imperial capital, but one local faction (roll 1d4 - 1 = religious group, 2 = ethnic group, 3 = political faction, 4 = merchant consortium) would like to see it succeed for private reasons of their own, and is willing to commit substantial resources to bring this about.
5. Financial. This mission is being financed by someone with extremely deep pockets, and carries letters of credit that allow them to call upon staggering amounts of money on demand. 
6. Military. This mission is being backed by someone with a lot of soldiers at their disposal, who is perfectly willing to send a whole lot of men to their deaths if it will help ensure the mission's success.
7. Covert. Although only minimally supported by its notional patrons, the mission is actually being backed by another imperial power, for nefarious reasons of its own. They are willing to offer it substantial support, but only in indirect and deniable forms. 
8. High. This mission has the full backing of the imperial government, which regards it as a strategic priority and are willing to launch large-scale military or diplomatic reprisals against anyone impeding or threatening it.

For the Son of Heaven!

Bringing Down the Hammer part 9: Night's Dark Masters, Tome of Salvation, Realm of the Ice Queen

This post brings me to the end of WFRP's Black Industries period. After this the line was taken over by Fantasy Flight Games.

Night's Dark Masters (April 2007)

Did you ever look at Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay and think: 'this is alright, but it would be much better if it was more like Vampire: The Masquerade?' If so, this is the book for you! It provides a history of the vampires of the Old World, an account of the different clans they belong to, rules for their vampire super-powers, and a description of how the nations of the Old World have been infiltrated by super-secret vampire conspiracies, requiring the humans to create counter-conspiracies of vampire hunters to fight them. Like I said, Vampire: the Masquerade. There are even rules here for playing vampire characters, if you really want to. And, yes, Geneviève Dieudonné gets name-checked, although I could have lived without the revelation that her heroic deeds are secretly tolerated and protected by one of the vampire conspiracies in order to trick people into believing that vampires aren't really as bad as all that.

Even though it came out in 2007, this book's 'vampires with everything!' approach to the Old World feels as though it has its roots firmly in the great vampire boom of the 1990s. (I'm guessing a lot of its lore is drawn from the 1999 Vampire Counts army book for WFB? I haven't read it.) Hunting down an individual vampire in some ruined castle or God-forsaken slum fits in with the tone and spirit of WFRP just fine, but I'm not sure about all these vast and secret vampire organisations. It feels to me as though you'd only be able to use most of this book if you were willing to make your campaign all about vampires, either by having the PCs actually be vampires, or by having them as a crew of dedicated vampire hunters. In a more traditional WFRP campaign, in which a vampire would be more likely to appear as a one-off antagonist, I struggle to see why you'd need a 143-page book about them.

(Klaus Gerken now has a perfect right to call me a hypocrite, because all the same objections could be raised to the skaven book. I guess I feel that the skaven need more specific information because they're a much more specific concept, whereas everyone already knows what the deal with vampires is, and this book offers very little in the way of new interpretations. Besides, the skaven lose most of their meaning and significance without their vast, mad Under-Empire, whereas vampires work just fine without all these clans and conspiracies and whatnot.)

Anyway. Turns out there are fighter vampires and wizard vampires and sexy vampires and ugly vampires and Dracula vampires. (Geneviève, naturally, is one of the sexy vampires.) There are loads of them and they're all  really powerful, but they're also so super-secret that everyone thinks the vampire hunters are crazy for making such a fuss about them. It all seemed a bit much to me, but then I know that some people felt that way about the skaven book, too, so maybe I'm just biased. What I really wanted from it was a Barony of the Damned style write-up of Sylvania, but the chapter on Sylvania is very brief, presumably to make room for all those multi-page clan descriptions. If you want to add fuckloads of vampires to your WFRP campaign, this is probably a great book. Otherwise I'd say it's skippable.

Tome of Salvation (September 2007)

Probably my favourite 2nd edition cover. You can view the whole image on the artist's DeviantArt page here.

This is a big (255-page) book on religion in the Old World. It has a heavy focus on religion as an actual part of daily life: the folk customs of the poor, the calendar of holy days, the way religious beliefs differ from region to region, and so on. (I mentioned my preference for the 'big Empire' interpretation of the WFRP setting back in this post, and it's very much visible here, with an emphasis on the fact that the Empire is less a unified state than a vast patchwork of tiny communities loosely connected by their shared allegiance to the Elector Counts.) There's a lot here about temples, monasteries, pilgrimages, relics, the daily routines of the priesthood, and other nuts and bolts of religious practise. There's also a lot of discussion of religious fanaticism, and militant religious orders, and of the ways in which especially devout individuals will indicate their faith through self-flagellation, ritual tattoos, head cages, back banners, rune-covered skulls, purity seals, and so on. I know that a lot of this stuff has its roots in the more extreme edge of medieval and counter-Reformation Catholicism, but I can't help but suspect that its real purpose is to make Warhammer priests look as much like 40K characters as possible. It finishes with thirty-five pages of game rules for all the different kinds of magic available to the followers of each god, which look like they would be essential if you were planning to run a WFRP 2nd edition game which was heavy on divine magic.

So this is a good book, and one that shows how far the depiction of Old World religion has come since the days of the original WFRP core book, which essentially just threw down a generic D&D fantasy pantheon - Druidic nature god, god of death, goddess of healing, god of thieves, goddess of knowledge, goddess of war, god of the sea, god of elves, god of dwarves, goddess of halflings - and called it a day. (I still miss the gods of Law, though.) However, I feel that the Tome's main strength may also be its greatest weakness: few WFRP campaigns are really going to need this level of detail on religion, and in most games a more rough-and-ready approach might actually be more gameable than the more exhaustive treatment of the subject offered here. If you wanted to run a densely detailed 'simulationist' game set in the Old World then you could get a lot of use out of this, but most campaigns could probably have got by just as well with a book that was half the length.

Realm of the Ice Queen (November 2007)

This book covers Kislev, the Old World's analogue for Russia. Like so much of the Warhammer setting, Kislev's status was beset by contradictory information from the wargame and the RPG. Something Rotten in Kislev (1988) drew upon a combination of medieval and nineteenth-century Russian history to portray it as a highly bureaucratic state ruled by Tsar Radii Bokha, in which an ethnically Norse aristocracy presided over a combined Ungol (= Mongol) and Gospodar (= Slav) population, and tried to cope with pressure from the Hobgoblin Hegemony to the east. The Empire Army Book (1993) confused all this by asserting that Kislev was in fact ruled by a Gospodar ice sorceress named Tzarina Katarin, who inherited her magical ice powers from the ancient Khan-Queens of the Gospodars, who had once been the terror of the Empire. It also introduced the idea that Kislev's military elite were 'Winged Lancers', modelled on the Winged Hussars of early modern Poland.

Some of the oddest elements of Realm of the Ice Queen clearly have their roots in this contradictory source material. The idea that it was the Gospodars who rode out of the steppes and subjugated the Ungols, and not the other way around, reads like some kind of bizarre revisionist fantasy of Russian history, but I'm sure it arose simply out of an attempt to reconcile the WFRP account (in which the Gospodars are stand-ins for the Slavs) with the WFB account (in which they're stand-ins for the Mongols). Kislev being ruled by a literal ice queen who lives in a giant castle made of magical ice right in the middle of the capital city sits rather oddly with WFRPs general low-fantasy vibe, but does accord with its WFB presentation. The obviously-Polish Winged Lancers seem strange in a setting which is obviously Russian in every other respect, but they're the single most iconic Kislevite unit from the wargame, so what were they going to do? As with the Bretonnia book, the authors had to work with the material they were given, and I think they did a pretty good job.

Winged lancers from WFB.

Slavic settings are weirdly under-represented in fantasy media and RPGs, and when they do appear, they usually just use the same handful of cliches over and over again: snow, bears, Baba Yaga, vodka, cossacks, and Russia's greatest love machine, Rasputin. There's definitely some of this in Realm of the Ice Queen, but, for the most part, they actually wrote a pretty decent fantasy Russia setting instead. There are a lot of bears and snow, here, and I rolled my eyes at the state religion being rewritten into the Cult of the Great Russian Bear God; but there are also streltsy, and firebirds, and steppe nomads, and other things which suggest some level of actual familiarity with the subject matter. It's a bit first-year-undergraduate-Slavic-studies-ish in places - did the coffee shop attended by radical intellectuals really have to be called Raskolnikov's? - but a genuine effort has clearly been made, and this version of Kislev is a setting which I'd happily run a game in.

Anyway. Realm of the Ice Queen depicts Kislev as a kind of combination of seventeenth- and nineteenth-century Russia. It's seventeenth-century insofar as Tzarina Katarin is depicted as being a Peter the Great style moderniser, employing the authoritarian methods of absolutist monarchy to drag her nation into the modern era. It's nineteenth-century insofar as it's also full of opera houses, intellectuals hanging around in cafes, and Tsarist secret policemen, which implies that quite a lot of modernisation has already taken place. (The secret police are an odd bunch. They're called 'Chekists', which obviously evokes the Bolshevik Cheka, but their description combines elements of Alexander III's Okhrana with the Oprichnina of Ivan the Terrible. Anyway, you can play one, which will probably come as a boon to anyone who's ever looked at the Witch Hunter career and said: 'Sure, this looks fairly morally murky. But is it morally murky enough?')

There's no mention of the Hobgoblin Hegemony, which seems to have been retconned out of existence, but there's lots of other good stuff: there are monsters inspired by Slavic folklore, gods based on Slavic paganism, and a good write-up of the chaos-blighted city of Praag, complete with bleeding cobblestones and specialist watchmen who roam the streets at night armed with metal hammers, looking out for restless corpses to whack on the head and throw into furnaces. In the provinces the frozen ground gets too cold to dig graves, so corpses are left out in the wilderness with their eyes removed, to ensure that if they rise again they won't be able to find their way home... which means that horrible blind undead roam the wild, looking for living victims so that they can steal their eyes. The Gospodar ice sorceresses are a bit boring, but the Ungol witches are much better than the Baba Yaga knock-offs they could so easily have been, guarding their homes by deliberately inducing hauntings in the surrounding woodlands, and raising mutant children in secret communities deep in the taiga for use as sacrificial fodder in their secret war against chaos. (Also they have a spell which turns them into eight-foot hags with iron claws and rusted metal teeth, which is way better than yet another minor variation on the theme of 'I use my ice magic to make things really cold'.) It's a bit long, but anyone interested in running a fantasy Russia game will find something worth stealing in here somewhere, and it makes me rather regret the fact that Black Industries never had a chance to take a crack at Estalia, or Araby, or any of the other neglected regions of the Warhammer World.

And for really, really old-school fans, there's a mention of the legend that a girl in a glass coffin lies hidden, sleeping, somewhere beneath the streets of Praag...

TOTALLY WAKING UP SOON, YOU GUYS. JUST A COUPLE MORE EDITIONS AT MOST!

Monsters from Central Asian Mythology 14: Divs of the Desert

In Zoroastrian tradition, Divs are spirits of evil, the children of the Druj, or cosmic lie. In Persian folk-tales, they often lurk around in wild and dangerous regions, looking for victims to deceive and devour - and, as a result, they're just the kind of creatures you might run into if you leave the relative safety of the Iranian plateau for the deserts of Central Asia. My take on them here is heavily informed by their appearance in the twelfth century Persian poem Haft Peykar, where - in C.E. Wilson's 1924 translation - they are described as follows:

Innumerable demons seated there, exchanging shouts through valley and through plain.

All of them, like the wind, were scattering dust; rather, they were like leeches black and long.

Till it got so, that from the left and right the mirthful clamour rose up to the sky.

A tumult rose from clapping and the dance; it made the brain ferment in (every) head.

At every instant did the noise increase, moment by moment greater it became.

When a short time had gone by, from afar a thousand torches (all) aflame appeared;

(And) suddenly some persons came to view, forms cast in tall and formidable mould.

All of them “ghūls” like blackest Ethiops; pitchlike the dress of all, like tar their caps.

All with the trunks of elephants and horned, combining ox and elephant in one.

Each of them bearing fire upon his hand, (each) ugly, evil one like drunken fiend.

Fire (also) from their throats was casting flames; reciting verse, they clashed the horn and blade.

So: tall, black, fire-breathing, desert-dwelling monsters, with trunks like elephants, horns like oxen, and fires and blades in their hands, who go around laughing, and clapping, and dancing, and reciting poetry. Like you do.

Here's a fifteenth-century illustration of the scene.

My suspicion is that these particular divs are basically anthropomorphic representations of the perils of the desert. They're associated with heat: thus the fires that they carry in their hands and breathe forth from their mouths. They create sandstorms; indeed, in some sense, they may actually be sandstorms, which would explain why they dance around in circles filling the landscape with clouds of dust. They create mirages - thus the recoil of the guy in the picture as his horse suddenly turns into a seven-headed dragon beneath him - and they themselves, with their monstrous beast-faces, resemble the kind of hallucinations someone might experience while stumbling around a desert half-dead of sunstroke and dehydration. But at the same time, they seem to possess art, language, even culture. They aren't just whooping and gibbering: they're reciting verse. It's that combination of primal destructiveness with apparent knowledge and intelligence that interests me.

So - if you go too deep into the desert, if you are lost and dying and desperate, then you may meet the divs. The base daily chance of a group encountering them is 0%, modified as follows:

• Group has only the vaguest idea where they are: +10%
• Group is completely lost: +20%
• Group has no food: +10%
• Group has no water: +20%
• Many people in the group are sick: +10%
• Many people in the group are wounded: +10%
• Many people in the group are suffering from sunstroke: +10%

When encountered, they come whirling over the horizon, leaping and dancing and singing, clashing cymbals and horns and blades. They breathe out gouts of fire. They kick up great clouds of dust. They conjure up frightful illusions of people and animals turning into monsters. What they're looking for is a terror reaction: they want to see people flee in panic, abandoning the supplies and the pack animals that they need to survive in the desert in their desperate scramble for safety. The divs think that kind of thing is hilarious. They'll be laughing about it for weeks.

If you hold your ground, then they'll come stalking up to you, waving swords and snorting flame. They'll try to intimidate you, uttering blood-curdling threats, and demanding all the food and goods and water you have in exchange for letting you live. They don't need those things: they just think it's funny to send people staggering away to die of thirst and starvation. They'll probably burn it all as soon as you're out of sight.

Faced with sturdy opposition, however, the divs will waver. They admire bravery, and for all their threats and bravado they will be reluctant to strike the first blows, although they will fight back fiercely if attacked. They hate showing weakness, and will curse and bluster to the very end, but travellers who demonstrate both courage and respect may be allowed to pass in exchange for a mere token payment of tribute. (The divs are incapable of telling direct truths, though, and will come up with all sorts of absurd lies about why they are letting you live.) If they are particularly impressed with you they might even drop some broad hints about the way to the next oasis, although if questioned about it they will of course deny doing anything of the sort. 

Despite their ruffianly ways, the divs are great lovers of music and poetry. They will immediately warm to anyone who can answer them quotation for quotation, and prefer gifts of song and verse above all others. They know many old secrets, and the locations of all kinds of ancient ruins, and sorcerers and scholars sometimes deliberately seek them out with the hope of bargaining with them - although this usually involves deliberately getting lost in the desert first. They also have considerable respect for Dahākans, who they regard almost as their kinsmen. They view the Cruel Ones with utter contempt.

• Div: AC 15 (super-tough skin), 4 HD, AB +5, two attacks, damage blade (1d8+1) and flame (1d6), FORT 10, REF 12, WILL 12, morale 9. 

Divs resemble large, brutish humanoids with elephant faces and the horns of oxen. They carry swords and flames, which they can call forth from their hands at will, and wield like lashes: they can also breathe forth gouts of fire once per round, causing 1d6 points of fire damage per round to one target within melee range unless they pass a REF save. While leaping and dancing around the desert, the dust clouds they kick up are so thick that all ranged attacks against them are at -2 to hit. They can conjure threatening illusions, which last for as long as the div creating them maintains concentration. These illusions are visual-only, and can only take the form of monsters, distortions, fires, sandstorms, and other intimidating sights. 

Glimpses of the Wicked City: the art of the Silk Road

Art plays a major role in how we visualise other cultures. Our view of ancient Greece is heavily shaped by all those white marble statues: we'd probably think of it very differently if their paintings had survived as well. Ancient Egypt is monumental sculptures and paintings in tombs. Medieval Europe is stained glass, illuminated manuscripts, and woodcuts. Victorian Britain is pre-Raphaelite paintings and sepia-tint photographs. And so on.

For most of us, if the Silk Road looks like anything at all, it's probably a nineteenth-century Orientalist painting: something by Rosati, perhaps, or Delacroix. But while some Orientalist paintings depict their subjects with skill and sympathy, an awful lot of them are just excuses for tiresomely repetitive 'naked slave-girl' scenes, and even the ones that aren't usually emphasise the qualities of the 'Orient' that their painters went out looking for: sex, passion, luxury, exoticism, and violence. They give little sense of how these people understood their own world, as people with their own lives to lead, rather than as part of the backdrop to someone else's adventure tourism - and besides, for my purposes, their period is out by roughly two hundred years.

Rosati, 'A Game of Backgammon'. If you want the slave-girl paintings you can google them yourself.

Probably the greatest representative art tradition to emerge from late medieval / early modern Central Asia was Timurid painting, especially in the form developed by the miniaturists of Herat in Afghanistan. It's a style which combined Persian and Chinese elements to depict blue-and-gold worlds of staggering beauty, which really have to be seen to be believed. (Online reproductions do them no justice at all.) Here are some examples from the reigns of the Timurid and Safavid shahs:

Now, Timurid art is wonderful - but it's very much a product of the earlier part of the early modern period, and its fascination with the sages and heroes of the past means that it tends to look back earlier still. For a sense of what Asiatic Islamic civilisation looked and felt like once modernity started to take hold - and of what life in the Silk Road kingdoms might have looked like if they hadn't been in terminal decline by the late 1600s - I look instead to seventeenth-century Ottoman and Safavid miniature paintings, especially the Rålamb Costume Book (1650s) and the works of Reza Abbasi (1565 - 1635) and Abdulcelil Levni (?-1732). Here are some figures from the Rålamb Costume Book:

These last two are executioners. The first one carries an impaling stake. The second carries a garotting cord.

Here are some by Abbasi:

And here are some by Levni:

Janissaries at a banquet. There's always one guy who can't keep his hat on...

I love the expression on this one. 'It says olive prices are down again. Fuck.'

The other visual source I keep coming back to is the sixteenth-century Tyrkervaerk of Melchior Lorck. Like the nineteenth-century Orientalists, Lorck's engravings show the Ottoman dominions through European eyes, but his perspective is completely different from theirs. The Orientalists painted from a position of assumed cultural superiority, safe in the knowledge that while the Islamic world might be excitingly dangerous to the individual traveller, it no longer posed any meaningful threat to European dominance. But Lorck's drawings of the armies of Suleiman the Magnificent reflect the strength and terror of the Ottoman Empire at its height, when it was an aggressively expansionistic imperial power which had demonstrated itself to be entirely capable of kicking the shit out of the forces of European Christendom. Here are some examples:

Lorck's Tyrkervaerk engravings are an important part of the way in which I imagine the Wicked City itself: a world dominated by strong, cruel, violent men and the weary, hollow-eyed despots who command them, full of militaristic pomp and spectacle, strong lines, sharp angles, and plumed soldiers marching through the streets in splendid uniforms while veiled figures with downcast eyes scurry into corners to avoid them.

The world of the Rålamb Costume Book is the world of the oasis kingdoms beyond, all bright colours and gorgeous fabrics and matter-of-fact violence. The world of Levni and Abbasi is the world of the rich and powerful, the merchant princes of the Great Road: a world of strong coffee and extravagant fashions, elegant youths in perfumed gardens, falconers and dancing girls, and people who really, really don't want to talk to you about exactly where all their custom-made guns and fancy clockwork machinery is coming from.

And outside that, in the steppes and the deserts and the mountains, is the blue-and-gold world of the miniaturists of Herat: a world of flowers and water, rocks and monsters, vast and strange and old and dangerous and very, very beautiful.

The taiga looks like Evenki folk art and Gennady Pavlishin illustrations.

I guess the gods and spirits of the steppe look like figures from Mongolian thangkas?

Fuck, this post is long enough already. I'm just going to hit 'publish' and have done with it.

Horse-hair and pine-needles spill from their frozen hearts

The other thing I managed to do over the Christmas vacation, aside from playing intermittently-disturbing games with my three-year-old son, was visiting the Scythians exhibition at the British Museum. Most of the items on display barely ever leave Russia, so it was an opportunity I really didn't want to miss.

One thing I learned from the exhibition was that many of the most famous examples of Scythian art were found in what was essentially a tomb-robbing gold rush in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Buried in the frozen earth of the Altai mountains, many Scythian kings and chieftains had been preserved by the ice, along with all their grave goods, for millennia - until the locals discovered, by chance, that there were hauls of ancient gold buried up in the hills, some of which found its way back to the court of Peter the Great. Believing that the only proper place for such rarities was in his new cabinet of curiosities (which would one day form the basis of the original Hermitage collection), the tsar sent out archaeological expeditions to search for more of these ancient tombs, along with decrees that anyone finding Scythian gold would be richly rewarded if they handed it over to the tsar, and harshly punished if they attempted to keep it for themselves. Soon the golden treasures of the long-dead kings of Scythia were flowing north to St Petersburg, where they have largely remained ever since.

Lost tombs in the wilderness... preserved corpses... ancient treasures from forgotten civilisations... the whole set-up is absurdly D&D-friendly. The fact that it began at almost the exact historical moment that the ATWC setting is pegged to is just a gratuitous bonus.

So: for the last few years, there's been a new rumour travelling up and down the Great Road. They say that the distant Western Emperor, the ruler of all those hairy foreigners with guns who are currently carving up the taiga, has gone mad: that someone brought him a beautiful gold carving from some long-lost tomb, and he fell in love with it, and swore that he would not rest until he had gathered together all such treasures that still exist upon the earth. They say that he thinks of little else, now; that he sits all night long in his treasury, caressing the ancient faces of his golden stags and tigers and monsters, and dreaming of what new acquisitions his messengers may even now be carrying back to him across the endless steppe. Anyone who owns such items and is willing to sell them to the Western Emperor's agents can make a quick fortune. Anyone who owns such items and refuses to sell them is likely to suffer either a very precisely-targeted robbery or a premature death.

Who were they, these ancient goldsmiths, whose skillful workmanship has so bewitched the mind of the emperor, thousands of years after their own deaths? No-one knows: the steppe has devoured them, along with their name and their language and their history, just as it has so many peoples before and since. They lived long before the Wolf Khans, and left no script to be decoded: only scratched pictures of horses and chariots, and carved stone men standing in endless vigils on hillsides, with three diagonal lines cut where their faces should have been. Those who have seen the bodies which lie within their icy tombs call them the Frozen Ones, or the Tattooed Folk, or the Pale Riders. But there are few who can truthfully claim to have seen such sights - and fewer still who like to talk about it.

They built their tombs in the frozen earth, high up in the mountains; and there the ice has preserved them, age after age. Imagine a row of sturdy log cabins, lowered into pits, covered with mounds of earth, and left to freeze: that's what their royal tombs are like. Within lie the bodies of men, women, and horses, their skin dried and frozen into icy leather, their weapons and clothes and harness still intact despite the passage of so many centuries - but cold, all of it, so deathly, deathly cold. Sometimes the corpses are just corpses, and any daring hand can loot them, plundering all their valuables - their golden buckles and armbands, their bowls and brooches and earrings, and all those other precious things of which the Western Emperor dreams. Sometimes even their beautiful beaded clothes can be stripped from them, revealing the fantastical tattoos on their bare and frozen limbs, and their long-dead wearers will simply loll, and crack, and not resist. Sometimes a fortune in old gold can be pulled from the earth with almost no risk at all.

Sometimes. But sometimes not.

For sometimes they rise, these old ones, these pale riders. Sometimes they lift their ancient war-picks in anger against the intruders in their tombs. Sometimes would-be looters will find themselves impaled by volleys of millennia-old arrows, launched out of the subterranean darkness by icy fingers which have forgotten how to miss. Sometimes the adventurer who reaches down to take a golden buckle from some withered corpse will find their arms suddenly grasped by a dead man's hand. They never speak, these frozen guardians. If their bodies are cut open, horse-hair and pine-needles spill from their wounds instead of blood.

Here is a secret that no-one knows yet: the bizarre creatures depicted in the gold jewellery of the Pale Riders were not mythical or imaginary, but real monsters of the ancient steppe and taiga, which their heroes hunted to extinction in the dim and distant past. The preserved and frozen corpses of a few of them still stand in certain undiscovered tombs, buried as trophies with the great hunters who slew them. Such a specimen would be worth a fortune to any scholar or collector; but their mighty spirits do not rest easy, and if taken from the tombs of the mighty men and women who defeated them in life, their bodies are liable to reanimate as soon as they feel the wind and sun once more upon their faces.

Here is a another secret which no-one knows yet: although the Western Emperor isn't nearly as mad as the rumours claim, he is becoming increasingly obsessed with his collection, and his obsession is not an accident. The gold really is calling to him, calling in a voice that feels like snow and smells like hemp and horses. The more of these ancient treasures he brings together, the louder the voice becomes. He feels he can almost understand it, now. He can almost make out the words.

Surely, surely, just a few more pieces will suffice...

• Animated Pale Rider Corpse: AC 13 (frozen, leathery skin), 3 HD, AB +3, damage 1d6+1 (war pick) or 1d4+1 (claw), FORT 10, REF 13, WILL 10, morale 12. Each round, roll 1d3: on a 1, the corpse exhales a cloud of ice crystals onto any one target within melee range, who must then make a FORT save or take 1d6 cold damage and be at -1 to all rolls until properly warmed up. (Penalties from multiple freezings stack.) Take only 1 damage per hit from piercing attacks such as daggers, arrows, or bullets.

Leathery, pale-skinned corpses with tattooed limbs, these ancient warriors defend their tombs using the antique war-picks they were buried with: these weapons are fragile with age, however, and will break on an attack roll of 1 or 2. In life they were expert archers, but there is simply no way to preserve a compound bow for two thousand years in a useable state, so they have to rely on melee weapons instead. If anyone intrudes into their tomb carrying a bow, their first priority will be to kill that person and take it. A Pale Rider corpse with a functional bow shoots with AB +5 and +2 damage.

• Monsters of the Ancient Taiga: AC 14 (agility and tough skin), 6 HD, AB +6, damage 1d8, 3 attacks per round (a combination of goring, biting, kicking, clawing, and trampling), FORT 8, REF 8, WILL 10, morale 8. 

These bizarre creatures resemble odd combinations of features from elk, wolves, lions, tigers, and predatory birds. One might have a lion's body, an eagle's head, and feet ending in hooves; another might have the body of a tiger, a wolf's muzzle, spreading many-tined antlers, and a lashing tail that ends in a snapping bird's head. All are huge and savage. They de-animate at once if the corpse of the hunter who originally killed them is brought into their presence, or if they can no longer feel the sun and wind on their skin.

• The Ice Maiden, Witch-Queen of the Steppes: AC 15 (semi-corporeal body), 5/10 HD, AB +4, damage 1d10 (freezing touch), FORT 10, REF 10, WILL 8, morale 10. Each round, she can exhale a cloud of ice crystals onto any one target within melee range, who must then make a FORT save or take 1d6 cold damage and be at -1 to all rolls until properly warmed up. (Penalties from multiple freezings stack.) Takes half damage from non-magical attacks.

The Ice Maiden loved worked gold more than anything else, so much so that when she died a fraction of her spirit passed into each of the golden treasures that she loved the most, which were then divided among the various kings and chieftains of the Tattooed Folk. Once more than three of these are gathered together in any one place, their owner will begin to feel a nagging desire to own more; this desire will grow stronger the more such treasures are brought together, gradually reaching the level of an obsession. Once half of them have been collected, she will be able to manifest herself at will as an 5 HD spirit. Once all of them have been assembled, she can manifest at 10 HD, instead.

The Ice Maiden manifests as the ghostly figure of a woman in a high conical hat, her arms and legs covered in fantastical tattoos of taiga animals being devoured by predatory beasts and monsters. If she wills it these beasts can spring to life, uncoiling themselves from her limbs and dilating into full-size predators within seconds: each round, in lieu of attacking, she can summon one such creature, up to a maximum of four. These have the statistics of the Monsters of the Ancient Taiga, above, but they cannot act in the round in which they are summoned. They vanish instantly if she is defeated.

Once manifested, her first objective will be to regather all her original treasures, and her second will be to start hoarding together as much gold as possible. She will find modern cities extremely confusing, however, and if she manifests in such a city - the capital of the Western Emperor, for example - she will venture forth only at night, when it's quiet and there aren't too many people around. She speaks only her own long-extinct language, but is capable of basic telepathic communication with whoever owns her treasures, and can also be contacted like any other spirit through the use of shamanic trance rituals.

Killing the Ice Maiden banishes her for 1d100 days, but she will always return as long as her treasure collection is intact. The only ways to permanently get rid of her are to break up the collection, destroy more than half the treasures, or get every surviving treasure blessed by a man or woman of great holiness (which sends her spirit on to the afterlife). Alternatively, if all her treasures were taken to one place and buried, she would become a spirit of the land, who could be contacted and bargained with by shamans like any other. Her favour would bestow skill in metalwork, prowess in hunting, and resistance to cold, but - unsurprisingly - she would demand offerings of gold in return.

We dance for the spirits and yet they are not appeased.

These are Tsam dancers.

The Tsam or Cham ceremony is a ritual of Tibetan origin, in which masked performers enact symbolic dances in order to spiritually purify themselves and the surrounding environment. Like much of Tibetan Buddhism, it bears a strong resemblance to the indigenous shamanic traditions which were incorporated into local Buddhist practise: and it may have been this shamanic heritage which helped it to catch on in Mongolia, where Buddhist monks began performing Tsam dances of their own in the eighteenth century. To a population familiar with Tegriist shamanism, with its use of ritual masks and dances, it probably seemed logical that Buddhist clergy might also achieve their spiritual objectives by putting on masks and dancing: and the Mongolian Tsam rituals quickly became even more elaborate than their Tibetan originals.

The setting of ATWC is mostly pegged to the seventeenth century, which is before the flowering of Mongolian Tsam traditions: and in any case, I'm extremely wary of turning real religious ceremonies into gaming fodder. Still, I like the idea of the having something similar to the Tsam ritual - let's call it the Great Spirit Dance - as an exciting new ceremonial technique, knowledge of which is just starting to filter into the steppe khanates from some half-legendary mountain kingdom in the south. For the steppe peoples, the Great Spirit Dance is still something daring and experimental and dangerously foreign, which many people have heard of but which very few actually know how to carry out. As such, the performance of such dances is only likely to be attempted by the truly adventurous - or the truly desperate.

Here's how it's supposed to work: through ritual supplications, powerful spirits are drawn down into the masks, which become their temporary homes. The ritualists then don the masks and perform their ceremonial dances, symbolically enacting the cosmic order of the universe. The spirits inhabiting the dancers are reminded of their place within the cosmic system, and at the end of the dance they depart from the bodies of the ritualists in a state of harmonious contentment, meaning that the chances of them deciding to unleash plagues and famines and other disasters upon the people will be drastically reduced in the year to come. They might still do those things, of course: but if they do, it's likely to be because they have a good reason for it, rather than just because they woke up feeling spiteful that day.

Here's the harmless way to get it wrong: if you mess up the construction of the masks, or the initial ritual preparations, the spirits won't be called down into the performers. You can still do the dances, and if your human audience is paying attention to the symbolism they might even learn some useful religious lessons - but the spirits won't be influenced, because the spirits won't have turned up. As a result, they'll be no more or less likely to send a murrain on your cattle than they would be in any other year.

Here's the really dangerous way to get it wrong: if you get the ritual masks and preparations right, but then mess up the dance, then the spirits will arrive... but they won't leave. You've called them here, into your masks and your bodies, and you're dancing for them... but the dance isn't telling them anything, or at least not anything that makes proper sense. They get confused. They get frustrated. They won't let you stop dancing. They won't let you take the mask off. They want you to do it right.

Thus it sometimes happens that travellers on the steppe chance across a ragged band of dancers, arrayed in the tattered remains of once-fantastical costumes, leaping and stomping their way across the empty lands. Their huge, heavy masks sway and nod to the beat of inaudible music, and through their open mouths can be glimpsed the wild eyes of the dancers, spirit-ridden, gleaming, and crazed. They move in great wheeling circles, their feet tracing intricate mandalas across the featureless grasslands of the steppe. They never eat. They never sleep. They never stop.

It's best to avoid them, which is easily done on horseback: they move faster than any man, but never in straight lines, so a horse will always outdistance them over time. But if they come upon you by surprise - if they burst upon your camp during the night, for example, for their dance continues in darkness just as it does in light - then almost anything could happen. To determine the disposition of the spirits, roll 1d6:

1. The spirits want you to join the dance. They will each grab one dance-partner and whirl them away, carrying them off over the steppe for 2d20 hours before releasing them and pirouetting off. If resisted they will become forcible, first grabbing and grappling, then escalating to actual violence. They'll dance with unconscious bodies or lifeless corpses if they have to. 
2. The spirits want musical accompaniment. For 1d6 hours, they demand that you play for them, with whatever instruments you have available: if no-one has any musical instruments, then they'll accept beatboxing and drumming on nearby objects instead. They're not picky about performance quality, but will grow agitated and violent if you can't keep the beat.
3. The spirits want new bodies: these ones are becoming quite worn out. They will try to grab victims and force their masks over their heads, using whatever degree of force is necessary to do so. Anyone who has such a spirit-mask forced over their head must pass a WILL save each round or suffer spirit possession. The mask's previous wearer will be freed from the spirit's influence once the new victim has been possessed, but they will be in a terrible physical condition, and will die in 1d6 hours unless they receive immediate care. 
4. The spirits want an audience. You have to sit and watch them for 2d12 hours, cheering and applauding whenever any of them does anything especially athletic: after this time is up, they bow and dance away. They will use force, and if necessary violence, to compel continued attention. 
5. The spirits have questions, and they want you to answer them. The imperfect symbolism of their dance has puzzled them rather than placated them, and now they surge towards you, roaring out theological queries like challenges: 'What is the nature of heaven? What is the purpose of suffering? Of what essence are the Men of Bone and Iron? What is the true homeland of the soul?' If your answers are good enough to give them something to think about, they'll whirl away and dance around contemplatively in a circle for a while, giving you a chance to leave. (For these purposes, clever-sounding wordplay is just as good as something genuinely profound.) If they receive obviously unsatisfactory answers, or no answers at all, they will become frustrated and attack.
6. The spirits believe they are engaged in a ceremonial re-enactment of some primordial battle... and that you are the enemy. They attack furiously, yelling out the names of antique war-gods as battle-cries, and forcing their luckless hosts to fight until they have been hacked to twitching pieces.

PCs confronted with such possessed individuals may try to free them by pulling their masks off, but these unfortunates are not so easily saved: while the spirit rides them, the mask is effectively their actual head, and cannot be removed by any means short of amputation. (The exception is if the spirits themselves will it - see 3, above.) Aside from killing them, there is only one way to end their possession, which is to identify what is wrong with their dance and then demonstrate to them how it should actually be completed: if this is accomplished, then the spirits will be satisfied and depart, and their hosts may yet be saved with the aid of prompt medical attention. (They will remember their possession only as a blurred and interminable dream.) For anyone other than a Spirit Dance expert, understanding the flaw in the dance's symbolism requires a 1d6 x 10 minutes of close observation, a specialised religious education, and successful Intelligence check; demonstrating what the correct version should look like requires a great sense of rhythm, 3d6 minutes of dancing, and a successful Dexterity check. Both are likely to be challenging under combat conditions.

• Possessed Dancer: AC 15 (superhuman agility), 3 HD, AB +3, damage 1d4+3 (inhumanly strong kicks and punches) or grapple, FORT 8, REF 8, WILL 8, morale 12.  Possessed dancers are immune to all mortal magic, as well as to fear, exhaustion, and pain. They can never stop dancing for any reason until they are either cut to pieces or freed from the spirits that drive them. 

CONFERENCE SEASON IS UPON ME

The summer conference season is a kind of passive-aggressive ritual in which the academics within a specific discipline stalk around the world in rotation, keeping an eye on what the competition is up to. The next few weeks of my life will be a blur of interchangeable hotel rooms, interminable keynote addresses, and jetlagged exhaustion kept in check by endless cups of cheap black coffee. As a result, I probably won't be posting anything to this blog until early / mid August.

Here's some random inspirational images for ATWC to tide you over until then.