Friday Encounter: Double Agents

This encounter assumes a conflict that the PCs are outsiders to, so it's best used as something the party comes upon while traveling on the road. Ideally, at least one PC should have ties to nobility. As always, feel free to modify this encounter to suit your campaign.

Background

Like many small feudal subjects, the village of Rielenberg answers directly to its lord. Also like many small feudal subjects, the results of this arrangement depend heavily on how reasonable this particular lord is. Rielenberg, as it so happens, is under the thumb of Baroness Gloria von Habischem, a woman who believes it is the right of all nobility to do as they will, unfettered by the voices of the peasantry. After all, they should be grateful the nobles even allow them to stay on their land - who are they to complain?

Recently, Baroness Gloria's forces repelled a bandit raid elsewhere in her territory, but the cost of maintaining and raising a sufficient army put strain on her coffers. In response, she subjected the people of Rielenberg to crippling taxes in order to make up the cost. For the people of Rielenberg, who have long felt that the nobles were uncaring and indifferent to their concerns, this was the last straw. The people are planning a revolt in secret, uniting around the leadership of the blacksmith Lorenz Bahr, a charismatic visionary who feels the time is right for the peasants to fight for their freedom. Though they are sure they don't stand a chance in a head-on assault of the Baroness's castle (not knowing how meager the garrison is), they have begun stockpiling weapons and plotting movements to disrupt her patrols in what they hope will be the first step in a long guerilla war.

However, the forces of the Baroness have picked up rumors of these plans. And when the PCs arrive on the scene, it'll soon be realized that their status as outsiders could be valuable to either side...

The Encounter

While traveling, the PCs should come upon either the village of Rielenberg or Baroness Gloria's castle, which is located about a mile to the northeast. Decide which location you would prefer to use. The players may be swayed by whichever side they hear from first, so keep that in mind.

If they go through the village first, they will find the people are struggling to sustain themselves under the burden of taxation - their fields are poor, they don't have much to sell at the market, and they can barely scrounge together enough food to offer a meal at the local tavern. If the PCs enquire about this, the people will explain that they are suffering under the Baroness's taxes. They will direct them to Lorenz, who they explain is forging weapons on the side and hiding them at caches around the village (in barrels, under hay bales, and the like). Lorenz sees an opportunity in the party - as experienced fighters, they might stand more of a chance in taking on the Baroness's forces than any of them could alone. If they seem trustworthy, he will let the party know of the location of his weapon caches and inform them that he is planning on ambushing a patrol of the Baroness's guards under the cover of night in three days' time, where he plans to hold the guards for ransom. He invites them to participate if they wish.

If the party visits the castle first, they will similarly discover that it is facing hard times. The castle's halls are empty and the guards are few in number, making it clear that it was built to hold a larger garrison than it currently does, and everything is covered in dust, as there are not enough servants to attend to its upkeep. If the party seeks an audience with the Baroness, it will be granted; alternatively, if there are any nobles in the party, one of the Baroness's knights will invite them to the castle, hoping that they might be sympathetic to her cause. There, the Baroness will explain her situation, noting that she suspects that the peasants are planning an uprising under her nose - they have, after all, been speaking in whispers whenever the guards are around, and moving around barrels and hay bales for seemingly no reason. The castle surely will not be able to defend itself against a revolt unless it is crushed soon - and she hopes the PCs might be able to turn the tide. She requests that the PCs gather information on any potential revolts, reporting back to her on their movements or leaders. She emphasizes that under no circumstances can the peasants learn that the castle is undermanned, or they would surely be emboldened to attack.

For this encounter to work properly, the PCs should have the opportunity to visit both parties and hear both sides of the story. Both factions feel the party would be able to help them - as outsiders, they would hold no preconceived loyalties. Naturally, this makes for the perfect opportunity for the PCs to act as double agents - they have information on each side that the other side would want. It's only a matter of choosing which side to aid.

Further Developments

If you want, you could easily extend this encounter with the PCs performing missions for whichever side they choose. The peasants, for instance, might request the party's aid with transporting weapons to potential allies, while the nobles might need them to set a trap for the peasants during one of their mobilizations. To make things really interesting, both sides can give the PCs missions as long as they believe they're on their side, and the PCs can aid or sabotage them accordingly. You can keep this going as long as you, and your players, find it entertaining.

The end goal for the peasants will be storming the Baroness's castle and deposing her from the throne, while the end goal for the nobles will be stamping out the leaders of the rebellion. Ultimately, the conflict should culminate in one of these things, and the PCs may well be involved on the front lines.

If the PCs sided with the peasants, the people of Rielenberg will have little to offer them, but they will be hailed as heroes every time they return to town, and the people will be happy to provide them aid. Any of the townsfolk will give them a bed for free if they need to stay the night, and they will lend their services if called upon to the best of their ability. Lorenz will also offer to forge each of the PCs an enchanted weapon of their choosing - it has +1 to all to-hit and damage rolls, or +2 if the attacks are made against a noble or similar authority figure.

If the PCs sided with the nobles, Baroness Gloria will be thankful for their aid and grant them all knighthood, with all the privileges that entails. They will be able to stay at the castle as welcome guests whenever they wish, and she will provide them land on which to establish a manor of their own. This could be a good introduction to domain-level play, if one so desires.

Regardless of the outcome, the status quo will surely be shaken up, and this can be used to fuel further adventures. If the Baroness is deposed, it will leave a power vacuum that must be filled at some point - and her feudal masters might step in, not wanting to leave such a powerful peasant levy unchecked. If the rebellion is crushed, it might well inspire another such group to take up arms some time down the line, seeing the attacks on the people of Rielenberg as a gross abuse of power they are motivated to fight against. And the bandits that plagued the Baroness's forces might well return, too...

In Defense of Gor, Part 3: Gaming on Gor

Now that we've gotten the disclaimers out of the way and taken a look at the history of Gorean influences on the gaming scene, we can finally get to the stuff I've been wanting to talk about. We now know that many individuals in the early TRPG community read the Gor novels and used elements of the series to influence gaming materials. But is there any particular reason why Gor was used as an influence by so many gamers, as opposed to any other novel? I, personally, think there's something to that. Looking deeper into the setting, we can see that the way it's set up makes it very easy to facilitate RPG campaigns, especially those in the old-school milieu.

In fact, after reviewing these things, I am convinced that, had he been born ten years later, John Norman would likely have been an early contributor to the RPG industry. To date, the only official Gor RPG is Postmortem Studios's Tales of Gor, originally published in 2017. We have no reason to believe that Norman ever played an RPG, or even knows what one is. But he was an advocate of roleplaying as a activity in Imaginative Sex, citing it as a natural behavior that one should not be afraid or ashamed of engaging in, and as a safe outlet for desires that would be unethical or impossible in real life. Yes, he's talking about a different kind of roleplaying game here, but it isn't hard to see how he might be intrigued by tabletop gaming if he had been in the circles where it first arose. For that matter, the setting he created shares many traits in common with some of gaming's most enduring settings, as well as the ideals elaborated by those writing on the subject.

Before we begin, though, I would like to include an addendum to my last post. White Dwarf, back when it was a general gaming magazine and not solely a Games Workshop-related publication, used to run a column called Fiend Factory, listing new monsters for D&D, often submitted by readers. Many of those entries would later be collected in the Fiend Folio, making that book and its monsters a part of the British old-school gaming tradition. Issue 49 features a Fiend Factory article themed around insects, and includes stats for the golden beetle, a creature prominently featured in 1968's Priest-Kings of Gor. The entry, submitted by Steven Quayle, specifically lists the novel as its source material. Once again, we have evidence that many gamers of the era read Gor novels and wished to bring them to the table.

Anyway, back to our subject of the day: what makes Gor so gameable?

1. Deep, Readily Accessible Lore

Though the novels are infamously dry and many find the prose unexciting, it cannot be denied that a lot of thought went into the creation of Gor as a setting. Over the course of 38 books, Norman extensively details multiple cultures, locations, and characters, exploring what this world looks like, who lives there, and how these people think, act, and behave. We know how Goreans fight in wars, what their etiquette is like, how their castes are structured, what they eat, and so on. This is the same sort of information that might be found in an RPG setting guide - and because of it, it would be quite easy to run a campaign that feels like it authentically takes place in the same world as the original stories.

In fact, many books in the series focus on a journey to a particular region of Gor; for instance, Tribesmen of Gor takes place in the Tahari Desert, and Explorers of Gor focuses on the equatorial jungles of Schendi. They describe the inhabitants of these regions, some key locations there, and the sorts of things that may be encountered. It can be argued that Norman's focus with these entries is more on worldbuilding than storytelling - which makes them subpar as novels, but quite like a systemless RPG sourcebook, with a narrative attached. Much like the Mystara Gazetteers, these books detail specific parts of the setting and bring them to life, creating a deeper world.

It isn't hard to see how useful this much lore would be for the purposes of roleplaying in the setting. I'm far from the first person to note this - in the 90s, there was a substantial Gorean roleplaying community on IRC, which to my knowledge has mostly moved over to Second Life these days. While, yes, the people here are mostly engaged in a different kind of roleplaying, they still found that the books provided enough material for them to conceivably envision themselves in the roles of characters in the setting - and the same could be said for players in an RPG campaign.

I'm reminded of this post on Erin Hunter's Warrior Cats series, arguing that the series is technically an RPG. Though is is not presented as an RPG, and includes no hard mechanics like stats or die rolls, the setting is detailed and codified enough that one can easily understand how new stories with new characters could be told within the framework of the world - as is evident when one sees the multitude of original characters created by the fandom. Gor is much the same way. Even before it received an RPG, one could argue that the novels provided all the contextual details and dynamics to ground roleplaying in the setting and make sure it was consistent and in keeping with canon.

Of course, the fact that all this worldbuilding is contained in novels (and ones that can prove impenetrable to casual readers) makes for a barrier to entry. Luckily, one should never underestimate the dedication of fetishists. During the boom of Gorean online roleplaying, a number of fan sites sprung up to catalogue the lore of the novels in order for those interested to better understand the setting. In these articles, I've linked extensively to Luther's Gorean Education Scrolls, a series of articles cataloguing various aspects of Gorean worldbuilding originally written for roleplayers. In my opinion, this is the most accessible way to get into Gor, as it presents the relevant setting details without needing to slog through the original context - and it provides plenty of material that would be useful for would-be DMs. It does, however, only cover material through Witness of Gor, the 26th book in the series; more material has been published since. The Gorean Cave provides quotes directly from the text on a number of subjects, but isn't as easy to navigate. There is also an official illustrated encyclopedia released by Postmortem Studios entitled World of Gor; although released in conjunction with the RPG, it does not contain game stats and is targeted at both gamers and enthusiasts of the setting.

2. Highly Non-Flintstonist

One thing we know from all that worldbuilding is that Gor is decidedly not a Flintstonist setting. Goreans do not think, behave, or act like modern-day people do; in fact, that is kind of a recurring theme of the novels. Even besides the presence of widely accepted slavery, there are a number of key differences between Earthling and Gorean society - Luther even has an entire scroll on this. These range from superficial jargon (Goreans say "tal" instead of "hello," and "I wish you well" instead of "goodbye") to characterful bits of background detail (Goreans sit on floors, with free men sitting cross-legged and women and slaves sitting on their knees; we do have a few examples of women sitting cross-legged, and this is seen as a provocatively tomboyish behavior) to things that could impact gameplay or create new challenges (Goreans haggle over prices at stores and do not set fixed prices for items).

With so much detail given to culture and sociology, a campaign set on Gor would provide a great opportunity to immerse players in a truly exotic world, rather than a reskin of their everyday lives. There are many ways this could create enjoyable and engaging roleplaying opportunities. It is true that this sort of thing isn't for everyone; some people may feel intimidated by the thought of portraying a character whose thought processes and the context they exist in are so different from those of the player. And few gamers enjoy having to read a bunch of worldbuilding notes in order to play the setting consistently. Luckily, there are a few aspects of Gor as a setting that make this easier.

3. Historical Parallels

So a Spartan, a Viking, and a Mongol walk into a tavern. They find a table where a Bedouin is engaged in a fierce arm-wrestling match with a Scythian. A samurai is watching from a table where a forest-dwelling amazon lies slumped over drunk. Then a Wookiee gets up and flips his table in a rage.

No, it's not the setup to a very bizarre and esoteric joke. This scene could very well play out on Gor - granted, it would be an unusually cosmopolitan tavern, but nothing says that it couldn't happen.

Gor is a History's Greatest Hits setting, where cultures and locations based on multiple real-life eras coexist simultaneously. Like Howard's Hyborian Age, it's a setting where all sorts of pseudo-historical adventures can take place without anything feeling out of place. In fact, this is justified within the lore of the setting - Gor is a planet located opposite the sun from Earth, and throughout history, the aliens running the planet (it's a long story) abducted humans from different cultures and brought them to Gor, restricting their behavior so that their cultures would stay relatively unchanged over time. Thus, you have a culture descended from the Vikings existing side by side with one descended from Greco-Roman traditions, and so on.

This means that one can get a pretty good idea of what several Gorean cultures are like by perusing the history of the groups they're based on. None of the cultures are an exact match, and some borrow more heavily from real life than others, but there is enough precedent for the different cultures that a newcomer doesn't necessarily need to consume a lot of exposition to get the gist. As a bonus, this also means that if a DM wants to do some worldbuilding of their own and introduce a new culture to their personal Gor, they can do so and have it make sense in the setting - they just need to find a culture Norman hasn't already covered.

They're even being meta
about it now.

4. Isekai

For those not versed enough in weebery, isekai is a Japanese word translating to "other world." It's used to describe stories where the protagonists come from a mundane world like our Earth, but are transported to a new, fantastic setting. It's become very popular in anime in recent years, but the term has also been used to describe classic fantasy stories like The Wizard of Oz or John Carter of Mars.

Gor is also a setting that lends itself to the isekai route. Those same aliens that abducted a bunch of historical people also routinely abduct modern-day humans, on a much smaller scale. Most of the series' protagonists are brought from Earth to Gor this way, usually as slaves, but sometimes for other reasons. This is useful for gaming purposes because it provides an easy excuse for PCs to not know everything about the setting.

A big reason isekai is so popular in anime is that it allows writers to portray fantastic worlds, but use protagonists the reader can relate to. This way, worldbuilding doesn't have to be delivered through long spans of exposition going over things the characters already know. The details of the world can be revealed to the characters at the same time it is revealed to the viewer. From a TRPG perspective, this would also allow for lore-dense settings to be introduced to players without requiring them to do homework in order to portray characters from that setting. A campaign in which the PCs are humans from Earth brought to Gor allows them to experience the world without it seeming weird if they get details wrong or don't know everything. And discovering more about the world can be a source of progression, allowing PCs to better understand the contexts surrounding them and their places amidst them.

This isn't a new concept in RPGs. Empire of the Petal Throne is known for the richly-detailed setting of Tekumel, which also boasts extensive worldbuilding elaborating on its cultures, social dynamics, mores, and customs. Many players have cited this as an obstacle, as they feel like they can't make characters who conceivably exist as a part of the setting without researching the lore. But this ignores how the setting worked in practice. MAR Barker would, famously, begin most of his campaigns where the PCs were foreigners arriving in Tsolyani lands for the first time. That way, they could discover the setting a little bit at a time, just as the players did, and gradually understand more and more of what was going on around them. A player in a Gor campaign wouldn't need to read all the books in order to understand the setting. Their character wouldn't have to know anything more than they did, and there would be established precedent for it.

5. Points of Light

All these points outline how Gor lends itself well to roleplaying. But what about specifically roleplaying games? Well, there's plenty for that as well. In the leadup to the fourth edition of D&D, Wizards of the Coast described the new default setting as points of light in a sea of darkness - a setting that mostly consisted of unexplored, inhospitable wilderness, with a few scattered, isolated islands of civilization. This way, the setting could feature exploration and high adventure, while still containing enough settled areas for parties to have a home base, as well as the possibility to get themselves involved in social intrigue.

It was a term that caught on, and it has been used to describe a number of different settings, with some noting it as the platonic ideal of an old-school D&D setting. It also happens to describe Gor pretty well. The social assumptions of Gor are grounded more in the ancient Greek polis than medieval feudalism. Each city is a self-sufficient unit with its own government, and its people consider themselves loyal to the city rather than to any higher-reaching state or culture. Cities rarely form colonies, and when they do, these colonies usually become independent once they reach sufficient size. This means that Gor does not really have anything comparable to a wide-reaching kingdom with centralized authority, and as such, there is plenty of wilderness in between the cities. This lends itself well to a campaign framework of traveling from a city to adventure in the wilderness, and then either returning to the city or traveling to another along the road, both of which are often seen in old-school games.

This sort of thing.

6. Megadungeons

Another common feature of old-school campaign settings is the megadungeon - a single dungeon large enough to comprise the setting for an entire campaign, often explored over the course of multiple sessions, with the PCs returning to civilization in between. Some of the earliest campaign settings seem to have grown around a single megadungeon and its adjoining city, like Gygax's Castle Greyhawk. Conveniently, there are a couple of locations described in the Gor novels that resemble megadungeons, or could easily be adapted into them.

One of these is the city of Treve, located in the Voltai Mountains, which forms the setting for Witness of Gor. Treve is a heavily fortified city deep in the mountains, renowned as a haven of thieves and cutthroats; it relies on raiding other settlements for food. The city is only reachable from the air, or through a maze of underground passages, narrow crags, and outposts; even getting there entails braving many dangers. Beneath the city is an extensive network of pits, tunnels, and corridors used to hold prisoners, with traps to prevent their escape. Is there anything more OSR than a lawless city of rogues built atop a vast subterranean trap-filled dungeon?

The other is the Sardar Mountains, Gor's holiest site, and the home of the Priest-Kings, the insectoid aliens that style themselves as the god-like rulers of the planet (more on them later). Though the mountains themselves hold cultural importance to Goreans - they are the site of festivals held four times a year where all Goreans may gather to sell wares and settle disputes, and all Goreans are expected to make a pilgrimage there during their lifetime - the Priest-Kings themselves dwell in an underground complex of tunnels and chambers containing strange creatures (including the aforementioned golden beetles) and powerful technology off-limits to the general populace. Surely a campaign involving raiding the Sardar Mountains under the noses of the Priest-Kings could provide plenty of excitement and opportunities for OSR gaming.

I am this entire image.

All in all, I'm not surprised that so many early voices in the TRPG communities embraced Gor - the setting seems almost tailor-made for gaming, especially the sort of gaming that predominated in that era. I have no doubt that more than one DM at the time used the setting for their games. We know such a thing wasn't unheard of - Wilderlands of High Fantasy began as a campaign set in Tolkien's Middle-Earth before the PCs were teleported elsewhere, for instance. Surely people noticed the same points I did and realized how ripe they would be for gaming. And while the Gorean roleplaying community is largely more concerned with the bedroom than the table, a lot of what makes the setting appealing to one circle also makes it appealing to another. In the end, people into RPGs and people into BDSM aren't so different - and we can see that principle at play here.

We're almost done with this series, but before we go, I still have one post left in the tank - one devoted to things I personally find cool about Gor as a setting, now that all the theoretical stuff is out of the way. Until then, I wish you well!

Friday Encounter: Cloaking Devices

I've said before that cloakers unfairly get a bad reputation as "gotcha monsters" that only exist to pretend to be cloaks and fool anyone stupid enough to put on some random cloak lying around in a dungeon. But I've never seen them that way. Firstly, because in no game I've ever run has there been a situation where it would ever make sense for someone to put on a random cloak that they just found in a dungeon - and secondly, because the concept of a flat monster has so much more potential. Potential I intend to exploit here.

This encounter is best suited to a dungeon. There should be a room where there is a tall, narrow shaft in the ceiling, extending some 30 feet above the PCs' heads. The shaft is too narrow for a humanoid to fit through, and the sides are too steep to be climbed, but it is home to a cloaker - and it makes use of this fact to launch ambushes.

If creatures pass underneath the shaft, the cloaker will drop down on top of them, attempting to latch onto them with a bite attack to smother them. It will target any creatures bearing light sources if possible, so that it won't be adversely impacted by its sensitivity to light. If the creatures prove a threat to the cloaker and it drops to half HP, it will attempt to use its Phantasms ability to distract the party with illusory decoys before it retreats to the shaft to take cover. While in the shaft, the cloaker has full cover and cannot be targeted.

Even when wounded, the cloaker will attempt to secure its prey, using hit-and-run tactics against the party. It could wait for the PCs to pass through the room again, hopefully when they're weaker, and then strike. It could attempt to make noise to lure one of the PCs apart from the rest of the group and try to pick them off. A really devious feature for this encounter would be to have the shaft connect to other rooms in the dungeon, creating a network of narrow passages that the cloaker could travel through, but the party couldn't. You could even design an entire dungeon around this conceit!

In Defense of Gor, Part 2: Gor in Gaming

This is actually the
most SFW cover I can find.

I'm pleasantly surprised by the reception my last post received, arguing that the infamous Gor novels are worth a look as a source of inspiration for pulpy, sword-and-sorcery-flavored gaming. But I'm not the first person to make such an argument. The influence of the Gor series goes back almost as far as the TRPG hobby itself. It's often been buried, and given the reputation the series has accrued, that may be a deliberate effort on the parts of various rights-holders - but a look into the history of tabletop gaming reveals that there is a Gorean connection behind some surprisingly influential developments, not just in the world of gaming but pop culture as a whole.

There are many seminal works of fantasy literature in the first edition Dungeon Masters' Guide Appendix N, and the ways in which these works influenced the game, its tropes, and its elements have been studied time and time again by people far more qualified to speak on the subject than I. The Gor novels are not a listed influence in any version of Appendix N. Given how they are directly referenced in other works from the same period, as I will discuss later, I don't think this was an omission based on the content of the series or its reputation. Gor did not accrue the image of something taboo among mainstream discussions of fantasy and science fiction until later. It seems more likely to me that Gygax simply didn't read or wasn't a fan of the novels, and thus they don't appear on a list curated by him.

What is known, however, is that the other co-creator, Dave Arneson, was a fan of Gor and did reference it in his work. Quite a bit, actually. To see the Gorean influence on early D&D, we need to start with materials that were written by him - most famously, Blackmoor, the second supplement to the original 1974 edition of D&D. If we really want to get to the source, though, we should look in particular at The First Fantasy Campaign, a collection of rules Arneson used at his table that was published by Judges' Guild in 1977. This is unfiltered Arneson; it reads like the ramblings of a madman, with no real regard to layout or organization, and shoves you right into the material without a proper introduction or preface. It's a bunch of lists, tables, and house rules in no particular order. It seems that editing Arneson's rules was not a priority. So we can assume that the elements he includes do in fact capture his influences in as pure a form as we can get.

It's worth noting, then, that The First Fantasy Campaign has a lot of rocs in it. They're listed as purchasable, they appear in encounter tables, and many cities are listed as using roc cavalry in their armies. One note, in particular, describes a larger variant of rocs called tarns. In the Gor novels, tarns are large birds used as beasts of burden and are ridden into battle; the series' most recurring protagonist, Tarl Cabot, is a tarnsman, ie. one who rides a tarn. What's more, Arneson's rocs occupy much the same role that tarns do on Gor; stats are listed for "war tarns," "cargo tarns," and "racing tarns," all of which exist on Gor. Furthermore, in "The Temple of the Frog," a dungeon Arneson includes in the Blackmoor supplement, mention is made to "landing points for rocs" on the building's edge - many Gorean buildings include ledges on higher floors for tarns to perch on.

Despite a singular reference to tarns being "same as rocs but larger in some cases," the text seems to use the terms "roc," "tarn" and "eagle" interchangeably, listing "tarn trainer" and "eagle rider" on the same list when listing upkeep of hirelings. The ways in which Arneson uses rocs as rideable animals also implies he isn't thinking of the elephant-eating monsters of Arabian mythology. We can assume any time Arneson refers to a large rideable bird, he has tarns in mind. Since The First Fantasy Campaign still uses the terms "hobbit" and "balrog" instead of "halfling" and "balor," it seems unlikely that rights issues were behind this terminology. Most likely, this is the result of The First Fantasy Campaign being generally unedited; there is little stylistic consistency with the book as a whole.

What's more, on the same list of hirelings and their upkeep requirements, Arneson lists separate rates for "male slave," "female (Red)," female (White)," and "female (Special)". While the color-coding of female slaves is not explained in the text, the terminology is taken directly from Gor. There, a "white silk slave" is a virgin, and a "red silk slave" is not. I'm not sure what "female (Special)" refers to here, and frustratingly, Arneson doesn't give any explanation. It might be a reference to Gor's "exotics;" slaves bred to have inhuman traits such as venom (also a woefully underexplored concept in the series), but in the books this phenomenon is not limited to female slaves, and I would think that there would be more game mechanics for something like that. Seems like a good excuse for a random table.

This is a bit of theorizing on my part, but one idea that seems to have originated with Arneson was oozes as a class of monsters, which cemented slimes, jellies, puddings, and the like as a staple of fantasy bestiaries. It's attested to by Gygax himself that Arneson was the first DM to use a black pudding, and many commentators have traced this back to 1958's The Blob, which is certainly plausible, given Arneson's stated love of monster movies. However, I think it's worth noting that 1969's Nomads of Gor includes a delightfully pulpy interlude where Tarl is fed to a living corrosive ooze, kept in a pit in the palace of a corrupt merchant, and must fight his way out. Given we have hard evidence that Arneson read the Gor books, it's quite possible that this creature influenced his creation.

But if I had to pick the one instance Gor was arguably at its most influential, not only on D&D but on gaming and the fantasy genre as a whole, that traces back to Supplement II.

Let me ask you a question. What comes to your mind when I say the word "assassin?" If you read this blog, probably a guy in a dark cloak, probably with a hood, holding a dagger and sneaking up on someone to stab them. Maybe, if you're younger, a white-clad figure doing parkour up the wall of a Gothic cathedral, or Keanu Reeves in a slick suit dispatching a horde of henchmen with cinematic gunplay. If you ask an older person, or someone who knows nothing about fantasy, they'd probably think of someone with a sniper rifle shooting the President from a book depository. Before the 70s, that's what most people would say. The idea of the assassin as a class, with a distinct set of skills, equipment, and associated tropes, owes itself to two things: the meteoric rise in popularity of the pop-culture ninja (specifically the pop-cultural stock character, which has little in common with the historical ninja of feudal Japan), and the D&D assassin class, first introduced in Blackmoor.

Many, citing Arneson's established precedent of drawing from Gor, have posited that this class was inspired by the Gorean Assassin Caste. If this is true, this means that Gor directly inspired an entire character archetype, and that Pa-Kur the Master Assassin has as much of a valid claim to fame as being such a model as Aragorn does for rangers. However, I'm not entirely convinced this is the case. The primary class features of the original assassin class are the use of disguises, which we do not have much textual evidence of Gorean assassins using, and the use of poisons, which Gorean assassins explicitly do not use, as they view it as impersonal and cowardly. There are some links, however. Blackmoor's assassins work in guilds, with temples and a defined structure, much like how Gorean assassins, though termed a caste, are not born into it and instead join such an order, pledging their lives to its service. Also, Blackmoor's assassins gain the right to challenge their guildmaster in a duel at 12th level, and take over the position if they kill them. This could be related to how Gorean assassins are always trained in pairs, with their final task being for one of them to hunt and kill the other in order to be inducted into the caste. Gor may have influenced the assassin class, but I do not think it was the only source.

All in all, looking at both textual and contextual evidence, it is undeniable that Gor was an influence on Dave Arneson in particular, and by extension D&D. However, its influence on the gaming scene didn't stop there, and Gor references continued to crop up in gaming materials.

In terms of official material, Dragon Magazine used to run a feature called "Giants in the Earth," listing game stats for characters from existing works of fiction. Issue #61, from 1982, stats Tarl Cabot, courtesy of Glenn Rahman. What's interesting is that he is listed as Lawful Evil and his misogyny is described as a character trait, but the text explicitly connects this to his upbringing with an abusive aunt, an in-universe explanation for his outlook. This might indicate that at this time, at least with this one author, Cabot was viewed as a flawed anti-hero, not as a mouthpiece for Norman's alleged views, and his outlook on women was viewed as just a character trait, not something assumed to be "natural" in a man. One could argue that Rahman may have portrayed Cabot this way as a means to criticize the novels, but the text makes several allusions to the events of the books as late as Raiders of Gor from 1971, which most people online will tell you is well after the series took on a BDSM tint. If Rahman truly disliked the series, I doubt he would know as much about the plot as he alludes to. Most people bail out by that point. If true, this would support the evidence that it was relatively socially acceptable to read and enjoy Gor novels, even later Gor novels, in the gaming community at this time.

There's something charming in
the naive earnestness of early
third-party gaming mag covers.

Also, Judges' Guild's magazine, Pegasus, published Gor-related gaming content. While I was unable to find any scans, the sixth issue (also from 1982) boasts on the cover that it features an article by Paul Elkmann with rules for kaissa, a chess-like game described in the series. Of note to me is that kaissa would not feature into the plot of any of the novels until Players of Gor two years later - remember that title, we'll come back to it - and even then, the full canonical rules have never been established. It would be interesting to compare this interpretation of kaissa to what we know now. But it also confirms what we know - there were people in the tabletop RPG community in the late 70s and early 80s who openly read the Gor books and used them as a source of inspiration at the table. If the kaissa from the Pegasus article is intended as a minigame as part of an existing campaign, it may indicate that people then were even using D&D or other RPGs to play campaigns in the world of Gor.

What about across the pond? I've long posited the existence of a British old school tradition, linked to but possessing distinct qualities from its American counterpart. There, too, Gor was known and accepted in the gaming sphere. Both Rick Priestly
and Tony Ackland note Gor among the books they read in developing Warhammer in this interview; Ackland in particular allegedly designed Warhammer's war eagles after the tarns, but I was unable to find a source to back up this anecdote. To me, though, the clearest sign of Gorean DNA in Warhammer isn't the war eagles, but something else entirely: the Skaven.

This book walked so
Vermintide could run.

Yes! Numerous people have written on the various sources that came together to form the Skaven over the years. And, while I don't think anyone involved in their development confirmed this one way or another, I would not be surprised if Gor was one of those sources.

You see, in 1984's Players of Gor, one minor character is Nim Nim, a slave who belongs to a race known as "the Urt People." Nim Nim is a fairly minor character, all things considered. He only appears in one book, and we never meet any other Urt People before or since. However, from his example, we do know that such a race exists in the setting, and are described as having hairy bodies, large eyes, narrow faces, a hunched stance, and a habit of travelling in large packs. It should be noted that in Gor's ecology of made-up animals, an urt is a small rodent pest that takes the role a rat would on Earth. Thus, the Urt People are essentially rat people (I should now clarify, for the sanity of my readers, that although Nim Nim is a slave, there is no indication he is a pleasure slave; as I said before, that is not all slavery on Gor is about). They debuted in a book that came out two years before the Skaven first debuted in "Vengeance of the Lichemaster," a Warhammer scenario published in the Citadel Spring Journal.

None of this means anything on its own - there have been many examples of rat people popping up in fantasy. However, the Urt People speak in a particular dialect that includes repeating most things they say twice, much like Skaven are known for doing.

"What do they call you here?" I asked.

"Nim, Nim," it said.

"I am called Bosk," I said.

"Bosk, Bosk," it said. "Nice Bosk. Pretty Bosk. More larma! More larma!"

I gave the creature more of the hard larma.

"Good Bosk, nice Bosk," it said.

I handed it another bit of larma.

"Bosk want escape?" it asked.

"Yes," I said.

"Bad men want do terrible thing to Bosk," it said.

"What?" I asked.

"Nim Nim afraid talk," it said.

I did not press the creature.

"Few cells have table," it said, fearfully. "Bosk not chained."

I nodded. "I think I understand," I said. Not being chained, and because of the table, I had been able to witness the cruel spectacle in the courtyard. That I supposed now, given the hints of the small creature, was perhaps intended to give me something to think about. I shuddered. Much hatred must I be borne in this place.

"More larma!" said the creature. "More larma!"

I gave it some more larma. There was not much left. "They intend to use me in the baiting pit," I speculated.

"No," said the creature. "Worse. Far worse. Nim Nim help."

"I don't understand," I said.

"Bosk want escape?" it asked.

"Yes," I said.

"More larma," it said. "More larma!"

I gave it the last of the larma.

"Bosk want escape?" it asked.

"Yes," I said.

"Nim Nim help," it said.

(I brought this up to Gideon in the comments of a now-deleted post on the history of the Skaven at Awesome Lies, one of the best blogs out there for Warhammer history, and he actually went back and edited his post to mention the Urt People. Alas, he's dealing with technical issues that prevent me from linking that one. So you get the full quote to see what I'm talking about.)

Now, Skaven would not develop these particular speech patterns until later, with the Kaleb Daark comics. But knowing the time frame, and the fact that people at Games Workshop did read Gor novels and considered them an influence, it seems reasonable to theorize that Nim Nim was on the writers' minds when they needed to come up with a distinct speech pattern for a rat-like humanoid. In all other regards, Urt People are nothing like Skaven - they certainly don't seem to be a threat to any Gorean city, and don't appear particularly warlike - but the similarities cannot be denied.

Whether one likes the series or not, it is inarguable that Gor was one of the many sources that informed the early development of tabletop gaming as a community, and the tropes, stories, and settings that grew during this era. At this time, it was not particularly regarded as anything to be ashamed of or to reject, and was mined for inspiration just as much as other works of the genre. Regardless of whether or not we feel this source material is offensive, obscene, or objectionable, we shouldn't bury the truth. I think it's important to recognize that Gor did play a role in the perfect storm that allowed tabletop RPGs to flourish, and that it is a part of the canon of inspirational material that underpinned D&D and beyond, for better or for worse.

But why Gor? Was it simply the fact that the people behind the scene would read any fantasy literature they could get there hands on?

I think there's more to it than that. Gor, in my opinion, is actually a very gameable setting. I don't doubt that in those days, more than a few would-be DMs looked at the books as a source of inspiration, either in terms of the ideas contained within themselves or how they were presented. With its focus on worldbuilding, I can easily see how it would appeal to the same sorts of people interested in the lore of TRPG settings. Even I have a hard time reading Gor lore and not thinking of ways it could drive scenarios at the table. And in my next few posts, I'm going to shed light on why. See you next time!

In Defense of Gor, Part 1: Addressing Misconceptions

Also, no one feels the need to hesitate
about defending Forgotten Realms -
and I could tell you some things.

A while back, as a Christmas present, I got a set of Attillan Rough Riders for Warhammer 40,000. As-is, they don't really fit with any of the projects I'm working on at the moment, but they do look pretty cool, and I've been able to incorporate some of the parts into a few kitbashes. But in doing so, an idea sprung into my head - the parts, or at the very least some of the heads, would be a decent base for kitbashing an army of Wagon People from one of my biggest guilty pleasures in fantasy literature - John Norman's Chronicles of Gor.

Yes, that Gor.

I'm willing to bet that most people reading this have never heard of Gor, or have only heard it as the most profane and reprehensible hate literature in existence. Anyone who brings it up these days is either a fan of the books or doing so disparagingly, and the former category have essentially cordoned themselves off from the rest of society so as to be impenetrable to outsiders. Even 1d4chan/1d6chan, normally the South Park of the TRPG community when it comes to shock humor, has an article on the series that's one of their most vitriolic.

What might surprise you is that things weren't always this way. In fact, Gor was surprisingly influential in the early science fiction and fantasy communities - and, yes, that includes the early tabletop gaming community. It was never exactly mainstream, but it did have its influence, and there was a time where you could say you were a fan of Gor and people wouldn't recoil from you making the sign of the cross. It even got a few (very bad) film adaptations, one of which made it onto Mystery Science Theater 3000 (Outlaw, S05 E19 - it has absolutely nothing to do with the source material, but Jack Palance is in it, with predictable results).

And you know what? I know where those early names in the community were coming from - because Gor might well be one of the most gameable settings out there.

Let me back up a little, though. And put down those torches and pitchforks. Let me answer a few questions, and hopefully we can come away with a little more understanding.

What's a Gor?

A Beastman warrior, forming the majority of the Brayherds of Chaos, which have threatened the Empire for generations.

Okay, but all jokes aside. Chronicles of Gor is a long-running series of pulp sword-and-planet novels (a la John Carter of Mars) written by John Norman, starting with Tarnsman of Gor in 1966, and still being published to this day. Not all the stories feature the same characters or narrative, but they largely concern a university professor who is abducted by aliens and taken to a planet called Gor, orbiting the Earth on the other side of the sun and inhabited by the descendants of various human civilizations from throughout history coexisting at a roughly Iron Age technology level, where he becomes a powerful warlord.

Okay. What's so bad about that?

So to understand why Gor developed the reputation that it did, you need to understand the context surrounding it.

See, the books themselves are not really very good. The writing is dry, and the stories are largely an excuse to get the characters from place to place. But what really sets it apart is the worldbuilding. The world of Gor is incredibly intricate and detailed, and large swathes of the books are devoted to detailing different parts of the setting, its various cultures, and their practices.

It just so happens that these practices involve slavery, including sexual slavery. John Norman was writing in the time of the Sexual Revolution, and he has a few nonfiction publications exploring the rising fetish culture of the era. That context shaped the books, too. As such, the books detail various practices the Goreans use to keep, train, and use sex slaves. And when the BDSM community was rising in prominence at the time, many latched onto the descriptions in the books and used the information to shape how they handled things in the bedroom.

It's important to realize that the earlier Gor novels don't focus on this all that much. It's always there, but it's not really given much more focus than, say, Gorean honor culture, or weaponry, or the caste structure. The novels themselves aren't much different than what you would find in, say, a Conan the Barbarian story.

But due to the timing, some of the most prominent and most vocal members of the fandom were those people in the early BDSM community. And for better or worse, John Norman knew his audience. He realized that his books were selling because people read them for the smut, and he started writing more and more for those people specifically, with later books focusing much more on sexual slavery and including more focus on erotica. As such, the perception of Gor shifted to being "a sex thing" more than anything else, and that fact made it harder for outsiders, who might have liked pulp sword-and-planet adventure but had no interest in BDSM, to get involved. This in turn led to the community becoming increasingly tied to fetish culture.

That does not take away from the fact that, if you look past the sex stuff, it's still a wonderfully detailed, evocative, and elaborate setting that's just asking to be played in.

But Gor is about how all women should be sex slaves and how the ones that don't want that should be raped until they do!

This gets into the other side of the coin with the changing perceptions of Gor - the books started out as a part of the science fiction and fantasy fandom, but switched focus over time to instead be targeted at the BDSM community. These later books contained material that was characteristic of erotica, particularly BDSM erotica, including depictions of sexual slavery and sexual violence that were intended to titillate readers. But the books were still viewed through the lens, and judged by the standards, of people in the speculative fiction community, where this material was not commonplace. Naturally, this led to people believing that the BDSM content was in some way a reflection of the themes of the stories, or the personal beliefs of their author.

This isn't exactly true, on either aspect. Gor as a setting is not really about sex slavery or misogyny. It is stated on numerous occasions in the books that 98% of Gorean women are free. We don't have a figure for the entire planet, but it is mentioned that about 10% of the population of the city of Ar is made up of slaves - which is proportionate to some estimates of the Roman Empire, if not lower. Most slaves are female, but of these, many of these are used for labor, not sex. It's just that much of the writing focuses on female sex slaves, but this is not stated nor intended to be a representative sample of the norm. Norman focused on it because it sold. And the themes of the stories themselves are not unusual for BDSM erotica - if anything, they're tame by those standards; the books do not go into graphic detail on abusive or degrading practices, and a surprising amount of the sexual content is told through implication and occurs "off-screen." This is more than what can be said about some of the novels your bookstore probably has on the erotica shelf. The Gor novels, then, only seem offensive by the standards of "serious" science fiction.

As for John Norman himself, we have no reason to believe that the content of the later Gor novels is reflective of his personal philosophy. If you look into his nonfiction writings on sex, his outlook is not dissimilar to that of accepted voices in the modern BDSM community. His 1974 book Imaginative Sex focuses on the practice of erotic roleplay, and there he specifically lists consent and trust of one's partner as paramount in such a sexual relationship, as well as the fact that there are boundaries in one's sex life and personal life that must be respected.

In fact, some of his advice is hilariously quaint by modern standards. When discussing BDSM practices, he goes as far as to insist that using an actual whip on your partner is unacceptable; one should instead pretend to whip their partner because the fantasy of being whipped is erotic, but actually evoking physical pain is an inherently abusive act. I've never been to one, but I can say with confidence that if you said that in most BDSM clubs you would be laughed out of the room.

Also fun fact: Imaginative Sex presents several femdom scenarios. Just in case you thought he actually believed the stuff about men being naturally dominant. Sorry, try again.

But isn't there a culture based on Native Americans that are literally called "Red Savages?"

Yeah, I'll give you that one, that's pretty bad. That's why I'd call them Plainsmen if they came up in a game instead. There. Done.

It's important to realize that the Gor novels are products of their time. They were written in the 60s by a man who was born in 1931 - for reference, that's not a baby boomer; boomers are younger than that. Of course they're going to have things that won't fly by modern standards. So do plenty of stories that are beloved by the TRPG community. Kuo-Toa remain a staple of the Monster Manual, and they are based on a story about how mixed race people are disgusting and horrifying. We can accept that times were different then and strive to be better.

But wasn't there a Gorean sex cult involved in human trafficking? And don't a lot of Gorean BDSM people think you shouldn't use safewords?

Yeah, and they're pieces of shit. As previously stated, those people do not represent John Norman's beliefs or vision. There are going to be people like that in any fandom; they shouldn't be allowed to tarnish the good parts of the community. Should we judge D&D players by the standards of that guy who died LARPing in a steam tunnel in the 80s? Oh, wait, people did, and we laugh at them to this day.

But the Gor novels are poorly written anyway!

Yeah, you're not wrong there. John Norman is not a particularly good writer. What he is is a good worldbuilder, and the quality (or lack thereof) of his prose shouldn't devalue the genuinely interesting and gameable ideas he puts forward.

I'm uncomfortable with RPing sex at the table. Especially with strangers.

So am I. But as stated, there is plenty of material in Gor, as a setting, that has nothing to do with sex. There is no reason a Gor campaign has to address the topic of sex at all, let alone BDSM. It's important to know the boundaries of your players and what they're comfortable with and what they aren't (hey, that sounds familiar...). Yes, the official Gor TRPG includes sexual skills. I get why they did that, but I still find that weird and uncomfortable and I wouldn't use them if I was running it.

If you think the entire setting is too closely associated with fetish culture to feel comfortable using it at the table, that's fine. You can always take inspiration from certain parts without using the whole thing. You can just change certain names, and hey, anyone who notices can't call you out on it without outing themselves. There's plenty of ways you can make use of the material and stay well within your comfort zone.

I was in the Gorean RP community and it's full of elitists who think people who don't follow the books exactly are subhuman!

I wouldn't want to play with those people either. Again, we shouldn't let bad actors color a given fandom or community. When I'm running an established setting, regardless of what it is, that is essentially our version of that setting at the table, and canon only matters as long as it's fun. Hell, there are aspects of Gor canon I would do differently (more on that in a future post). Anyone who doesn't like that isn't going to be fun to play around, and games are supposed to be fun, so there's no room for them at the table. You don't have to play with them if it's going to make for a miserable experience.

I'm in the Gorean RP community and I think people who don't follow the books exactly are subhuman! Gor isn't a game, it's a way of life!

Fuck you. Next.

Something something Houseplants of Gor! Hahaha, look at how funny and original I am!

Please, for the love of god, get another joke. People who don't like Gor have fewer jokes than Imperial Guard players or transphobes. Seriously, that was kind of funny in like the 90s, but it doesn't need to get brought up every time someone mentions Gor. Give it a rest.

Well, that does it for the first post in a perhaps ill-advised series of essays. Now that we've got that out of the way, I'm going to devote my next posts in this series to exploring the influence Gor had on the fantasy gaming scene (you'd be surprised!), discussing the factors that make it lend well to RPGs, and highlighting some parts I personally find cool. Stay tuned!

Friday Encounter: Don't Feed the Bears

Here's an encounter that ties into my previous points about how wilderness survival can make for interesting challenges in RPGs, making travel more realistic and engaging. It's best suited for a wilderness location, but could work on a road as well if the party makes camp there, or even in a dungeon with appropriate changes to the fauna in question.

After the PCs make camp and consume their rations, wild animals are attracted to their location. This might happen while they're asleep, in which case anyone on watch will be the first to deal with it, potentially alone - you are keeping track of who's on watch, right? Alternatively, it could happen while the PCs are eating, and now they have to deal with an incursion while they're trying to settle in, which could catch them unawares and underprepared. You can even use this encounter to punish a party that fails to follow proper precautions when setting up camp like keeping food uncovered and accessible. If you have something like this happen to your PCs, your players might see it as a wakeup call to pay closer attention to these matters going forward!

Exactly what shows up is up to you - or your random wildlife encounter tables. There are a number of compelling options here. The most obvious, of course, is bears, as anyone who's ever gone camping (or has read Tales of the Grotesque and Dungeonesque) can tell you. They have several advantages - they're easily attracted to the scent of food, they're dangerous if provoked, and they can make for a tense encounter. This can be a combat encounter, but a more realistic scenario, where the bear doesn't attack on sight and the PCs have to remain still and avoid any sudden movements or loud noises so as not to provoke it, can be just as fun. In a fantasy or sci-fi setting, you even have the option to make it something worse than a bear.

However, it's also valuable to consider other ways curious beasts can impact the party. Even if small animals like rats or raccoons don't pose an obvious threat, they can still make noise (such as by rustling underbrush or dry leaves) that can alert more apparent dangers. If these creatures make off with the food, they could deplete the party's resources, something that could prove just as dangerous in the long run. They may even decide that it's worth following the party if they're a consistent food source, which could prolong the problem, and the PCs might not even know it at first until they notice food keeps going missing and it's suddenly harder to be stealthy. In a more fantastic setting, beings that can speak with animals, like elves or druids, might use these scavengers as a means to spy on the party and report on their doings. There's a lot of possibilities here, which goes to show you how the things they teach you about when going into the outdoors can be mined for exciting gameplay opportunities.

Saga of the Ortegids: Dials and Inspiration

The Saga of the Ortegids is intended as a dialed setting - that is, there are several main streams of inspiration behind it that influence its tone, look, and feel. A DM interested in fine-tuning the details and creating a mood that seems right to them can turn these "dials" up or down, exaggerating or downplaying certain elements to make the setting their own. Trey at Sorcerer's Skull explores a similar paradigm with Star Wars - identifying the main sources of influence as swashbuckling, classic science fiction, Orientalism, and mid-century Americana, and how giving these aspects more or less focus could create a setting still identifiably influenced by Star Wars but with its own distinct flavor. This is a vast oversimplification of Trey's point, but it shaped how I think about Saga of the Ortegids and how it could be approached.

The three major dials of the setting are:

1. Western Dragon Warrior Art

These are the same people -
You probably didn't need me
to tell you that.

As discussed in my last post, the idea behind Saga of the Ortegids as a setting is to create the connective tissue between the art pieces produced by Nintendo, Enix of America, and others to market the Dragon Quest games in the west during the late 80s and early 90s. Nintendo tried very hard to sell people on Dragon Warrior, even giving out cartridges for free with subscriptions to Nintendo Power, and there's a great wealth of art out there that illustrates how I envision the world of the Ortegids looking. The folks over at Dragon's Den, some of the most in-depth archivists of all things Dragon Quest, have been invaluable in this project, and I suggest anyone interested in the subject to click around.

I've seen people describe this art as "a bastardization of Toriyama's art to appeal to western audiences," but that's quite dismissive of the hard work of the artists, and to the audiences they captivated. It also ignores the fact that in Japan, Toriyama's art is considered much less integral to the Dragon Quest experience than it is in the west; there have been numerous projects, including the long-running manga The Adventures of Dai, which he was not involved with at all. What's very interesting to me is that elements of Toriyama's original designs actually crop up quite frequently in this art - the artists clearly knew what they were doing, and wanted to translate the imagery of the series to a different visual style. They could easily have thrown some unrelated fantasy art on the cover, but they didn’t. They used artists who had played the games, or at least saw the original concept art, and reproduced the designs faithfully.

This is, admittedly, a hard dial to turn up. It mostly relies on these images being in the minds of the people at the table, and it's hard to control that unless you use visual aids and handouts (I don't). I would suggest looking at this art as a way to get in the mood. Lean into its visual tropes in your descriptions - shadowy taverns, horned helmets, Moebius-like tall grassy plains. The first two games rewrote all the dialogue in Shakespearean speech, so throwing around some Elizabethan pronouns might help evoke this mood if your players won't kill you for it. Alternatively, you can turn down this dial if you'd rather have a world that looks and feels like Toriyama's depictions, emphasizing the anime influences of the world.

Inspirational Reading: Nintendo Power circa 1989; NES manuals and strategy guides; if you hate yourself you can watch the two Captain N episodes that adapted Dragon Warrior.

2. Norse and Germanic Sagas

The thought that kicked off this whole experiment in the first place was the idle musing I had that the Erdrick Trilogy is an Icelandic saga. I don't know how intentional this was - given the trilogy's use of Norse motifs, it's certainly possible - but structurally and thematically, there are very strong similarities. The conceit of the first three Dragon Quest games is that they take place in the same world(s), generations apart from one another, all following a single lineage of heroes. A constant recurring theme is living up to one's legacy - protagonists of one game must prove their mettle by weighing their deeds against those of their ancestors, which are shown on-screen in other games in the series. Even though DQ3 is the first game chronologically, it too plays with this, as your NPC father and his heroic exploits are constantly mentioned.

This is the same throughline found in Norse sagas, which tend to be genealogical in nature, recounting several successive generations of a given clan and having the actions of one hero resonate through the ages to impact their descendants for good or ill. It grounds the trilogy in the context of a mythic tradition, and that tradition can easily be used to provide color and texture to the setting.

More superficially, I'd be remiss if I didn't point out that the plot of the original Dragon Quest starts with a warrior arriving in the court of a foreign king, seeking to prove himself so that he can be trusted with dealing with the king's problems with a marauding monster that has broken into his castle. There's a kidnapped princess, which immediately casts things in a fairy-tale lens to most people, but it's also not hard to see the similarities to Beowulf.

If you wanted to play up the higher literary influences on the setting, you could simply throw around more runestones and longboats, but to go a little deeper than that, you could make reference to themes of fate (even better if you call it wyrd) and cite legendary heroes of the past, who may or may not be related to the PCs. Use of the word "hwaet" is optional. Turn this dial down, and you have a setting that pays greater homage to pulp fiction, emphasizing action and exotic locales.

Inspirational Reading: Beowulf; The Saga of the Volsungs; the Kalevala.

3. Sword and Sorcery Fiction

In my previous post, I talked about how Conan the Barbarian does a better job in bringing the basic story beats of Dragon Quest V to the big screen than that game's official movie adaptation does. But it goes both ways, too. Here's another revelation I had - Dragon Quest III is the closest a video game has ever come to capturing Robert E. Howard's Hyborian Age.

Yes, I know about Age of Conan and Exiles and all the other official Hyborian Age games, but a significant portion of these games are drawn from the aesthetics of the movies. And I've come to realize on my replay that DQ3 feels very much like Howard's original stories, before Milius and Schwarzenegger's interpretations colored the public perception. As I've discussed on the blog before, the setting of DQ3 is very much a History's Greatest Hits setting, taking an Earth-like map but populating it with areas based on very different eras of history. On your adventure, you encounter characters who appear to be stand-ins for Cleopatra, Henry the Navigator, Galileo, Simon Bolivar(!), and Queen Himiko, among others. Does it make sense for all these people, and the settings they are grounded in, to be around at the same time? Absolutely not, but the game does not care. Much like Howard, it's more concerned with creating a fun venue to have exotic globe-trotting adventures than maintaining internal coherency.

Furthermore, the protagonist of DQ3 can easily be imagined as a Conan figure. Spoilers for a 40-year-old game to follow (for the record, the recent HD remakes did not even bother to try hiding this any more): at the third act of the game, you travel from one world to another, seemingly located on the inside of a hollow planet, which turns out to be the setting of the original two games. By the end of the game, it's become clear that you are in fact the same legendary hero who was mentioned in the first two games and set the legacy their heroes will follow. But this also means that DQ3 is about a hero leaving their homeland, having adventures that span the globe, and then settling in a foreign land to become a figure of legend, much like how Conan left Cimmeria and became the king of Aquilonia.

Also, there's a female pirate captain, and by picking the right dialogue options you can apparently seduce her. I sincerely doubt this was a deliberate nod to Queen of the Black Coast, but it makes for a fortuitous coincidence. The antagonists of Dragon Quest II are a doomsday cult that worships a sinister reptilian god, so there's that.

Luckily, there's a rich vein of imagery associated with pulp sword-and-sorcery stories you can tap into to play up this dial. For more superficial examples, use fewer historical names in favor of imagined two-syllable constructions (bonus points if hyphenated), put in some slave girls, giant snakes, and carnivorous and/or winged apes (both of which, incidentally, appear in the Erdrick Trilogy), and use the term "mighty thews" at least once. Or emphasize the sweeping scope of adventure and the exotic locales it takes place in, and provide the party with plenty of examples to cause mayhem. Turning this dial down will result in a more "highbrow" Saga of the Ortegids, emphasizing its roots in mythic traditions.

Inspirational Reading: Conan the Barbarian (books, comics, and films); Thongor of Lemuria; Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser; that one sadly short-lived Beowulf comic DC did where Grendel kills Satan for favoring Dracula over him.

The Saga of the Ortegids

Know, O prince, that between the years of the fall of the Sons of Aliahan, and the years when the moonless sky drank the Great Pit of Giaga, there was an Age undreamed of, where shining kingdoms lay spread across the worlds above and below like blue mantles beneath the stars - Romalia, Samanao, Ashalam and Baharata, Zipangu with its dark-haired women and towers of dragon-haunted mystery, Edina with its chivalry, Isis that bordered on the rich lands of Portoga, Rhone with its shadow-guarded tombs, Moonbrooke whose riders wore steel and silk and gold. But the proudest kingdom of the world was Alefgard, reigning supreme in the dreaming heartland. Hither came Erdrick, the Aliahanian - black-haired, sullen-eyed, sword in hand, a thief, a reaver, a slayer, with gigantic melancholies and gigantic mirth, to tread the jeweled thrones of Torland under his sandalled feet.

- The Midenhall Chronicles

This is basically my vision,
summarized in one image.

I don't think I need to introduce that I'm a fan of the Dragon Quest games. I've posted about them many a time, and I maintain to this day that were it not for me playing the third game on the Game Boy Advance as a kid, I would never have become the DM I am now. Not only was that game my first real introduction to an interactive, open-ended game world with player-driven exploration, the excellent Prima strategy guide was a major source of inspiration for my campaigns and homebrew creations. I borrowed a lot of quests, dungeons, items, and locations from that game in my early days.

Now, I would like to explore taking things a step further - creating a full-fledged campaign setting out of the world of Dragon Quest.

I'm not the first person to suggest such a thing. On the subreddit for the series, I've seen a number of players ask for advice on how to take the Dragon Quest games and adapt them to the tabletop. Usually, the advice I see focuses on making D&D play more like a console JRPG, or using a system specifically designed to mimic one.

I get where this line of thinking comes from. In Japan, Dragon Quest is a much bigger phenomenon than it is here, and defined the popular perception of the fantasy genre in the way The Lord of the Rings did in the west. As such, a lot of Japanese fantasy pastiches heavily ape the games, not only in aesthetics but also in its tropes and mechanics. I'd like to do a post on this phenomenon somewhere down the line, but you'll notice, for example, that in a lot of modern fantasy anime like Konosuba, you'll see such things as "heroes" and "monsters" being defined and recognized metaphysical classes of beings ontologically different than regular people or animals, and sometimes even people having recognized "levels." That can all be traced to Dragon Quest - for much of Japan, part of the fantasy genre, at least a very popular subgenre thereof, is things acting like they're in a video game.

I, instead, would like to go in the opposite direction.

Lately, I've been constructing a setting I'm calling The Saga of the Ortegids around this conceit - what happens to the setting of Dragon Quest when anything "video gamey" about it is treated as indeed a construct of game mechanics, rather than a diegetic in-universe truth? Take the maps, the characters, the plots, but strip back the video game artifacts to bring the setting back in line with its roots in classical Western fantasy and TRPGs.

There's more precedent here than you might think. Let's take a trip back in time. Today, in the west, the series is known primarily for its designs courtesy of the famed manga artist Akira Toriyama, better known as the creator of Dragon Ball. In fact, it's so associated with Toriyama that most people don't even know about its other two co-creators, Yuji Horii and Koichi Sugiyama (and if they know the latter, it's mostly as "that guy who said some homophobic things"), despite the fact that in Japan, all three were established as big names by the time the first game came out. Since the original Dragon Quest came out shortly after Dragon Ball started its run, Toriyama was already a household name, and his involvement was a major boost for sales, coupled with advertisements in Shonen Jump, the magazine that Dragon Ball ran in.

However, when the first game was released in the West in 1989 as Dragon Warrior (due to trademark issues with TSR), no one knew who Toriyama was. The game's main selling point in Japan was useless. Instead, the marketing heavily stressed the game's inspiration in tabletop RPGs and classical fantasy, with art inspired by the likes of Larry Elmore. I've seen some people blame the series never catching on stateside on this, but that overlooks the historical context involved. And I do think that the western art is beautiful and evocative in its own right. Consider that these games started coming out on the NES, with limited resources and often highly abstracted 8-bit graphics. For many, art like this was required for players to visualize what was going on. I don't doubt that what American gamers had in their heads back in the late 80s looked much more like Elmore than Toriyama.

My intent, with The Saga of the Ortegids, is to reverse-engineer the world that western players imagined all those years ago in the original Dragon Quest games, and to explore it as a setting for tabletop campaigns. If we prod a bit at the implications underpinning it, it's actually quite a compelling setting, with strong undertones of Norse mythology mixed with Robert E. Howard's Hyborian Age and the occasional dash of gonzo pulp, as I'll be elaborating on over the next few posts.

I'd like to set myself some ground rules here:

1. The primary focus here will be on the original three NES titles - the so-called Erdrick Trilogy. This is for a number of reasons. For one, they all take place in the same continuity, whereas the later games are mostly stand-alone affairs. The overarching narrative of the trilogy is also surprisingly akin to a Norse saga, which is something I want to play up. They also were all released for the NES under the Dragon Warrior name (IV was as well, but that one won't fit as nicely), while later titles were not released in the west until much later, and under Toriyama's original art. While I may reference elements from later in the series, they will be used sparingly, with a strong preference toward cosmic entities like gods or demons that could conceivably cross universes. I recognize this disqualifies Dragon Quest V, easily the most sword-and-sorcery-flavored entry in the series (I am of the opinion that 1982's Conan the Barbarian is a better DQ5 movie than the actual DQ5 movie, Your Story), but that's a sacrifice I'm willing to make.
2. The conceit here is that the events of the games are mostly canon, but not necessarily in the way they are portrayed in games. As stated above, game mechanics will be treated as just that, game mechanics; it will be assumed that the way the story actually played out in-universe was more realistic. For instance, "monsters" are not a discrete class of beings as portrayed in later games, but instead refers to a variety of unrelated creatures that might be encountered, as is the case in D&D.

3. 

   Maybe not like a poorly-drawn
   Keanu Reeves, though.

   Similar to the above, in-game graphics are taken to be a representation, not a literal image of how the world looks. Western art, from manuals, box art, posters, and the like, will be treated as being closer to a literal depiction of the setting. Ergo, Erdrick existed, but he did not resemble Gohan (and probably looked quite a bit like John Buscema's Conan, as a matter of fact - there's more to this than the ramblings of a madman, as you'll see).
4. The official English releases of the Dragon Quest series were handled by a different studio from Dragon Quest VIII onward. In my personal opinion, this marked a major decline in quality of the translations, as the studio decided to heavily play up the comedic aspects of the franchise over translating the Japanese script faithfully, adding in jokes in previously dramatic scenes, and renamed most characters and locations. I will be using the English terminology used in the NES and GBC releases wherever possible, both out of personal preference and because these were the versions western audiences would have had access to when the series was marketed using Elmore-style art. You may have noticed that my riff on Howard at the start of this article used a few of the newer names - this is because I feel like some of them work better as names for countries as opposed to cities, but I will still be using the original English names for capitals.
5. On the same lines, there will be a strong preference for using material present in the original NES releases of the original trilogy over that added in later remakes. Only NES content will be treated as guaranteed canon; material from later releases may or may not be used as I see fit.

To close, a visual guide to the project. The world of The Saga of the Ortegids is a world where the heroes look like this:

And battle villains who look like this:

With items that look like this:

In places that look like this:

In scenes that look like this!

Join me in the Year of the Barbarian, as we explore an age undreamed of since 1992!