NoD #130 — Chronicles of Asgard

I think that I’m getting on top of the year-end crunch time here, or at least was before breaking my back. Luckily I’ve gotten most time-sensitive tasks out of the way, so I have time to mope around feeling sorry for myself.

I guess I’ll explain Amber

Chronicles of Amber is a fantasy novel series from the early ’70s. This was a time of post-pulp high concept cosmic fantasy; turgid Tolkien-aping “epic” wasn’t yet the popular thing, but sword & sorcery was very much on the way out, so the “post-pulp” zeitgeist in fantasy literature tended to be highly symbolistic, psychologically oriented, telling stories of archetypal heroes wandering vast multiverses. I’ve never heard this era/style given a specific name, but it’s recognizable as an era when you read enough fantasy literature. Perhaps imagine Michael Moorcock’s Elric (or C.J. Cherryh’s Morgaine) as the pulp-facing end of the range, and Stephen R. Donaldson’s Chronicles of Thomas Covenant as the descend of the era into post-Tolkienism.

This literary history is important if you’re anything like me, and learned your fantasy literature genre history by basically reading pulp (Howard, Lovecraft) and Tolkien, and therefore formed a dualistic understanding of “low fantasy” vs “high fantasy” as the big picture of the genre. It’s not like this is the dumbest possible historiography of 20th century American fantasy literature, but it does create distinct blind spots regarding other subgenres of fantasy, with prominent examples in fairy tale fantasy and this whatever-you’d-call-it. If you think that this Amber stuff is sword & sorcery, you’re misunderstanding either Howard or Zelazny.

So anyway, Amber is a ’70s fantasy work in the subgenre of cosmic fantasy or whatever you’d call it. It’s also remarkable in that Zelazny writes in an extremely understated straight prose, he sort of assumes that you’re steeped in the genre assumptions of the time. This means that readers who post-date the era of publication are very likely to reinterpret the work in various ways. I’ll come back to this in a moment, it’s my actual topic today.

Amber Diceless, a spinoff rpg created 20 years later, is one of these cult treasures of tabletop roleplaying, a game that everybody who’s opinion is worth anything adores, even if it was never a great commercial success. I participated in abortive attempts at playing the thing in my dissolute youth; as tends to be the case with powerful roleplaying games, you have to either coincidentally share the creative orientation of the author, or be a scarily experienced old master to get anywhere with this caliber of game. I’m both intent on and hopeful that when I GM the thing myself at some point in the future, it’ll be entirely amazeballs.

The fact that both the novels and the game are relevant to their art form is super rare, I gotta say; usually license products are at best mediocre (e.g. consider the history of Lord of the Rings rpgs), but here we have a weird situation where the original novels are a landmark of straight prose genre fiction, anticipating 21st century light novel geek thriller, while the roleplaying game is an entirely unique, bespoken craft thing that re-envisions everything about traditional tabletop roleplaying.

Amber has a presentation problem

The Chronicles of Amber and Amber Diceless are interesting in that as the franchise moves through time, there’s a clear thematic and aesthetic value drift visible in how they’re treated by the culture of fans and co-creators. This is a bit like how the Cthulhu Mythos gets reinvented for the needs of the present, except the effect is apparently much stronger: whereas there’s no dearth of currently-active Mythos participants (I prefer to not limit this observation to “authors” vs “fans”, that’s not a relevant distinction for any of it) with deep creative commitment to the literary ideals of Lovecraftian cosmic horror, with Amber it seems to me that it’s actually fairly unlikely to see it being tackled in its original context.

To be clear on what I’m about here, here’s a couple of random Internet picks of visual art associated with the Amber franchise. I think it’s fairly clear what the aesthetic ideas are here: renfaire, post-Tolkien high fantasy faux-medievalism. A lot like the aesthetics of Game of Thrones, the present generation’s favourite fantasy. Not all Amber things all the time are like this, but a lot of it is. Book covers, rpg gamer-created art, and so on.

The issue I have with this treatment of the franchise is that I think that medievalist Amber is a shitty and boring franchise. I encountered it in the early ’00s myself, both the novels and the roleplaying game, and didn’t really get any kind of handle onto why any of this was at all interesting. The truncated cultural context didn’t click for me at all.

(An interesting point about the Amber Diceless rpg book: its illustrations are kinda half and half in this regard! Some of the art has clearly been created by people who are familiar with the cosmic fantasy subgenre, while other stuff’s not, so they default to renfaire imagery. I wonder what that’s about. I imagine I could potentially have understood Amber better back in the early ’00s if I’d actually read the rulebook back then instead of just playing.)

I only really grokked Amber and realized how damn good it is when I, through personal study, accrued sufficient understanding of old fantasy literature, realized the thematic context Amber was operating in. When I re-read the novels 15 years later, something that was very blase on first read presented itself as extremely relevant to my interests, just because I was now imagining it differently: not as post-Tolkien renfaire fantasy, but as ’70s style cosmic fantasy.

Jack Kirby in Amber

So this was my actual inspiration for writing about this topic today: I was reading old Thor comic books (a Marvel superhero comic book from the ’60s, by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby) where I noticed that damn, Kirby’s Thor really does visually look note for note exactly like the New Gods stuff he did for DC in the ’70s. And then it hit me: this would be a great paradigm for illustrating Amber!

In fact it’s so great that I wouldn’t be at all surprised if Zelazny was explicitly inspired by Kirby’s Thor in conceiving of Amber. I realized when thinking about this that not only are they from the same era, and the same subgenre of fantasy, but their core stories are also kinda identical. (Not the Stan Lee stuff necessarily, I’m just talking Kirby here.) Check this out:

Asgard/Amber is the heart of creation: It is not so much a magical city-state as it is mythic, representing the pinnacle of creation, formed by the cosmocrator for their personal residence in the aftermath of creation. I will not deny that Amber has a thematic kernel of medievalism to it, suggesting that the true nature of reality is archaic; but that’s the case with Kirby’s Asgard as well! Kirby just constantly reminds us (via vaguely futuristic detail) that while the Asgardian reality is superficially archaic, in actuality everything about it is hyper-real, beyond the concept of “advanced”.

Asgardians/Amberites are divine: They’re not the gods that humans worship in Abrahamic religion, but rather a more humanistic, very hippie era imagination of a cosmic god-citizen of the true reality beyond our world. Human worship froufrou is incidental to their concerns, which mostly relate to the hyper-intense dramatic issues of their lives. They’re above humanity by being more archetypically human.

Odin/Oberon is the mighty king-god: I consider it particularly notable that in both myths, the king created reality, and in both they secure their cosmic-grade magical tools (Odinsword and Pattern respectively) in their heavenly city, and in general if you ever thought that Oberon is an useless and disinteresting character, that sure gets fixed when you realize that he’s actually Odin.

Thor/Corwin is an Earth exile: The protagonist of the story is a divine exile sent to Earth due to heavenly court politics. Their memory of their past had been stolen away, which made it possible for Earth to hold them. The story begins when they recover memory of their true identity.

This is cosmic fantasy: Amber, like Thor, is an archetypal mythic fantasy, not some kind of renfaire costume play. What the character do and how they are oozes power in a subtle way that, confusingly to modern fantasy, expresses itself in far more varied ways than mere “magic”.

So yeah, that’s it: if I was doing an Amber thing of some sort, I’d sure look into filling that “interpretation gap” caused by Zelazny’s ultra-minimalist prose, and I’d specifically and unapologetically fill it with the kind of fantasy aesthetics and thematic payload that I believe Zelazny to have been intending in the novels.

I can kinda imagine the kind of interpretation that e.g. an Amber movie or tv show (I hear there’s talks of that, in the forever march of Hollywood franchise exploitation) would get; TV people love their boring as fuck renfaire fantasy. Thing is, I don’t think that there’s necessarily much there in Amber if you interpret it like that. The actual interesting aspects of the work are reside in the cosmic archetypal hippie fantasy, and the way the stoic literary expression downplays the implicit context of mythic divinity.

One more Amber image in closing. This doesn’t relate directly to the above Kirby stuff, but I think it’s illustrative of one possible interpretation of Amber, also present in the rpg here and there. The cover art of this late ’90s comic book adaptation of the first Amber novel does a fair job of visualizing the notion that Amber is mythic; in this case by imagining the characters as musclebound superheroes in tights. I don’t hate it, it’s certainly better than the realist-romantic court dandy visuals I’m complaining about here. Shame the comic book itself isn’t particularly interesting.

Coup de Main in Greyhawk

Regarding the Coup campaign, let’s review the scheduled dates. The game’s open to visitors, newcomers, inexperienced players, cats and dogs.

Coup de Main #89

More Coup de Gnarley from last summer, with Tuomas. I hadn’t been participating regularly myself since the Illmire Fearmother affair wrapped up, but I did pop in for a session here, playing “The Wizard”. We continued with last session’s Grotto, trying to find the horn of Pornfoglio or whatnot in its grody depths.

It sure did. Also, that miniature figurines thing was just plain weird: we had this set of demon statues scattered around the dungeon architecture, and they generally seemed content to just hang in there, but then this one specific eyeball monstrosity statue seemingly had the property of materializing a small miniature statue of anybody who crossed through the room on their way deeper into the dungeon. Just plain left field dream logic stuff there.

Some entrepreneurial adventurer could start a miniatures company, I guess. There’s an amusing strand of wargaming miniatures as dungeon treasure already in existence in the adventure material corpus of the campaign anyway, this was like at least the third adventure that had some minis in it throughout the campaign so far. I bet that miniatures mean more to the Flanaessian magical reality than they seem.

That sounds like a custom creature or some property of the tomb, but it’s actually an old AD&D era Monster Manual critter. I forget it’s name, but it’s basically just a zombie that has the peculiar property of reviving after being hacked down for the first time, at which point it spooks everybody with a Fear effect. A good example of what gimmick monsters look like in the D&D tradition.

Pay attention to what happened immediately afterwards, I think it’s a good example of how Fear effects function in real play. It’s a genuinely neat little subgame in D&D how Fear makes characters flee in an unreasoning way, randomizing their direction at dungeon junctions, potentially splitting up and getting into dangerous situations. The results can range from entirely harmless to thoroughly lethal. It’s the sort of thing that dungeoneering could stand to have more of, really, to counterbalance the careful planning.

Coup in Sunndi #63

As I discussed in the last newsletter, we would run two distinct campaign arcs in parallel here. This time it was the turn of the Dhalmond bounty-hunting adventure to continue. Last time in session #61 we’d been dangerously ambushed by the sociopathic Dandy Boy, only for the party to defeat and imprison much of the dandy’s mercenary group.

The adventurers were originally planning to go hunt for an unrelated gang of cattle thieves, but with Dandy so mysteriously targeting them, and consequently being defeated, the opportunity certainly beckoned: a significantly greater prize, with a significant part of the danger in the form of his loyal hirelings already divested with. Unknown to the adventurers, royal favour was at stake as well: Dandy was actually contributing a fair bit to the ineffectiveness of Dhalmondian rule due to his highway assassinations of government officials, so there was opportunity for aggrandizement there.

Much of the practical details of the bountyhunting adventure were procedurally generated as needed. For example, here the fundamental facts I knew about Dandy were his resources, goals, and what he was up to “this month” in a kind of turn-based downtime sense. As it happened, Dandy was generally “laying low in the countryside”, which the outlaws in my bounty-hunting model tend to do after engaging in major heists to allow the heat to cool down. It’s supposedly very difficult to find a low-laying outlaw, as they’re just plain hiding in some random hex in the countryside, so it’s kinda funny how the players would often stubbornly target one of these anyway. Like here, both Camil the Camel-Lover and Dandy Boy were in hiding when the adventurers decided to go after them.

Here the adventurers had a clear advantage for finding Dandy Boy after his retreat, though, in the form of captured survivors of his attack. The players underwent the usual maneuvering challenges over what to do with their prisoners. In dungeon filibuster this is usually a torture/release/kill triad, but here in bountyhunting land giving the ne’er-do-wells to the cops was also an option to be entertained. Ultimately the party secreted their prisoners away for a bit in a suitable hideout and pressured them successfully to give up their leader. Dandy Boy does play a professional mercenary game, but he’s also a scary sociopath who doesn’t inspire loyalty in his men, so with the players managing to project a trustworthy image, the mercenaries preferred to spill the beans in exchange for their freedom.

The PCs obviously did their best to encourage the mercs to not just immediately run back to Dandy Boy to warn him of the coming storm. Interestingly they ended up relying on soft social influence on this, just plain trusted the read of the party’s social face and decided to let the mercs go, trusting that they wouldn’t want to return to Dandy Boy with news of what had happened. This happened to pan out for them, so good call in retrospect.

The rest of the session involved the kind of play that I personally like a lot, but that some other hobbyists can’t stand: the party continued information-gathering and planning a takedown of a competent 3rd level Fighter. This is a significantly different mode of play compared to dungeoneering in that I didn’t particularly frame the challenge for the players: it wasn’t just a “here’s a battle map of his hideout, what do you do?” affair, the players had to actually construe of their own best approach to the takedown.

Subtle information-gathering over Dandy Boy discovered that he had a public identity in town as an adventurer dandy; apparently the man had a habit of visiting Dhaltown every few weeks for dissolute entertainments that were, at least for the moment, centered around a specific whorehouse and a favoured paramour of his.

Meanwhile careful scouting of Dandy’s current hideout found it to be a walled village manor in one of the numerous rural communities that struggle to survive in anarchy-period Dhalmond. Dandy still had some men, or perhaps had managed to hire more while the party was doing their own maneuvers. And he was probably “home”, to the best knowledge of the party’s soft surveillance.

Again, the party was actually doing really well here, I’d just wish that we managed to play Call of Cthulhu with this level of reasoned investigation. Random chance and considerate player action had set up a situation where the party knew Dandy Boy’s methods, personality, hideout, patterns of movement. They had the luxury of waiting for Dandy Boy to come to town to satisfy his animalistic passions, apprehending him alone and distracted, or they could amass their forces for a surprise assault on the hideout itself, taking on what remained of the gang.

One of the formal framing rules of the bountyhunting adventure is that the Dhalmond constabulary will actually pay a 10% ratting fee to an informant delivering information that leads to apprehending a wanted outlaw. It’s a method for players to softball an investigation when they don’t feel that they’re able to take down the outlaw themselves. Of course making use of this option does require maintaining fair and constructive relations with the constabulary. (Itself a challenge when the party is engaged in a bit of a crime thriller conspiracy themselves with the guard captain himself.)

It was a bit of a surprise for me when the players, after massaging the Dandy Boy takedown for most of the session, ultimately decided to not try it, and rather sell the information to the cops. In hindsight I think it was a combination of fog of war and the exaggerated faith in character level that the players seem to have; they just plain didn’t believe that their party of predominantly 1st level characters and hirelings could possibly fight down a 3rd level Fighter. Not even with the prospect of surprising him alone on one of his bacchanalia nights in town. I guess Dandy Boy had just intimidated the hell of out of the players in their past encounter.

Thing is, the PCs didn’t particularly feel like joining the cops in the bust itself. They’d only get paid if the apprehension succeeded, but with some of the party being kinda wanted men themselves, and the party apparently feeling their mortality tonight, nobody wanted to be anywhere near Dandy Boy for his grand amok last stand. The players were fine with my summarily resolving the bust, which I was fine with as well: the flower of Dhalmond’s guard forces were mobilized for this fairly important affair (remember, there’s a suspected political aspect to Dandy’s crimes), so surely they’d be able to manage it.

Or not; the dice favoured Dandy Boy, so when the cops surrounded his hideout and assaulted the premises, Dandy Boy managed to escape in the confusion. His remaining mercenaries were all either slain or captured, but the main prize himself, and with him the reward for his capture, escaped. Dandy was apparently too dangerous a swordsman, plus he had a prepared escape route from his compound over a back wall. The cops had the misfortune of having the bumbling fool of a guard captain (corrupt to boot) leading the siege on the back side, where Dandy then proceeded to outrun the assailants.

We wrapped up the session here, but with Dandy Boy still on the loose, I kept modeling his activities. The smart move for Dandy after this close call would obviously be to escape Dhalmond and possibly never return, but he’s a stubborn megalomaniac by nature, so I diced for it, and Dandy apparently decided to stick around to wrap up his romantic obsessions in town. (The paramour in town loomed large in his diseased mind as the “betrayer” who managed to cause this setback for him. Probably heard about the PCs snooping around from her, and then invented the notion that she’d told them about his hideout, despite him never telling her about it. Dandy’s not entirely sane.)

All in all, an enjoyably anticlimactic, emergent scenario that came into being from loose pieces and fell apart likewise. I could see myself focusing on just this sort of stuff in D&D, who needs dungeons anyway.

State of the Productive Facilities

I’ve got Muster in the proofing stage once again, now with both a black-and-white softcover and a color hardcover edition. Hopefully they’ll pass muster and I can actually print them in early January, get that entire project out of the way.

Beyond that, I’ve got a little muggle book thing I have to write and edit sometime this winter. (A jubilee history of a local association; not a big deal, but a bit of work for sure.) I guess I’ll start on that next and see how it fits in with newslettering and writing more Coup Workbook partials and hopefully some more considerate blog essays over the first quarter of 2023.

Also, gotta say that while I do like the feature piece in this newsletter, it seems to be very difficult to actually express a full idea in less than 2k words. Makes for long newsletters. I’m forced to choose between writing entirely cryptic observations with no context at all, or this multi-thousand word format here. Not ideal.