"I am a petty god at the moment."

"You will find me more lordly and benign when I achieve the position of a greater god."

Those are the words of the immortal sorcerer, Prince Shool. Today I noticed that the phrase "petty god" was used in Michael Moorcock's first Corum novel, The Knight of the Swords. The term is deployed in both senses of the term, designating both a lesser god and a god with a propensity for pettiness. The novel is filled with petty gods in fact: Pilproth, the Gorged God; inadvertent organ donor deities, Kwll and Rhynn; and the sad deity who accompanies Serwde, the Brown Man of Laahr; perhaps the Dog and the Bear as well.

There's also just a suggestion of an association between giants and gods, which reminds me of another blogger's recent question of why there wasn't more interest in giants as a monster type...

Over the last week, petty gods have come up in a couple of other ways too. At last weekend's Fate of Tekumel game at Con of the North, I had a chance to use the Tzitzimine Star Demons minions and the non-canonical Eyes that I wrote for Petty Gods.

In fact, the Eye a player selected for her character was none other than the Eye of Petty Theogony! An ordinary sellsword was elevated for a good chunk of the session into a petty god in his own right, taking on the mien of a minor god of war. When I wrote up that Eye, I never dreamed that anyone would use it on anyone other than their own character! Players do find ways to do things with our creations that surprise us.

Co-creation makes us all petty gods.

Reading Ehdrigohr

I've been reading Ehdrigohr, Allen Turner's fantasy RPG for Fate Core. I read about 130 pages of this full-sized book over the Memorial Day weekend, and about 100 pages this weekend. I still have another 100 or so to go. Today's post isn't a full review, but more of a progress report.

Many Fate fans gained access to this game through a recent Fate-themed Bundle of Holding. The game has a blog, Council of Fools, and a G+ Community. If you haven't heard of the game, you will probably want to check out one or both of those resources before pulling the trigger on a purchase. The author didn't market the game very intensely with the Fate community, so it is less well known than other early offerings for Fate Core such as ADX and Jadepunk. My impression is that the author saw Fate as a vehicle for portraying his world, rather than Fate as a game system that needed new worlds to explore.

And quite a world Ehdrigohr is!

Author Allen Turner has created a multicultural world that is presented from a Lakota cultural standpoint. So this is a game set on a past or future Turtle Island, and the general metaphysics of the world are based on the Four Directions or Medicine Wheel. While not all native peoples of the Americas use the Medicine Wheel concept, it's cultural currency is widespread in North America. It's a model for the universe, for the cycle of life, the social world,  spirituality, science, and an understanding of physical and mental health. It's also a zone for physical and spiritual conflicts, and plays many of these different roles simultaneously in Ehdrigohr.

At the center of the world are peoples like the Lakota and Ojibway. To the East are people of the Longhouse. To the South East are mound building city-dwellers. In the oceans to the Southeast are Aztec-influenced folk who build their cities on the backs of sea monsters. To the far South, across a narrow sea, are Bedouin-like peoples as well as a city-dwelling Empire of artificers. To the far West are people who live in a vast marsh on the backs of giant turtles, and folks who live as island cliff dwellers. There are also northern peoples who live in the ice and cold.

This creates a bit of a cultural melange. It may not appeal to people who want a historically purist or very unified cultural vision. For instance, the New Fire RPG has a much more narrow focus on the cultures of Mesoamerica and appears much more unified and less of a gathering of scattered influences as a result. Similarly, Heirs to the Lost World RPG deals with significant cultural diversity but in a narrower geographic space than Ehdrigohr (and also as an alternate history game is a very recognizable 17th C. Mesoamerican and Caribbean setting). Nevertheless, Ehdrigohr is, like the other games above, a labor of love devoted to something of deep personal and cultural importance to the author. It is likely to appeal to the sorts of gamers who want something different than traditional fantasy.

Just as importantly, this isn't the erasure of Gene Wolfe's Urth of the New Sun either, where the peoples north of Patagonia are basically faceless monstrous communististic adversaries. The cultures of Ehdrigohr feel real-enough, tribe like groupings that could share some cultural commonalities as well as have significant differences from each other that make the individual cultures distinct. Along these lines, the juxtaposition of recognizably North American native peoples with Bedouin-type tribal peoples isn't that jarring to me. In fact, right here in Minneapolis, Somali and Native American people have been meeting together to promote intercultural and intergenerational peacemaking. They are discovering many commonalities they share as tribe and clan based peoples.

The setting is shared through both stories and exposition. The stories - often myths - are very good. The setting exposition and rules, however, are very poorly edited. The book has grammatical errors on almost every page with the exception of the stories. It really could have used a few more editorial passes. (I also have some reservations about the implementation of Fate Core here, although I think there's a playable game here.) Yet the vision of the world of Ehdrigohr is worth the reading. Like Tekumel or Everway, it borrows from real world non-European cultures, and does something new with them. I could see running this with my gaming group. Hell, you could probably run something like Fate Everway with it right out of the box!

We'll have a full review up on FATE SF when we have read the entire book.

Dollar Store Dungeons: Creatures

If you are going to run a game of Heirs to the Lost World, the New Fire, or are planning a Xeno-Meso or Hollow Earth Expedition adventure, you'd do well to pick up a $1 bag of creatures from the local dollar store. The Aztec and Mayan Underworlds are filled with bug-like creatures - especially centipedes. You may actually want a few bags of them.

For example, on Saturday, I played in one of Jeff Berry's wonderful Tekumel miniatures games where a big collection of bugs from dollar stores came in quite handy. I was playing a high-level priestess of Ksarul, up in the howdah of one of these wonderful Sro dragons:

At a certain juncture in the battle, it became necessary expedient amusing to summon some of Lord Ksarul's spider-like demon servitors in order to dispatch some of the Pe Choi and Shen who were harassing us. I didn't do too well on the roll, so Jeff told me I had summoned 13 demons who were not spiders. So out of the huge bug supply box came all kinds of other demons: centipedes, ticks, beetles, scorpions, a dragonfly, even a squid (freshwater/ambulatory/arboreal).

So don't leave home without your dollar store demons!

Con of the North 2014 - Game Candidates

Minnehaha Creek Flood Stage

We're inundated with convention gaming ideas at the moment. Con of the North 2014, the largest gaming con in the Upper Midwest, is scheduled for February 14-16, at its new location: Crown Plaza Minneapolis West. I usually run 3 or so games there as part of the House of Indie Games theme room. This year things are a bit more complicated with the new space, theme tracks are on but room arrangements is a more complicated picture. There will also be a Tekumel theme track.

I will almost certainly be running a FATE Core based Tekumel game, probably set in the city of Katalal. I am also thinking about running 1-2 more games.

Candidates include:

• An Everway  6-hour marathon session
• +trey causey 's pulp-inspired Weird Adventures setting, using FATE Accelerated Edition (FAE) as the game engine
• An adventure set in my Xeno-Meso setting as featured on The Everwayan, using FAE (or Everway, or Swords & Wizardry)
• A medieval African adventure using +Kevin Crawford's Spears of the Dawn RPG
• Tenra Bansho Zero
• 13th Age, which shares a design lineage with Everway. Maybe even an Everway-13th Age 6-hour marathon crossover game.

Event descriptions need to be postmarked by September 3, 2013, so I have about a month to get this all figured out.

EDIT: I am surprised I forgot to list a Ubiquity system game: either All for One: Regime Diabolique, Hollow Earth Expedition, or Leagues of Adventure. We need to consider those games too.

Tekumel Braunstein

Our GM, Jeff Berry

On Saturday, I had the opportunity to experience one of the gaming traditions which led to the roleplaying hobby: "Braunsteins" are large-scale, multi-player and multi-faction miniatures events featuring both armed units as well as name or signature characters. Each faction has its own victory conditions. Roleplaying and parley are possible. I can see how roleplaying evolved out of this tradition.

You can consult +Jon Peterson's Playing at the World for more on this gaming tradition and its contribution to roleplaying. Jon's book has become the definitive book on the origins of roleplaying. This is also a good reference.

You should also check out Jeff Berry's blog for more on the event itself, including video of the event, which you can also access directly from here.

The scenario was called "Saving Serqu's Sisters". The sisters had gotten marooned in a wet archipelago, and apparently needed rescuing. They had a reputation for being ditzy, but that was somewhat given the lie quite early in the game. One of them used one shot from an Eye of Raging Power to disable a ship full of Ahoggya mercenaries. It wasn't pretty.

I was part of the Hlutrgu faction, and the character that I personally ran (for the most part) was a Hlutrgu fire shaman. Imagine Karel Capek's "newts" with a very bad attitude, and a taste for "long pig" and you get the idea of Hlutrgu. What can I say, Professor Barker borrowed ideas from only the best authors in the early days of SF.

Our primary objective was to capture, cook, and eat the sisters - and as many other human intruders as possible. We quickly decided to align with the Ahoggya (who actually had TWO shiploads of troops) and let them try to capture the sisters. We contented ourselves with killing as many other human invaders as possible.

We Hlutrgu are the Grey-Joys depicted above

Our turf. Our surf.

Here is the first ship our shaman fired:

That was a small one. Later on, we did the same with a much larger vessel.

I accidentally uncovered a Feshenga (not bright), but we actually got to kill it with on Hlutrgu's well-placed spear:

The Feshenga is the green dragon-like creature

Killing a Feshenga with one spear blow is next to impossible. They are formidable semi-intelligent creatures. In another recent campaign, we ran away from one. That is always a sensible course of action.

It was a lucky roll.

Jeff adjudicated the game using the set of rules he wrote with M.A.R. Barker:

Jeff also supplied all the miniatures, props, and materials. It was a wonderful scene he created! The experience has been making me think about the limitations of most contemporary indie rulesets, which tend to eschew miniatures and props.But these visual elements CAN be used build story and drive a narrative, especially when you use them as well as Jeff used them here.

By my count there were about 20 players and visitors during the course of the day.

All I can say was it was a lot of fun.

Thanks to Jeff Berry for organizing this, and to Fantasy Flight Games for hosting us on their wonderful mezzanine.

All photos are copyright 2013 John Everett Till.

The Gig In Bamesa Bay

Nate's Map

Saturday, we resumed +Rob Leduc's old-school Empire of the Petal Throne campaign set in the vicinity of Penom, the fabled "armpit of the Empire". Our PCs are a clan of "fresh-off-the-boat" islanders from somewhere in he Deeps of Chanayaga, the great ocean south of Ngeshtu Head. When we arrived in Penom, the signed-up en masse for the local marine contingent based in Penom. The capstone of our military training is to survive two weeks on our own on a special island reserved for the marines in the Bamesa Bay.

Mark Allan's beautiful map of the region
around Pan Chaka and Penom

This session spanned roughly days 4-7 of our stay on the island. This time, we hand four players. In addition to myself, the players were Nate, Evan, and Jasper. Rob GMed, and  +Chirine ba Kal hosted us in the world's greatest Tekumel gameroom.

Nate drew the map at the top of the post. The island we're on is roughly tear-shaped, with the broad end of the tear facing south. There are two mountains to the south, both marked in red. We are on the more southerly of the two mountains, in an area with a lot of trees and streams. From there it is an easy walk to forested areas where we have begun to hunt (marked on the map with the yellow die), and to the lake a bit to the north, where we are fishing (marked by the other die).

These days were eventful.

By the lake, we found two jewels, an badly damaged canoe, and evidence of a fight between the elusive natives and some large creature with birdlike feet. Given the presence of blood everywhere, the abandoned jewels, the punctures in the canoe, and the absence of any animal or human carcasses, we concluded that a large, possibly birdlike predator carried off the natives and made a meal of them.

No harm done.

We fished for a while, and followed the streams back up to our camp, where we went gigging "frogged" (and if you know the correct term for "fishing for amphibians", please let me know). Hunting, fishing, and gigging frogging was the routine for a few days.

This routine was interrupted by a Serudla, a fierce semi-intelligent creature.

One of Howard Fielding's fine castings,
as photographed by the Pewter-Pixel Wars

The PCs did the intelligent thing. They ran. This caused them to survive the encounter. We are all first level.

There was also an encounter with a huge, somewhat segasauroid reptile. Our shaman made contact with the creature and determined that it was a plant eater. We let it go on its way. This led an NPC to declaim: "There goes 6 tons of pot roast." To which my PC replied: "Six tons of salmonella, you mean."

There was much paranoia about the deafening anurid serenades to which our camp was subject each night. We decided that the best course of action was more gigging frogging by day. This didn't do much to reduce the din, but so far we have not discovered any humongous predator-frogs.

Just as I had to head out, some ruins were discovered. I am looking forward to hearing whether the players went in, or whether that is going to happen next session.

All in all, it was a great time. The session really brought home for me the pleasures of old-school gaming.

• Learn about the world: plan and then act. Repeat many times. 
• There are problems to solve: go out there and try to solve them with the tools you have.
•  There are things too big for you: sometimes you have to run to stay alive. 

Looking forward to the next session!

Fresh Off The Boat, Again!

Howard Fielding's Figurative Map - Penom is center-right
http://thetekumelproject.blogspot.com/2011/12/
sample-picture-map-penom-and-pan-chaka.html

On Saturday, I was able to rejoin the Aethervox Gamers for another session of Rob Leduc's Old School Empire of the Petal Throne campaign. Our PC group are the most able-bodied, derring-do members of a clan from near Haida Pakala on the Southern Continent. We arrived in Tsolyanu in the port of Penom, the so-called armpit of the Empire, and almost immediately began our Marine basic training.

While I missed out on the introductory basic training session a couple of weeks ago, I was able to get back into the action this past weekend for the capstone of our Marine basic training. The denouement was rather like the show Survivor. We were "fresh of the boat" again, this time sent for a survival session on the Marine's training island in the Bamesa Bay.

This session we had a small playing group: three players and a GM. (This is actually the standard size of my regular roleplaying group, but fairly small for the Aethervoxes, who often have eight or more players around the table at Jeff Berry's house.) But it was fun. We set up camp and started to explore the island.

In the swamps at the foot of the mountain on the Southern side of the island, we heard something go squick-squick in the swamp muck. My character Tsuralnali is a magic user, and used clairvoyance to see what was making the sounds. She saw one of the Swamp Folk, a friendly race.

http://www.tekumel.com/pic_nonhumans13.html

Howard Fielding's Miniature of a Swamp Folk
A more traditional "look" than the one above.
http://thetekumelproject.blogspot.com/
2011/02/swamp-folk-getting-there.html

Good thing we hadn't reacted to the sound by hurling spears in the direction of the squicky sounds! Having friends who know their way around swamps is useful, especially when you're in one!

Fun session!