NEPHILIM, PART TWO

NOTE:  This is the second part of an ongoing series of articles about Nephilim: Occult Roleplaying.  Part One can be found here.

The Hebrew word that is translated as “giants” in the book of Genesis is Nephilim. This word is believed to be derived from Nawphal, “to fall...” Biblical literalists believe that this passage describes a historical event – angels in physical form interbreeding with humans before the time of Noah’s flood...In an esoteric sense, however, these readings are incorrect and miss the point of the passage... The simplest esoteric explanation of the Nephilim story is that it was created to explain the existence of individuals with spiritual or magical abilities...The marriage of Angel and Human that opens the door to greater magical power and understanding...(this) has much in common with a successful marriage, and the “child” brought forth from this union is in fact the magician him or herself, enlightened and perfected...

Scott Michael Stenwick, The Descended Angel

NEPHILIM IS A GAME. This is obvious, but having just spent the previous article showing how Nephilim is a fairly accurate depiction of the Western Mystery Tradition, it needed saying.  A completely authentic game depicting the progress of the Initiate in their quest for gnosis would be monstrously dull indeed!  Thus, while Nephilim's entire core premise--the marriage between a spiritual being and a material one that elevates both--is an honest reflection of Traditional teachings, much of the game arises from the imaginations of its authors and players.

While future entries might further explore the myriad ways Nephilim weaves occultism into its saga of secret societies and elemental entities, I would like here to focus on Nephilim as a game and as, despite what you may have heard, an extremely playable one.  If I have done my work correctly, hopefully by the end you might consider picking up a copy and giving the game a try.

THE MYTHOLOGY

The lunatic is all idée fixe, and whatever he comes across confirms his lunacy. You can tell him by the liberties he takes with common sense, by his flashes of inspiration, and by the fact that sooner or later he brings up the Templars…There are lunatics who don’t bring up the Templars, but those who do are the most insidious. At first they seem normal, then all of a sudden…

Umberto Eco, Foucault's Pendulum

Following the publication of the first article, a brief conversation with one of the authors of the original French edition, Fabrice Lamidey, confirmed something long suspected and revealed something I had not been aware of.  Namely, that two of the game's literary influences were Umberto Eco's tour de force Foucault's Pendulum, and The Stress of Her Regard by Tim Powers.  Eco's novel is a favorite of mine; in Tokyo, where space is somewhat limited, most of my novels are now read digitally, but if I turn my head slightly to the right Pendulum sits there proudly beside a few rare others.  It concerns a group of bored Italian editors at a publishing company which opens a vanity press department for writers of occult books.  Reading these insane and conspiratorial manuscripts, the authors start to play a game in which they re-imagine all of human history as a behind the scenes battle between secret societies, and eventually concoct "the Plan," a theory want these societies are after.  The joke is on them, however, when secret societies do start coming out of the woodwork believing these editors have stumbled across their designs.  

I start with Foucault because Nephilim owes so much inspiration to it.  It is, in fact, a game that re-imagines all of human history as behind the scenes battles between secret societies.  Chief amongst these in both the RPG and the Eco novel are the Templars, and in both works the Templar's Plan is strikingly similar.  To set the table for the rest of this essay, then, let's dig into the mythology of the game.

Science is an Illusion, History is a Lie

In the primordial Chaos, the ether, centers of order began to form; the stars.  Our local one was the Sun.  Its life-giving and creative solar energies brought planets into being around it.  Each acted as a sort of lens, transmuting the solar force into something else.  Mercury generated the force of Air; Venus generated the force of Water; Mars generated the force of Fire; Jupiter formed the force of Earth.  Another body, the Moon, generated the Lunar force, and out beyond Jupiter on the edge of the Void a dark force manifested in the form of Saturn.

There are, of course, elements in the classic sense, meaning they have spiritual, celestial, and material correspondences.  Everything in the mythology of Nephilim depends on them.  Certain colors, certain forms of life, certain gems and minerals, days of the week, signs of the Zodiac, etc etc ad infinitum are associated with them.  

The energies of the five planets formed as nexus and a seventh body formed amidst them...Earth.  Too distant, Saturn initially had no influence.  Because the Moon was closest to Earth, the Lunar force was strongest and the dominant life form on the planet was the great reptiles, the Saurian Priest-Kings.  Decadent, alien, sensuous, they created a sorcerous civilization and engaged in all manner of perverse delights.  

Around this time another type of being, formed by conjunctions of the five elemental fields, started to appear.  These were the KaIm, beings of Air, Earth, Fire, Moon, and Water.  When the Saurians conceived of a plan to create a second Moon, a Black Moon that would blot out the hateful Sun and create eternal night for them to bathe in, the KaIm intervened.  The Black Moon exploded, damaging the White Moon so that it would thereafter wax and wane.  Their powers greatly diminished, the Saurian went extinct or into eternal slumber, and the KaIm inherited the Earth.

These beings possessed mastery over the elemental magic fields and could form bodies at will, but they lacked the capacity to evolve, change, and ascend to even greater heights.  This is because they were missing the Solar element.  To rectify this, in their empire paradise of Atlantis they started breeding life forms rich in Solar force.  They had particular success with a species of apes that came to be called "human."

The original plan was to perfect these humans into vessels for the KaIm.  They would fuse their elemental forces with the humans' solar force, uniting higher and lower into a Perfected Being.  Two things went horribly wrong, however.  On one hand, a KaIm known as Prometheus took it upon itself to "awaken" humanity and give them sentience.  On the other, the Black Star fell from the sky.

A comet or meteor from the planet Saturn, it smashed into the KaIm paradise of Atlantis drowning it, and melted into the planet's core.  The dark essence of Saturn infused the metals of the planet, especially iron.  This was a sort of "anti-element" that destroyed the other planetary energies on contact.  The KaIm fell, losing the ability to create bodies and losing their center.  Now subject to mortality, and severely weakened, they called themselves the Nephilim, or Fallen Ones.

Some humans learned how to use the new Saturn-infected metals against the Nephilim, rising up and hunting them.  Some wanted to destroy the Nephilim, others enslave and use them.  Thus the first Secret Societies were born. The weakened Nephilim might have fallen if not for an unexpected and terrible ally...the dread Selenim.

While most Nephilim were experimenting with Solar force and merging with photo-human vessels, a faction led by Lilith became fascinated by the artificial Black Moon element created by the Saurians.  Merging with it and shedding their other planetary energies, they became Selenim, creatures of darkness that devoured living Solar force (just as the Black Moon had been fashioned to eclipse the Sun).  Because the Black Moon was artificial, it was immune to the baleful energies of Saturn.  In the Ice Age caused by the Black Star colliding with the Earth, the Selenim began to hunt humans en masse, ravenous for their Solar life force.  The humans with their Saturnine iron weapons could do nothing against them.

And thus, a bargain was struck.

Humans and Nephilim began to form alliances against the Selenim.  The Nephilim learned how to preserve their spirits in material objects called stases, and could emerge from these to temporarily inhabit specially trained human shamans.  This gave the shamans the Nephilim power of magic, and protection from the Selenim.  In return, periodic incarnation allowed the Nephilim the focus and concentration they needed to pursue spiritual evolution and perhaps escape their fallen state.  Eventually, the Great Compacts was formed, in which the Nephilim were allowed to permanently fuse with certain royal and priestly lines.  These divine priest-kings built civilizations and empires, using their powers to rule over and protect the non-Nephilim human race.  History as we know it began.

Behind the Veil

In Nephilim, all of human history is a secret war between the Nephilim and the secret societies. Every major event veils a "true history" behind it.  The pharaoh Akhenaton, for example, was not a mortal king revolting against Egyptian priesthoods; he was a Nephilim revolutionary who shattered the Great Compact and defined 22 paths to Agartha, the transcendent, perfected state in which the Nephilim reclaims not just the lost powers of the KaIm but access to higher planes of being as well.  He carved these into 22 Emerald Tablets, the Major Arcana of the Tarot, each of which became a society of Nephilim, a tribe.  

Against these are the human secret societies, the most dangerous of which are the Templars.  These are not the crusader knights of human history--that was just an exoteric manifestation--but a society with its roots in ancient Egypt bent on enslaving the Nephilim and seizing control of the magic fields generated at the center of the Earth.  Some societies seek to use the Nephilim, some to serve them, others to bind them...but all are distractions and obstacles on the Nephilim's True Path.

Playing the Game

That "True Path" and the singular focus of the Nephilim is Agartha.  It involves raising one's elemental energies to the highest levels, mastering fields of occult knowledge and magical techniques, and well as completing the fusion of the spirit and the host into a single, united whole.  The few able to complete this find the doors of higher reality opened to them; they become immortal again, with mastery over the magic fields.  This makes Nephilim that rare RPG with an actual endgame.

The heart of a Nephilim campaign lies in getting there, however.

In a typical campaign, you create a character by choosing the spirit's elemental focus--is it an Air, Earth, Fire, Moon, or Water Nephilim--and one or more past lives.  Since their Fall, disembodied Nephilim do not experience the passage of time, have no sense of space, no real "consciousness," and cannot interact with the material world.  Worse, their elemental energies degrade over time until they cease to exist.  Thus each Nephilim needs a stasis, an enchanted artifact or object that holds its slumbering spirit between incarnations.  When the planets are right, it awakens and unites with a nearby human host.  If that host dies of old age or some other cause before Agartha, the Nephilim returns to stasis and tries again later.  These previous attempts are then the past lives.

When the Nephilim awakens again at the start of the campaign, it incarnates in a human host.  This host, the simulacrum, experiences a mystical awakening, a moment of revelation.  John Smith the English banker suddenly realizes he is also Orogariel the Phoenix, a Pyrim (fire Nephilim).  He is still John Smith--he knows his wife Miriam and his two children, he remembers his entire life--but now he also remembers being Memtet the ancient Egyptian charioteer, Iulian the Carolingian knight, and Sir Richard Stone, the student of John Dee.  He remembers their lives and inherits many of their skills and abilities.  More importantly, he remembers how to do magic, and because of his new elemental powers, is able to make it work.

What happens next is up to the player, the GM, and the campaign.  Does John Smith remain with his wife and family, conducting his search for Agartha on the side?  Does he slowly separate from them in an amicable divorce?  Does he simply vanish into thin air?  This is in the hands of the player; only they know if John's love for his wife and children is more important to the new Nephilim that Agartha.  The game does not dictate this.  Each player navigates the dual identities of the character.  

This is not a bug, it is a feature.  It is not unlike a comic book; how does Peter Park balance his relationship with MJ and Aunt May along with the duties of being Spider-man?

The Possession Problem...Again

Ah! Mr. Waite, the world of Magic is a mirror, wherein who sees muck is muck.

Aleister Crowley, The Goetia

Despite the above, there will always be a potential player or two who chooses to see incarnation as "possession."  Initiation is not for everyone, neither is Nephilim.  The world of the occult is a mirror that shows us ourselves.  If you look into it and see evil and the Devil, perhaps what you are really seeing is a Fundamentalist religious background you were raised with.  If you look at the Nephilim and see body-hijacking, possession, and rape...perhaps there are issues you should first deal with that a game cannot cure.

For most players, though, it is easy to get around this.

1. Meet Dax.  Around the same time Nephilim appeared to an English-speaking audience, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine audiences were introduced to Jadzia Dax.  Jadzia was a young woman fused with an alien symbiont, Dax.  Captain Ben Sisko had known Dax before in a previous host, Curzon.  Over the course of the show, we learn all about the symbiont's previous hosts, and see Jadzia die and Dax implanted in a new character, Ezri.  Each host is different, but has all the memories and abilities of its previous hosts.  This complex character is the perfect analogue for how to deal with a Nephilim character.  Have the potential player revisit the show.

2. Meet Castiel.  In the horror-drama Supernatural, protagonists Sam and Dean Winchester ally with an angel, Castiel.  Spirit beings, angels do not have bodies of their own, he has incarnated in a human host, Jimmy Novak.  This is something Novak prayed for, however.  He wanted union with Castiel.  If this helps the player, simply have the Simulacrum being a willing host.  Perhaps they are an aspiring magician who located a Nephilim stasis and awoke the spirit hoping for incarnation to occur.

3. A Second Chance.  Something I have used in previous Nephilim games is incarnation as a second chance.  One player decided his simulacrum was a human on the edge of committing suicide when the incarnation occurred and gave him a new purpose and meaning in life.  Another, and my favorite, was my college girlfriend, who created a simulacrum who was a seventy-five-year old dementia patient abandoned by her family in a retirement home.  Sitting in the same chair alone, day after day, she is reborn when an Air Nephilim comes to her and for the first time in years she gets up and walks out of the hospital.  Incarnation can be a blessing, not a curse.         

4. Feels Like The Very First Time.  Perhaps the easiest way around discomfort is for this to be the Nephilim's first incarnation.  Nephilim are born in the nexus of planetary energies...perhaps a new-formed Nephilim blindly incarnates in banker John Smith.  Suddenly John starts developing weird senses and magical abilities, but has no sense of being anyone else.  There are no past lives to remember.  Eventually he stumbles across the world of the Nephilim, joins one of the 22 Arcana, has his first stasis made, and selects a Nephilim name for himself. 

These fixes should open the game to just about anyone, but there will still be some for whom the human is the end-all and be-all.   Perhaps they can play a human ally of the Nephilim?  Though of this, I suppose Frater Perdurabo would say;

A Sorcerer by the power of his magick had subdued all things to himself. Would he travel? He could fly through space more swiftly than the stars. Would he eat, drink, and take his pleasure? there was none that did not instantly obey his bidding. In the whole system of ten million times ten million spheres upon the two and twenty million planes he had his desire. 

 And with all this he was but himself. 

 Alas!

Crowley, The Book of Lies, Chapter 27

In the next part, we will look in depth at what a Nephilim campaign might look like, and how a typical scenario might go.

NEPHILIM, PART ONE

NOTE: This is just the first in a series of essays examining Nephilim: Occult Roleplaying.  This time we look at the core concepts and some of the controversy around them.  Next time, we will look at the game universe in greater detail.

GIVING THE GAME ITS DUE

TO DATE the most popular articles on this blog have been the occult ones. This probably comes as a surprise to those who have joined me more recently as the focus has shifted largely to gaming.  My series on Andrew Chumbley's Azoetia, the basic principles of Hermetic thought, and even traditional witchcraft come out slightly ahead of even the most-read game reviews (to date, the stunning new edition of Masks of Nyarlathotep).  Conceptually, I don't disassociate magic, writing, or gaming however, so the recent refocusing hasn't been that much of a sea change in my mind.  

I mention this though because if you do the math, the bulk of the traffic here has been either for occultism or Chaosium games.  So it is somewhat astounding looking back that I never actually got around to dealing with the work that unites those two streams.  It becomes particularly shocking if I admit truthfully that in the (un)holy trinity of my favorite games, Chaosium's Nephilim: Occult Roleplaying might actually be slightly nearer and dearer to my heart than either RuneQuest or Call of Cthulhu.  

A BIT OF BACKGROUND

It's probably inaccurate to lump Nephilim in with the host of "urban fantasy" RPGs that flooded the market in the wake of Vampire: The Masquerade. Many critics do, but the fact remains the original French edition of Nephilim was published in 1992, not even a year after the 1991 publication of Vampire, and Vampire was not quite yet the phenomenon it would become. Given its quasi-Biblical subject matter and country of origin, it is far more likely that Nephilim owed more to 1989's In Nomine Satanis/Magna Veritas than any World of Darkness title. 

Chaosium's edition appeared in 1994, and was part of a new trend of translating European games into English (both Kult and The Mutant Chronicles had appeared in English the year before). Multisim, the publisher of the original, had licensed Chaosium's Basic Roleplaying System so it was natural for Chaosium to be the ones to bring the game to the States. However, this was a year after Mage: The Ascension had hit the shelves, and it was an easy assumption to make that Chaosium was just trying to ride its coattails. Nothing could be farther from the truth, however. Yes, you can look at the two games as magician protagonists waging secret wars behind the facade of everyday reality, but the two games are as different as day and night (or rather, Postmodernism and Tradition). Mage, with its "reality is whatever you make it" approach was the ultimate vehicle for a pluralistic, self-referential, epistemologically relative age. It had far more in common with Dr. Strange or The Invisibles than anything even vaguely resembling real life occultism. Nephilim, however, was immersed in the "Tradition."  The game was a love letter to perennial philosophy.    

Despite being a monster hit in France, Nephilim never quite managed the same sort of popularity dans le monde anglophone. There are complicated reasons for this. Shannon Appelcline, in his terrific Designers & Dragons (and this is the point where yet again I urge anyone seriously interested in the hobby to get and read that series of books) puts much of the blame of the fact that the English edition was rushed to print too early and poorly supported in its first year. This is probably true--Shannon was there in the midst of it and knows better than I--but being the guy who bought the rules the moment they hit my local game store, and started running it soon after, my experience was that Nephilim ultimately was the victim of its own authenticity. 

THE PROTAGONIST PROBLEM

Mage was an easy sell to a modern Western public.  "You wake up one day and realize that the world is what we make it and humans have the potential to be gods."  This is, ladies and gentlemen, pretty much the entire message of the 20th century.  Don't get me wrong, I like Mage, but it does seem designed to stroke our Postmodern human egos.

Nephilim was a far harder sell.  "You are an element spirit that fell from grace, and in order to re-ascend to perfection needs to merge with a human host, uniting the lower and higher worlds."  The player characters in Nephilim are technically not the humans but the spirits.  I say "technically"--and I firmly believe this was a crucial misunderstanding of the game--but the fact remains in the world of Nephilim humanity isn't the center of the universe.  In its struggle to attain Agartha (the transcendent perfected state) your Nephilim character has reincarnated in as many as a half dozen human hosts down through history.  The spirit needs the human, who possesses the vital solar essence that the spirit lacks, but humans are pretty much the junior partner. This doesn't quite masturbate the ego of the human player in the same way Mage does!

On the other hand, the core principle of the game is accurate to the Western Mystery Tradition, which has always held that humanity cannot save itself.  Bound to the animal world of matter, only those who form a partnership with a higher spiritual power can become inhuman and ascend to higher reality;  

...The mutation of one’s deepest structure is the only thing that matters for the purposes of higher knowledge. This knowledge, which is at the same time wisdom and power, is essentially nonhuman; it can be achieved by following a way that presupposes the active and effective overcoming of the human condition... 

Julius Evola, Introduzione alla Magia 

To this end the Tradition has long embraced the principle of uniting with an alien, spiritual being;  

(there) is an auxiliary divine, or semi-divine (daimônic) spirit...called a παραδρoç in Greek. Such auxiliary spirits were permanently attached to the magician after certain rites were performed, not just for the duration of the operation, but for life. In such an instance, the magician is thought to gain a certain kind of union with that entity—to become a “son” of that god or daimôn. The essence of the magician and that of the entity have become, or are becoming, one. This is why the magician can himself be worshiped as god or daimôn... 

Stephen Flowers, PhD, Hermetic Magic 

By the Renaissance, in Christianized Europe the idea of "semi-divine" spirits had become associated with the Biblical Nephilim, or "fallen ones."  Discussed in far greater detail in the apocryphal Book of Enoch, they nevertheless get several mentions in the Bible from Genesis forward.  Essential, they are half-human half-angelic entities, the Jewish equivalent of demigods like Heracles or Jason.  Hermeticism--a form of the Tradition born in Hellenic Alexandria in the first centuries after Christ--attributed to these Nephilim all of the arts and sciences, including magic (again, this is in the Book of Enoch as well).  

The Nephelim (sic), the "fallen" angels, are nothing less than the titans and "the watchers," the race that the Book of Baruch (3:26) calls, "glorious and warlike," the same race that awoke in men the spirit of the heroes and warriors, who invented the arts, and who transmitted the mystery of magic. What more decisive proof concerning the spirit of the hermetico-alchemical tradition can there be than the explicit and continuous reference in the texts precisely to that tradition? We read in the hermetic literature "The ancient and sacred books," says Hermes, "teach that certain angels burned with desire for women. They descended to earth and taught all the works of Nature. They were the ones who created the [hermetic] works and from them proceeds the primordial tradition of this Art... 

Julius Evola, The Hermetic Tradition 

These Hermetic precepts form the core of the Nephilim RPG. A race of spirit beings, fallen from on high, teach humanity all arts and sciences, guide human civilization, and merge with certain mortals to form half-human half-spiritual beings.  To achieve perfection, the spirit and its host slowly merge together through as process called Metamorphosis.  The human and spirit overcome their conditions and become something inhuman, something higher.  An Agarthan.  All of this is perfectly correct from the standpoint of the Western Mystery Tradition.

In the eyes of many potential players, however, humans became mere "flesh vehicles" for the body-hopping Nephilim.  That this spectacularly misses the point is lost on a generation of Postmodern thinkers for whom "esoteric" means "out there" (it literally means "in there") and mystical is some nebulous concept.  The goal of the Nephilim is the "chemical wedding," to become one with its human host, and from the timeless and transcendent perspective of Agartha, they thus always were one.  This is the message of the very last page of the book, which closes with a quote from the Sufi mystic and poet Jalal al-din Rumi;

The moment I heard my first love story, I starting looking for you, not knowing how blind that was.

Lovers don't finally meet somewhere.  They're in each other all along.

Nephilim was not, as some critics felt, "body rape" but rather a love story.  But from a modernist perspective, games where humans become blood-sucking corpses, werewolves, ghosts, mages, and mummies are all well and good...so long as it remains all about the human condition.  Suggest there might be something higher or beyond the human condition, and sales suffer.

TALES OF THE SUN COUNTY MILITIA: SANDHEART VOLUME ONE (A REVIEW)

INASMUCH AS ROLEPLAYERS "like" the idea of settings different from our own world, we don't seem to like them to be too different.  Sure, castles and knights are fun, but the whole "women as second class citizens" business?  Not so much.  The speakeasies and jazz of New Orleans in the Roaring Twenties are great...let's just ignore the Jim Crow laws.  We enjoy using roleplaying as a window into the Other, but like Narcissus what we really want is to see our own face, the familiar, reflected back at us.

The most successful RPGs do this; the best do it well.  In the 70s D&D had absolutely nothing to do with Europe or the Middle Ages; written by Americans for (at the time) an American audience, the game was basically the Old West in Renaissance Faire drag.  There were alignments instead of White and Black hats, but it was still about swaggering drifters riding from town to town proving their badassness and making fistfuls of cash doing it.  The feudal system?  Vassalage?  Nah...you made enough money to buy your own land and build yourself a fort at 9th level.  It was a stroke of genius, really.  TSR served Americans Tolkien with all the confusing British bits removed.

I would argue that Greg Stafford's Glorantha was a masterpiece of this principle, and for the very simple reason that it was built on myth.  Set in a Bronze Age world--and a flat world under a sky dome at that--20th (and later 21st) century players could nevertheless see the familiar reflected back at them in it.  The reason is simple; myths are timeless.  Yes, we can all sit around and debate "who the Lunar Empire is."  Like looking at Rorschach blots you see what you are familiar with.  They could be the Romans.  The Persians.  Assyrians.  But for a kid playing RuneQuest in Reagan's America, we knew damn well who the "Evil Empire" was.  Hell, they were Red too.  

The same goes for the Heortlings.  If you live in England, I suspect they look Celtic.  Northern Europe?  Probably Norse.  My friends and I thought they were clearly Mycenaean.  After Braveheart, they suddenly had woad and kilts.  But of course they are all of these things because Glorantha is this titanic genius mirror that shows what you want to see in it.

The best RuneQuest supplements (and for brevity's sake I am including Hero Wars/HeroQuest/Quest Worlds and 13G under that label as well), understand Glorantha is a mirror and use it as such.  Sure, it's a polished bronze mirror, of course, but we recognize ourselves in it all the same.  Think back to the classics, like Pavis, The Big Rubble, and Borderlands.  New Pavis is not a terribly accurate recreation of any actual Bronze Age city, but it is a mythic mirror of Tombstone, or San Francisco during the Gold Rush, a boom town where an intrepid adventurer can make a name for themselves.  If you are Australian, New Pavis might be "The Alice," with adventuring stockmen traversing the "Red Center" of the Praxian wastes.  The classic RQ supplements never got bogged down in the scholastic gobbledygook of recreation.  This is what made them great.

 Tales of the Sun County Militia: Sandheart Volume One is another example of an RQ supplement that "gets it." I am reviewing specifically here the "remix," a 103-page expanded version of the original 39-page (!!!) Jonstown Compendium offering.  Written by Jonathan Webb, with help from Nick Brooke, Darren Page-Mitchell, and Shaun Rimmer, what stood out to me reading it was how intuitively the authors understand why Glorantha is such a powerful setting and how to use that to their advantage.  Indeed, right from the very start on page 1 it is made clear to us that Sandheart is going to be a sort of dialogue between Bronze Age societies and our own;

It could also be argued that it (Sun County) is a xenophobic, misogynistic, repressive and strict culture. Although this goes against many of the values and virtues of a 21st Century culture, it also presents the player characters plenty of opportunity to both uphold the more noble values of Sun County whilst, at the same time, reeling against such a system. There is plenty of opportunity for role-playing the conflict between the nature of the county and the nonconformist nature of player characters. The secret is to make these conflicts fun and part and parcel of your game... 

In this succinct passage, Sandheart makes clear something that took me a dozen boxed texts in Six Seasons in Sartar to do, namely, to suggest that instead of whitewashing Glorantha or remaking it into something more palatable to us, it might be more useful to engage in a dialogue with it.

Now the book itself contains a single scenario, "No Country for Cold Men," as well as a detailed look at the Sun County hamlet of Sandheart.  Two further volumes, The Corndolls and Tradition, also available from the Jonstown Compendium, continue the campaign.  Sandheart is not a large community, only about 100 souls call it home, but it is lovingly detailed in glorious depth.  It's people, its environs, its mysteries are all there. 

 The heart of the book however is the Militia, because your player characters are it.  This is where the mirror comes back into play again, because Sandheart feels a bit like a police procedural.  Your characters enforce the law.  You are going to come up against lawbreakers, and it isn't always black and white.  So what do you do?  It's nice to get away from the Heortling Clan campaign but still see how adventurers in Glorantha work best as part of a society, rather than outsiders to it.  There is tremendous potential in Sandheart to capture the same feel of all those cop shows were tough choices are made.

"No Country for Cold Men" is the centerpiece here, and I don't want to spoil it for you except to say that the Militia is up against a gang of drug runners here.  I am going to use this opportunity to segue for a moment to the layout and the art.  Because it is here in Marc Baldwin's iconoclastic sketches that the Gloranthan mirror principle comes back to the fore.  Gloranthan art has always had a wicked streak, going through the decades often with tongue firmly in cheek.  I think back to the Argan Argar with his sunglasses and parasol.  Baldwin does it here by giving some of the NPCs direct references to our own world.  Let me show you an example;

The "Make Pavis Great Again" logo also appears in some graffiti.  No, it isn't Bronze Age.  But neither, really, is Glorantha.  In a subtle reference to 21st century America, connections and reflections are happening again between two societies fallen on hard times where people turn to drugs.

Baldwin does the bulk of the heavy lifting here, with Ludovic Chabant and Kris Herbert, and a cover by Jacob Webb.  The layout is Nick Brooke, fresh from his A Rough Guide to Glamour and looking at the terrific work the team does here makes me question the wisdom of going my books alone.  Sandheart is an example of how it is getting harder to tell the Compendium and the Chaosium books apart.  It looks professional, the art (and there is a ton of it) is engaging.  It simply looks great.

The book winds down with Brooke's Sun County Backgrounds, here replacing the parental and grandparental backgrounds in RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha.  This helps make Sandheart an even more useful tool to anyone wanting to run an RQG game in Sun County.  

With a foreward by Michael O'Brien, who brought Sun County to us back in 1990, Sandheart marks another step forward not only in the development of the Jonstown Compendium but in the entire Gloranthan Renaissance.  MOB writes of his frustration, back then, of RQ3 doing reprints and not new material.  On the opposite side of the planet, a younger version of me shared that frustration.  What we have now is an embarrassment of riches, with better and better Gloranthan material coming at us every day.  Sandheart is a worthy successor to Sun County, and it looks to be just the beginning.  Thoughtful, exciting, challenging, it is essentially what you want your fantasy gaming to be.  And if you learn something about yourself in the process, even better. 

    

   

     

SIX SEASONS IN SARTAR: THE COMPANY OF THE DRAGON - A FIRST LOOK

A NOMINAL SEQUEL

IN WRITING THE COMPANY OF THE DRAGON, the one thing I didn't want to do was a sequel.  Six Seasons in Sartar is a self-contained story; it has a beginning, a middle, and an end.  It struck me as silly to just have "continuing adventures" tacked on, as if the ancient Third Age poet Usuphus of Jonstown just kept cranking out additional epics like some Gloranthan Jerry Bruckheimer.  So from the start I knew The Company of the Dragon had to be something different.  It would have to be 100% compatible with Seasons, but also a stand-alone project.

Because the metafiction was key to Six Seasons, it proved essential here too.  It enabled me to establish a connection between the two sagas, but to also explain why they are so different in design and in tone.

For decades, scholars have argued that Usuphus's coming of age tale was pure fiction, without basis in fact.  But the discovery of additional Third Age documents in the 1960s changed all that.  The War Bands of Occupied Sartar is a history, the name of its author unknown, and it details the individual guerrilla warfare companies that comprised the Sartarite resistance between 1620 and 1625.  One chapter, "The Company of the Dragon," is the first real hint that Usuphus might not have made the entire thing up.  Though it doesn't mention the "Haraborn," it details a war band made up of warriors "whose homes were burned and lands taken" by the Lunars.  While this is only a thin similarity to Usuphus's protagonists, one striking detail is that this war band is described as having a draconic wyter, a coiled dragon spirit with rainbow scales.  This sounds suspiciously like Shah’vashak, the dragon spirit that becomes the patron of the youths in Six Seasons.

IN PLAY 

What this means at your gaming table is that The Company of the Dragon could, indeed, be played as a direct sequel to your Six Seasons in Sartar campaign. After the fall of the Haraborn, your player characters join the "Deer Folk" become warriors in the underground. The Company of the Dragon tells the story of that phase in their lives. On the other hand, the Company may have no connection to Usuphus at all, and could easily be run as its own campaign.

Beyond this, however, it means The Company of the Dragon is very different in both tone and design. Six Seasons is based on an epic poem; it is a fairly linear story. Company is a history, covering a five-year period. Instead of chapters building to a climax, the book is made up of 50 to 60 "episodes," much like the ones in the final chapter of Six Seasons. Some of these episodes can be used at any time, others are time specific. They become available at certain times along the timeline. In this way Company has a much more "sandbox" feel, but instead of encounters being triggered by wandering a round a map, they are activated by previous encounters and by certain times.

To keep the story aspect, however, Company introduces "character arcs." During character creation, each player and the GM will map out an "inner journey" the character will take. Avenging the death of a loved one. Finding someone they lost. Being torn between love and duty. Etc. As the campaign progresses, these personal stories weave in with the episodes to keep a continuity and to help the characters develop and grow as they pursue personal goals.

TONAL DIFFERENCES

The biggest difference between the two campaigns, however, is that Six Seasons was about a clan. The characters farmed, had families, community. It presented a fairly bucolic image of Heortling life.

The Company of the Dragon is about war. 

Though the Lunar Empire considers Sartar "pacified" enough to move their troops south to the Holy Country, the resistance aims to prove them wrong. Your characters will hold up and rob Lunar caravans, strike military targets, engage in espionage and diplomatic assignments, take hostages, rescue prisoners, fight battles, and yes...Heroquest...all while evading capture and hiding out in the highlands and the wilds. You will fight to survive the Great Winter than falls when Orlanth and Ernalda "die," and you will be instrumental in the Dragonrise.

Oh...and did I mention the sealed, forbidden city of insane Dragonewts?

This doesn't mean that community is not an important part of the story! The Company of the Dragon includes introductory chapters on war bands, on the sacred bonds that join members of them together. You are not some collection of murder hobos! You are a group of people who have put your lives into each other's hands, a bond closer than blood. Three types of war bands are given as examples; Vingan, Orlanth Adventurous, and Humakti, each with their own rituals, customs, and initiations.

THE DRAGON CONNECTION

Another difference between this and Six Seasons is scale and scope. Seasons takes place in one narrow valley over a six season period. The Company of the Dragon moves across Sartar and Dragon Pass, with forays into Prax and the Holy Country, and covers five years. This means a lot more of what we love about Glorantha enters its pages; Uz, Mostali, Ducks, Morokanth, and especially Dragons. In an intentional echo of Six Seasons in Sartar, Kallyr Starbrow will need the help of the player characters and their Dragon wyter to bring about the Dragonrise, and The Company of the Dragon includes a meaty chapter on "Draconic Consciousness" and Dragon Magic.

FINALLY, MORE 13G AND QUESTWORLDS 

While Six Seasons was always intended to be compatible with QuestWorlds/HeroQuest Glorantha (the blog contains an HQ conversion of the entire campaign), 13G was not covered by the Jonstown Compendium. All that has changed, and The Company of the Dragon will fully support all three games. In the coming weeks we will also be released a FREE 13G adaptation guide for Six Seasons! 

I will be sharing a lot more about the book over the coming weeks, and keep you posted about a release date. Please note; because of the new Jonstown Compendium guidelines I cannot offer a print version until the book has sold at least 250 PDF copies (as of this writing, Six Seasons is nearly double that and very close to Gold bestseller status, so with any luck, Company will get a print release eventually too). 

HARLEM REVISITED: THE LEATHERETTE EDITION OF HARLEM UNBOUND

THE SECOND EDITION of Chris Spivey's Harlem Unbound is officially the first Chaosium title I've gotten my hands on in the leatherette incarnation (well, unless you count two-volume Guide to Glorantha).  

Understand; I am a book nut.  I am an addict.  I have a problem.  Before I came to Tokyo, I had a three-bedroom apartment and two of the bedrooms were just for books.  Collector's editions.  Illustrated editions.  And yeah, a lot of leatherette.  But Japan is a nation that crams half the population of the United States into an area the size of California.  Land is expensive.  Rent is punitive.  Apartments are small.  In my two-bedroom here, I still have a room full of books...but I need to be careful.  90% of what I buy and read is in PDF.  9% are those books that I read in PDF that I knew I needed in paper.  Then you have that 1%.  Books like Harlem Unbound.  For those, you want the best.

I've already reviewed the book and will not repeat that here.  It's not only the best RPG sourcebook book I have read in the last year, but also the most timely.  Harlem gets absolutely everything right; the art, the writing, the tone, the details, the horror.  It somehow manages to be a Lovecraftain tour de force, a critique of the man's less palatable opinions, and a book that encourages us to use roleplaying as a tool of understanding.  I am still mystified how Spivey managed to fit all of that into one basket and then so deftly carry it.  As an author, it makes me jealous as hell.

But let's talk about the leatherette edition.

Like Chaosium's other hardcovers the last few years the print quality is superb, the paper high quality and silky to the touch.  The spine is impeccable and it lays perfectly flat.  It's lighter than it looks and easy to hold curled up in your favorite reading chair.  It simply looks wonderful.  The only possible criticism I could make of the design is that it doesn't have Brennan Reece's ENnie-nominated cover (good luck to both Harlem and Berlin!!!). 

No, sorry.  That was a lie.  I have another criticism.

Because sitting there on the shelf, next to Call of Cthulhu and The Grand Grimoire of Cthulhu Mythos Magic that leatherette spine looks so much more...regal.  Now I'll have to replace them with leatherette too...

...and the Malleus Monstrorum will be coming out in print down the road...I'll need that in leatherette...and Berlin, of course...

And the shelf next to it?  I can't have the Call of Cthulhu shelf outshining the RuneQuest shelf.  They will need to be replaced too...

You are evil, Chaosium.  You are evil.

         

     

MALLEUS MONSTRORUM 2nd EDITION: THE REVIEW

Monstrosity fascinates us because it appeals to the conservative Republican in a three-piece suit who resides within all of us. We love and need the concept of monstrosity because it is a reaffirmation of the order we all crave as human beings . . . and let me further suggest that it is not the physical or mental aberration in itself which horrifies us, but rather the lack of order which these aberrations seem to imply…

Stephen King, Danse Macabre

HERE THERE BE MONSTERS

WEIGHING IN at a cyclopean 480 pages, divided across two volumes—Vol 1 Monsters of the Mythos and Vol 2 Deities of the Mythos—the second English language edition of Chaosium’s Malleus Monstrorum is a full-color feast for the eyes and the absolutely essential compendium of Lovecraftian deities and denizens for the seventh edition Call of Cthulhu RPG.  Unlike many books of this kind, the Malleus is not merely a Keeper (GM) reference book.  For reasons we will explore below, this is a book every player can enjoy.

To be clear we are reviewing the PDF here.  Because there really is not that much you can say about a collection of monsters in a review (“um...so, okay, it’s like got a lot of monsters and stuff in it...”) we will be digging deep into some of the background of the volume (Now About That Name) and what distinguishes it from the first edition (A Matter of Monsters).  The third section, A Look Within, covers the nitty gritty details.  So pour yourself a brandy, draw a chair up beside the fire, and let us peruse this blasphemous tome of lore together.

NOW, ABOUT  THAT NAME...

PERHAPS THE FIRST OFFICIAL “MONSTER MANUAL” crawled its way out of the shadows in the late 15th century. To be clear, we aren’t talking about the “bestiary” or bestiarum vocabulum here.  That, as a literary tradition, extends at least as far back as Aristotle.  No, this isn’t about catalogues of animals and living creatures or any sort of “fantastic beasts and where to find them.” We mean a monster manual…an instruction manual, if you will, in the art of exterminating abominations.  The honor of originating that sort of tome, gentle reader, probably has to go to Catholic clergyman Heinrich Kramer.

Now before we deal with Kramer, let us linger a moment on that word, “monster.”  The word comes to us from the Latin monstrum, which indicates a curse, or a warning, from the gods.  A monstrum—a deformity or malformity—makes us aware of the deities’ displeasure.  When your cow gives birth to a two-headed calf, it is the gods telling you something,  This “making aware of” aspect of the word links it to ones like demonstrate or remonstrate.  It signals to us that a monster isn’t just an aberration, but a sign.

File that away.  We are coming back to it in the next section.

Now, for Heinrich Kramer, a calf born with two heads, curdled milk, impotence, failed crops, and other similar monstrum were all signs of the same thing; witches.  Thus in 1487 he authored the first great monster manual, the Malleus Maleficarum.  While this volume of fever-dreams and misogynistic ramblings didn’t technically start the witch trials of the next two centuries—Pope Innocent VIII’s Summis desiderantes affectibus was the technical culprit—the Malleus was clearly the accelerant.  

The “Hammer of the Witches” reads like a modern horror novel, and like a good work of horror fiction it is really about rubbing our faces in our own phobias and complexes than anything else.  For Kramer, the complex clearly was with women.  He could have just as easily called his work the Malleus Maleficorum, with an “o” rather than an “a,” but he intentionally selected the feminine title.  This is in character with the man.  Two years before the Malleus saw publication, Kramer had put Helena Scheuberin, the wife of a wealthy burgher, on trial for witchcraft.  Described as “an independent woman not afraid to speak her mind,” Kramer had been so much more obsessed with her sexuality and toilet habits during the trial than with spells and devil worship that she was acquitted and the Bishop of Innsbruck expelled the clergyman for insanity.  Unable to let go of it, Kramer took his obsession and fear and wrote the book that made him famous.  A guide for hunting witches.

Five centuries later, when author Scott David Aniolowski had assembled a compendium of horrors for the Call of Cthulhu roleplaying game, Frank Heller and German game company Pegasus Spiel suggested a title that referenced Kramer and his “Hammer of the Witches” directly.  That title, Malleus Monstrorum, worked on a surprising number of levels.  

On one hand, Malleus Monstrorum might be the most “on-the-nose” title for an RPG game book of this kind.  “Hammer of the Monsters” pretty much describes the role monsters have played in RPGs since the beginning.  To borrow an old Japanese proverb, they are the nails that stick up, and it is the job of player characters to hammer them down.  This has been tradition since that other alliterative tome, the AD&D Monster Manual.  Never mind that the act of monster hammering in Call of Cthulhu involves a great deal more madness, gibbering, and unspeakable horror than most other RPGs, it still boils down to player characters ridding the world of monsters.    

One the other hand, Malleus Monstrorum is very specifically suited to this particular RPG.  In a game where the player characters are called “Investigators,” a reference to arguably the most famous manual for “Inquisitors” (from the Latin, “one who searches for answers”) was a perfect fit.  That Cthulhu Investigators spend much of their time quite literally hunting witches—or “cultists”—only serves to deepen the parallel.  Further, one cannot read Lovecraft’s descriptions of the orgiastic rites of Cthulhu’s worshippers, or the depiction of witch-cults in pieces like “The Dreams in the Witch House,” without thinking of Kramer’s fevered depictions.  That Lovecraft had read the Malleus is known—“Koenig has all the famous old witchcraft books of the Middle Ages—like the "Malleus Maleficarum", which I'm now borrowing from him” (H. P. Lovecraft to Emil Petaja, 29 Dec 1934, LWP 396—but from his writings it is very clear that Lovecraft’s notions of witches in general owes much to it.  Kramer’s shadow lies across many of Lovecraft’s pages.

A MATTER OF MONSTERS

The titular switch from Maleficarum to Monstrorum is a critical distinction, however, and here we come to an essential component of Chaosium’s new 2nd edition. As an exhaustive compendium of Call of Cthulhu horrors, the first edition was without peer.  Part of its tremendous charm was its art direction and illustration; departing from usual approaches, it showed impressions of its horrors captured in woodcuts, sculpture, period posters, etc.  We never saw the monsters, but rather people’s impressions of the monsters.  This is “good Lovecraft,” as Lovecraft understood what it is exactly that makes monsters work;

“The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown...” 

Lovecraft, Supernatural Horror in Literature

Of the two critical elements distinguishing a Call of Cthulhu monster from one in, say, D&D, the unknown surely must be the first.  Lovecraft jettisoned gothic horrors because they were too familiar; his barely described and largely indescribable terrors horrified because they could not be quantified or categorized.  The art of the first edition was an expression of this principle. 

The second edition accentuates it, however, by moving some of the material stuck in the first edition’s appendices right up front and expanding on it.  The entire first chapter is now about not describing the monsters, or rather, describing them in a way that keeps the unknown front and center.  “The moonlight splashes across its matted fur, the silver lost in inky black patches that might be ichor, might be blood...long and lanky, it lopes towards you, a muzzle vaguely canine, features vaguely human.”  Is it a werewolf?  Is it a ghoul?  Something else?  The crux of the entire first chapter is how to make any of the entries that follow unknowable, using the senses and impressions rather than just announcing “you see a Deep One” and plopping a miniature on the table.

Again, all this was in the appendices of the first edition, but the second edition makes it a priority.  In fact the second volume, which covers the deities of the Mythos, begins in exactly the same way, and explains its reasoning; 

The Cthulhu Mythos is unknowable to humanity. What scraps of information are known are drawn from rare and fragmentary texts, conversations with wizards and witches, and from life-altering exposure. Thus, each entry highlights the often-conflicting data concerning these beings, leaving each Keeper to draw their own conclusions and mold the entities to fit their own concept of the Mythos. What “canon” exists is loose and unreliable. 

This makes the second edition of Malleus a book that even players can enjoy and have on their shelves.  No two Keepers will run monsters the same way, and if they follow the advice in these tomes, it won’t matter really if the players have read the entries.

This brings us the the second critical point concerning the Mythos and its monsters.

Humans filter their perceptions through the world as they understand it. For some who receive a glancing touch of the Mythos, perhaps a fleeting vision or dream, the connection to the entity sending the “message” is unreliable and vague, causing such messages to be misunderstood. The truths held within such communications are mostly lost, with such humans having no genuine appreciation or conception of what took place... (Vol 2, p. 12)

We spoke earlier of monsters as being a “sign” from the gods.  In the ancient world, the monstrous was evidence of the gods’ displeasure.  In the Middle Ages, the monstrous was often evidence of Satan at work.  With the Enlightenment, and the rise of Gothic literature as a direct result, the monstrous in these tales was often evidence that we were wrong; that the new age of Science and Reason was mistaken and that the old medieval world of supernaturalism still held sway.  Lovecraft took the monstrous in a new direction.  In the Mythos, the monstrous is not so much an aberration, but evidence that our very concept of order is an error.  We cannot know the truth, our minds are incapable of grasping it.  The second edition is very aware of this, and this awareness is present on every page.

A LOOK WITHIN

Now for the details.

Authors Mike Mason and Paul Fricker join original Scott David Aniolowski for the second edition, with cover and interior art by Loïc Muzy.  Volume 1, Monsters of the Mythos is a 218 page PDF, Volume 2, Deities, is 266.  As mentioned both are full color, and the fonts, lay out, and over all style is identical to over 7th edition Call of Cthulhu products.  The editing, clarity of prose, and user-friendliness that Cthulhu has had under the watchful eye (well, probably eyes) of Mike Mason is all evident here.  

Monsters contains more than 15o entries, and after the foreword, consists of a chapter on running and creating monsters (described above), one on creatures of the Mythos, creatures from folklore, and finally beasts (animals).  There is a guide to pronunciation and an extensive index.  Deities starts with another introduction, a lengthy chapter on the unknowable gods of the Mythos, the god’s themselves, then another pronunciation guide and index.

As touched on above, each entry gives a Keeper a spectrum of choices to make in describing and tailoring the monsters.  With gods this often takes the form of avatars and manifestations.  Hastur, for example, is described with separate avatars like the Amber Elder, the Ravening One, and of course the King in Yellow.  Cthulhu appears as B’Moth, Chorazin, and Leviathan.  Monster entries all include alternate names and whatever detail on subspecies or technology is appropriate.  The total effect of all of this is to give Keepers a palette of Mythos beings with which to paint their own campaigns, driving home the point that no two encounters with Shub Niggurath or Yog Sothoth should ever be the same. 

Obviously all entries conform to the style and mechanics  specifics of the 7th edition.

I cannot not say something about the art.  On the whole, I have let it speak for itself by gracing this review with it. Muzy is clearly a singular talent, and his images are jaw-dropping.  As with the RuneQuest Glorantha Bestiary, which also chose to use a single artist, the unity of vision Muzy brings to the project elevates it.  If I was forced to complain, I would probably have to settle on the complaint that there is not an illustration for every entity.  In fact, there are not a lot of illustrations for many entities.  I am not clear if this is a function of not wanting to work poor Loïc to death or a feature of the approach the text itself takes (again the emphasis is on not showing the monsters, making excessive illustration counter-productive).  Regardless, the art feels sparse.  What is there, however, is some of the best we have seen.  Again, ignore my two cents and just gaze upon the covers.  

FINAL THOUGHTS

Let’s not pretend here.  Alongside The Grand Grimoire of Cthulhu Mythos Magic and the core rulebooks, the new Malleus Monstrorum forms a kind of unholy “must-have” trinity.  Often when I get review copy PDFs I question whether or not I will invest in print copies.  I live in downtown Tokyo.  Bookshelf space is at a premium. But owning the print version of this is not even a question in my mind, nor should it be in yours.  It is, without doubt, the definitive Call of Cthulhu monster guide.  It has absolutely everything you could possibly want from a Cthulhu product; true to Lovecraft with room for Keepers and players to deviate, respect for the fact this is a literary tradition while at the same time bringing 40+ years of Chaosium game design, merciless editing and top shelf production values.  So really there is no point in fighting gravity here.  You want this.  You want the PDF.  You want the hardcovers.  You want the inevitable leatherette editions to come.  This is all a forgone conclusion.  The good news is, the text backs your desires up.  There are monster manuals and then there is the Malleus Monstrorum. 

Kramer might have gotten there first, but Chaosium has perfected the art form.