More Pathfinder Rambling: Mothers, Fathers, and Villains

[Fair warning: this post consists entirely of rambly analysis of gender roles in some Pathfinder adventure modules you've probably never read and don't care about. You should probably skip it unless you really love reading stuff like that.]

[Also: massive, massive spoilers for both Rise of the Runelords and Curse of the Crimson Throne!]

As I've mentioned before, for a while now I've been idly reading my way through a bunch of Pathfinder adventure paths, looking for good ideas to steal. Some are better than others, but one thing I've noticed that a lot of them really seem to struggle with is their final villains. The final boss-fight should be the climax of an entire campaign, but all too often they strike me as... perfunctory, as though the writers are simply going through the motions. You've hacked your way through fifteen levels worth of pirate-themed adventures, so now of course you get to fight the Evil Pirate King. Or you've slogged your way through fifteen levels of Fantasy Egypt, so now of course you get to fight the Evil Mummy Pharaoh in his flying pyramid. (It's not nearly as cool as it sounds.) They may have more super-powers than they know what to do with, but most of these villains are boring: they have no charisma, no menace, no narrative presence, and usually no personality beyond 'generically power-hungry and evil'. They just sit around in their throne rooms poring over their multi-page stat blocks, waiting for the PCs to kick down the doors and beat them to death.

The two big exceptions to this are the first two adventure paths: Rise of the Runelords and Curse of the Crimson Throne. Their respective villains, Runelord Karzoug and Queen Ileosa, are about as iconic as Pathfinder characters get, casting such a long shadow over later volumes that they ultimately got a whole adventure path as a sequel. (Shattered Star, in case you're interested, which you probably shouldn't be.) Both adventure paths are very highly regarded by the Pathfinder fanbase, routinely voted as among the best, if not the best, that Paizo has ever produced, and I think that lot of that is probably due to their villains. In many ways, Karzoug and Ileosa are, respectively, the king and queen of Pathfinder bad guys.

Karzoug was first, so let's start with him. Karzoug, is, basically, The Man. He's older than you. He's stronger than you. He knows more than you. He's richer than you. He's seen more than you. He's suffered more than you. Everywhere you go is a place that once belonged to him, and in his eyes it still does belong to him, and he wants it back. He is the Runelord of Greed, and he wants it all, and he wants it now. 

Runelord Karzoug, from Rise of the Runelords.

I don't think one would have to be any kind of committed Freudian critic to see Karzoug as a kind of demonic father-figure. His children (i.e. the inhabitants of what was once his empire) have grown up and left home, but he refuses to recognise their right to any kind of independent life; instead, he's determined to bring them back under his authority, by any means necessary. The world has moved on without him, in ways that confuse and enrage him, but he's still a formidable adversary: he wields the power of the Old World, its wealth and authority and status, its incredible and time-tested strength. He has the horrible weight of history on his side. For all of these reasons, I think it's really quite important that Karzoug is male: he represents the old order, the Old Guard, the Old Boy's Network, the Way Things Used to Be. (It would be tempting, although not quite accurate, to call it 'the patriarchy'; Karzoug himself is certainly a patriarch par excellence.) His tools are the classic masculine tools of wealth and power and violence. As I say, he's The Man. This would come across rather differently if he was actually a woman.

Interestingly, most of Karzoug's lieutenants are women, and his ability to maintain command over this collection of powerful women is one of the key markers of his masculine authority. In fact, one can go further than this: most of his lieutenants are mothers, and the plot of the first half of Rise of the Runelords could be pretty much summed up as 'a series of monstrous mothers unleash their deformed sons upon their PCs at the behest of a distant father-figure'. The goblins in part 1 are led by Nualia, a woman who has literally sanctified her own womb to 'the mother of monsters'. The assorted monsters in part 2 are led by a 'lamia matriarch'. The ogrekin in part 3 are led by their hideous mother, Mama Grauul, while the leaders of the ogres in the same book include another lamia matriarch and a trio of hags. Karzoug's personal champion is a woman. His high priestess is a 'lamia harridan'. But right at the top of the heap, reigning over all these monstrous mothers, is Karzoug, the Big Daddy, whose patriarchal authority is what ultimately sets all these miniature matriarchies into action. To get to him, the PCs have to fight their way through increasingly exaggerated parodies of masculinity: first goblins (physically and mentally stunted men), then ghouls (physically and mentally deformed men), then ogres (exaggerated men), and finally giants (super-exaggerated men). They also have to keep climbing upwards: from lowlands to hills, from hills to mountains, from mountains to higher mountains. Karzoug waits for them in the highest tower on the highest mountain: so high, in fact, that the game needed to add rules for altitude sickness. He's the man in the top-floor office. He's the man with the penthouse suite. He's so rich that his home base is literally paved with gold. He's the Big Man. He's the Boss.

This is Nualia, from Rise of the Runelords. Note the icon of the Mother of Monsters in the background.

Queen Ileosa of Korvosa, the villain from Curse of the Crimson Throne, forms a striking contrast. All the writers involved with Rise of the Runelords clearly knew roughly what they wanted Karzoug to be, but Ileosa seems to have grown in the telling. Part 1 describes her in very pejorative terms, as a mentally and physically weak woman who just happened to provide a convenient vessel for the (male) spirit which is the true source of her power: she may be 'ambitious' but she's also 'unimaginative', 'a coward' with 'a vain mind' whose 'idle fancies' of regicide would never have come to anything if she hadn't stumbled across an evil relic and been possessed by the spirit within it. But as the books pass, the series (and its writers) seem to become more and more fascinated with Ileosa, giving her more and more credit for the tyranny that unfolds under her increasingly unhinged rule, while the relic shrinks to the status of a mere power-up. By the time her stats are given in book 6, the text's attitude towards her has reversed completely. Explaining why she has such eye-wateringly high ability scores - Charisma 36! - the writer comments that: 'Queen Ileosa was destined from birth to achieve greatness and glory - it is to Korvosa’s great misfortune that her path took her along one of cruelty and arrogance.'

These two villains form a very powerfully gendered pair. Karzoug is associated with all things hard and cold: gold, stone, mountains, iron, ice. Ileosa is associated with all things warm and wet: swamps, fevers, sex, and blood. Just as Karzoug's mountaintop stronghold acts as a kind of mega-phallus with which he menaces the world, so the lairs of Ileosa and her minions read like checklists of symbolic Freudian nightmares about the female body: swamps, diseases, dark passageways, monstrous births, creatures emerging out of pools of blood. But whereas Karzoug was, emphatically, a father-figure, Ileosa is both mother and daughter; she is a queen, and thus a kind of mother-figure for her nation, but her power is built on her youth and beauty just as much as Karzoug's is built on his age and experience. In fact, her grand plan revolves around immersing herself in the Everdawn Pool (a 'floating mass of blood') at the heart of her final lair, the Sunken Queen, and thus becoming immortal, symbolically reborn from her own womb as her own ever-youthful daughter.

Queen Ileosa, murdering a would-be assassin. It'll take more than a crossbow bolt in the throat to kill the walking embodiment of all your anxieties about women!

Karzoug was the Runelord of Greed. Ileosa was supposed to just be a silly girl who opened the wrong treasure chest, but as the series progresses, she gets tied into the Runelord mythology, too: it turns out that her palace is built on top of the stronghold of the slumbering Runelord of Lust, Sorshen, who - with rather tiresome predictability - is a beautiful woman. So is she responsible for all this? Is Ileosa's transformation due to the influence of Sorshen, rather than the evil spirit in her crown? Well, no, actually; Sorshen is very thoroughly asleep, and does not feature in the adventure path. And yet the ancient demons who knew Sorshen comment on how much Ileosa resembles her (and then sign up to work for her), the frog-men who worship a giant statue of Sorshen in the swamps revere Ileosa as its living incarnation (their 'mother-queen'), and Ileosa effortlessly takes command of the various ancient magics that Sorshen left behind her, including the Everdawn Pool itself. As a Runelord, Sorshen should be Karzoug's distaff counterpart, the Destroying Mother to his Destroying Father, with Ileosa a distant daughter-figure at best; but in some uncanny way, it seems that Ileosa is Sorshen, or at least close enough to make no difference. Symbolically, mother and daughter blur together once again.

What is the Curse of the Crimson Throne? The 'official' answer is that it's the evil influence of the relic; but all this symbolism of blood and birth links it to a different crimson 'curse' altogether: menstruation, the marker of female fertility. Ileosa may be fertile, but she's anything but motherly; and by killing her husband, she ensures that she'll never have to bear his children. It's implied early on that her distaste for him might be partly due to her being a lesbian, but this also changes as the series goes on: her lesbian lover Sabina is a tragic figure, who learns too late that her love for Ileosa was never truly returned. Ileosa's status as stand-in Runelord of Lust might be thought to imply promiscuity, but in truth her sexuality seems to be completely narcissistic: her 'children' are simulacra, mere duplicates of herself, created through magical parthenogenesis and exploding into blood when slain. She has the young women of her city mutilated and imprisoned within suits of armour, forced to serve her as her 'Gray Maidens', their platemail acting as a guarantee of their continuing virginity. She surrounds herself with women devoted to the creation of death rather than life: female assassins who worship a preying mantis god (remember, female preying mantises often decapitate their mates), and the high priestess of a disease-spreading plague-cult whose goddess resembles a beautiful woman from the waist up, and a rotting corpse from the waist down. The whole adventure path is filled with a kind of horrified fascination towards female sexuality and sexual reproduction, a fascination which Ileosa herself seems both to embody and to share.

One of Ileosa's Gray Maidens. No, I have no idea how she was able to find enough attractive, athletic, easily-brainwashed young women to make a whole army out of either, but they make symbolic sense.

All this might sound like the lead-up to some kind of attack on the series for being sexist or misogynistic or something, but it's really not. Curse of the Crimson Throne is my favourite Pathfinder Adventure Path by miles, and one of the reasons it's so good is because it's not afraid to get stuck into all this really murky, icky, semi-conscious attraction-repulsion stuff. (Some of the adventures being pretty good also helps.) I suspect that's why Ileosa kept growing in stature as the series went on: as the symbolic locus of all these queasy feelings of horror and desire she could hardly help becoming an increasingly mythic figure, a 'mother-queen' who needs no parents, no partner, and no children, a demon-queen of blood and death and diseases, the fatal beauty who demands that all men (and all women) love her and despair. Just as Karzoug comes to stand in for every king, every boss, every tyrant, so Ileosa comes to stand in for every vamp and femme fatale. (More specifically, she becomes yet another re-imagining of Erzsébet Báthory, the Blood Countess.) The gender politics are a bit iffy - albeit offset by the fact that Curse of the Crimson Throne features plenty of female heroes as well as female villains - but it all makes for some nightmarishly potent symbolism.

Compared to Karzoug and Ileosa / Sorshen (who, as I've suggested, might be best understood as two versions of the same character), I feel that the rest of the Pathfinder villains really just can't compete. A snake-man who wants to build a snake-man empire. A giant who wants to build a giant empire. A half-demon who wants... something or other, for... reasons. (Seriously, what was the plot of Council of Thieves?) A pirate king who wants to carry on being a pirate king. Some loser necromancer who fucked up his own lich-transformation ritual. An angry drow who wants to blow up the world. In Shattered Star the writers try to up the ante by giving the PCs a chance to fight the guy who originally trained the Runelords - grandpa to Karzoug's daddy, if you will - but he's a sad figure, stumbling around in his clockwork reliquary, his palace filled with living memories that let the PCs experience just how thoroughly the Runelords fucked him over the first time around. (Sorshen, unsurprisingly, turns out to have played a leading role in this.) When, in an appendix, the book finally gives information on all seven of the Runelords, the other five are noticeably light on great achievements when compared to Karzoug and Sorshen. All through Shattered Star, the PCs keep exploring the ruins of the great works Sorshen and Karzoug (and occasionally those five other guys) left behind them, all of them built on an enormous scale. They are Mummy and Daddy, and in our deepest dreams they will always tower over us.

I guess where I'm going with this is that a good villain needs to mean something. Not in some clunky 'this villain represents the evils of the international arms trade' sort of way, which is rubbish in fiction and even more rubbish in RPGs, but in the sense that they need to draw imaginative power from something deeper than their own damn stat-block. They need to give the PCs who oppose them a sense that they are wrestling with something more than just flesh and blood. This doesn't mean that you need to try draping them with fully worked-out systems of symbolism - your players will just ignore it anyway - but it does mean that their trappings are probably more important they are often given credit for. Most of the other Pathfinder 'big bads' lack anything like this kind of evocative symbolic apparatus, and they are much the poorer for it.

Evil Dave the Dark Druid isn't memorable because of how many hit points he has; he's memorable because of his iconography of wicker men and stained stone altars, leaning menhirs and stone sacrificial daggers and creepy cults in isolated villages, all of which evoke a whole range of fears about just how horrible the primordial past might really have been. The real menace of Mad Suzie the Science Sorceress comes less from how many fireballs she can throw, but from her ghastly laboratories and vivisection chambers, the moaning things thrashing about inside fluid-filled tanks and the padded cells with bloodstains on the walls, tapping into a whole bunch of anxieties about the awful, irrational places that our seemingly-rational pursuit of knowledge might take us to. These patterns of imagery doesn't even need to be properly thought through; I'm sure they weren't in the case of Curse of the Crimson Throne. Just follow the symbolic logic of the concept, and see where it leads you. A little bit of evocative scene-setting can take you a very long way.

Just ask Queen Ileosa...

Random Encounter Tables: the Taiga

Getting back to the wilderness random encounter table series for ATWC. This one deals with the immense reaches of bog and forest that lie north of the steppe and south of the tundra, in a vast band a thousand miles across. The taiga is sparsely inhabited by humans, but the birds, animals, monsters, and spirits are plentiful there. Go deep enough and who knows what you might stumble across, lurking among the swamps and trees?

Random Taiga Encounters (roll 1d12)

1: This part of the taiga is the territory of a Wise (talking) wolf and his pack. The Wise wolf is hungry for decent conversation; the rest of the pack are just plain hungry. They will stalk the PCs at a distance, growling and howling and looking for opportunities to pick off vulnerable pack animals or similar, while their alpha calls out from between the trees that all he really wants is an opportunity to talk to someone interesting for a change. If a well-read and/or well-travelled PC is willing to sit down in the middle of a circle of hungry wolves and indulge his appetite for long, rambling conversations about art, philosophy, and current affairs, he'll agree to call off the rest of the pack and lead them off to hunt musk deer or something instead. 

2: A group of Children of the Pines, busily engaged in carving fantastical totems for the local spirits. They are superb woodcarvers, but have no other materials to work with, and eagerly offer to barter with the PCs for items of gold, silver, copper, or other precious metals that might be pounded flat and used to ornament their woodwork: in exchange they offer carved goods, the pelts of animals that they have shot, the healing sap from their veins, and knowledge of the nearby spirits. PCs who treat them or their totems with disrespect will be directed into the domain of a particularly psychotic bog spirit, who loves nothing better than drowning groups of stupid travellers in his bottomless swamps.

3: A band of hunters, armed with bows, guns, and traps, looking for any animals whose pelts might fetch a good price in the markets of the south. They are expert woodsmen, but extremely superstitious, living in a state of constant anxiety that they might accidentally anger the spirits of the deepwoods by killing some favoured beast. They are an excellent source of information on the surrounding woodlands, but will not associate with any group who they think are likely to anger the spirits by their words or deeds, knowing full well that such entities are usually firm believers in guilt by association. 

4: An absolutely enormous bear, regarded as sacred by all the nearby inhabitants. They are not mistaken in this: the bear is the favoured pet of a local spirit, which will be very upset if it is killed, although a competent shaman should be able to calm it down with the aid of some suitable offerings. The bear itself isn't especially aggressive, but it doesn't like being bothered and may lash out at people who refuse to leave it alone. Its pelt, if intact, would fetch a considerable price in the markets of the south.

5: A young married couple, emissaries from a taiga clan, on their way to the distant shrine of the Golden Lady: their people are planning a great migration, and they have been sent to beg the Lady for oracles regarding the fates that would await them in the various lands which they are considering moving to. (The young woman is also pregnant, and she secretly hopes that the Golden Lady will bless their unborn child, as well.) They are both skilled travellers, but they have never been so far from home before, and their supplies are starting to run low after navigating their way through the seemingly interminable boglands. If the PCs assist them they will offer to ask questions to the Golden Lady on their behalf, although the PCs will obviously need to go back into the taiga to meet their (now-migrated) clan in order to hear the answers!

6: A grove inhabited by a shurale, which recently stole two adolescent girls from a nearby village, hoping to keep them as the jewels of its collection of precious and beautiful things. One of them tricked it into letting her go within a few hours of being caught, but the other is slightly slow-witted and is still stuck inside its lair; the escaped girl is camping in the woods nearby, trying to work out some way of staging a rescue so that she won't have to make the difficult journey home alone. She will implore the PCs to help her in this, but begs them not to actually kill the shurale, as her community rely upon its knowledge of the spirits to avoid accidentally trespassing against them. The shurale itself is in a foul mood because of the girl's escape, and is determined not to allow itself to be tricked again. 

7: A flock of ironclaw ravens inhabit this part of the taiga, sharing their lair with a filthy and demented outcast whom they regard as a kind of human pet. They know better than to attack armed groups, but will send their outcast out howling and gibbering, to lead them into the most dangerous and treacherous parts of the forest; their hope is that they or their horses will perish there, and the ravens will feast upon the resulting carrion. They try to keep their distance from the PCs, but observant characters may spot huge ravens with glinting beaks and talons high up in the trees, watching them from above...

8: A shaman and her assistants, on a hunting mission; the chief of their clan has fallen gravely ill, and the shaman has discerned that this is due to his soul having passed into the body of a nearby elk, which she is now trying to hunt down for use in a healing ritual. She will gravely insist on the PCs not killing any elk they encounter for fear that they might end up killing the chief by mistake, and would be happier if they accompanied her until the hunt is over so that she can keep an eye on them. The elk in question is weirdly intelligent due to the human soul inhabiting it, and will be extremely challenging to catch. 

9: Outriders from a deep taiga clan, riding through the forests on domesticated trees, which creak alarmingly as they scurry through the woods on their innumerable root-feet. Their riders are odd folk with a not-quite-human air about them; they are searching for another deep taiga clan whose camp they believe to be nearby, and question everyone they meet in exhaustive detail as to whether or not they have seen any sign of it in their travels. They are an excellent source of information on all tree-related matters, but they are utterly uninterested in the outside world. Any PC who performs a truly extraordinary service for them - locating the rival clan and helping them to ambush it, for example - may be rewarded with a domesticated walking sapling of their own.

10: This part of the taiga is haunted by a mad, shape-changing Hortlak, which sneaks from shadow to shadow looking for creatures to devour. It can take the shape of any animal, but its mind is so shattered that it's constantly forgetting to actually behave like the creature it's pretending to be, meaning that the PCs are likely to be in for what will seem to be a series of extremely bizarre encounters with oddly behaving animals (a bear that hisses like a snake, a wildcat awkwardly walking on its hind legs, etc) as it tries to spy upon them 'in disguise'. Sooner or later its hunger will get the better of it and it will attack, preferably while the PCs are separated from one another or asleep.

11: A war party of taiga nomads, heading home with the spoils of a successful raid on a rival clan: furs, weapons, horses, reindeer, and slaves. They are jubilant and drunk and high on their own success, and their captives are eagerly watching out for any possible opportunity to escape and flee into the trees. PCs investigating the feud that led to the raid in the first place will discover it has involved generations of tit-for-tat raiding, with any pretence of moral high ground on either side lost decades ago. If the PCs do anything to distract the warriors then 2d6 captives will immediately make a break for it, with both sides loudly demanding that the PCs assist them: the captives yell wild promises of riches with which the PCs will be rewarded if they can help them escape back to their homes, while the warriors make blood-curdling threats against anyone who helps their slaves get away.

12: The domain of an angry spirit. Her mortal lover recently died in a hunting accident; now, enraged and inconsolable, she takes out her grief and frustration on anything that comes nearby. Terrible weather, falling trees, flooded rivers, runs of incredible bad luck, and forests that seem to rearrange themselves whenever no-one is looking are just some of the ways in which she will afflict anyone who intrudes upon her sorrow. The local inhabitants have learned to avoid the area, but if the PCs can somehow manage to console the spirit - through offerings, distractions, grief counselling, building a really nice tomb for her dead lover, or whatever else they can think of - they will be celebrated as local heroes. Attempts to contact the spirit are best made at her sacred pool, deep in the woods, where she sometimes deigns to appear amongst the reflections in the water's surface.

The lost colours of D&D

So I looked up ogres in the 1st edition Monster Manual recently, and I came across this text:

The hide of ogres varies from dull blackish-brown to dead yellow. Rare specimens are a sickly violet in color. Their warty bumps are often of different color - or at least darker than their hides. Hair is blackish-blue to dull dark green. Eyes are purple with white pupils. Teeth are black or orange, as are talons. Ogres wear any sort of skins or furs. 

And I thought: ...wait, what?

Ogres come in three colours: blackish-brown, yellow, and violet. They are covered in 'warty bumps' of 'a different color': so presumably you could have a yellow ogre with violet warts, or some even weirder combination. Their hair is either blue or dark green. Their eyes are purple with white pupils. Their teeth and claws are either black or orange. In short, I have been imagining D&D ogres wrong for my entire life.

All your ogres were supposed to look kinda like this.

Imagine, for a moment: a nine-foot tall brute of a monster with violet skin covered in yellow warts, orange teeth and claws, dark green hair, and purple eyes with white pupils. That, apparently, is what D&D ogres are actually supposed to look like. Did anyone ever describe them like that? Did anyone draw them like that? All the illustrations I can find just depict them as great big grey-brown thugs...

A little more reading soon demonstrated that the ogres were not an isolated case. There were yellow bugbears with brick-red fur, green eyes, and red pupils:

The skin of bugbears is light yellow to yellow brown - typically dull yellow. Their hair ranges in color from lusterless tannish brown to brick red. Their eyes are greenish white with red pupils.

There were silver-haired, amber-eyed elves wearing yellow clothes and purple cloaks, and nicknames based on their eye colour:

Grey elves have either silver hair and amber eyes or pale golden hair and violet eyes. The latter sort are generally called faeries. They favor white, yellow, silver, or gold garments. Their cloaks are often deep blue or purple.

There were gnolls with green-grey skins, reddish manes, amber nails, and armour made of horn:

Gnolls have greenish gray skins, darker near the muzzle, with reddish gray to dull yellow mane. Eyes are dull black and nails are amber colored. Their armor is of horn, metal plates, and leather; like their fur capes and vests, it is shabby, and the latter are moth-eaten and dingy, being brown, black or grayish pelts.

Gnomes were the colour of wood:

Most gnomes are wood brown, a few range to gray brown, of skin.

Goblins can be red, yellow, or orange (no green ones yet), with red or 'lemon yellow' eyes:

Goblins range from yellow through dull orange to brick red in skin color. Their eyes are reddish to lemon yellow.

Or maybe their eyes are actual lemons!

Red hobgoblins with orange faces and blue-red noses:

The hairy hides of hobgoblins range from dark reddish-brown to gray black. Their faces are bright red-orange to red. Large males will have blue-red noses. Eyes are either yellowish or dark brown.

The brown skin of orcs has a 'bluish sheen' and their ears and snouts are pink. (This is back when orcs were still pig-men, of course.)

Orcs appear particularly disgusting because their coloration - brown or brownish green with a bluish sheen - highlights their pinkish snouts and ears.

Red, orange, yellow, purple, blue... all those colours bled out of the game as time went on. Modern orcs are green. Goblins are green. Gnolls are brown. Hobgoblins are sometimes orange but usually brown. Ogres are brown. Bugbears are greenish-brown. Gnomes have human skin-tones, rather than being wood-coloured. Even elves have become far less glam-tastic than they used to be.

Now, there are probably a whole lot of reasons for this. One would be the move away from stories inspired by 1930s weird fiction, which drew its colour palette from the Decadent and Surrealist art of the previous generation, and towards those based on 'map fantasy' novels, which made use of a more chastened colour palette derived ultimately from the Pre-Raphaelite art of the 1840s. Another would be the enormous popularity of the goblinoids from Warhammer, which firmly fixed orcs, goblins, and their kin as 'greenskins' in the popular gamer imagination. A third would be changing fashions in fantasy art, away from the space-rock psychedelia of the 1970s towards the much more grounded grey-green-and-brown aesthetics of most modern fantasy illustrations.  (Erol Otus loved using neon-bright colours. We shall not see his like again.) The move towards more naturalistic colouration certainly makes the monsters feel a bit more 'realistic'; a green goblin and a brown ogre feel like variations on real creatures, things that might conceivably evolve in a natural environment full of mud and trees, whereas a yellow goblin and a purple ogre feel like escapees from a children's cartoon.

Still, though.... orange goblins. Blue-green pig-orcs. Yellow bugbears with red fur. There's something to be said for them. Their 'unnaturalness' could be a strength as well as a weakness: these sound like things which broke out of a wizard's lab, or crawled out of a crashed spaceship, or stumbled through a portal from a world very different from our own. They have an obvious out-of-place oddness about them. Why do bugbears have red pupils? What kind of fucked-up world do they see through their green-and-red eyes?

The bugbears walk amongst us!

In my games, I've always described humanoids as grey, or green, or brown; but the next time I run something with more of an old-school, science-fantasy vibe, I think I'm going to mix it up a bit. Bring back the blue orcs and the yellow goblins and the green gnolls and the purple ogres. If nothing else, they should act as big, brightly-coloured signs that we're not in Tolkien any more. 

B/X Class: The Half-Troll

It's exam marking season here at the university, and so my mind turns once again to B/X monster classes. I've always liked the idea of troll PCs, but struggled a bit with how to reconcile their signature ability, regeneration, with the B/X resource management paradigm: after all, if you can get all your hit points back after (or during) every fight, then you really have no reason not to keep wading into battle. Half-trolls are my solution, based around the idea that 'true' troll regeneration isn't passed on to their half-human offspring; they can regenerate, alright, but all that extra tissue has to come from somewhere. They can't just grow it out of the air: to fuel their healing, they need to eat. They need to eat a lot.

From a game-balance perspective, this means that the player of a half-troll has to balance two resources against each other: hit points, and encumbrance. How much food can you carry? How much food are your comrades willing to lug into the dungeon for you? How much food can you keep fresh and edible under adventuring conditions? You can hire bearers and pack mules, but they have their own problems: good luck extricating your personal baggage train from the middle of a panicked retreat. And, of course, it means that half-troll PCs will be constantly on the lookout for anything (or anyone) who can be used as an extra source of food. You know you want to eat the dead demon. You know you want to. What's the worst that could happen?

B/X Class: The Half-Troll

To-Hit, Hit Dice, Saves: All as per Fighter.

Weapons and Armour: Half-trolls can use any melee or thrown weapons, but their thick, clumsy fingers are ill-suited to using bows or crossbows. (If you insist on trying, you can use them with a -4 penalty to-hit.) They can wear any armour, but their huge, bulky frames mean that it must be made specially for them at double normal cost: human-sized armour will not fit. 

Experience Per Level: As per Elf.

Low Light Vision: Half-trolls can see perfectly in very dim light such as moonlight or starlight, but cannot see in total darkness.

Regeneration: Your body can repair itself at an incredible rate. When injured, you regain 3 HP every ten minutes. If reduced below 0 HP, you continue to heal at a rate of 3 HP every ten minutes unless reduced to more than twice your level in negative HP. (So a third-level half-troll dies at -7 HP, and so on.) This ability cannot be used to heal damage caused by fire or acid. 

Troll Hunger: You require an enormous amount of food to power your regenerative abilities. Every time you regenerate, you feel as hungry as if you had just gone for a full day without food, and must gorge yourself on a day's worth of rations at the first opportunity. (So a half-troll who has just regenerated 9 HP will feel as though they had gone without food for three full days.) Eating a day's worth of food in this fashion takes 20 minutes - which means that if you're still regenerating while you eat, you may finish your meal hungrier than you were when you started it! Normal limits on how much food you can eat at once, or how quickly your stomach can digest it, do not apply to these regeneration-fuelled binges: a half-troll can easily swallow down ten or twenty meals worth of food in a sitting, their swollen stomachs digesting it almost instantly to 'pay off' the enormous calorific debt incurred by their regeneration. 

Metabolic Limits: Your regeneration cannot function forever without food. If you are suffering from a number of 'days' of starvation greater than your level (either due to regeneration or extended fasting), your regenerative abilities will shut down, and will not work again until you eat at least a day's worth of food. 

(Note that this means that your regeneration will never actually make you starve to death - even a 20th level half-troll can only inflict the equivalent of 21 days of hunger on themselves through regeneration, which isn't enough to be fatal - but it can leave you very, very weak. Assume a penalty of -1 to all rolls for physical activity, including to-hit and damage rolls, for every five 'days' of hunger.)

Om nom nom. Art by Peter Mohrabcher.

The Reborn

This is a companion-piece to my last post on clockpunk undead. That was all about installing clockwork components, and clockwork brains, into animated flesh. This post deals with the opposite: grafting living brains into clockwork bodies.

Among the wealthier urban classes in ATWC, the use of clockwork prostheses to replace lost limbs is relatively commonplace. Lose a hand in a duel? Get a clockwork replacement. Both legs blown off in a freak gunnery accident? You'll be running around on shiny bronze feet in no time! Having to wind them up all the time is a pain, of course; but it's much better than the alternative. Given this, it's not that surprising that when they see a loved one dying of stomach cancer, or lung disease, or whatever, their minds immediately turn to clockwork alternatives. Can't we replace those as well, they ask their doctors? Can't we just replace the whole thing?

At this point, their doctors usually start trying to let them down gently. (Golden Ones are very good at this.) Yes, some amazing work is being done with brass lungs and clockwork-powered hearts these days, and, yes, some of the Steel Aspirants have replaced truly shocking amounts of their own torsos with mechanical substitutes; but turning grandpa into a brain-in-a-jar controlling a clockwork body requires a level of expertise in both medicine and clockworking which is out of reach for all but the truly astronomically wealthy.  Then there are the adjustment issues; it can take years to learn how to operate a robotic body via mental manipulation of the clockwork computer connected to your brain, and even then most people never get very good at it. Would grandpa really want you to waste his entire fortune just so that he could spend a few more years in a semi-functional robot body, silently weeping with frustration as he bumps into the wall of his bedroom yet again?

But there are two factors which ensure that the technology to transplant human brains into clockwork bodies is still used from time to time. The first is that the bodies, once built, are reusable; so a family which has already gone to the trouble of buying a clockwork body for grandpa, complete with brain-jar, might well keep it around after his final death, ready to be used by grandma or auntie or whichever elder of the family is the next to fall mortally ill. The second is that psychics, who have a lifetime of experience at manipulating objects with their minds, find the transition to clockwork bodies very much easier than other people: so if grandpa is part of one of the Mindblade orders, or an Adept of the Diamond Mind, then his telekinetic powers may well reduce the adjustment period he needs to learn to use his new body from years to days. A number of the most prosperous Diamond Mind schools even transfer their ailing senior tutors into clockwork bodies as a matter of course, viewing it simply as an efficient means of ensuring that their students are able to benefit from their teaching expertise for as long as possible.

Alchemical golem miniature, made by WizKids.

These, then, are the Reborn: clockwork automata with the brains of mostly-dead humans instead of clockwork computers inside their skulls, controlling their mechanical bodies via complex Logician implants which connect directly to their gearwork. (Some psychic Reborn opt to dispense with the implants and simply control their bodies directly via telekinesis.) Keeping a human brain alive in a vat of nutrients requires the attentions of an expert doctor, such as a Golden One or one of the Serpent Folk, of at least 5th level; this doctor must spend at least 30 minutes per day checking and adjusting the balance of fluids and the level of electrical conductivity in the brain-jar, or risk irreversible brain damage. (For each day in which this 'check-up' is missed, roll 1d6; the Reborn loses this many points of Intelligence, Wisdom, and Charisma, and if any are reduced to 0 then they die. Going back to their normal medical routines will restore lost points at a rate of 1 per day, but the Reborn must pass a FORT save or lose 1d3 points of each stat permanently.) Their clockwork body and logician implants also need to be maintained and repaired if damaged, which means that they or their attendant must have a Tech Rating of at least 5. (If they're a psychic who didn't bother with the implants, then Tech 4 will suffice.) Their bodies cost no more than any other clockwork body would, but the implants which connect them to their brains are staggeringly expensive. If you have to ask how much they cost, you definitely can't afford it.

Aside from this, Reborn follow all the same rules as Brass Men. Normally it takes them 1d6 years to get used to operating their new bodies, although for psychic characters this is reduced to a mere 1d20 days; psychic Reborn also have the option of winding themselves up using their own telekinetic powers, allowing them to operate indefinitely without any need of fuel. As long as they receive proper medical and mechanical upkeep, they can survive for up to (1d10 + half their Constitution score) years before finally suffering irreversible degradation of their brain tissues and sliding into final senility and death.

Rumours persist of a special alchemical formula which allows the brains of the Reborn to survive indefinitely inside their jars, even without medical upkeep. These same rumours usually also claim that the Wicked King had this procedure used on him when he grew old, and that he now lives on as an immortal evil brain inside a giant bronze murder-robot somewhere near the top of the King's Tower. Hopefully that bit, at least, is completely untrue.

Clockpunk Undead

Image by Scott Purdy.

The fundamental fact about clockwork machinery is that it needs to be wound up before it will do anything. It doesn't have to be wound by hand: you can use wind power, or water power, or steam power to turn the key and wind the spring, and the presence of ubiquitous coal-powered 'autowinders' in ATWC basically exist as an excuse for PCs to surround themselves with clockwork technology without having to spend their whole lives winding the damn things: instead they can just say: 'I take off my clockwork legs, throw some coal in the autowinder, and go to sleep.' But you need to wind them with something. They don't just run by magic.

They can, however, run by zombie.

They might not be the brightest or toughest of the undead, but even the humblest zombie is basically a perpetual motion machine. It never needs to eat. It never needs to sleep. It can crank a handle, or walk a treadmill, for weeks or months or years on end. It can't actually work forever: eventually simple friction will wear its fingers to the bone, or reduce its feet to stumps, and after a few centuries you'll just be left with a dessicated zombie uselessly waving the stub of its arm at the wheel it's supposed to be turning, or a legless corpse helplessly flopping beside a treadmill that it no longer has the power to move. But they can work for a very long time.

Traditional D&D undead are something I've deliberately left out of ATWC so far, partly because they're not a good fit for the mythology - the living dead of Central Asian folklore are ravenous horrors like the Hortlak, not servile drudges - and partly because I'm wary of adding a source of effectively 'free' energy to a clockpunk setting. But there's no reason that a few of them shouldn't exist here and there, created by odd little wizard cults, or by crazy Dahakans, or by the creepy aristocratic Bone Witches of the Wicked City; and when they do, then combining them with clockwork is the next logical step. Or logical by the standards of the kind of people who spend their spare time turning corpses into zombies, at any rate.

So here are some clockpunk undead.

Image by redblackstripe.

Corpse Puppets: These are zombies animated with a combination of necromancy and clockwork technology; the kind of thing you might expect a novice necromancer to create, using clockwork to work around the limitations of their black magic. An animated corpse is fitted with a clockwork exoskeleton which helps to move it around, giving its movements greater force than they might otherwise possess; clockwork machinery may also be used as a substitute for missing body parts, replacing lost limbs or rotted joints. Whenever it's not doing anything else, the corpse puppet winds up its own clockwork, ensuring that it's ready to lurch into action the next time it's called upon. Because the necromancy which animates them is so weak, corpse puppets are usually unable to do much more than flop about helplessly if someone disables their clockwork machinery.

• Corpse Puppet: AC 13 (leathery flesh and metal bars), 2 HD, AB 0, clumsy smash (1d6+1 damage), FORT 13, REF 16, WILL N/A, morale N/A. Tech difficulty: O0 M1 R2 C2.

Augmented Zombie: Whereas the Corpse Puppet uses clockwork technology to make up for the weakness of the necromancy that animates it, the Augmented takes an already fully-functional zombie and enhances its abilities through the addition of clockwork prostheses. There's no need to worry about the zombie dying during surgery, so the only limit is really the skill and resources of the builder: one might add extra clockwork limbs, replace arms with guns or fingers with blades, graft clockwork wings onto a zombie's shoulder-blades, and so on. Like corpse puppets, the augmented can wind their own clockwork parts during their own downtime, so fuel is a non-issue; they will normally need regular maintenance, however, as their zombified brains are hopelessly inadequate to the task of maintaining anything except the very simplest of clockwork machinery.

• Basic Augmented Zombie: AC 16 (armour plating), 2 HD, AB +1, gun arm (1d8 damage, 3 rounds to reload) or finger blades (1d6+1 damage), FORT 13, REF 16, WILL N/A, morale N/A. Tech difficulty: O0 M1 R2 C3.
• Advanced Augmented Zombie: AC 16 (armour plating), 3 HD, AB +2, 2 gun arms (1d8 damage, 3 rounds to reload) or 2 clockwork arms with pop-out claws (1d6+2 damage), FORT 12, REF 14, WILL N/A, morale N/A. Clockwork wings allow it to fly in short 'hops'. Tech difficulty: O2 M3 R3 C4.

Image from some Pathfinder thing or other.

Brainbox Zombies: These are basically what you get if you take the clockwork brain of a Brass Man and connect it to the sinews of an animated corpse rather than the gears of a clockwork body. (The top and back of the zombie's head are usually removed in order to make room for the bulky clockwork brain in its reinforced metal casing: thus the name.) The result is a zombified body controlled by a human-level clockwork intelligence, and thus vastly more capable of independent thought and action than any ordinary undead. Many brainbox zombies are also fitted with additional augmentations, and/or covered in armour plating: building a clockwork brain of this sophistication is neither easy nor cheap, and their creators will usually be keen to safeguard their investments! Unlike regular augmented zombies, brainbox zombies are quite capable of maintaining their own clockwork prostheses.

• Brainbox Zombie: AC 16 (armour plating), 2 HD, AB +2, gun arm (1d8 damage, 3 rounds to reload) or finger blades (1d6+1 damage), FORT 13, REF 14, WILL 14, morale 7. Tech difficulty (body): O0 M1 R2 C3. Tech difficulty (brain): OM N/A, R5, C5. (NB: The brainbox zombie has a Tech Rating of 2, allowing it to operate, maintain, and repair its own body indefinitely.)

Necro-Mecha: The pinnacle of the clockworking necromancer's art. Take a mech, but instead of a pilot, insert a zombie with its limbs welded directly to the controls: then weld the hatch shut. Replace the boiler with a bunch of zombies on a treadmill, with orders to never stop walking unless the mainspring is fully wound: then seal them inside. The result is, effectively, a fully-automated mech which obeys your orders, never needs fuel, doesn't need to worry about overheating, and cannot be boarded; all you need to do is maintain the machinery in decent working order. Necro-tanks are also completely possible.

• Necro-Mech: AC 22 (reinforced mech armour), HD 10, AB 0, giant sword (1d12+6 damage, ignores 4 points of physical AC) or swivel gun (2d8 damage, ignores 4 points of physical AC, 4 rounds to reload), FORT 5, REF 12, WILL N/A, morale N/A, immune to missile fire from weapons smaller than a swivel gun. Tech difficulty: O2 M2 R3 C4.

Give me a snake-man and I will explain the monster manual

People who look through D&D monster manuals often say things like 'how would this evolve?' or 'why would something like this even exist?' or 'why are there, like, a hundred slightly different humanoid creatures all competing for the same tiny ecological niche?'

I propose that all of these questions can be answered with one and the same answer, and that answer is a snake-man with an unlimited research budget and a whole lot of time on his hands.

Postulate 1: There was an Ancient Snake-Man Empire. (This is true in most fantasy settings already.)

Postulate 2: The Snake-Men maintained a large population of human slaves. (This is also usually true.)

Postulate 3: The Snake-Men loved freaky bio-magical archanotech alchemy and had very limited ethical oversight when it came to using it on mammals.

Given only these three postulates, I shall now explain D&D!

• Dwarves: Human slaves genetically modified for mining.
• Elves: Human slaves genetically modified for use as research assistants.
• Halflings: Human slaves genetically modified for doing delicate jobs on the inside of giant machines, in much the same way as small children were employed in Victorian factories. 
• Gnomes, Pixies, Quicklings, Leprechauns, and all those others small annoying fairies: Like halflings, but modified even further in order to carry out tasks deep within the machinery of immense archanotech engines, which required nimble fingers, instinctive magical awareness, and the ability to fit into very small spaces. Quicklings were emergency-repair units, able to climb through a machine to the heart of a malfunction in seconds. Gremlins are fairies who went rogue deep inside the gear forests and began sabotaging machines instead of repairing them.
• Orcs: Human slaves genetically modified for warfare. (This is why they're perpetual minions; they're always looking for a commanding officer, trying to fill a big snake-man shaped hole in their little orcish hearts. Sometimes they'll go to work for an evil wizard who really loves hissing at people, and they'll feel all happy inside, and they won't even know why.) 
• Goblins: Defective castoffs of the orc creation project. The Snake-Men tried to exterminate them, but the damn things escaped into the Underdark and multiplied. Their massive genetic defects, the result of their malfunctioning genetic programming, explains their very high rate of mutation and insanity.
• Hobgoblins: Goblins whose genomes finally stabilised at something approximating the desired target (i.e. an orc) after several dozen generations of chaotic interbreeding. 
• Bugbears: Weirdly stable strain of goblin mutants blessed / cursed with hereditary gigantism.
• Gnolls: Uplifted hyenas developed as a response to crippling difficulties in keeping armies supplied in the field; as scavengers, they were able to live on the corpses and carrion generated by their own campaigns. Flind sub-race bred for use as NCO class. 
• Humans: Uplifted apes genetically modified for use as a general purpose slave-race. An early success of Snake-Man bio-thaumaturgy: hardy, adaptable, and much less intelligent than they think they are. Formed the template for a number of subsequent slave-races developed for more specialised duties.
• Lizard Men: Uplifted lizards bred as soldiers and bodyguards for more conservative Snake-Men, who never really felt comfortable with having all these mammals running around.
• Kobolds: Dwarf strain of lizard men bred as household servants and pets.
• Giants: Human slaves genetically modified for use as shock troopers. Multiple sub-types were created for different environments (cold climate operations, high-altitude operations, etc), thus leading to a proliferation of sub-races.
• Ogres: Stunted and defective giant sub-breed. Too stupid to be useful as soldiers. Kept around for further experimentation after giving rise to Hags and Ogre Magi.
• Ogre Magi and Hags: Mutant ogres who lucked out and acquired hereditary magical powers. The Snake-Men weren't sure why this happened, and kept them (and the ogres) around for additional study and experimentation.
• Dragons: Gigantic bio-engineered terror weapons. Genetically programmed to assert dominance over a region through displays of terrifying force, gather up all useful local resources, and then hand over the materiel thus accumulated to the Snake Man armies when they finally turn up. Their hoarding behaviour is a result of this latter instinct; and now, as dragons sit on their hoards, they are occasionally troubled by the thought that they know they should be turning all this loot and magic over to someone, they just can't quite remember who...

• Trolls: Experimental creatures designed for minimum-fuss harvesting of tissues and organs. Go ahead, take its kidneys: they'll grow back in a couple of minutes!
• Demons, Devils, etc: Pure-energy beings created by the Snake-Men in order to explore the fantastically hostile environment of the Lower Planes. They were mostly built out of dreamstuff harvested from human slaves, which means that hell is basically an enormous projection of the collective dream-life of the slaves of the Snake-Men. (This is why it's so horrible.) These days they go around calling themselves things like 'Orcus, Arch-Duke of the Abyss', and don't like to talk about the whole 'being made by snakes' business. 
• Dryads: Magical tree symbiotes created as a solution to the problem of slaves constantly escaping into the woods in heavily forested areas. The dryad charms any passing slaves and keeps them with her; then the Snake-Man slave recovery squads just have to go from one dryad's tree to the next, gathering them all up for reprocessing. Nixies and lamia served similar functions for wetlands and deserts, respectively.
• Nymphs: Over-successful spin-off of the dryad creation problem, with supernatural beauty so powerful that it blinded and killed people rather than enthralling them. Kept around for their potential military uses.
• Minotaurs: Genespliced creatures created as slave-overseers and prison-wardens for populations of human slaves. Their bad tempers and inclinations towards violence were seen as desirable traits. Their ability to instinctively navigate mazes is an ancestral memory of their origins in the endless slave-warrens of the Snake-Men.
• Mermen and Aquatic Elves: Elf and human slaves genetically modified for service in and around the domed Snake-Man cities on the ocean floor. 
• Sahuagin: Genetically engineered bioweapon introduced into the seas to hunt down and exterminate escaped populations of aquatic elves and mermen, after traditional methods of containing and recapturing them proved ineffectual in submarine oceanic environments.
• Chimeras, Manticores, Harpies, and other apparently pointless 'crossbreed' creatures: The Snake-Man equivalents of PhD theses, these creatures were engineered by up-and-coming Snake-Man biomancers as demonstrations of bio-thaumaturgical skill. Like PhD theses, the best ones were preserved for posterity in menageries which functioned as living libraries. After the empire fell they escaped and established breeding populations in the wild.
• Slimes, oozes, gibbering mouthers, etc: Created by alchemical run-off from Snake-Man laboratories.
• Ilithids: Created to act as living components of a biological super-computer: their 'always on' telepathy was supposed to enable their minds to be connected into a kind of psychic wi-fi network, able to answer any question provided it was fed enough human brains. Unfortunately for the Snake-Men, the Ilithids soon deduced what was going on, mind-blasted their handlers, and fled into the depths of the Underdark.
• Beholders: Mobile weapons platforms designed for use against high-threat magic-using targets. Their eye-rays made use of bio-thaumaturgical breakthroughs for which the catoblepas, basilisk, medusa, and cockatrice had served as prototype proofs of concept.
• Ghouls: A bioweapon intended for use against population centres; each ghoul infects its victims, who rise as more ghouls in turn, until a large chunk of the population have been replaced by low-level undead easily controlled by any competent Chaotic cleric.
• Vampires: Recipients of a prototype 'immortality treatment' which, while sufficiently developed to have reached the 'human testing' stage, was still exhibiting an unacceptably high number of negative side-effects (blood dependency, light vulnerability, etc) by the time the Snake-Man empire fell. 
• Yuan-Ti: In the chaos which followed the fall of the Snake-Man empire, a bunch of desperate humans tried splicing themselves with Snake-Man genetic material in the hope that the guardian automata protecting the remaining supply depots would mistake them for genuine Snake-Men. It didn't work, but at least they got funky snake powers.
• All those giant animals all over the place: Early Snake-Man experiments in magically-engineered gigantism, of the same kind that would later be employed in the creation of giants, dragons, and ultimately the Flesh Moon Project. The Flesh Moon itself was last seen shortly before the final collapse of the Snake-Man empire, propelling itself off into space on its stubby little wings. If it's still alive then it must be the size of a planet by now.