Mimetic Worldbuilding: Historical Fantasy And Why To Do It

Michelangelo Caravaggio, "The Sacrifice of Isaac"
Front-piece to the Princeton Classics edition of Erich Auerbach's "Mimesis"

In fantasy-type RPGs, we can, without too much oversimplification, delineate two basic types of worldbuilding: the sub-creative and the mimetic. The former is overwhelmingly predominant, for reasons that are hardly mysterious: the inventor of the sub-creative method was none other than J.R.R. Tolkien, who justifiably claims the mantle of founder of the fantasy genre in general.

For Tolkien, sub-creation denoted acting in the image of God by composing a second, imaginary world. This world was not to be the equal of the Primary World, because we would fashion it with the psychic and spiritual tools made initially by God and put at our disposal through his Grace. Moreover, as sub-creators, we would have to take care to remember that we continued to live in the Primary World, which our Secondary World could never replace (so long as we wished to keep our sanity and remain within God's Grace).

Nevertheless, these Secondary Worlds were to be free and independent creations, not dictated, contrived, and pale imitations of the Primary World. Rather, they would be vivid, beautiful, supernatural - populated by creatures of Faerie, larger-than-life heroes, magical animals that talked, and also the darkest villains. The more disbelief in these things was suspended, the more real the Secondary Worlds became. These 'faerie tales' have been told from time immemorial and are an inalienable part of all human cultures - to entertain, to escape the drudgery and misery of the mundane world, and to rekindle hope by showing that there are other Worlds where, despite the presence of Darkness, Good triumphs over Evil in the end.

Fantasy as a literary type was, for Tolkien, a project for restoring the Secondary Worlds of Faerie in the conditions of a runaway modernity. In a thoroughly disenchanted world, he saw all thought, action and communication as being enslaved by the necessity of scientific, socioeconomic or political facts and to which there could be no alternative. Imagination necessary to appreciate sub-creation, and the suspension of disbelief were discouraged or punished, and relegated to the sphere of children: the wise and terrible elves of old shrunk to the tiny, winged Tinkerbells that still inhabited 20th-century tales of 'fancy'. Fantasy was to restore the right to imagine and sub-create to adults who, if anything, were even more victimized by disenchanted modernity than children. In a world where the myths and fairy tales of old were declared to be atavisms or screens veiling "real" social relations or primitive scientific knowledge, and mercilessly caricatured by science and bad drama, sub-creators could not simply retell old tales, but had to fashion them almost de novo in order to imbue them with a heavier dose of imagined reality. These would have to be internally consistent, living worlds, with their own history, genealogies, legends, poetry, and languages (which Tolkien, himself a linguist, would proceed to fashion).

A further stipulation of the sub-creative method in fantasy was the injunction to keep the Secondary world strictly separate from the Primary. Any leaking through, any blurring of boundaries between the two would not only undermine the inner consistency of the former and blur the line between reality and fantasy, but also threaten to implicate the Secondary Worlds in the political conflicts of the Primary, which they were explicitly constructed to escape. It is on those grounds that Tolkien objected to the use of allegory in fantasy. Reducing an elfin or divine being to a manifestation of a natural force weakened sub-creative power. Explicitly rejecting the notion that the War of the Ring was in any key sense an allegory of the Second World War, Tolkien indicated that if it had been such, it would have concluded with the taking of the Ring and its use to augment the power of the victors, which would have obviated the therapeutic power of his sub-creation. Similarly, in contrast to C.S. Lewis' Narnia Chronicles, which were an obvious allegory of the ministry, passion and resurrection of Christ, Tolkien, though he saw the Lord of the Rings as a fundamentally Christian work,  felt that such a heavy-handed insertion of Christianity would not only undermine the integrity of the fantasy, but also of religion: by inserting an explicitly Christian preachiness into Middle Earth, he would also turn the latter into the domain of political and doctrinal struggle. Instead, the truth of Christianity in a compact, symbolic form, which would become only become transparent over time to an emotionally-invested reader.

It requires little argumentation to demonstrate that Tolkien's method was not only successful in introducing a new literary style, but that this style has attained the semblance of hegemony in speculative fiction, in role-playing games, and arguably, even in the culture at large. It is Re-enchantment, rather than Disnechantment which is now feared, because instead of the End of History, we are in fact living through the End of the Future (so it is no surprise that fantasy has displaced science fiction as the ascendant vision of that future). In the 1960s, the Lord of the Rings became a bestseller on the crest of a popular revolt against disenchanted modernity. In the 1970s, it midwifed the birth of D&D and (roleplaying games generally). The Tolkien-created races - elves, dwarves, hobbits/halflings, orcs, as well as humans continue to form the core of the official D&D legendarium. D&D and the fantasy genre has continued to dominate the world of RPGs, and this dominance has only been reinforced with the 5e renaissance, which has brought D&D and gaming into the mainstream. And in the wake of the success of the Lord of the Rings movie franchise at the turn of the century, fantasy finally tamed drama, which Tolkien saw as being opposed to it. Now that Secondary Worlds can be dramatically represented in non-caricatured ways, the full power of the culture industry can be brought to bear on the ceaseless expansion of sub-creative worldbuilding - a fact reflected in the imperative to make D&D sessions and descriptions "cinematic". 

Much about the playstyles, play process, and worldbuilding in D&D continues to reflect the imprint of Tolkien's sub-creative method. Consider the officially published settings for 5e, as well as those of earlier editions that many fans call to have updated for the new ruleset: Forgotten Realms, Eberron, Greyhawk, Dark Sun, Dragonlance, Ravnica. All are Secondary Worlds, wholly imagined, wholly fictional, with internal coherence and distinct histories. Forgotten Realms and Greyhawk are, to an extent, parallel worlds to our own, but it would be hard to suspect them of being allegorical (certainly with respect to contemporary politics and culture). On top of that, the more "ethnic" areas of those worlds that might be recognized as versions of particular cultural regions have been deemphasized (to the point of their near-absence) in newly published materials.

Consider as well the separation of the creatures in these worlds into good and evil. Although alignment as a game feature is in decline (making these Secondary Worlds less like Middle Earth over time), it still exists. Planes of existence that embody these alignments, and planes such as the Faewild parallel Tolkien's Faerie quite closely. The popular reference to D&D-type games as "elf games" is sardonic, but it contains more than a grain of literal truth.

Moreover, claims to the effect that the PCs are heroes, and should be played as heroes, are still quite widespread. How often do we hear comments from people who say that they want their characters to do heroic things, because in real life, they are quite average, and want to escape their hum-drum existence when they are engaged in elf games at the table. And how often do we hear comments to the effect that at that table, they want to deal with simple, diverting fantasy, and not with morally- and politically-complicated issues that suffuse their personal and professional lives? How often do we see people on gaming lists insisting that cultural and political issues have no place there? All of this testifies to the preeminence of the sub-creative model.

Sub-creation: the music of the Ainur

* * *

The sub-creative model is not, however, without its detractors. In his critique "Epic Pooh", Michael Moorcock accused Tolkien of putting on airs, when in fact, there was little difference between the Lord of the Rings, Winnie the Pooh, Peter Pan, and the Wizard of Oz. All were children's stories, but in claiming that his work was something more, Tolkien was infantilizing his reader, isolating him from sexuality, politics, and other adult themes, and in so doing, promoting a veiled reactionary political agenda. Moorcock, of course, was a fantasy writer, too, but he saw no fundamental distinction between fantasy and other varieties of belles lettres, which were intended to challenge its readers morally, epistemologically, politically, and syntactically. Tolkien-style fantasy writers dismissed most contemporary fiction as "boring", while glorifying pulpy cliches and escapism as the only basis for good writing - a testament, as Moorcock saw it, to the disenchanted and discredited worldview of antimodernist social groupings that formed their worldviews, as well as to the decline of cultural standards in the second half of the 20th century. In opposition to this tendency, Moorcock cited fantasy books that are based on real-world mythological and legendary sources (Gillian Bradshaw), as well as fantasies that incorporate anthropological and non-Western perspectives (Ursula K. Le Guin).

George R.R. Martin, while generally more appreciative of Tolkien as a forbear, similarly faulted him for his lack of realism. Why such stark division into good elves and evil orcs - do the latter also have evil orc babies? Why is there nothing about the monetary system or the taxation policy of the realms of Middle Earth? Why is it based on such a primitive political philosophy - as long as Gondor has a legitimate king descended from the Numenorians, then all is right with the world? (Unsurprisingly, it took a Russian, Kirill Yeskov, to extrapolate a realist spin on Aragorn's claim in the Last Ringbearer, where the Future King turns out to be a politically ambitious ranger who marries an elf princess, practices genocide against Mordor, and ultimately, uses these to assert a royal claim reaching back thousands of years [!]). For Martin, being a good guy or a legitimate ruler is not enough: even in a fantasy world with magic and dragons, you have to make hard choices, and occasionally, act to cruelly to save more lives down the road. All sides in his world advance moral and religious justifications for their actions. On top of that, there are more than two sides. Sometimes, good guys fight good guys, and ally themselves with evil guys to do it. This type of fantasy world accords more with our own historical experience: notably, Martin is quite explicit that the inspiration for A Game of Thrones came from real conflicts (the Wars of the Roses first and foremost).

The concern for realism, and for a more academically informed fiction does not mean jettisoning fantasy altogether. For better or worse, we live in a world Tolkien made, and internally consistent Secondary Worlds - with their own history, with magic, with creatures that don't exist in the primary world - these have become so widespread that they now even infect 'serious' literature (Umberto Eco, Alice Hoffman, Michael Chabon). It does, however, mean adopting a different methodology for fantasy worldbuilding, at least in part, precisely because our world has changed, and with it, so has the meaning of fantasy. Whereas Tolkien was confronted with what he saw as runaway industrialization, disenchantment, and an existential struggle between political ideologies, we are confronted with a more complex, multi-cornered struggle between many identity groups which all advance claims for recognition. Some of these - heretofore the most dominant, but sensing challenges from all sides, have even begun to draw on the Lord of the Rings to justify war-making in defense of such claims and of their purported ethical superiority.

The epigraph to Chapter 11 of David Gress' From Plato to Nato: the Idea of the West and its Opponents. The chapter looks at the conception of the West following the end of the Cold War, and envisions its assault in its traditional homelands by various postmodern ideologies.

In addition to the use of sub-creation toward explicitly political ends in the Primary World, the imagination of new magical worlds into being has become increasingly exhausted, runs into the turned in upon itself, derivative and solipsistic. For commentators (and sometime fantasy writers) such as John Michael Greer, what's missing from popular, pulpy kind of fantasy - precisely the kind that Moorcock disparages, is mimesis:

The distinction between cliché and personal vision is also the difference between the two categories of fantasy mentioned above. Read a volume of Thongor of Lemuria and the thoughts that you’re experiencing are utterly familiar, the generic mindset of pulp fantasy, replayed in an endless loop with only the most minor variations. Read a volume of the Zimiamvian trilogy and the thoughts you’re experiencing are unique to Eddison. You get to see how someone else thinks and feels and experiences life. In the process, the range of thoughts you’re capable of thinking and feelings you’re able to experience gets expanded. That’s what I mean by mimesis: the experience of a work of genuine art guides you toward new ways of being in the world...

In contrast to the currently dominant conception of art as a vehicle for self-expression, the mimetic theory of art stipulates that, "[a]rt is a means—the only one we’ve come up with so far, despite a vast amount of tinkering on the part of assorted mad scientists—of enabling one person to share, in some sense, in another person’s experience of the world."
 
Curiously, although Greer promotes mimetic theory in part to defend Tolkien from (his now mostly forgotten) high-brow critics in the 1950s, the definition of art (or fantasy literature) as a representation that is experienced, understood, and appreciated by a passive recipient is quite a bit different from Tolkien's own idea of sub-creation. It's not that the two approaches are inimically opposed to one another: Tolkien certainly put great stock in being able to spin a good yarn that others could enjoy. But there is nothing in imagining Secondary Worlds into being that necessarily involves effectively sharing the experience with others: sub-creation may involve communion with God, but it is, and not infrequently, a solitary business - I create worlds because that is how I express myself, and if people aren't able to appreciate them, that is their problem, and not mine. In sub-creating, I partake of a divine genius, and that is all the justification I need. 

Though Greer does not explicitly tell us what makes one's artistic representations relatable, he is drawing upon the notion of mimesis introduced by the literary theorist Erich Auerbach shortly before the appearance of the Lord of the Rings. For Auerbach, the ability to think and feel together with an artist was made possible by the fact that the latter successfully represented an external reality which he (typically) had no hand in creating. This reality could be the physical reality of what people do and say, the psychological reality of the tension between the external and internal selves, or the historical reality of trying to change oneself in a constantly changing world: in any case, the imagination of the artist is focused on representing the Primary World rather than trying to create a Secondary one. For Auerbach, this mimesis was the red thread running through Western art and literature, and the successful representation of the Primary World, despite the toil and complexity involved in doing so was the primary criterion in determining whether a particular work was to be adjudged as "great" and accepted into the canon. It is for this reason that fantasy such a difficult time at the hands of tastemakers and literary critics - until recently. Creating worlds that were explicitly not intended to represent reality was seen as a shirking of the artist's responsibility, and avoiding having to learn the difficult techniques of the writer's craft. Fantasy as a whole was seen as self-referential, and hence, not admissible into the canon.

The suitability of the mimetic approach for fantasy worldbuilding has already been broached in the discussion of Moorcock's and Martin's critique of Tolkien. Martin, in particular, insisted that his series could have "the gritty feel of historical fiction as well as some of the magic and awe of epic fantasy". Westeros and Essos have internal consistency - their own timelines, ruling families, languages, gods, magical creatures, and still take inspiration form the Wars of the Roses, the Vietnam war, Hadrian's Wall, and a myriad other real-world influences. In some cases (as with Moorcock's invocation of series based on the Arthurian legends or the Celtic Prydain of Lloyd Alexander), fantasy worlds could even derive their 'inner coherence' from real-world history or mythology. And where but from history does one get ideas about how people, even in fantasy worlds, act in response to the pressures of family, social status, economic scarcity, and geopolitical competitors? Where for Tolkien, sub-creative worldbuilding had to preserve elements of nature, which he thought were steadily being destroyed by industry, for the mimetic worldbuilder, historical and social structures had to be preserved in fiction and game to resist a world in which symbolic production was being overwhelmed by the entertainment industry that had already largely incorporated the sub-creative approach.

Examples of mimetic-type worldbuilding certainly exist in fantasy RPGs, though they have been overshadowed by sub-creative worldbuilding. The first genuinely mimetic FRPG was Backhaus and Simbalist's Chivalry & Sorcery (1977) - a game born out of a desire to simulate a medieval European society, as well as a general dissatisfaction with D&D's lack of realism. C&S had dragons and magic, too, but as add-ons in a setting that had a more-or-less realistic economic system and price lists, a real feudal-type social hierarchy, and a political and legal system that actually impacted PC actions. C&S also had Christianity, which was left out not only by Tolkien but also by Gygax (who, too, was a believer, but also guided by practical considerations, as D&D was hit by a fundamentalist backlash in the early 80s, and had to assert its purely fictional bona fides). The creators of C&S insisted not only on immersion, but also on complexity: the worlds in which characters operated were not to be mere dungeons where one killed monsters, but 'total environments' - an imperative that evokes Braudel's 'total history'.

C&S was followed by a host of mimetic FRPGs - Bushido, Man Myth and Magic, Pendragon, Legend of the Five Rings, Nyambe, and a host of others too numerous to mention. Beginning in the mid-1980s, mimetic settings began to appear under the D&D imprint, which provided them a framework for much wider circulation. Settings like Kara-Tur, al-Qadim and Maztica were mimetic in the sense that they reflected non-Western historical regions and mythology, at least in a way that resonated with the average fantasy fan. As such, they enjoyed a measure of popularity, especially in the 1990s. However, these settings were incorporated into, that is, subordinated to, generic fantasy settings such as Forgotten Realms. And despite the fact that Forgotten Realms has served as a vehicle for the vast majority of 5e adventure paths, these specific regions have not appeared, except in passing, in any 5e publications.

Map depicting the world in Philip Pullman's "His Dark Materials" series -
a good example of mimetic worldbuilding

More importantly, these settings have come under attack from within the 5e gaming community on account of being Orientalist, culturally appropriative, and not reflective of the diverse and multicultural fanbase of the current D&D game. I have addressed these charges elsewhere, and will not recapitulate my arguments here. I will underline, however, that the attack aimed at a broader target than mere exoticism. In its insistence that the D&D franchise has accepted multiculturalism, thereby dictating its system design "to embrace the construction of Orientalist fictional worlds where the Orient and Occident mix, mingle, and wage war", it took aim at mimetic worldbuilding in general. The idea that historico-cultural bonds (of any kind) could no longer play the role of suffusing settings with inner consistency, implied that settings now had to be wholly fictional, thus ruling out 'total environments' of the C&S type, even if the latter did not partake of any cultural appropriation. D&D, according to this perspective, has outgrown mimetic worldbuilding: if it survives, it would only be in niche markets and communities, perhaps wedded to complex mechanics, and appealing to people who were more interested in historical simulation, rather than freewheeling play, and 'having fun'.

A separate issue, but one that nevertheless resonates with charges of Orientalism leveled at mimetic settings, is the explicit Eurocentricity of mimetic theory. As laid out by Auerbach, mimesis was a key component in specifically Western cultural production, rooted as it was in the Homeric Epic, classical Greek drama, and Old Testament theological history. This led many scholars to deny that regions outside Europe had mimetic artistic production of any sort. One might, therefore object that an approach to worldbuilding that is grounded in a theory positing an absolutely external, transcendent reality is grounded in cultural imperialism - it is precisely such an objection that I find implicit in the insistence that worldbuilding be 'multicultural' referred to in the preceding paragraph. However, historical cognition is not a purely 'Western' phenomenon - examples of Chinese, Japanese, Islamic, etc. histories are simply too numerous to mention, so historical simulation in itself does not constitute Orientalism or cultural appropriation. Moreover, the notion that mimetic cultural production is absent outside the West has been convincingly challenged. Writing about mimesis in the case of Chinese aesthetics, Ming Dong Gu demonstrates that the Chinese system of writing, Chinese landscape painting, and the description of social life in Chinese literary works all testify to the presence of mimesis in Chinese culture. Owing to the centrality of epic and drama, which stress narrative, in Greek aesthetics, and of lyric poetry, which stresses spontaneity and embellishment in the Chinese, mimesis does not occupy a dominant role in the latter. However, both the world-creating and the world-reflecting "models exist in Chinese aesthetic thought, but the emphasis seems to rest on the second model. Mimetic theory must exist in any literary tradition that has formed a system of aesthetic thought, because imitation is a basic human instinct". In fact, a multiplicity of appraoches is present in the West as well, as is demonstrable in Tolkien's case in particular: despite the political uses neoconservatives have found for the Lord of the Rings, Tolkien is clear that world-creation is not a Western or even specfically Christian feature - sub-creation is a universal divine gift. If for Tolkien, the overemphasis on world-reflection demonstrated an imbalance which he attempted to correct, the same might be said regarding greater emphasis on the mimetic in Chinese culture since the Revolution.

On the whole, arguments that mimetic worldbuilding in RPGs is culturally imperialist, or only of interest to niche gamers, strike me as being off-base. If anything, I think there is likely to be increased interest in such worldbuilding, given the market-saturation of sub-creative games, the presence of a new player base that flowed into the hobby as a result of the 5e generational shift. As they mature, many of the new, younger players are probably going to be looking to play (and to make) something different and more complex, just as the original cohort of RPG players did in the late 80s and 90s. Recommending more mimetic, historically-realistic settings, are:

• Simulation. Well-made, well-researched historical RPGs can be a highly effective tool in exploring life in past societies. Just like VR technology can give us the sense of what ancient cities may have looked like, historical RPGs can tell us how life in these and similar societies might have been experienced. The recent 'dramaturgical turn' that has accompanied the rise of streamed games has been to the hobby's benefit, because psychological exploration of a PC's emotions and inner world has greatly augmented the role-playing aspect of RPGs. Paying a similar level of attention to making vivid and realistic settings can do the same to the simulation aspects.

• Immersion. A world with inner coherence is much easier to achieve if it borrows heavily from historical exemplars. I don't claim that sub-creative worlds cannot do this, but how many GMs are worldbuilders like Tolkien? Of course, Tolkien's own worldbuilding drew on the mimetic method as well - particularly, Celtic, Germanic, and Finnish mythology (as well as the Old Testament). Similarly mixing and matching historical influences, or emphasizing particular elements for the purposes of closer exploration can also aid in understanding processes of historical change, much like alternative histories or hypotheticals can.

• Difference. For all the talk about multiculturalism, making worlds that look like fantasy versions of present-day United States does little to effectively promote difference, or escapism. When (again, following Tolkien), the simmering Cauldron of Story in which setting elements cook over time turns out to contain the same ingredients time after time, or when people insist that the Cauldron must contain all ingredients, sub-creation suffers as well, because playing in such settings, while possibly entertaining in small doses, becomes no more escapist than shopping at the local supermarket. If the Cauldron is cooking up a story and not a shopping list, the limitation of ingredients, and some notion about which ingredients go with which others, can make the final dish much more enjoyable. Historical settings provide us with tried-and-true recipes, giving us a solid base on which to experiment.

• Critique. Oftentimes, history textbooks are no less clear on who the good guys and bad guys are than is the Lord of the Rings. We know who the oppressors, the righteous downtrodden, the conniving compradors, and the barbaric monsters are. But whether accurate or distorted, these roles and labels are constructed over time. If we look at particular historical (and quasi-historical) transition points in which characters of some verisimilitude act and operate, we begin to see that these roles can be quite fluid, and that the outcome of interactions between different groups is not predetermined. If we are really to "interrogate" colonialism (or autocracy), we see how they emerged because of decisions people make, and sometimes, because of unforeseen circumstances. As we saw earlier with Martin, "if you want to do anything, you can’t keep clean hands. You will have to make difficult and often unattractive decisions. And you might have episodes where you look like the good guys but we’re not going to cut and roll credits there. You will certainly also find yourselves in the position of bad guys."

The degree of mimesis is obviously going to differ in each case of worldbuilding. Some people will opt for near-complete historical simulation (in which case, we are no longer really talking about historical fantasy). Others will want to borrow different elements, mix and match, go for alternative history, and have a lot, some, or no magic in their settings. But the question of magic brings us to another approach to mimetic worldbuilding, one that may apply more to largely or even wholly fictional worlds. To use Martin's case as an illustration, he allowed his friend to convince him to put dragons into A Song of Ice and Fire, likely because in an age where reenchantment has returned into a society that still possesses tremendous technological potential to alter its environment, mimetic worldbuilding seems like an especially apt choice because of its allegorical potential. Play as social critique suggests that it can also be applied toward thinking deeply about one's own society, deriving ways to transform it in a desired direction, but also finding ways to accept changes that cannot be turned back. In the 19th and 20th centuries, this function belonged to utopian and dystopian fiction, but as these genres became increasingly formulaic and overloaded with predictable sets of political signifiers, their utility declined.

Tolkien's sub-creative approach, as we have seen, evinces a powerful allergy toward allegory. In this, it follows the well-marked out path of the Romantics, which whose aesthetics eschewed allegory in favor of symbolism (notwithstanding Moorcock's criticism of Tolkien's obsession with the soil and conservative 'good sense' as anti-romantic, the latter explicitly regarded romance as a close synonym to 'fairy story'). Like the Romantics, Tolkien found allegory heavy-handed, and disparaged it in favor of the symbol. Allegory was the product of another age - the Baroque.

Allegory conveys historicity and temporality, whereas the symbol encapsulates immediacy and makes it seem eternal. A symbol functions like a revelation, a lightning flash, whereas allegory is always a construction. A symbol fuses the signifier and signified, whereas allegory separates them. As Todorov explained, “the symbol is, allegory signifies"... The reader’s task is not to empathize, as was customary with contemporary sentimental novels, but to decipher... Allegory, dissolves all suspension of disbelief... The Romantic poets reacted to the rupture of modernity not only with the rhetorical choice of symbolism, to capture a lost unity for which they yearned, but also with allegories that represented and emphasized the experience of laceration. As Andrea Cesarini put it, allegory as “an alternative rhetorical procedure to symbolism ... renounces any nostalgic attempt at recomposition, is bitterly pessimistic, [and] lucidly catastrophic'.

Tolkien's strategy was clearly to try to capture lost, timeless unity. The utopians (including early science fiction authors) as allegorists accepted the revolutionary rupture of modernity, and tried to shine a light on the way ahead. And occult philosophers like Louis-Claude de Saint-Martin - an allegorist of the French Revolution and the the main hero of the article just cited, as well Frankfurt School thinker Walter Benjamin, call on our reasonable faculties to make sense of the tragedy that the winds of revolutionary change wreak, while yet leaving ourselves open to the possibility of salvation despite the bleak landscape that we perceive. Curiously, as for Saint-Martin, the allegorical tale might even feature a struggle between Good and Evil, though unlike for Tolkien, the tale, simplistic on its face, is more important for what it leaves out for the reader to infer about what Good and Evil is by reading between the lines.  

Paul Klee, "Angelus Novus" - the image that served as the
basis for Benjamin's backward-flying Angel of History

A good allegory uses a good code, which can be interpreted in multiple different ways. Read allegorically, A Song of Ice and Fire is not simply about dragons as stand-ins for modern weaponry. It's about how big wars started by those seeking power rarely end well - for them. It's about how rediscovering the magic of the past can simultaneously lead to the salvation of the world, as well as its destruction: who can doubt that Westeros as we know it will not survive the clash of dragons and Others? And who can doubt that Daenerys' fight to rid the world of slavery will end, not in a post-historical triumph of the one right political system, but tragically, with her own death, and possibly the death of magic (we know that one of the dragons has already perished)? In that sense, the Lord of the Rings is allegorical as well, and also concludes with the death of magic.

Our age is also about the rediscovery of magic. Today, there is much talk about the old magic of tribes that causes us to divide people into us and them, and to demand blood sacrifices to keep the bonds between us strong. Somewhat less frequently, we remember that those who not long ago called for the rediscovery of 'true' liberalism - one with little state interference in the economy, with negative rather than positive freedoms, one which laid out the only truth path to modernity - also stirred up old magic, and perhaps the most dangerous tribe of all. Then, why not spin an allegory about elves - attractive, long-lived, talented, public-minded, ethical, ruling on the basis of meritorious service to civilized life - and, increasingly, cut off from their less attractive but more numerous subjects - whom they no longer benefit, who tire of their tutelage, and who see through their self-serving and self-destructive attempts to cling to power? If RPGs are a new art form, as many claim, why do they need to be art for art's sake, as opposed to a medium that can also explore pressing issues of primary reality? 

Notes in the Margin: I'm starting a Facebook Group for discussing Historical Fantasy worldbuilding. If you're interested in mimetic worldbuilding and other theoretical approaches, and, more importantly, practical issues involved in designing and running such worlds, check out the Never-was Worlds group.

    

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Far-From-Equilibrium 5e

I do not consider myself an OSR person, though I do play OSR games on occasion, and I appreciate the movement's DIY spirit, openness, design edge, and philosophy stipulating that "nothing is supposed to happen". I lack the requisite reverence for the hobby's Founding Fathers, and am at best lukewarm toward OSR's dominant dungeon-and-frontier aesthetic. I also think randomness is a necessary element of any RPG, and that it is of equal importance to a GM's worldbuilding and narrative skill, and player agency; but I do not believe randomness should be an imperative in itself - only a tool, and a mediating element between GMs and players. I don't think everything about a character needs to be randomly generated, and while character death and maiming need to be part of the game, the most interesting characters are those that are built with care, not those that are designed as cannon fodder and happen to survive.

In general, I think that DIY is applicable to all RPGs, and certainly, has always been a mainstay of D&D in all its incarnations. Not all systems are appropriate to all settings, but for most fantasy save truly low-magic settings, most types of D&D and its offshoots are generally suitable. On the whole, I think 5e is a fine system, that deserves the accolades it has received. It has simple, streamlined, easy-to-learn mechanics. It has a sufficient number of basic player options (classes and races) to make it attractive to a large and expanding player base, and the fact that the player options are designed from the flavor up, and not from the mechanics up, is a definite point in its favor. The design system is also fairly easy to reverse engineer, and serves as a good guide for DIY race and class design. Moreover, the introduction of backgrounds has proven to be a very useful feature that helps to ground characters in settings. And the elimination of earlier mistakes - the lack of integrated mechanics of AD&D, the crunch-heaviness of 3e, the 4e attempt to become a low-tech tactical video game - has given 5 justified recognition as a back-to-basics game that even OSR people have appreciated. And ultimately, 5e's popularity which some gamers complain about, has created an unprecedentedly large pool of potential players, some of whom can be poached for less conventional and more experimental approaches.

At the same time, there are aspects of 5e that I like quite a bit less - not so much the rules, mechanics, and flavor themselves, but the culture they are informed by, and in turn, generate. First and foremost, this involves the obsession with balance. Ideally, design should attempt to mechanically balance distinct classes and races against one another - all should have things they excel in, all should have player appeal, none should be far-and-away better than the others (else, why play them?). Such balance is fine as a goal, but a lot of people fail to realize that the attainment of balance in a complex game like D&D is impossible, simply because it is impossible to quantify every in-game situation. It is widely recognized that some classes are stronger than others, and that, in the grand scheme of things, casters are more powerful than non-casters at high levels (and that combat classes, conversely, are more powerful at low levels). This has recurred in every edition, despite the explicit push to minimize the imbalances starting with 3rd edition.

The real problem with balance is when it begins to bleed over from character design into every other aspect of the game. All encounters must be balanced. The number of encounters per day must be balanced. Each session should be balanced between role-playing, exploration, and combat. Agency must be balanced between players and GM, and all individual players, so as to maximize player efficaciousness over the course of a session (though it's really about efficaciousness more than balance - the same people who complain about a Charm spell being ineffective because NPCs remember you cast it on them will complain that a Charm spell cast on them takes away their PC's agency). The advent of the ideally balanced game session - where the party is challenged, but only just; no one dies; and everyone has a prescribed level of 'fun' is reflected in numerous advice videos, which create certain expectations of what is supposed to happen in a game session or campaign (a 'full campaign' is one in which a character advances from 1st to 20th level, where the 'capstone' is reached). It is therefore not accidental that the ideal game begins to look more-or-less the same regardless of where you look. Heroes, who almost always survive, are railroaded through very similar settings, on route to a fight with the aptly named Big Bad Evil Guy (BBEG), and then retire (occasionally, are killed in a final blaze of glory). The party mix is always the same diverse mix of races and classes that don't really belong together, and don't really belong in the setting, which reduces more and more to generic fantasy. This ideal type of D&D game is somewhat reminiscent of an ideal game of Diplomacy from the point of view of the realist international relations theorist. Ideally, in Diplomacy, skilled players are so sensitive to a balance of power that the slightest imbalance in favor of one Great Power will lead to immediate bandwagoning, so that boundaries don't change. Of course, real games of Diplomacy hardly ever work out that way (as do real interstate relations). Similarly, real D&D, in whatever iteration, is going to be unbalanced. To my mind, this should be factored in, and recognition of the fact can make a game more fun than an adherence to the notion of optimal balance.

Below are some ideas for playing 5e far from equilibrium, which, if done right, can create more unique and memorable campaigns. (I say campaigns, because balance is much easier to achieve in individual sessions, which consist of one set of players, where parties have clear goals and are usually rushed through preliminaries to get to them. In campaigns, where the group chemistry is always in flux, and where the setting changes, and becomes more real over time, the pursuit of balance becomes significantly more challenging. But campaigns are a unique feature of RPGs [whereas Diplomacy always reverts back to 1901 at the start of each discrete session]. Campaigns, in other words, offer quite a bit more scope for DIY).

• Roll for stats and HP. Not all characters have to be the same. Rolling for stats creates tension and can limit choices, but the limitations likely results in more memorable, suboptimal characters (as well as more memorable superoptimal, and even more memorable average ones). A character's choices are impacted by rolls, and the player can choose to adjust accordingly, e.g. by taking a 'Tough' feat as a result of consistently bad HP rolls, or picking a particular archetype because the wizard ends up with a high Strength. Note that having some choice over character type is important - taking the time to make a backstory for a character kind of necessitates not being forced into a particular class and race as a result of a die roll.

• System. Different systems for generating stats are widely known, and need not be detailed here. 4d6, drop the lowest, and arrange in any order works well enough for me, but 3d6 down the line has a certain charm that works for some games. I'm personally not in favor of setting a floor, below which a player is entitled to a re-roll - I'd rather make a deal whereby a really poor character can qualify for later adjustments due to being young, or perhaps give that character a magic item. But if rolls can simply be cancelled, there is no reason to do them. Of course, you have to make sure that players understand this ahead of time.

• Ditch the healing surges. 4e introduced them, trying to make D&D more like a video game where you can observe the "health bar" going from red to green. These healing surges are what allow campaigns to transpire in an entirely abstract atmosphere - no wounds are more than bumps and bruises, no healers are necessary (any character can just heal themselves, because balance), and no relationships with NPCs that might help a character's predicament need be established. Everyone is self-sufficient. The surges are also central to the assumptions upon which classes are balanced - getting rid of them introduces the (rather realistic) factor that characters trained specifically for combat are better at shaking off battle effects (the fighter's second wind feature). Healing surges also make the game more combat-oriented. The recommended 6-8 combat encounters per day (that hardly any campaign-style game actually implements) are also based on the availability of healing surges, which are a key baseline in resource management. If a single fight can stretch resources, managing them becomes more unpredictable, and forces parties to change tactics to incorporate more negotiation, cunning, and speed, and less murder.

• System. Simply use the gritty healing variant already available in the Dungeon Master's Guide: a long rest (8 hours) makes hit dice available to restore hit points, and a period of rest (or downtime) lasting a week or so makes it possible to recover hit dice. This preserves a modicum of the surges, and allows characters to be self-reliant in a pinch, but it greatly restricts free-floating cures. For more granularity that helps ground characters in a setting, make the hit dice recovery subject to the quality of the rest - if it's "poor" or "squalid" (as per the categories listed in the Equipment chapter), the character can recover 1 or 0 hit dice per week, and if it's "comfortable" or "wealth", allow 3, 4 or more hit dice per week. Suddenly, figuring out how to stay in a mansion is no longer a meaningless luxury. 

• Relatedly, use Lingering Injuries. The argument that hit points represent fatigue, skill, and luck has a long pedigree, going all the way back to Gygax. But hit points were also physical damage. Even in 4e, a character that lost half of its total hit points was considered "bloodied". Characters that are knocked to 0 hit points are not just 'tired', but have likely sustained some sort of wound. The argument that damage is all virtual falls down on several counts. First, there is now a mechanic for Exhaustion, which is a less granular (though to my mind, effective) way to track hunger, impact of the elements, and actual fatigue. Second, if a damage type (e.g. "slashing" or "bludgeoning") is listed (as it has been in all rulesets since 3e), the idea that all damage is virtual doesn't stand up (else, why distinguish it?). As with controlling healing surges, making damage dangerous obviates a lot of common assumptions about balance, and pushes parties to be more creative about tactics.

• System. The table provided in the DMG is rather stripped-down, and rarely leads to serious complications, but it is one option. Creating the possibility of lingering injuries on a critical hit, or when a character is reduced to 0 hit points seems reasonable. The severity of the injury can be linked to the amount of damage suffered, number of Death Saves failed, whether the hit was a critical and knocked a character out, etc. System Shock - another variant rule that recalls an old-school mechanic - is a bit too brutal (even for me) at low levels (characters make a Con save if they lose half of their hit points or more on a single attack). But if linked to critical strikes, using System Shock can make sense. Making criticals more dangerous (and flavorful) than simply doubling damage also adds extra ooomph to Champion Fighters, which are commonly considered a bit weak and boring.

• Use reasonable assumptions for missile weapons. Lots of people think they're entitled to fire projectiles into melee without a chance of hitting your friends (because the game is balanced upon the assumption that you can). However, using the 'rulings, not rules' guideline that this and earlier editions subscribed to, you can impose a reasonable penalty for doing so. This has the effect of forcing players to actually think about tactics, instead of just pumping out DPR. One side effect this has is to dampen the use of at-will cantrips without completely breaking 5e game design and taking these away from casters. If you are worried about hurting your friends by spamming fire bolts, you either have to take a chance on rotating into combat with a melee weapon or touch spell, or rely on other abilities. Imposing penalties for firing into combat will also impact players' choices of cantrips.

• System. The easiest thing to do is to impose disadvantage on a missile attack into melee, where friends are likely screening an opponent. If either roll is a "1", you roll an attack against your ally. You can make the system more complicated by determining how much cover an ally provides to an opponent, and make the likelihood of hitting the friend higher if your ally provides 3/4 cover (e.g., if either roll is a natural 4 or less).

• Impose limits on the use of magic. Taking away at-will cantrips seems unwarranted, because they are so integral to the system. But other traditional ways of limiting access to spells may work and may be justified, especially in light of the fact that melee specialists are putting themselves in the way of more lingering injuries.

• System. For wizards, you can reintroduce the old mechanic of understanding a spell before being able to copy it into your spell book. Understanding can have a DC, which is modified by proficiency bonus, ability modifier, skill in arcana, and the level of the spell. The wizard must also use a Write spell to copy a newly understood spell into a spellbook, and make a Dexterity check in the process (to make sure no smudges are created). People who complain about having nothing to spend money on in 5e will soon discover their stationery costs beginning to pile up. For warlocks, on the other hand, the recovery of spell slots after a short rest can be linked to a coven feature. A coven has a collective mind, and you tap into it to have access to the extra slot after a short rest. The bigger the coven, the greater the chance that a slot is available. The drawback is that sometimes, coven mates make the same requests from you, and if you refuse them, you will put yourself in a bad position to request spells from the coven mind. This not only encourages resource management, but also creates new role-playing opportunities (coven recruitment is obviously in your warlock's self-interest). It might be a good idea to create more openness even as you impose more limitations, e.g. by allowing a caster who has used up all spell slots to cast a spell by making a DC roll (modified by spell level, and number of the attempt at doing so) at the risk of being subject to damage or other effects if you fail the roll. 

• Take terrain and climate seriously. Balancing mechanics typically presuppose an abstract space in which adventuring takes place (which in turn further inclines GMs to set adventures in dungeons). But forcing PCs to negotiate wilderness actually means using a lot of rules that are already on the books, but that GMs hand-wave as they push the party along toward the 'adventuring site'. Make the foraging rolls mean something. Make the navigation rolls mean something. Throw in some terrain hazards (ravines, rockslides, quicksand, wide rivers, etc.) into your encounter tables. Make the characters roll (or undertake actions) to find the hidden tower, instead of just assuming they do. Once characters begin to go without food, acquire exhaustion levels due to being underdressed, or fail to rendezvous NPCs on time because they got lost, parties will begin to make better plans for travel. Also, all of a sudden, rangers' Natural Explorer feature will no longer seem like a bunch of useless fluff, but a highly valued and desired set of skills. If realistic biomes are used, rangers will also know which type of preferred terrain to take at low levels (e.g. because they live in the taiga, instead of bumping into an Old Forest from time to time, when the GM is so inclined). The feeling of living in a certain terrain changes the experience of a game quite drastically from one where it is always a dry 70 degrees Fahrenheit, with perfect visibility.

• System. Again, use the Survival checks for finding food and navigating in specific terrain types that the PHB and the DMG already include. Put hazards into your encounter tables. Keep track of exhaustion due to food and water deprivation, or heat and cold, and make wind impact projectile use, as it should.

• Design character options for a unique setting. So far, we've mostly been talking about limitations, but a far-from -equilibrium game is fundamentally about variance. That doesn't mean reinventing the wheel in every campaign, but it does mean developing a theme. Look at the class and race options in the official sources. Decide what resonates with your campaign, and what doesn't. Keep what works, and design new options based on your favorite historical setting, mythology, fantasy series, film, etc. The new options will have to be playtested, and not every variant will work, but the testing itself pushes the game away from equilibrium, and makes people's characters more experimental. A different range of options also alters party balance. Most importantly, different character options make settings unique. One common complain about each edition is that players demand variants, and new variants create bloat, that in the longer run can only lead to designing new editions. It also makes settings incoherent - more options is automatically assumed to be 'better'. I don't necessarily agree with those who think it's all about making parties more human, and less firbolg or yuan-ti. It's more about making firbolg or yuan-ti thematic, having different sets of options (which include limitations as well as augmentations), not just more of them. As different variants and settings proliferate, they acquire a life of their own, and such differentiation can go on indefinitely. There is no reason why 5e can't have the same number of "hacks" (or more) as OD&D (the existence of the OGL is a wise partial retreat from all-embracing corporate control).  

• System. Use existing designs as guidelines and models. There is no reason to make character options unbalanced on purpose - just see what sorts of properties emerge in various games and settings by trying new things, or tinkering with existing chassis. If need be, use a good point-system, or more qualitative approaches to good class or race design. Reintroduce older notions of classes being actual structures within gameworlds, rather than just bags of mechanics. Make access to higher levels limited by number of spots, approval of elders, or results of single combat. Figure out features for "epic"-level characters beyond 20th level.

• Reward different playstyles. If you want different playstyles, you have to valorize them. It's not just about killing monsters, or routing the Big Bad. It can be about negotiating wilderness hazards, finding treasure, stealing important items, negotiating, finding ancient ruins or portals, learning secrets about NPCs, saving lives, and so on. When winning combats is not the default assumption, the game begins to balance very differently. Characters who specialize more in exploration or RP suddenly become more viable. But more than that, the sweet-spot upon which the balance rests constantly changes, depending on the decisions players and characters make. And consequences of particular actions shift the balance in certain directions over the long term. One incautious slaughter of NPCs can lead to more frequent fights, while acquiring a reputation of being a fair dealer, or having a silver tongue, will likely create more opportunities to persuade opponents.

• System. Those who prefer the 'milestone' approach can reward player actions as they see fit. Those who prefer a more traditional XP-based approach can institute a more granular system of rewards. For my part, I usually award 10% of monster XP for mere interaction, 20% for fooling or persuading encountered creatures, and 50% for defeating them without physically vanquishing them (e.g. causing them to flee or retreat). I also give half the monetary value of treasure as XP, but without differentiating whether that treasure was looted, stolen, or paid as stipulated by a contract. Learning information yields a given amount of XP, depending on whether the information was common, uncommon, rare, etc. And making advances within an organization or a social unit is usually worth 1 point of XP per person who belongs to the organization, multiplied by degree of advance (or change of the existing institution). Obviously, there is a whole host of permutations, but you can opt for a system that rewards PCs for exploration and RP without forcing them into combat, which allows for somewhat slow level advancement at low levels (keeping a campaign low-magic, and gritty for longer periods of time, if that's what's desired).

Obviously, the list can be extended indefinitely. Not all recommendations will find purchase with everyone, but the creation of niches can be a way forward at times when a system is threatened by a saturation of interest, and bloat.

Worldbuilding on World Anvil

I discovered World Anvil by accident while looking for a video on Twitch a couple of weeks ago, when I saw Satine Phoenix advertising it on the D&D channel. Since I think worldbuilding is the most neglected leg of TTRPGs (compared to resources devoted to mechanics and RP), I decided to check it out. Then I decided to test it out by uploading materials for one of my campaigns.

To simplify, World Anvil is kind of like a wiki for your campaign. I wouldn't say it's indispensable, as there are lots of other ways to share info with your players. It is convenient to have all that information in one place, that is easily accessible, and simply organized. This is an extended list of World Anvil's pros and cons, at least based on my experiences with it so far.

The Good:

• Again, convenience. World Anvil is easier to navigate than, say Google Drive. All your entries (locations, organizations, religions, NPCs, etc.) appear in a clear table of contents, and you can click on each entry to see all the specific headings that fall under it without having to switch back and forth between different folders.
• Visuals. Miniature maps appear right there next to the entries on your main campaign page, and you can then click to enlarge them. You can put article cover images into individual entries that make them look quite attractive, and the default sepia page layout is easy on the eye.
• Design. Specific articles have built-in subheadings for specific purposes. For example, play reports can display tl;drs in the form of loot acquired, NPCs interacted with, missions accomplished, locations visited, and so on. In general, World Anvil is pretty ideal for play reports (this means, freeing your blog for others sorts of posts). If you are uploading an article on a settlement, you can easily highlight information on its history, demographics, mode of rule, etc., and these subheadings can easily be linked to other entries. I do find that the choices are better suited to higher-tech settings, though (precise sociological information is hard to come by for people living in pre-modern environments, nor is it clear why PCs would need it).
• Timeline.  This is one of the best features of World Anvil. Personally, I think players don't need to memorize the dates of historical events so they can do well on the quiz at the start of your next session, so world timelines are best left vague (though having key events laid out graphically in a timeline is much better than a historical narrative or a list of bullets). However, where this resource really becomes handy is for making campaign timelines. Players often have little sense of how long their character has been adventuring, how long their characters have known one another, how long it's been since a particularly significant occurrence in the campaign, and so on. If the number of entries is kept within limits, the campaign timeline will probably be referenced fairly often.
• System-variant. If you are so inclined, you can upload howebrew material (classes, races, spells, character sheets, monsters, etc.). World Anvil gives you options for various game systems (haven't closely inspected the range, but it seems broad enough). 
• Economy. Using World Anvil is free - but see below. The resource is sort of set up for people who want to monetize their world-building, so you can link the page with Patreon and social media. For the artistically-inclined, it's a good place to feature your creations (graphic or narrative), and to make connections with people who will pay you to draw/write things for their settings.

The Bad

• Free, but. So it is free, but you only get 100 megs of storage space, which, all things considered, is pretty skimpy. Google Drive gives you 15 gigs. The stuff I uploaded for a campaign that has been running since early summer took up nearly 10% of that. If I decide to upload materials for my other campaign, which has over 50 play reports, I'll be pretty close to maxing out (or actually over the top). You can put up fewer pictures (which eat up most of the memory), but that kind of defeats the utility of the resource. In other words, World Anvil is designed to hook you, and get you to pony up once you've invested all that time and energy uploading (or writing) your materials and attracting followers. On top of that, if you're using the resource for free, you're exposed to ads (which you now see on Facebook and Youtube, so you're inured to it, but still - it's oh so easy to get rid of them if you just fork over between $3 and $10/month (and then you still only get 5 GB of space). Also, unlike on Google Drive, you have to pay if you want to allow others to edit particular pages.
• Some visuals are fuzzy. The best images - the ones that take up the most space - look pretty good on cover pages. Smaller pics look fuzzy and washed out - which, of course, encourages you to use ones that eat up more memory. For NPCs and such, you should use character portraits, which are smaller, but less voluminous, instead of cover images - they look better, and use less space.
• Some cross-referencing is suboptimal. There are easy built-in ways to allow someone to read more about a character's race, or to see which NPCs are located in which settlement. But if you want to make links to and from your NPCs or PCs and a play session, you have to sweat, and input them manually, which is quite time-consuming. And you have to make sure your eyes don't fall out of your head while you're looking at all that BB code that appears on your edit pages. These are all far smaller problems on Blogger and such.
• Rules are harder to design than setting fluff. If you want to include custom options like classes, you also have to deal with BB code. There are instructions on how to fashion/import tables (kinda necessary for level progression, say), but they are not particularly user-friendly. It's also not clear where the rules end up - I don't see them on the main world page.
• Calendar is poorly designed. The calendar feature is useful, but not well executed. You input all your months into a numbered table, but then only the numbers show up, not the names. Also, the dates show up in numeric form, which kind of loses the purpose of having cool names. And the numeric form is European (i.e. November 2nd is 2/11/2018), which is fine, but would be confusing if most of your players are American. They should give you an option of which system to use, at least. And, the calendar doesn't include names for days of the week, which is also kind of... weak.

 So, in a nutshell, you have to do some work to make your stuff look its best. Is it worth a try? I say yes - put in what you can while it's free, and see what happens. People spend money on electronic rulebooks and tokens on various platforms; for my money, I'd rather spend my money on this, if I have to spend any money at all. And people are much more likely to read your setting stuff here than elsewhere.

So look at my Lukomorye setting, and follow it.

The Chronicles of 'Team B' - Chapter 10 - The Demiurge of the Raid

Before the companions take leave of Zinovii, he introduces them to one of his servitors - a rooster-headed man called Anatoly Frolyn. Anatoly was a captive who grew up with the Kochmaki on the steppe after having himself been taken captive on a raid from a Norik village. Along with his sister, he grew up among the nomads, learning their customs and language. On a trip to the Khan's court with Grand Prince Vasilii, Zinovii met him, and purchased his freedom. Now, he sends Anatoly along with the other companions to serve as a translator and protector. Anatoly - a person of martial disposition, tells them that he would like to serve his benefactor and learn what befell those whose fate is similar to his own. The best use of his talents at present, Yuri and Lokan decide, would be to visit the Kochmak encampment just outside of town, and to ask them about the Vladykino captives. Yaakov has personal and family matters to attend to in the main city, so he excuses himself, and says he will meet the group at the cemetery, where they are to hold their vigil again tonight. Agapia also runs off, apparently in search of a new cauldron.

Anatoly, a new companion taking up the vacant 'cocky' role in the party

Anatoly, not wanting to attract unwanted attention, prepares himself by changing into the form of a tall, muscular human. The party then rides outside of the Nart Quarter, and heads through the rain toward the field dotted with multicolored yurts. Upon coming to the perimeter, they are immediately surrounded by four Kochmak riders, who, ignoring Anatoly's entreaties, order the group to dismount and disarm, and conduct them to one of the tents. The riders look very similar to those that confronted Yuri when he was following the raiders several weeks ago.

Inside the tent, they find Nygmet, a white-bearded clan elder of some sort. Unlike the camp guards, Nygmet treats the visitors cordially, inviting each to sit down on the cushions, and enjoy a bowl of broth (which Anatoly, who eschews meat, politely sets aside at an opportune moment). When Anatoly explains that they would like to speak to the bey about the whereabouts of the captives taken from Vladykino, Nygmet replies that the bey would in turn like information about who the guests are, who they work for, and what their interest in the matter is. After negotiation, it is decided that the spirits will determine the matter by having the two sides cast knucklebones, and the winner of the throw will be required to divulge their secrets first. The knucklebones are cast, but the spirits remain silent on the matter - the throw is judged to be a draw.

To resolve the draw, Nygmet offers a tie-breaker contest - a test of skill in archery. Anatoly makes his own counteroffer - he knows that the highest honor among the Kochmaki is held by those who demonstrate feats of physical prowess, so he suggests a wrestling contest. Nygmet agrees, and brings Aibek - one of the clan's best wrestlers, as well as Zhuldyz - the daughter of Sholpan Bey. Zhuldyz is conversant in the Noriki tongue, which will ease communication with the whole group, and relieve Anatoly of having to translate.

Anatoly offers the group his services as their champion against the strongman. His forelock stands upon end as he feels the power of the Earth flow through his body. He locks arms with Aibek, catches the Kochmak in a reverse hold, and quicker than one can blink, throws the strongman over his back. Clearly impressed with his strength, Zhuldyz asks if he would like to join the clan as a wrestling champion. When he replies that he is currently engaged, but will consider the offer, the bey's daughter fulfills the promise of the wager. She tells them what they have already heard from Berke: that the bulk of the prisoners are warehoused on Slave Island in a caravanserai owned by a man named Hassan, but the young women in the group were transported across the river. She does add that they are now in the possession of a powerful lord named Yaqub, who owns land across the river, and who paid for the raid in the first place. The raiders keep the proceeds for the sale of the other captives, but the young women were sent to Yaqub immediately upon the expedition's return.

Zhuldyz then asks the companions to tell them about herself, as a courtesy, and Yuri reveals his story, as well as the group's relationship with Zinovii. Zhudyz ends the meeting by wishing the companions luck in buying back the captives, and invites Anatoly to return at any time, asking whether his prowess at wrestling is matched in other areas.

Leaving the camp with heads still attached to necks: a moral victory

The party leaves the raider camp, and returns to the city. Now that they have some answers, which seem to absolve the Grand Prince of any responsibility, they hope to receive Zinovii's promised princely protection. But the ailing boyar, though he praises the group for the results so far, objects that the people of the Ladeisk prince who would blame his master would require more concrete legal proof of the raiders' collusion with this Yaqub, preferably in writing. Anatoly promises that he will return to the encampment to obtain the proof, especially as he seems to have a standing invitation from the bey's daughter. But now, as the day heads toward evening, it is time to return to the cemetery, and this time, Anatoly would like to accompany the rest of the group, in all his rooster glory.

At the cemetery, the watchman is closing up as Yuri, Lokan, and Anatoly arrive. He hasn't seen any disturbing activity since the previous night, but remains nervous - the grave robbers might come back! The companions ask for a few candles - they'd like to have a closer look around for tracks and disturbed graves. Searching around, Lokan finds disturbed dirt on top of a stone slab, which Yuri shoves aside, finding another staircase down into the darkness. Around this time, Yaakov shows up. He informs the rest of the group that his contacts in the main city have revealed to him that the grave robbers are Banu Tabar that operate out of an apothecary shop, where they sell the stolen water as a cure-all remedy. Perhaps one of the tunnels leads to this shop.

Lokan heads down into yesterday's tunnel with Anatoly, and after entering the long hallway, finds the passage blocked with a newly constructed brick wall. A careful look around reveals that some of the mortar hasn't set, or is perhaps of lower quality. Lokan easily removes the bricks adhering to the bad mortar, revealing a hole that a person can crawl through. Looks like the grave robbers have left themselves a back door, and likely intend to return. Meanwhile, Yuri finds an identical wall, with an identical "back door" in the new tunnel. Both tunnels continue for quite a ways, and then begin to branch off into side passages. Perhaps tonight is not the time to find out where they lead, and to confront whoever waits on the other side - these are tasks best left for another day. The group returns to the cemetery, and completes their nightly vigil. Nothing transpires, and at sunrise, they all go back to their resting places - Yaakov to his home in the main city, Anatoly to the Nikonov mansion, and Yuri and Lokan - to Hegumen Mitrofan's monastery, to sleep, and reconvene at Nikonov's in the early evening.

The following day, Anatoly rises to meet his new companions at the monastery. Alden and Agapia are still nowhere to be seen, Yakov is likely preoccupied with his affairs, and Anatoly returns, in human form, to the nomad encampment to speak to Zhuldyz, to see if he can wrangle a confirmation of what she told him the previous day in writing, and perhaps to have a bit of fun. The bey's daughter seems preoccupied and dismissive in comparison to the previous day, says that she does not write, and invites Anatoly to return another time.

In the meantime, Yuri and Lokan decide to head into the main city to see if anything more can be learned about Yaqub. The most promising place to go seems to be the docks from where captives were ferried to Slave Island, because here they might find the ferryman who took the young women across the river, and on to Yaqub. Yuri leaves his weapons behind - he doesn't want want trouble with the guardians at the West Gate. Lokan, however, tries to sneak a dagger and his whip into the city. The guards don't like how he looks, so they demand that he hand his purse over. Lokan toys with the idea of pulling a little sleight of hand, but a dirty look from Yuri dissuade him. The guards are thorough, find the weapons, and confiscate them, giving the vagabond a token so he can redeem them later.

After arriving at the docks and asking around, they find the dockmaster, Kardysh, who directs them to a man named Mamoun - the transporter of the slaves. The arrival of the captives was obviously big news, and hard to cover up. When they ask him where the young women were taken, who Yaqub is, and where he lives, Mamoun takes them aside and demands three gold dinars as payment - a hefty sum. There is nothing to it, so Yuri pays up, and in return, Mamoun tells them that Yaqub is in fact a firebreathing zilant - a winged, two-legged serpent, who lives under a hill a couple of hours upstream on the other side. It seems he has lived there for a while, and is sometimes seen to take flight at night. His hunting grounds are elsewhere - perhaps on the steppe, as he has been seen carrying horses back to his lair. But this is not the first time he has received contingents of young women taken on raids. What he does with them is unclear, but Mamoun took the women there shortly after they arrived, turned them over to people who are presumably Yaqub's agents, and they took it from there, while he returned. There is no indication that the man is lying, but he refuses to set any of this down in writing.

Mamoun spills the beans while sipping his sherbet

Yuri's heart sinks - can it be that his beloved Svetlana has already been devoured by a monstrous serpent? Whatever the case, the monster must die, but he and his companion must return to the Nart Quarter to at least wait out the downpour, which threatens to wash out the rest of the day, and collect their weapons and the rest of their companions. At Nikonov's, they meet Anatoly, back from his foray to the encampment with little to show for it, though the rooster-man is eager to join in the expedition to hunt down a serpent - it is just the thing to prove his heroic mettle. Yaakov is there as well - he has returned to give Zinovii another blood-letting. He had spent the day watching his nephews and nieces after his nightly escapades, and is now trying to give a skeptical Zinovii a diagnosis of his malady. It seems that the boyar is a little too indulgent a drinker - an explanation the latter dismisses as outlandish before agreeing to cut back his mealtime consumption from five drinks to three.

As the four stand outside the mansion discussing the diagnosis and their next steps, Agapia appears, happily skipping by. Yesterday, she tried to replace her missing cauldron by lifting one from a local bazaar, and was promptly caught and escorted back to her uncle for punishment - her relationship and special status do give her some leeway. Mitrofan promptly punished her by locking her in her room for a day, but now she has been set free, and is skipping along merrily - she just found a clay jar in an alley, and used magic to clean it from sediment, so she is elated.   

Chronicles of 'Team B' - Chapter 9 - Seeking Support of Church and State

Armed with new information courtesy of Berke, the companions return to the Nart Quarter as the sun sinks in the west. Tonight, they will hold a vigil in the cemetery of the large Irii Church that dominates the Quarter, as it is here that all of Udyn's Gaalites are buried, and here that unclean creatures come in the dark hour. If they succeed in driving the darkness back, perhaps Hegumen Mitrofan, and the other Fathers will see fit to support their efforts to free Yuri's family, both materially and spiritually.

As they arrive at the cemetery, the night watchman is just closing up the gate. He is frightened, and tells the group that undead nezhit' come up out of the ground at night, notwithstanding the fact that the cemetery is hallowed ground. They have already scared off some local adolescents who undertook to watch the graveyard, and caused a dog that had come with them to go rigid for hours after grabbing it with their claws.

What are those ghostly forms floating above the church?

Agapia, Lokan and Yuri enter the cemetery, and begin to search for a place where the nezhit' might emerge from. There are some recent burials, but no signs of where such creatures may emerge from out of the ground. There is a a sacred spring at the center of the graveyard that Agapia knows about - it is dedicated to Saint Pachomii of Udyn - a Bahite who converted to the True Confession, and was martyred by the Kochmaki on that very spot. The spring erupts from a rock, and empties into a font that the faithful built around it. Lokan looks longingly at the coins they threw in the font to win the saint's favor, but Yuri shoots him a dirty look, and dissuades him from fishing any of them out of the sacred water. Figuring this for a strategic and defensible spot, Agapia and Lokan set up a triangular tripwire using rope, wire and grave markers around the font, and begin filling a waterskin and Agapia's small cauldron with holy water. Yuri uses the opportunity to slip out, back to the Noriki monastery, to retrieve his horse Vera, and to see if there is any sign of Alden. Vera is there, stabled by the Hegumen's people, but Alden seems to have gone out on the town with his friend Fedor, and has not yet returned.

Yuri rides Vera back to the cemetery, and the trio begin their watch. Hours pass, but after the call for the nightly prayer from the minarets in the main city, which Agapia knows marks the midnight hour, the sound of a moving stone slab, buried somewhere under dirt, alerts the watchers that something is coming. Soon, two shapes dressed in rags approach the font, shambling and groaning. Their faces are deathly pale and covered with dirt and fresh blood, which is running down their chins. As they come closer, a groan goes up from somewhere behind the companions. The doughty men of action - Yuri and Lokan - have seen enough, and both head toward the gate, Yuri astride Vera.

Little Agapia is left alone to face the two fiends, perhaps not realizing why she should fear them. She positions herself to squirt one of them with holy water, expecting this to drive them off. But in response, the creature emits a wheezy laugh through its groan, deliberately steps over the tripwire, dips its hand in the font, and sprays Agapia with the water. Then it grabs her cauldron, which she left undefended.

Realizing that their friend is in trouble, Lokan masters his fear, and returns, succeeding in cracking one of the fiends painfully with his whip. Yuri rides back, too, but one of the creatures rips him with its claws, and he goes rigid. Only because he is an expert rider does he manage to remain mounted as Vera retreats once again. The other fiend claws at Agapia, and gets tangled in her thick fleece. It is then that Agapia sees that its talon glints in the moonlight, and that it is not a claw at all, but a dagger! She flings her own dagger at the creature, and buries it in its rags. At this point, both creatures turn and flee, no longer shambling, but running nimbly back in the direction they came from. They are able to outdistance even the similarly nimble Lokan, and disappear into the darkness. The stone slab grinds back into place.

Yuri is still frozen on Vera, but he indicates through his teeth that his two companions should follow the creatures without him. It would be good to know where they went, and to learn why they came. Worst of all, they have borne away Agapia's knife and cauldron full of holy water. After struggling, Lokan finally succeeds in moving the stone slab. Underneath, he finds a set of stairs. Shrugging, he and Agapia descend into the darkness. At the bottom of the stone stairs, a tunnel leads away, turning right and left. Lokan pursues in the darkness, with Agapia lagging far behind. Agapia soon finds herself peering at two glowing, yellow eyes, but they soon move away. She tries to move forward, feeling the wall, but after a time, she feels Lokan's hand on her shoulder. After turning two corners, Lokan saw a light off in the distance, but it moved away very quickly, and he found that he could not catch up. He returned to Agapia, and the two now ascend back to the cemetery.

After finding Yuri, they lead Vera back to the monastery. Lokan's ministrations to Yuri are in vain, and when they get back, they find an empty cell, lay Yuri down carefully, and collapse. The following morning Yuri is groggy, but finally mobile. Hegumen Mitrofan ministers to him, and he feels better, after which the hegumen questions the companions about their nightly escapades. The monk asks if Lokan remembers which direction the long tunnel was leading, and the vagabond answers that he is quite certain that it led east. That means that the tunnel and the grave robbers went back into the main city, and now, they will be hard to find. The companions entertain the notion of trying to seek them out, and to learn why they are stealing holy water, but the hegumen points out that if they get into a conflict with Bahites, he will be hard-pressed to support them. He surmises that now that they know the cemetery is guarded they won't be back, at least not right away. He will undertake a collection among the faithful to support the watchers.

The companions decide that their time is best spend seeking out the emissary of the Grand Prince, to learn what, if anything, he knows about the captives. Agapia leads them to the mansion of Georgii Nikonov, a boyar and fur merchant who resides in the Nart Quarter. Once there, Yuri explains to armed guards that he has heard an emissary of Grand Prince Vasilii is staying in the mansion, that he himself hails from the village that was raided by the Kochmaki, and that he wishes to speak to the emissary about the raid and the captives. The guards convey the message, and tell Yuri and the others to wait until the emissary is ready to see them.

While they wait at the bottom of the stair, a robed, turbaned and bearded man with a yellow armband that strikes Agapia's eye descends down the stair. He is Yaakov - a Fogarma physician, who was summoned here to attend to the emissary. The companions are then called up, to see his patient - pale, lying on a bench, with leeches on his arms and legs. His name is Zinovii Surikov, and he listens carefully to Yuri's tale, and his request to be granted the Grand Prince's protection so they can openly bear weapons and act on his behalf. Zinovii explains that he is actually in town to learn the truth of the matter behind the raid. He knows that subjects of the Prince Trofim of Ladeisk - Yuri's suzerain lord - probably suspect Vasilii's connivance in the raid, but he assures them that this is not the case.

Zinovii Surikov after surviving the wonders of 'modern'
69th century medicine

The physician returns to the mansion to remove the leeches. Zinovii orders the servants to bring food, while Yuri and Lokan entertain all those assembled with music. At the end, Zinovii tells them if they learn the true reasons behind the raid - from the slavers on the island, the raiders still camped outside town, or Udyn's rulers - he will know he can trust them, and will extend the Grand Prince's patronage to them. Yaakov expresses a desire to accompany them, for reasons that are as yet unclear.