The Gorgonis Sector

Art by Daniel Vega

Well, it happened again. It seems my post from last week about Rogue Trader: Warhammer 40,000 and how its setting, taken in a vacuum, is something very different than what would evolve later on is doing numbers. This isn't the first time that I made a one-off post about an existing setting that I found gameable only for that post to end up breaching containment and generating a lot more buzz than I thought it would, but this time the reception is a lot warmer, so there's that at least.

But it did get me thinking, and I've decided I want to do more with this idea.

Probably my favorite part of the Warhammer 40,000 universe is how it was specifically designed to have room for just about anything fans could imagine. Space, after all, is big, and an entire galaxy is especially big. The factions of 40k were created to be just vast and decentralized enough that every player's army is canon - there's room for every concept and fan creation to exist somewhere in the universe. I love that. Not only does it do a much better job capturing the sweeping scale of a grand space opera than pretty much everything else I've ever seen, but the way in which it integrates the players and their creations gives people the license to do whatever they want with the setting. And that's an approach I wish more of the big names in the TRPG sphere did, as I've discussed before.

In my opinion, it's the 40k RPGs that have taken this conceit and ran with it. One of the best things Fantasy Flight Games ever did with their line of 40k RPGs was to have the default setting of each game take place in a different sector of the Imperium, a tradition carried on with Wrath & Glory, the new RPG by Cubicle 7. This not only allows for a greater breadth of coverage that can truly delve into how diverse the Imperium is and how wildly culture can vary between planets and sectors (something increasingly vanishing in the wargame - I will never forgive Games Workshop for what they did to the Imperial Guard), it also keeps each release feeling fresh. But it also opens the door for a whole new level of creative potential. Why stop at creating your own Space Marine Chapters when you can create entire sectors of space for them to inhabit?

This approach has caught on with a number of fan projects. 4chan, for example, came together to create the Tiji Sector, and later a more serious attempt in the Victorum Sector. But in light of the reception to my post on the setting of Rogue Trader, I thought about taking a different approach: what about making a sector that could only exist in that universe?

One of my favorite blogs kitbashed one of those things.

I'll be devoting the next few posts of this blog to my current hyperfixation: creating a homebrew sector specifically for the setting of Rogue Trader, ignoring any subsequent 40k lore. For my purposes, only what's established in Rogue Trader is canon. I can bring in elements from later 40k lore if I want to, but I cannot contradict what's established in the first core rulebook, and I cannot introduce new factions wholesale.

For instance, I love the concept of space hulks - the idea of massive derelict spaceships (or conglomerations thereof) filled with valuables and threats alike is perhaps the best translation of a traditional fantasy RPG dungeon to the realm of science fiction that I've ever seen. I want to use them. Space hulks were only established as a thing by the eponymous board game two years after Rogue Trader, after the addition of Chaos as a faction. But I feel like the existance of Chaos has much greater implications for the setting than the existence of space hulks (and indeed, they're implications that make what's shown in Rogue Trader impossible), so I can use space hulks but not Chaos.

This is a look into what a sector of the Imperium might look like if Warhammer 40,000 never abandoned being a pulp-drenched gonzo space Western envisioned by an insane person (affectionate). Lore purists need not apply. Gaming in the Gorgonis Sector is not a cerebral examination of the self-destructive nature of fascist extremism. Gaming in the Gorgonis Sector is about teaming up with an elf space pirate wielding a pistol-sized grenade launcher and a power-armored coked-up cyborg barbarian wielding a gun that shoots ninja stars to blow up interdimensional space vampires on Dinosaur Planet. I highly recommend you check out my previous post if you want to get up to speed with the setting we'll be working with here. And no, I did not get those weapons backward!

So for those of you who are still here, sit back and watch this space as we take a tour of the last stop 'til Logan's World!

When the Eye of Terror blinks, ships fly between the Lost Worlds and the rest of the galaxy. Miners ship their ores and slavers play their loathesome trade. Where chance permits, the forces of the Imperium make their mark, bringing to the Lost Worlds the brutal order of the Imperium, if only for a few days.

What perhaps galls most at the local Imperial Commanders, however, is the Cambion Spur - a warp-lane located at a relatively stable point in the Eye of Terror, located in the Gorgonis Sector. Though the route is still dangerous without a trained Navigator, advanced pathfinding computers, or (preferably) both, vessels are capable of crossing the Spur into the Eye of Terror year-round, allowing traders and travelers to bypass the need to wait for the storm to dissipate.

Such a safe route would be a tremendous strategic asset to the Imperium - were it not for the dastardly Naraka Syndicate, a criminal enterprise that controls passage through the Cambion Spur. Their talons extend into all sorts of bloody business conducted through the sector, from the pirates who menace shipping lanes to the hoverbus gangs of Helsreach.

One system stands as the last bastion of Imperial law in the Gorgonis Sector. From the capital world of Gorgonis Major, the Imperium holds against pirates and raiders, but there is only so much they can do with their stretched resources - supply lines from the distant Imperial core are unreliable and often tied up in the intrigue of Earth's noble houses.

But even they enjoy a comfortable existance in comparison to Pacifica, an Imperial holdout on the inside of the Eye of Terror that must hold its own with woefully outdated technology and dwindling stockpiles.

And it is not just pirates that Pacifica deals with, for the planet lies dangerously close to the Orrathi Empire, an Orkish domain. The Imperium has only recently negotiated a tenuous peace with the Orrathi, but who knows how long that will last?

On the fringes of Imperial society and with threats from all sides, the Imperium cannot police the Gorgonis Sector with the full might of the Adeptus Arbites. Instead, many planets abide by a rough frontier justice, with Commanders having full authority to deputize civilians, mercenaries, and privateers - be they human, abhuman, Astartes, Eldar, or even stranger yet - for official missions. But those same individuals are just as likely to go into the business for their own bottom line, or to make a name for themselves in the annals of history.

The Gorgonis Sector is a place where fortunes can be won and lost at the barrel of a laspistol at any moment. It is a place where would-be adventurers just might carve out a place for themselves in the face of the relentless Imperium. But the universe is a big place and, whatever happens, you will not be missed. . . .

The Forgotten Setting of Rogue Trader

As someone with an interest in worldbuilding, there's one interesting thought experiment I've seen going around. I don't know if it's ever been given a name - or, indeed, if anyone else has ever really noticed it being a thing - but for lack of a better term, I'm going to call it selective canon. Essentially, taking an existing series but treating only some installments or iterations of that series as canon, and then exploring how such an approach would impact the setting.

More often than you'd think, this results in a setting quite distinct from canon, due to something TV Tropes calls Early Installment Weirdness. It's rare that fictional universes, especially long-running ones, emerge fully-formed - often, they need to go through a growing phase where authors are still working out the details, which may lead to ideas or plot points coming up that don't fit neatly into the vision that would congeal later. Selective canon, then, asks us to consider how things would be different if these outliers were never brushed aside or retconned to bring them in line with what came later.

One popular example I've seen asks "what if A New Hope was the only Star Wars movie?" This actually changes quite a bit. Most prominently, Darth Vader is a distinct character from Luke's father (not yet named Anakin). We know that Obi-Wan served under Bail Organa in the Clone Wars, but we don't know what or when this is. The Jedi are a religion that few people in the galaxy have ever heard of, and even fewer believe in; there's no indication that they were once a unified order, let alone one that held prominent political power. There's no Padme, no Qui-Gon, and no Yoda. If we bring the official novelization into this, there's also the fact that the Emperor is a powerless figurehead and the real power in the Empire is with his council of scheming advisors. If we ignore the prequels, the Expanded Universe, and even the other two-thirds of the Original Trilogy, what we get is something very different.

Another proposal I've seen is running a campaign set in Tolkien's Middle-Earth that assumes The Hobbit is canon, but The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion are not. We know Gandalf is a wizard, and we know that he left the party to fight an evil necromancer at some point, but as far as we know, both are simply human magicians; we have no reason to believe that they are immortal angelic beings. Elves are just as antagonistic as goblins are. Gollum, as far as we can tell, is simply a strange creature who lives in a cave and has always lived there, and he owns a magic ring that can turn people invisible. There is no indication that he is a hobbit driven mad by a cursed artifact of immense power.

On my own end, there's The Saga of the Ortegids, which was inspired by these exercises - it asks to take the first three Dragon Quest games, and their Western marketing materials, and ignore everything else relevant about the franchise, reverse-engineering a setting that has more in common with 80s pulp fantasy novels than the pages of Shonen Jump. But another setting I think is just begging for the selective canon treatment is Warhammer 40,000.

I haven't talked much about 40k on this blog, but I'm a long-time fan, first getting into it with its third edition in the early 2000s. However, I'm endlessly fascinated by what came before my time. While I do enjoy the modern 40k universe, I'm equally interested in the setting of the game's first edition all the way back in 1987 - which I would argue should be considered a separate setting, because it's evolved so much over the years as to be nigh-unrecognizable today. And I think that the setting revealed in the first edition rulebook, Rogue Trader: Warhammer 40,000 (yes, that was a subtitle at first), as well as the articles in White Dwarf released around that time, deserves to be examined more closely. It's a compelling and unique setting in its own right, and one arguably more conducive to roleplaying than the modern one (fitting, since Rogue Trader started life as an RPG, and even in its final release is only mostly not one). So, let's take a look at the far future of 1987, when it wasn't quite so grimdark and there were still things that were not war.

• While this article will discuss what the setting of Rogue Trader does have, I think it's just as interesting to pay a close eye to what it doesn't. Many factions that modern 40k players will be familiar with had not yet been established. There are no Tau, no Necrons, no Dark Eldar, no Skitarii, no Grey Knights, no Sisters of Battle (there's a single illustration of a gun-toting woman in power armor and a nun's wimple, but there's nothing to indicate who or what she is), and perhaps most consequentially, no Chaos. There's no daemons, no Chaos Space Marines, no Chaos Cultists, and no Horus Heresy. All that stuff, at this point in time, is strictly exclusive to Warhammer Fantasy. It would very quickly be added with the Realm of Chaos sourcebooks, but when we look at the core rulebook in a vacuum, the second most popular faction of modern 40k is completely absent.
• The aesthetics of the setting resemble a combination of Star Wars, Alien, and 80s glam rock. Bright colors and big hair (especially mohawks) are the order of the day. There is not nearly as much gothic imagery or as many skulls as modern 40k, and things generally look like they came off the pages of Heavy Metal or 2000 AD more than they do from a medieval manuscript.

It took me far too long to realize the graffiti was supposed to say
"MARINES OUT," not "MARINES LOL"

• The main power of the setting is the Imperium of Man, a dystopian aristocracy encompassing somewhere in the vicinity of a million planets. The capital of the Imperium is Earth (not "Holy Terra"). It is governed by the Emperor (not "God-Emperor"). He is extremely old, but mortal, and dependent on a life support device called the Golden Throne to sustain his aging body, which requires the daily sacrifice of a thousand psykers to operate. Although immobile, he is conscious and can talk, and has agents that he directly orders to do his bidding. Overall, he comes across as more of a Baron Harkonnen than a Leto Atreides.
• 
  The other planets of the Imperium are feudal dependencies of Earth, and largely autonomous. The Imperium of Rogue Trader appears to be a much more diverse place than that of modern 40k canon, even if we take Games Workshop at face value when they emphasize that the Imperium is much more culturally heterogenous than what we see in published fiction. There are multiple religions practiced and tolerated in the Imperium, including the Adeptus Mechanicus (who are explicitly based on Earth, not Mars, and do not have their own exclusive units) and the Cult of the Space Pudding. There is no indication that the Emperor is universally worshiped as a god.
• Mutants are a persecuted minority in the Imperium. They are stated to arise from the effects of long histories of pollution and nuclear war on the human genome - remember, no Chaos. There are extensive mutation tables included in Rogue Trader, allowing for the creation of anything ranging from X-Men style humans with superpowers to something more visibly grotesque. Certain strains of mutants, like Astropaths (psychics used to maintain interstellar communications), Navigators (mutants used to guide ships through the Warp), Beastmen, and Squats are defined.
• Although the Imperium is a human polity, there are at least some planets where aliens coexist openly with humans, and trade is maintained with both the Eldar and the Slann.
• Robots are explicitly noted to be a common sight in the Imperium, and are used for both labor and warfare. The Imperium also makes use of artificial intelligence in its vehicles and weapons, allowing them to operate autonomously.
• The main military arm of the Imperium is the Imperial Army (not "Imperial Guard" or "Astra Militarum"). They are supported by genetically-altered special ops commandos called Space Marines. Space Marines are often recruited from criminals and convicts and are given combat stimulants. They are easily identified by their trademark power armor and bascinet-shaped helmets; however, power armor is not exclusive to Space Marines. Both the Imperial Army and Space Marines use the same vehicles, including the Leman Russ tank, Rhino APC, and Dreadnought walker (the latter of which is piloted conventionally and is not exclusively used as a life support system for crippled Space Marines). Traitor Space Marines do exist, but they are portrayed as criminals and mercenaries who mostly serve their own agenda.
• Space Marines operate as autonomous organizations, called Chapters or Legions. Each Chapter has its own colors that it uses to decorate the power armor of its Marines for ceremonial purposes, but Marines are expected to use camoflauge while on field duty. Chapters include the Dark Angels, the Blood Drinkers, the Silver Skulls, the Ultra-Marines, and the Spacewolves (note the formatting on the latter two). In addition, there are specialized positions within a Space Marine Chapter, including Chaplains, Librarians, Medics (not "Apothecaries"), and Field Police, which all have their own designated heraldry.
  

• The founder of a Space Marine Chapter is called a Primarch. Primarchs are normal, mortal Space Marines, if esteemed and decorated ones. The named Primarchs are Rogal Dorn of the Imperial Fists, Roboute Guilliman of the Ultra-Marines, and Leman Russ of the Spacewolves. The former two are long dead, and their bones are on public display.
• The Imperium also uses Inquisitors and Rogue Traders as agents of their agenda, who have free reign to do what they want with whatever resources they wish, and map quite clearly to traditional RPG adventuring parties. One Inquistior is named Obiwan Sherlock Clousseau.
• The single named character most often referenced in Rogue Trader is a smuggler named Abdul Goldberg, who makes several appearances in the random scenario generator, apparently intended as a recurring rival to the PCs.
• The Squats are a race of offshoot humans with shorter, stockier builds adapted to planets with heavy gravity. They are found throughout the Imperium, but have their own autonomous holdings concentrated in the galactic core.
• The Imperium's most prominent enemies are the Orks. Orks are explicitly noted to be the most populous race in the galaxy. They have changed the least out of any major faction since Rogue Trader, but it is noted that they have planets that they govern permanently, sometimes using human slaves as an underclass.

• The Eldar mostly live in their own post-scarcity societies, but are usually encountered by outsiders as pirates, most commonly because they turned to piracy out of boredom due to their long lifespans. They can interbreed with humans.
• The Slann are a race of humanoid amphibians found on many planets. They were once a highly advanced spacefaring empire, and may have seeded life across multiple worlds, but have degenerated from their prime.
• The Tyranids are a race of hexapodal reptilians who travel in nomadic "Hive Fleets." They utilize organic technology, which is manufactured from biomass obtained from slaves. Tyranids are fully sapient and do not have a hive mind. They primarily rely on slave races to do their bidding, most notably the centauroid Zoats.
• Interstellar travel is accomplished through an alternate dimension known as the Warp. Navigating the Warp is very dangerous and often requires Navigators. There are several entities native to the Warp, including Enslavers, tentacled creatures capable of mind-controlling other organisms, and Vampires, bat-like humanoids that feed on the life force of others. The latter are capable of adopting illusory human forms, and contact between humans and vampires in the past gave rise to traditional vampire folklore.
• One hazard of the Warp is Warp Storms, which can block off routes of travel. One major Warp Storm is the Eye of Terror, which encloses multiple planets, including Logan's World, the capital of which is Helsreach. Because the Imperium cannot easily get there, the planets in the Eye of Terror are wretched hives of scum and villainy, but abide by the traditional laws of physics. The Eye of Terror can only be accessed from the outside galaxy when it "blinks" once every four to ten years, which marks both boom periods of trade and attempts by Imperial authorities to crack down on crime.

• 

  He also has a throne
  shaped like a Velociraptor.

  The Ultra-Marines are a relatively recent Chapter, and their arch-enemies are the Tyranids. The leader of the Ultra-Marines is Commander Marneus Calgar. He was originally a soldier in the Imperial Army, but was inspired to join the Ultra-Marines when they liberated a Tyranid POW camp he was being held in. Another important figure in the Ultra-Marines is the Chief Librarian Illiyan Nastase, a half-Eldar Astropath who was born on the planet Badab after the Imperium ousted its Tyrant and reclaimed control. He originally served as a member of the Dark Angels before joining the Ultra-Marines. I saved this one for last because it's such a perfect encapsulation of how much the setting has changed - literally every fact I just listed makes no sense in the current canon.
• Also, there is something called the Stegatank. Need I say more?

Friday Encounter: Fallen Star

This encounter definitely isn't for everyone, and that's okay. It introduces elements of science fiction into the campaign, which might work in a setting that trends more gonzo or isn't afraid to mix genres, but would probably be about as jarring as a brick to the face in a campaign with a more mythic or purely fantastic tone. But the beauty of D&D, as I've outlined before, is that it can do both - and my recent discussions on sci-fi put it in my head. This isn't an encounter I would use in my typical campaigns, but maybe it would work for you.

This encounter is best used in the wilderness, but it could also work on the road or in a more settled area. It probably has the most potential if used in a low-tech setting - most medieval fantasy settings would qualify, but in a campaign that already trends toward science fiction, it could be used on an underdeveloped backwater planet. The idea is to put advanced technology into the hands of the PCs, and explore how that impacts the world around them.

The PCs should ideally hear rumors of a comet sighted in the vicinity - a bright light in the night sky that went shrieking toward the ground, after which a great tremor was felt through the earth. Or the PCs might observe such a phenomenon themselves and decide to investigate.

Either way, if the PCs decide to investigate the site where the "star" was said to have fallen, they will discover a strange mass of smoking twisted metal, about the size of a large carriage, lying in a crater. It appears to be a machine of some sort, but using mechanisms and components beyond anything they've seen before. There is a door on the machine - it is bent and warped, but a DC 10 Athletics check can be used to force the door open; this check can be made with Advantage if a PC has a crowbar or another object that could be used to wedge it open.

If the door is opened, the PCs will discover a compartment inside where two skeletons of an unknown humanoid race are seated before an array of lights and switches, dressed in strange and tattered attire. Further investigation will yield documents in an indecipherable language. Using comprehend language will determine that these are orders from the "Ashtar Galactic Command" to patrol the "Omicron-92 Sector" to protect against "piracy and incursions from the Lidarian Federation;" if the players press further, make up more contextless sci-fi sounding jargon as needed. Furthermore, each of the skeletons is carrying a holster at their hip containing a pistol-like device; another such device, like an oddly-shaped arquebus, is located in a cache behind them.

The "falling star" was in fact an alien spaceship that crash-landed on the campaign world - and left its advanced technology behind. The pistols are laser pistols, and the other gun is a laser rifle (see the Dungeon Master's Guide section on firearms). You can also throw in other advanced technological devices for the PCs to plunder if you wish. These don't have to be anything fancy - for example, a device that can create a flame at the press of the button without the need for fuel (ie, a lighter) would be an incredible treasure in a world where fires are lit by flint and steel.

In a typical medieval fantasy world, these weapons will be more powerful than most mundane weapons available - but on the flip side, no one will be familiar with what they are or how to use them, and the PCs must discover their properties through trial and error. They will also likely be quite valuable if the PCs can find the right buyer - a feudal lord or bandit chief with access to such power would be nearly uncontested. However, that same value could easily paint a target on the PCs if knowledge spreads that they are carrying such items.

For a variation on this encounter, perhaps the PCs aren't the first to get to the crash site. Maybe the ship has landed near a town, and the people have already salvaged its technology - if so, the party might hear rumors of people armed with powerful "magical" devices that they guard fiercely. Or the devices might already be in the hands of entities hostile to the party. Either way, it's unlikely that they'd give such things back without a fight.

And if you really want to shake the campaign up, perhaps the ship's employers might come back looking for it...

The Sci-Fi Kitchen Sink Setting

Don't ask why. Ask why not.

There has never been a successful RPG that has done for science fiction what Dungeons & Dragons has done for fantasy.

Already, I'm sure there are hundreds of hands running to keyboards to tell me I'm wrong. Surely I can't believe that - there are all kinds of successful sci-fi RPGs out there. What about Traveler, which has a history almost as long as D&D's own? What about games like Spelljammer and Starfinder, which build off D&D's rules to facilitate space adventures? Star Frontiers was being published by TSR at the same time they were publishing D&D; surely that counts. There's all manner of RPGs based on existing sci-fi properties, like Star Wars or Warhammer 40,000. And if we step outside the space opera subgenre that's dominated this conversation so far, we'd be remiss to forget Cyberpunk and Shadowrun. Science fiction surely has as much support as fantasy does in the TRPG landscape!

And that statement is absolutely correct! However, that isn't the point I'm making. I don't mean to say that there has never been a successful sci-fi RPG. I'm saying there has never been a successful sci-fi D&D.

All the games I just listed, to some degree or another, have their own defined tone, look, and feel. They all have a setting they're either built around or heavily associated with. They're geared toward playing a specific kind of sci-fi. Most RPGs are like that - D&D, despite being the oldest and most popular of them all, is somewhat of an outlier in that it doesn't try to emulate a specific subgenre of fantasy.

Much has been made about the "kitchen sink" nature of a typical D&D campaign. If you asked what kind of fantasy D&D is, the answer would be "yes." It combines Tolkienian elves, dwarves, halflings, and orcs with the barbarians of the Hyborian Age, monsters from myth and legend, Hammer Horror vampires and werewolves, Lovecraftian elder gods, and even some original creations. That's been tempered somewhat in recent years, as Wizards of the Coast has tried to lock down a canon for the game, and while I understand why that is - they're part of Hasbro now, and a game about an entire multifaceted genre doesn't do well to attract investors or establish a brand identity - I can't help but feel it's lost something. To me, D&D is at its best when it's a game that can cater to and accomodate pretty much everything under the fantasy umbrella, allowing DMs to create their own fantasy worlds with whatever colors of the genre's broad spectrum they choose.

Science fiction has long been viewed as fantasy's sister genre, but it doesn't have anything like that. And I've always found that curious. Really, there's not much of a difference between expecting every high fantasy setting to include elves and expecting every space opera setting to include Wookiees. Both races were created as something specific and idiosyncratic to a seminal work in their respective genre, but one expectation is normalized, and the other sounds completely insane.

Part of it might be because of copyright laws. Tolkien, after all, was building off of a long tradition of mythology and folklore. He might have codified the ways we view elves and dwarves, but no one owns elves and dwarves, as a concept. Meanwhile, most of the classic sci-fi races were created out of whole cloth in living memory, and are protected by large and litigious corporations. Gygax faced legal trouble with hobbits and balrogs, after all. But, on the flip side, he was able to get away with basically using them as-is once he changed their names, and no one stopped him. No one in sci-fi has even tried that.

It could also simply be the fact that D&D was the first of its kind. When it came out there was no real precedent for what a roleplaying game was supposed to be, and TSR was allowed to make their genre as broad and as open-ended as "fantasy," with no further qualifiers, without anyone telling them not to. So too, it was a game made by and for fans of the fantasy genre, not by any large-scale corporation, so it's understandable that the people behind the game would want to make something to capture the magic of their favorite stories instead of trying to stand on its own within its genre as a product that could itself be marketed for its background lore, as later games would do.

I can't help but wonder, if D&D was made today, assuming the TRPG landscape was otherwise identical, would there still be elves, dwarves, and halflings, or would it just be dragonborn, tieflings, and kenku? Many have noted a greater trend toward players wanting to use D&D original races instead of those grounded in Tolkien, but I have to ask if that's truly just a player thing, or if it's what Wizards wants - after all, they can establish dragonborn as their thing. They can't do that for dwarves. And we were getting setting-specific RPGs as early on as Empire of the Petal Throne. Sci-fi RPGs, then, had to enter a world where merely being a sci-fi RPG wouldn't set them apart. They needed to create their universe from the ground up, and be RPGs about playing in that setting, not just in a sci-fi setting.

Now, you'll notice the qualifiers I used. I said that no successful RPG has pulled off a sci-fi kitchen sink setting like this. That was on purpose, because there have been attempts. Grognardia, which has a very good article on this very subject, reviewed 1980's Space Opera, an RPG by Fantasy Games Unlimited that probably came closest out of any published RPG to what I'm positing here. To pull a direct quote, "this is a game where Flash Gordon, Chewbacca, Ming the Merciless, Barbarella, and assorted aliens can meet in a cantina and go adventuring among the stars without the petty concerns of rhyme or reason." Alas, Space Opera was burdened with an incoherent ruleset and the shadow of Traveler, and never caught on.

But I also want to talk about something outside the scope of TRPGs. I want to talk about Star Schlock.

Star Schlock is a skirmish wargame by Wunkay Games that's seen steady releases for the last few years, with both rules and an official miniatures range. It's themed around science fiction cinema and TV from the late 60s to the early 80s. I don't have much interest in the game itself, but as someone who's been steadily getting back into miniatures, and as someone who's always been interested in retrofuturism - and in particular, the cassette futurism movement of that era - it scratches an itch for me, and I've picked up several of the minis for my collection.

But even if I might not ever play the game, I'm fascinated by Star Schlock's setting. The developers have made no attempt to hide its origins. Their ranges all draw heavy inspiration from assorted source material. The two armies included in the starter set are the Explorer Corps, an agency of scientists and explorers charting the final frontier led by "Captain Timothy J. Curt," and the Simian Star Kingdom, a brutal regime of ape despots and their oppressed human slaves led by "Dr. Zayce." Other factions include the Eternal Empire and its faceless, white-armored "Dronetroopers," the zombie plague of the Necronauts, and the Viper Legion, a ruthless terrorist organization led by a megalomaniacal masked commander. There are stat profiles for lawyer-friendly versions of Boba Fett, Buck Rogers, Robbie the Robot, and even Ro-Man from Robot Monster. To my delight, the cuts run so deep that there's an entire faction that seems to be based on the concept art from Alejandro Jodorowsky's aborted Dune adaptation, complete with a miniature of Salvador Dali as the Emperor of the Known Universe.

It's a game that unabashedly started as an exercise to mash up forces from different sci-fi universes and find out who would win. But in order to justify that, the game has spun a setting with surprisingly deep and extensive lore that places these different factions in the same universe - and it works. The starter set includes a "Galaxy Guide" devoted entirely to background information, and the official Schlocklog magazine publishes enough articles on the setting that I've found them an engaging read even when I have no plans to play the actual game.

This, to me, is what a setting that does for science fiction what D&D has done for fantasy would really look like. And I'd argue that it's a setting that would work very well for roleplaying. There's enough background material out there for a prospective DM to get started on a campaign, with a number of distinct factions and power players; there's even been multiple planets that have gotten their own dedicated writeups in the pages of Schlocklog. So too, the mix-and-match nature of the setting makes it easy for newcomers to get in - chances are they'll be familiar with the series these factions were drawn from, and can come to the table with their understanding of what they can expect from them, no expodumps needed. It might have been written for a wargame, but the information would be just as applicable, and just as useful, for a TRPG.

Am I asking for an official Star Schlock RPG some day? Not necessarily - though it would be cool. But I do think what's there could prove just as useful to DMs as it could to wargamers. It would be a good fit for Retrostar, an RPG designed to emulate science fiction film and television of the same era, if one wanted to lean into the genre conventions (the system even puts a limit on how many actions can be made per session to ensure "episodes" fit into a 30-to-60-minute timeslot). But if one didn't want to go such a meta route, I'd argue that you could grab a sci-fi ruleset of your choice, use the Galaxy Guide and Schlocklog as your campaign setting, and be good to go.

In Defense of Gor, Part 4: Stuff I Like

Welcome, everyone, to the fourth and (most likely) final installment of my series on why the Gor novels deserve a look if you're interested in worldbuilding. We've discussed why the series isn't as bad as people make it out to be, the influence it had on the early TRPG scene, and why the setting works so well for gaming. To finish us out, I intend to take a more personal look at the world of Gor, and go over a few aspects of the setting I find interesting. The stuff I couldn't really fit into my other posts, but which I enjoy all the same.

You might find some of these things cool too. Or you might not. You might even find other parts of the setting more interesting - your perspective is unique, and all your own. I encourage you to peruse the rich lore of the novels; with 59 years in print and 38 books, there's bound to be something that interests or inspires you. But these are mine.

Technology Laws

In my personal opinion, Gor is the only setting to do Medieval Stasis right. For those unaware, Medieval Stasis is a concept in worldbuilding describing how a setting can have an in-universe history stretching back centuries, yet never develops modern technology in order to keep the medieval fantasy feel. Various settings over the years have come up with their own answers to this, ranging from "magic makes technology unnecessary" to "technology just doesn't work on this world" - I, personally, just go with "the stories I am telling in this setting happen to take place during its preindustrial era." I don't think you really need an excuse to have medieval technology and society in your setting, considering our world had such things for hundreds of years. However, if one does need an excuse, Gor handles this concept the best out of every setting I've seen.

Gor, as a planet, exists simultaneously with our Earth in the modern era, just on the other side of the sun. However, the people there have technology around the level of Earth's Iron Age, with some later innovations like crossbows. Although it's technically a sword and planet story, I find the feel a lot closer to sword and sorcery - or perhaps sword and sandal - because of the relative lack of advanced technology. However, the possibility for advanced technology is there - but it's limited by the Priest-Kings.

Art by Chris Achileos

Who are the Priest-Kings, you might ask? If I am to spoil a decades-old book, the Priest-Kings are in fact a race of hyper-intelligent insects from another planet who have set up Gor as something like a wildlife preserve as part of a mysterious experiment. Humans from various cultures and eras have been brought to the planet throughout history, and the Priest-Kings take precautions to ensure their ways remain consistent. This includes enforcing strict regulations on technology - things like firearms, explosives, communication devices, and full-body plate armor are prohibited. Interestingly, this doesn't encompass all modern technology. Goreans have light bulbs, for instance, but they're prohibitively expensive for most people, and culturally seen as weird. They even have some inventions more advanced than those on Earth, such as portable translators. But most modern technology as we would think about it is banned.

If you're wondering how the Priest-Kings go about doing this, it's quite simple. Most Goreans don't know that they're alien bug people at all. They've established a cult around themselves to posit themselves as gods, and insist that technology is to be shunned as witchcraft. They themselves have technology the Goreans don't have access to, including spaceships, and use it to work "miracles," including causing people who invent banned technology to spontaneously combust. That tends to get the impression across.

Some might recognize this as quite similar to Forgotten Realms, in which the Harpers are an international organization that suppresses societal and technological progress by assassinating anyone who disturbs the status quo. The difference is that the Priest-Kings are actually portrayed as having questionable motives. They're actively suppressing progress in the name of their own ends, be it research or something more nefarious. This is an easier sell to me than accepting the Harpers as good guys in spite of everything they do. One could even conceive of a campaign in which the Priest-Kings are set up as the villains for this, and the PCs are rebelling against them. I find this answer does a good job of answering why technology doesn't advance, grounding it from a conceivable in-universe explanation that - better yet - offers compelling opportunities for storytelling.

Furthermore, if technology is illegal but not impossible, this creates even more opportunities. You could easily pull an Expedition to the Barrier Peaks and have off-world technology take the place of magic items in a Gorean campaign. Goreans would likely react to, say, a laser gun or a communicator as enchanted artifacts, which could help introduce what functions mechanically as magic into a world where actual magic doesn't exist. In addition, the party would likely have to hide these items from the authorities, lest they be reported as witches, which presents opportunities for conflict. This is actually where I would deviate from the books a little - instead of having the Priest-Kings be able to spy remotely on people and immolate them at will, if I was running a Gorean campaign, I would have "witches" be hunted down and persecuted by the people of Gor. That would make it easier for PCs with such items to avoid undue attention, and could allow for more human drama if the enemies they stand to make from using technology are people they can see and interact with directly.

Kurii

In terms of the roles they play in the story, the Kurii are essentially Gor's equivalent of orcs - a monstrous race that usually appear as antagonists and enemies of Gorean society. However, they deviate from the stereotypical orc in a number of ways, and those ways provide some insight into how one can shake up fantasy tropes to make them feel more fresh.

First of all, they are only orc equivalents in terms of the role they play in the story. Visually, they have more in common with Wookiees than anything else, standing seven feet tall and covered in thick fur, with claws and fangs. We've seen plenty of settings where the main bad guy race is one of tusked green-skinned brutes, but how many can you think of where the heroes fight armies of Bigfeet?

Secondly, in keeping with its attention to detail in worldbuilding, the series goes into great depth about the society, culture, and biology of the Kurii. Like most portrayals of orcs, they are a barbaric warrior race that enjoy fighting and believe that might makes right; they engage in ritualistic combat in order to be allowed the right to mate. They also see humans as a food source, and their word for "human" translates literally to "meat animal."

Where things get interesting is in their biology. They are more active at night, they go into a frenzy at the scent of blood like sharks, and they store food in a second stomach to digest it later, meaning they don't need to carry food while traveling. They also have four sexes, although two of them - Dominant and Nondominant - seem to be more akin to genders and have more of an impact on their place in society than their role in reproduction. Then they have another sex called a Blood-Nurser, which is akin to a cross between a queen insect and a biological incubator; an Egg-Carrier, after being fertilized by a Dominant, implants that egg in an immobile Blood-Nurser to gestate until the baby forcibly eats its way out of the Blood-Nurser. All in all, the Kurii truly feel like another species, and not just humans with funny heads.

What's perhaps most interesting of all, though, is that despite their warlike ways, Kurii are not merely dumb brutes that exist to raid and prey on civilization. They are, in fact, an advanced spacefaring race that are in a state of cold war with the Priest-Kings. Many Kurii on Gor are actually secret agents working to undermine Gorean society and overthrow the Priest-Kings, though others have gone native and have no ulterior motives. They don't just pull out guns and shoot everyone because they too are subject to the Priest-Kings' technology laws and will be persecuted for them, so they use the same limited technology Goreans do. It certainly subverts expectations if a setting's equivalent of orcs are some of the more advanced races around (ironic, because that's what they were in Tolkien, but I digress), and if they have bigger motives than just wanton destruction. Those motives also help to justify their role as villains. They aren't inherently evil, and in fact some Kurii even develop respect for the protagonists of the stories, but they're on the other side of a war most Goreans don't even know they're fighting.

Exotics

Gor is a humanocentric setting, but other races do exist. The aforementioned Kurii and the Urt People, for instance, are sapient nonhuman species, but they don't appear to play a very big part in mainstream society. Most Goreans of most cultures are human. However, the books do make occasional references to so-called Exotics. They don't go into much detail about them, which is unfortunate, but the information we do get is quite interesting.

An Exotic is a slave that possesses some unusual quality. The term is a broad one, and it isn't limited to physical characteristics. One example given is that of a female slave who was raised not knowing about the existence of men, only having been exposed to women. But the term also describes slaves specifically bred to have unusual physical features. These traits can be cosmetic, like unusually large earlobes, or more unusual and stretching the limits of plausible human biology, like having venomous saliva.

I find this concept quite interesting, and it could certainly be used to add additional races to a setting that doesn't have them. Want to play a dwarf? How about someone with horns? Just keep whatever stats are relevant and flavor them as Exotics bred for those traits. It could also be a good excuse to break out your favorite mutation table. Even those Exotics that don't possess strange physical features could present interesting opportunities to roleplay as a character with a very unusual outlook on the world, shaped by their upbringing to serve as a curiosity.

No one can get kaiila right.

Wagon People

Those of you with a good memory might remember that what kicked off this series in the first place was me kitbashing some miniatures to make an army of Wagon People for something like Kings of War. I started on that a while back, and I do intend to return to it. My motivation goes beyond simply having the appropriate parts on hand, though. Out of all the cultures detailed in the series, the Wagon People might be my favorite.

The Wagon People play an extensive role in the fourth book in the series, 1969's Nomads of Gor. Because so much of the book focuses on them, we know quite a bit about their society and culture, which provides ample source material for gaming. Quite fortuitously for my project, we know what weapons and tactics they use, how their military units are organized, and even their heraldry - it all reminds me of the information found in wargaming materials (or even how humanoid armies were organized in the old Monster Manuals), and gets back to my point about how John Norman totally would've been involved with tabletop gaming had he been born a decade later. But besides being easily adaptable to a gaming context, the Wagon People are just cool.

As nomadic raiders and pastoralists, they fill a role similar to the Mongols; indeed, they seem to be largely based on them. They travel in tents on wheeled platforms similar to yurts, and their armies consist almost entirely of cavalry. However, while many cultures introduced later in the series have details borrowed heavily from their real-life counterparts, Norman did not get so lazy with the Wagon People, and they have many quirks unique to them.

They use an elaborate system of facial tattoos to indicate rank in society. They don't eat vegetables (meat, dairy, and fruits are okay) because they have a cultural taboo against eating anything that touches dirt. They accept certain outsiders as welcome guests and allow them to trade with them, but in order to receive such status (marked by a brand on the forearm), one must present themselves to the Wagon People offering gifts, and if they aren't impressed they might just kill you. Because they trust their memory more than the written word, they have people tasked with memorizing the calendar and recounting the passage of years - which are named after important events that happened in them, and are counted from snowfall to snowfall, so they don't have a fixed length. I love these sorts of little cultural details that give you a window into how these people think, and help make their societies feel more real, fleshed out, and lived-in.

Also, perhaps more usefully to DMs, the Wagon People are a good example of how you can vary up a culture based on a real-life one by mixing and matching details from other cultures. Although they're mostly based on the Mongols, they don't feel like Mongols, but like something all their own. A lot of the details are either completely invented or taken from other sources - they have skalds, for instance, and some have noted that they appear to be partially based on gauchos, as they live on the plains and use bolas and throwing knives. If this is the case, it showcases how the New World has just as many interesting cultures as the Old, and how even for a medieval fantasy setting one need not limit themselves to the medieval era when it comes to inspiration. As someone with a culture based on Mexico, I should know.

Finally, while most Goreans ride either giant birds or dinosaurs, the Wagon People ride a creature called a kaiila. Most renditions that I've seen draw them as horses with fangs. This is coward behavior. To me, the way they're described, with long necks, silky hair, and clawed feet, makes them sound much more like carnivorous killer death-llamas. I shouldn't need to explain why Mongols with bolas on carnivorous killer death-llamas are cool.

Verticality

We exist in three-dimensional space. That statement might seem trivially obvious on the surface, but it's something a lot of games forget. Because of the limitations of depicting it on maps, and because of the fact that we rarely have to interact with our world on a Z axis unless we live in a big city, not a lot of maps truly make use of three-dimensional space. Adding towers, chasms, tall ceilings, and the like can really liven up your dungeon design, quite literally giving the players a new dimension to explore, and adding new challenges to how they approach the world around them. For instance, they might need to scale a sharp cliff in order to get from one level to another, or balconies on one level could overlook rooms on another, providing opportunities for ambush. I think it's something a lot of people forget, since we're so used to dungeons being stacks of simple floors on top of one another. But looking at real-life cave maps shows how complex an enclosed vertical space can really be.

Gor has verticality baked into its setting, and because of that, it serves as a good illustration of what vertical design can do for a game. It achieves this through two ways - first, through the ready availability of flying mounts (one can buy a tarn for a single gold tarn disc, although that's "more than many common laborers will earn in a year"), giving characters a means to maneuver up and down, and secondly, through the use of vertical space in the design of its locations. Many large Gorean cities are complex multi-leveled affairs; buildings consist of tall towers, with different businesses and facilities on different levels, and bridges spanning between them. One could navigate a city not only through the cardinal directions, but also moving up or down, and discover new things. Mapping a Gorean city would be quite similar to mapping a dungeon, and could provide just as many opportunities for exploration. It would also make chases through the streets more exciting, as PCs would have to move between levels - or avoid falls off narrow bridges, particularly because Goreans think railings are for cowards. All in all, it's food for thought that presents an interesting perspective for designing dungeons and other spaces.

He just wants to discuss philosophy. 

Spider People

I love these guys. The Spider People don't really do a whole lot in the series. There's one brief encounter with them all the way back in Tarnsman of Gor, and they kind of get forgotten about afterward. But the concept is so batshit insane that I have to mention it.

The Spider People are another sapient race on Gor, dwelling in the swamps north of the city of Ar. With a name like that, your mind might conjure the image of driders. They're part spider, part person, right? No - Spider People are literally just giant spiders. They're "people" insofar as they're capable of rational thought and speech, but there's nothing anthropomorphic about them. Considering giant spiders are a staple of dungeons, having one of them turn out to be a friendly, personable NPC could be a fun way to subvert your players' expectations.

What's also quite interesting is their culture. Although the Spider People are sapient, the people of Ar hunt them for sport and to harvest their webs. They could easily wipe them out if they wanted to, but keep a small population alive to have a steady source of silk. The Spider People are completely okay with this and do nothing about it, because they have such a strong taboo against violence that they will not do anything to harm another sapient being, even in self-defense. If a person wants to kill them, they'll just assume they have a good reason to and let it happen. This line of thinking is so alien that it stands as a great example of Norman's approach to worldbuilding, making his cultures and races feel truly distinct from humanity, and avoiding Flintstonism.

I hoped you enjoyed this look at the world of Gor. Hopefully, you came away from it with a better idea of what the setting is, how it's informed gaming, and how it could continue to do so. For all the books' flaws, I truly do find the series to be up there with some of the most fascinating worldbuilding projects put to paper, and I'm sure many of its ideas would appeal to DMs.

This will probably be the last post I write about Gor. There's so much more I could talk about, but Luther has already catalogued everything far better and more extensively than I ever could. I might make some more posts here and there if the mood strikes me, but for those interested in looking into the setting more, I encourage you to click around his site, or even to seek out the books if you truly are interested. Until then, I'll be continuing to post on other settings, and intend to get back to The Saga of the Ortegids. See you then!

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!