Tales of the Fortress Eternal

Building a Tower Underwater

2010-11-03T12:23:00.000-07:00

Skills are a superficially simple aspect of game design, but they can be quite tricky. Whereas your abilities - magic, special powers, kung fu, or eye lasers - are distinct, unique to the world, and visually immediate (who doesn't love tinkering with what special powers they want their character to have?), skills differ in that any, and indeed every, character can potentially have them. A set of skills is the final arbiter over what methods the PCs can use to interact within the world - within reason, obviously; house rules and all that. I find it easier to think of skills in terms of how they both limit and enable the players during the game.
I've had a lot of experience of dealing with skill systems used by games over the years, from White Wolf's nice simple dot system to Call of Cthulhu's percentiles to 7th Sea's somewhat byzantine skills and knacks to 2nd Edition AD&D's brutal Non-Weapon Proficiency system. Each of these systems limits and enables the players in different ways - what gamer has not had a sketchy librarian with no skill at firearms try to pop off a shot at a Byakhee (and it is always a Byakhee) before they go insane and/or are killed? Call of Cthulhu's wide variety of skills tends to require a large mutually-dependent party, whereas AD&D's Proficiencies generally meant that if a PC could do something besides fighting, magic or Thief Skills - a separate system, of course - then that was basically an unexpected and surprising or annoying bonus. Skills besides those required for Heroics were barely noticed except in niche games like Birthright and Ravenloft.
Conversely the wide skill set of 7th Sea tended to create the co-dependency found in Call of Cthulhu while the setting required the sturdy ultra-heroism of AD&D - more so, in fact, as the characters were extremely unlikely to die like a punk five minutes into their first game. The problem was the Knack system - characters were unwilling to leap from rooftop to rooftop as the Leap knack was an Advanced Knack. In layman's terms, it was an expensive skill to buy at character creation, and being good at it meant you would suffer elsewhere. Further, it wasn't the same skill as Swinging, or Balance, or Running, or a number of other skills required for acrobatic swashbuckling. Thus people were generally terrible at it for quite a long time. The system as it stood wasn't terribly mechanically complicated - a little complex, perhaps - but it erected a sort of barrier for skills in terms of prioritisation right at the moment the character was made, and it usually persisted for a long time after creation.
Other games have benefited from a more streamlined skill system, but can create in the player a feeling of limitation - Savage Worlds, for example, has very few non-combat skills and those skills only really have formal combat uses. The focus on combat tends to lead to more combat-oriented perceptions of the game - if all you have is a hammer, and so on.
This is something I'll have to elaborate on, possibly after I've recovered my old 7th Sea Skill revisions that I wrote a few years back. At the moment I can't quite get to a conclusion.
I'm sure I'll get there eventually.

The First Brick

2010-10-15T04:24:00.000-07:00

Right. First attempt at a basic system so far, only really dealing with Stats and Skills. I haven't managed to entirely round out combat, magic, and character filligree yet so they'll have to wait for now.

ATTRIBUTES

The concept is that the game has three core attributes - Body, Mind, and Spirit. These are the simplest reduction of a statline that you'll generally get for a game. Each of them has a value - one is valued at Zero, one at Minus One, and one at Plus One. This is decided upon by the player when they make their character. The idea is that there is never such a thing as a "raw" stat roll; the situation is always combined with a skill of some sort.
How the attribute - the "stat" - works is as a modifier. If you are making a roll to shoot an arrow without taking the time to aim, you would roll a number of dice equal to your Bow skill, and then modify the result of each die by your Spirit. If it were an aimed shot, you would modify it by Mind.
Another example - briefly - is the act of climbing a building. If your character needs to haul himself over a ledge or swiftly move up the outside of a tower, he would roll his Climb skill, modifying each die by his Body attribute. If he were engaged in a long climb, he would modify it by Spirit.

SKILLS

I'm still in the process of fleshing out and thinning down a definitive skills list - the temptation to run away with Skills is quite high, but at the same time a peril. The idea with skills is that the system is based around six-sided dice, and skill checks are made by rolling a number of dice - between 1 and 5, say - based on how proficient the character is with the skill.
At character creation, each PC will have 2 points in each skill, and will be able to pick 3 skills which they roll 3 dice with. In addition, they may reduce a skill to 1 die in order to pick a further skill to roll an extra die in - this allows for some modification of the skill pool to start with, but doesn't allow people a pool of points that they can leech from skills to put into something else.

Target numbers for success are set by the GM and are marked by success on an individual die - for example, an easy task may have a target of 3+, whereas a difficult one may require 5+, or may require more than one success in order to complete.
I'll set out an example as a sketch.

ANOTHER EXAMPLE

Daisy has 3 points in Athletics and a Body of +1, and is on a rooftop in the Long Gallery chasing her enemy Fred. She comes across a break in the roof, which she must leap. The GM assigns this a difficulty of 4+. Daisy rolls her 3 dice, getting a 2, a 3, and a 6. The 2 is modified to 3 by Daisy's Attribute, but is still a failure. The 3 becomes a 4 - a success! The 6 is also a Success - Daisy has succeeded, and her additional success enables her to land nimbly, closing in on Fred who scrambles awkwardly across the slippery roof.

OR

Lothar has 2 points in Climb and a Body of -1, and is clinging to a broken staircase in the District of Ashes. Trying to get to safety, the GM assigns his hazardous climb a target of 4+, and he rolls his 2d6, getting a 2 and a 4. The 4 is modified to a 3, and Lothar falls - in all possibility to a terrible end from which he will awaken changed.

Anyway, these are brief notes. I will keep posting.

Back To Basics

2010-10-14T04:51:00.000-07:00

Some people say that they find fear to be a motivating factor. This strikes me as odd - I'm often paralyzed by something akin to fear, and it keeps me from doing things. It's been almost a year since I last wrote anything substantive on my attempts to write an RPG of some sort, and it's pretty much been fear that has kept me from continuing.
More on that later - or not, if I don't feel like writing about it.

My point, however, is that I've been starting to scratch together the basic building blocks of a system - the Stats and Skills part of things, rather than the Advantages, Magic, and Stonebound aspects; the bits which are needed for any game, but the way in which they are used can tell you a lot about how a game is, for want of a better word. For example, Dungeons and Dragons has used an increasingly mechanistic system - back when it started, the building blocks of the game looked very peculiar, with a lot of different dice types rolled and some rolls in which high numbers were good, some in which high numbers were bad. Low armour class was good; low Strength was bad.
More recent iterations have increased the mechanistic aspects of the game; now, the border between RPG and board game is blurred to the extent that it more honestly resembles World of Warcraft for the person who doesn't have a computer - or whose body generates a magnetic field after some form of esoteric lab accident. Within the mechanistic frame, the concept of narrative is less important to the game - an after-effect, "fluff" to use the poisonous nickname attributed to the notion of storytelling within a game by wargamers and the like. Examples of games such as Descent by Fantasy Flight are games in which the Dungeon Crawl itself is elevated to pure boardgame - who your character is is irrelevant; they are a collection of stats that you must push through doors and keep safe from traps so that they WIN.

And in an RPG, winning isn't really what it's about.

If I have time, I'll post the system basics tonight. If not, tomorrow at lunchtime.

Kevin Bacon

2010-01-13T04:19:00.000-08:00

I love the Six Steps to Kevin Bacon game. What fascinates me most about it is seeing how people make the connections to get from Person A to B to C, and what connections they make. It reveals a lot about how their minds work - at least as much as I can figure out from my perspective. With me, for example, I tend to root around in TV work - and I'm never far from my useful list of people who've provided voice work on Justice League Unlimited, massive nerd that I am. People tend to walk down familiar roads to themselves, relying on names and faces they find familiar, and the directions they take are always entertaining, interesting, and potentially surprising.

I've always found that to be the case with adventure design. Historically, I have a very poor track record with published adventures and game modules. I'm bad at working with them, and I'm not good at writing adventures for other groups either. I am not much of a house-rules guy, and the irritating stickler in me will only bodge around unworkable rules if it saves me effort rather than makes effort.

Published adventures perforce have to create a situation, then anticipate how the group running the adventure will react to the situation they create. The amount of space available and the need to keep the story focused and fast-paced necessitates a limitation of options. Further, a wide variety of outcomes to the situation based on the group's reactions will make future situations more difficult to script in anything but the broadest terms, and nobody wants to buy a published adventure only to find page 75 reading, "by this stage, the players should have done some things and be in a place. Cool. Maybe you should have them fight a bad guy. Use one that makes sense. Thanks."
The problem is, few player groups will feel the need to respond to the situation created in a published adventure in exactly the way the writers anticipate. Specifically, no group I have ever GMed for has acted in a way that a writer would anticipate. Even the old Doomstones campaign for WFRP, a legendarily vague dungeon-crawl in the utterly inappropriate for dungeon-crawling Warhammer World, was repeatedly derailed when I ran it until the last adventure looked precious little like anything written in the book. Still, it had those cardboard model Doomstones. They were nice.

My point is that I guess I operate better with the Adventure Hook idea - both published and self-"hooked". The adventure is still a situation, and I know what will happen if the PCs don't interfere with the situation, but I have no idea what will happen when they do. When I ran 7th Sea I very rarely had any idea how an adventure would end, even though I could generate quite a bit of detail for how it would begin.

I guess what I'm saying is that the best lesson I ever learned as a GM was that I am not in control of the story, and attempts by me to assert control of the story will detract from the group's enjoyment - mine as well as the players'. They control the story - it is the heroes' story, after all.

Recurring Villains

2009-10-22T11:15:00.000-07:00

Anybody who knows me and has had to put up with at least one of my games knows that I love recurring villains. Generally I like a group of PCs to recognise and have some form of history with the Bad Guy of the moment, and I will sometimes go to great lengths to ensure that the bad guy recurs.
In Legend of the Five Rings, I saw the potential in the bloodspeaker Yajinden, and was using him as a campaign villain over a decade ago. Yikes. A decade? Really? Point is, Yajinden was a bodiless spirit who could take over the body of anyone else - no-one had any idea what he looked like, or what his long-term plan was, and in the end it got to the stage that PCs could tell if someone they met - a friend, an enemy, whoever - was Yajinden merely by slight mannerisms. They built up a history with him, and that was important - it added a personal dimension to their struggle.
7th Sea is pretty much built around recurring villains - massive, larger-than-life boldly drawn bad guys that exist to add contrast to the massive, boldly-drawn heroism of the Player Characters. Some of the recurring villains of my 7th Sea campaign were always intended to be recurring villains, such as the disillusioned mercenary and bloodthirsty patriot Rudolf Starke or the Syrneth monster in fop's clothing Julian LaVoire, and some - such as Lars Van Dreysen - were just bit-players who were deemed sufficiently obnoxious or entertaining to bring back. One future villain I haven't really got to use - The Brass Lady - was in fact a PC from the old campaign.
Even in the Warhammer campaign I ran in 1993 Rojax Gorewade came back as a recurring villain - despite his signature move of dying like a punk the instant he turned up. Though I think he counts as more of a running joke, to be honest.

By its nature, The Fortress Eternal encourages the concept of the recurring villain - as well as the idea of the Epic Monster. Any enemy faced within The City, as opposed to out in The World, cannot die - they are in fact as immortal as the Player Characters, and that immortality can change them with each successive Preservation as it will the PCs. Thus the players cannot count on death being the checkmate move of any confrontation, and by default should come to rely on alternative means for defeating an enemy - isolating him from his allies, frustrating his aims, or depriving him of his resources where possible. It might happen that during the course of a confrontation the PCs kill their enemy, but this might only hinder him in the long term - and may even benefit him, depending on his agenda, and what role The City plays in it, or the role he plays in The City's plans. A villain motivated by his connection to The City would probably be more trouble if he was repeatedly Preserved during his encounters with the PCs.
The second prong of this is the notion of the Epic Monster. Birthright played into this quite well with its Abominations, the Awnshegh. These were sometimes people and sometimes creatures corrupted by the blood of a dead evil god and made epic in their natures. The idea of the Epic Monster in The Fortress Eternal is similar in nature to this as well as to the myths of the hunt and the struggle against similar wild animals throughout our common mythology - the primary idea I have in my head here is the Boar of Kalydon, and thankfully I've figured out how to fix a link into the post. Other labours, particularly the Nemean Lion, stick out as well.
The idea is that, from time to time, animals will wander into The City. If they are dangerous, they end up getting killed. The City then Preserves them, and they resume wandering about until they get killed again. Time after time this will happen until you are left with something that has become very far removed from what it once was, and is now a being that should never occur in nature - a monster, rather than an animal. These will be the basic monster types of The Fortress Eternal but the key to them is that with these there is only one of each kind of monster. The creatures themselves are legendary, half-worshipped by some as Avatars of The City and feared rightly by even the most experienced warriors with the ageless vaults. There is only one Boar, only one Sphinx, and there are rumours that some monsters lurk unseen in The City's shadows who once were human.

Hearts of Stone

2009-10-14T11:27:00.001-07:00

In previous posts, I stated that death is not final in The Fortress Eternal. The more complete truth of this is that death cannot be final within the walls of The City. The City lasts forever, and the Preservation that maintains The City also maintains everything within it - broken blades return repaired to armouries, empty branches soon bend under the weight of ripe fruit, and the dead live.
The City's magic preserves life as it preserves stone and steel, though the process is not without its cost to the newly-immortal visitors to The City. The simple way of looking at it is as follows: When a person dies within The City, be it through accident, carelessness, disease, or foul play, The Preservation will return them to life. Those brought back to life are more tightly bound to the fabric of The City, more in tune with the Preservation. They often find they are able to hear whispers from anywhere within a District of The City, or direct their wounds to the stone around them, or walk to any street they can picture simply by turning down a previously unnoticed alley.
In exchange for this power, The City preserves the returned visitor. Each time a character dies and returns, they gain a new power courtesy of The City. They also find it more difficult to increase their skills and abilities through the use of experience - each resurrection raises the XP costs of everything. The more times a character dies, the more they are made a static thing, struggling to advance or grow as a person while The City's unchanging character infects them.

As a second caveat to these powers, The Preservation only works within The City. Outside of The City, every wound a character has ever taken returns - the length of time this takes is determined by how frequently they have died. The screaming apparition in "The Silver Demon" is an example of a character who has frequently died, and then has left The City in order to have his many fatal wounds immediately - and spectacularly - return.

At the moment, I'm unsure whether to refer to these unfortunates as Stonebound or The Preserved.

Bonus XP For Punching The GM

2009-10-14T04:31:00.000-07:00

Lunchtime! I've got sandwiches to eat, but while I'm waiting for the coffee to brew, I'll make a couple of points.
It's often argued that skills such as Etiquette and Diplomacy are ones which can be compensated for by Good Roleplaying. The argument goes that if a player can portray the actions of his character really well, he should earn bonuses or even acheive the effect he was looking for without having to roll any dice, check any skills, or even flip a coin.
This is bunk.
Let's take a look at two characters to see why this is bunk. Boktar is a barbarian - a mighty-thewed warrior from the fringes of civilised society, possessed of unmatched skill with the blade and the hardiness to endure almost any blow. Sigfried is a Courtier, a rakish dandy with an unmatched collection of scented lace handkerchiefs, powerful cuffs, and the savoir faire to make almost any recipient of his glances swoon.
Sigfried's player is a bit shy and not 100% comfortable in the group, but he really really wants to play the social role - to strike out into that territory of information-gathering and intrigue. Boktar's player is very outgoing, and tends to dominate social situations within the game because he roleplays out his social skills. Will Sigfried's player - who outlines his actions and then has to roll for them - suffer as a result of this? Probably.
Is Boktar's player playing the role of Boktar when he takes over socially? Yes, if he roleplays an annoying, boorish bully. If he gets his suave mojo going, then no.
This would be comparable to a situation where Sigfried dominated combat by actually beating up the GM - and to be honest, if that happened in a game, it would come up later in stories. Lots of stories. And possibly on the news. And the GM would almost certainly not award it with bonus XP or free successes, unless he was very keen on setting an alarming precedent.

So my point is this: I am not generally keen on awarding bonuses for roleplaying in social situations, as it allows and encourages the more outgoing types to dominate these encounters - even if that is not the type of character they have chosen to play. In the interest of full disclosure, I should point out that I tend to GM and also am really quite socially awkward, even by Nerd Standards.

As an additional point, I also don't care for handing out bonus XP for "good roleplaying". It's as good as turning to anybody who didn't get the bonus XP, looking them in the eye, and saying "...and nothing for you, because you were shit."
Discuss?

The City Is Forever

2009-09-23T14:17:00.000-07:00

The Fortress Eternal takes place in The City. To explain The City, and the concept, I have to enter into a digression on the subject of magic as it applies to The Fortress Eternal.

Magic is capable of three things, though these categories are quite broad: Magic can create, magic can preserve, and magic can destroy. At some point, the idea that The City would fade and be forgotten so terrified someone that the greatest Preservation ever wrought was placed upon it. The City would always be preserved. The City would last forever - eternally present throughout time.
This could not be, and thus was the kharmic cycle, the thread of reality, the will of Fate - call it what you will - torn asunder. The World thus moves in an uneven and unknown cycle of Epochs, and The City is present throughout it all - hidden just beneath the fabric of The World like a splinter buried beneath the skin. In The World, time moves on - people are born and die, wars are won and lost, nations rise and fall, the tide ebbs and flows, and The World turns.
Within The City, things are somewhat different. Those who enter The City cannot die - even if they fall to the blade or poison, The City's enchantments return breath to their bodies.
Over the long years, people have come to The City - how exactly varies from person to person. Sometimes it is the result of a lifetime's pursuit of half-forgotten legends, sometimes they have merely sought shelter from a storm in a building that looked out of place and, upon emerging, saw alien buildings towering above them against an unfamiliar sky.

Those who come to The City can be grouped into four known Epochs: Those from The Time Before, those from The Golden Age, those from The Killing Years, and those from The Long Twilight. Scholars attempting to write histories of The World as they knew it are confounded by the tales of other visitors to The City - even visitors from an Epoch that sounds much like The World they knew often hail from unfamiliar countries or profess ignorance of the legends and places the scholars share with them. No work has yet been able to conclusively fit together the four Epochs into one linear history.

So The City lasts forever and has been made eternal - this in itself is a corruption of nature, and The City, though a place of wonder, should not be. Its towers are high, its streets long, and caverns and tunnels run deep beneath it. It is everywhere and nowhere, and time has bent beneath the strain The City has placed on it. It is sparsely populated with visitors who have had no hand in building it and who cannot die - though every time they return to life, they are bound that much closer to The City. In all its castles, palaces, temples, inns, and dwellings there is no sign to be seen of anyone who claims to be a native of The City, and inhuman creatures - as lost in an unfamiliar world as the visitors - are rumoured to wander the dark and unknown districts of The City.
The City is a place that defies reason, and in it the most valuable commodity one can possess is trust.

So where do the players fit in this? The players represent a group of visitors - perhaps from one Epoch, perhaps from different Epochs - who are part explorer in and part prisoner of The City. They each define what they seek from the The City - truth, escape, seeking someone lost - and their trust alone keeps them together.

The Fortress Eternal: Basic Concept

2009-09-01T13:20:00.000-07:00

In all honesty, I probably ought to get the central idea - or at least the initial draft of it - down on paper. I work around it a lot; this is much the same as what I used to do in art class, when I'd do very detailed drawings of people, paying attention to everything except their faces. The odd faceless portraits I ended up doing creeped the art teachers out, and I never had time to add faces at the end of the class.
What I'm doing here - sporadically, I'll admit, but still technically doing - is similar. I've had a fair few ideas for roleplaying games over the years, but nothing ever really gets done with them. So, I thought I would get the actual core notion behind The Fortress Eternal written down so I can see it, modify it, and get some ideas behind what it actually means. So, here it is:

The players are explorers lost, or trapped, within a city that spans eternity and where death has no meaning. They seek to unravel its mysteries and perhaps escape - though to when, they cannot be sure.

To follow within the next week: Some details on the setting.

Brief Observation re Gaming and Money

2009-08-21T04:44:00.001-07:00

It seems to me that pretty much anything that goes on in the world of RPG gaming involves expense. Maybe it's the old-school Scot in me kicking off against the naked pointless consumption of things like "Cardhalla" at GenCon (look it up: People basically build a city out of Magic: The Gathering cards they won't be using and then it gets wrecked), or the increasing push toward "high-end" games in the RPG industry, but it just seems wrong to me.
I understand that geeks love expensive stuff, but it seems to me that there should be more to the game to pull in the player than how fancy the book is or how nice the box looks. Don't get me wrong - I'm easily as suckered by all the razzamatazz as anybody else is, but part of me thinks that there should be a Discount Option. I'm aware of the Indie RPG scene (though I am, as I state, hopelessly out of touch with it), but seeing things such as unfeasibly expensive Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay sourcebooks or the like passing their absurd cost off as perfectly reasonable on account of their unnecessarily high production values kind of gets on my nerves a bit. I mean, this is a game played primarily imaginatively by people sitting around a table - once you're at that stage, the actual playing stage, it doesn't really matter how nice the book is, right?

Basically, what I'm saying is that I like the cheaper option. I have things I want to write - in some respects things I need to write (not that this is the same thing as these works needing to be written).

I might photocopy the finished products and hide them in cereal packets in supermarkets.

Fortress Eternal: System Basics

2009-08-11T13:34:00.000-07:00

I'm not going to say a lot today about the Fortress Eternal, but I wanted to get the very basics of the system laid out just to see it written and give a little background on why it is the way it is.
In all honesty, what I find I'm really looking for in a roleplaying game at the moment is simplicity without sacrificing the feel of playing the RPGs I really loved in the 1990s.
What I mean by "simplicity" essentially boils down to a streamlined system of stats and skills, and an easy way for them to interact with each other. A while ago I started work on a revision of the Skills and Knacks packages for 7th Sea - not for anyone in particular, just for me, as 7th Sea was not a going concern at that point. The chief point I came away with from that exercise is pretty much something for another day, but one of the first things I noticed was that there was a Heck of a Lot of Skills - many of which were expensive to raise and had little benefit, and many of which had what I think of as a fuzzy boundary. The fuzzy boundary is a problem you get quite a bit with 7th Sea, as most of the political skills for example have ill-defined uses. Oratory and Incitation - there's one. Pretty much every knack in the Ambush skill set contrasted with, say, the Ambush knack, or even Hide.
Anyway, the idea is that there will be a smaller skill list with skills that can be used widely depending on which stat you link with for the purpose of the skill check. Again, this is nothing new - I think the average White Wolf game has maybe thirty or so skills, and Legend of the Five Rings has quite a few skill options, but nowhere near the 7th Sea mark.
Then again, Savage Worlds has a concise skill list but most of the skills have literally no defined non-combat applications. Even the social skills have rigidly spelled out combat uses and vague non-combat uses.
I think I'm starting to drift from my point and in any case I acknowledge now that any skill system created by me is by no means going to be perfect. Or possibly even good, but I'll try to push that thought to one side for now.

It's getting late so I'll finish this update tomorrow, but the basics are this: A small pool of attributes and a moderately-sized pool of skills which themselves can be customised depending on the individual player's tastes and what they want for their character. Attributes are used to modify skill rolls, but not in the same fashion as found in the Roll and Keep system. The idea is that a number of dice equal to the skill will be rolled, with the number on each die modified by the Attribute's rating.
The idea is that it will be simple. As for the execution, that's where these things always get needlessly complex, so we shall see how it looks when I get this finished - and whether graphs will be needed.

Dharuta on the Bridge

2009-07-13T13:20:00.000-07:00

A Tale of the Fortress Eternal
From the Golden Age

So Dharuta left the court of King Jharugatha and went from Rashur along the road to Maratha, bearing with her only her staff and bowl. She came then to the great bridge spanning the Grey Straits, its carved battlements telling the saga of the Asuras to the pilgrims who walked their road. As Dharuta trod the pilgrim's path a crowd gathered, beseeching her to speak.
In those days, the governor of that land lived in a high fort built around the central span of the bridge. This man's name was Karakatha and, seeing the crowd from his tower, he asked his soldiers why they gathered. "They hope to hear Dharuta's teaching", they said. "She comes to Maratha by our road." At once the governor ordered his horse made ready and rode out to meet the sage.
Now Karakatha was not a foolish man, and his fathers had kept that bridge all their days, but in his dreams he was tormented and sorrow would overtake him as he stood atop his home gazing down at the great river far below him. So it was that he sought Dharuta on the Asura's Road, the hooves of his horse grinding the smooth-worn stones that had known the tread of a thousand holy men.
He came upon the sage when the sun stood at its height, surrounded by a vast crowd. Desparate to speak with her, Karakatha drew his sword and moved with force to Dharuta. Her followers gathered close but she bade them sit to the side, saying that she would turn away none who wished to hear her.
Humbled, Karakatha sheathed his sword and dismounted. Before the teacher he stood clad in shining mail and silk, and there he knelt and begged her to answer his question. Dharuta consented, and when Karakatha spoke his voice was dry. "Through all the days of my fathers", he said, "the Empire has stood strong and peace has reigned. The cities are places of wonder, our marvels have tamed all the world, and the wisdom and compassion of our leaders is unmatched. Is this order, then, not the will of the gods? Must not this perfect world endure?"
This is the story Dharuta told.

Once there was a city unlike any other. This city was as a perfect jewel and the delight of her King who, like any doting father, lavished all his riches upon her. Scholars came from distant kingdoms to dwell near the libraries which held the wisdom of the ages. Soldiers, tired of war and all its hollow glory, came to sit by the whispering fountains. Even kings rode to that city to behold the magnificence of the jewelled gates and the glory of the golden towers. Every tower, every street, and every dwelling, from the grandest temple to the merest stable, was a work of art worthy of a place of honour in any Rajah's capital. All through the years of men would the city be renowned, and yet her king was sad.
"Look", he said one day as he walked, "and see how the golden dome of the Tower of the Morning Sun no longer shines so brightly as it once did."
"No matter, Majesty", counselled his viziers and his seers, "our coffers are full. It can easily be replaced. The gleaming spire will once more be a true reflection of your glory."
So it was repaired, yet still the king was sad.
His generals could not console him. "The glory you have won shall ever be remembered", they said. "Your triumphs have gained you eternal renown."
But the king cared not for triumph in battle, nor for the renown he had won through bloodshed, and so his generals took their leave.
His scholars could not console him. "Your Majesty's greatness has brought all the wisdom of men to his great city", they said. "The thoughts and dreams of this generation will shake the world, and shape it evermore." But the king cared not for their laboured wisdom, nor for shaping the minds of those who would come after him, and so his scholars took their leave.
Even his wives could not console him. "My husband, no city has ever stood that can approach the beauty of our home", they said. "All who behold its wonder are enthralled, and weep with joy the first time they walk its streets." Yet the king feared that beauty would fade, and wonders would be forgotten, and so his wives took their leave.
So it was that one day a magician came before the king. "What then," said the king, "do you counsel me, sorcerer? What cold posterities do you offer me as blankets about my fear?" The magician shook his head. "I offer you no such comforts, O King," she spoke, "for it is known that they bring you no joy. I would not have come before you but that I could offer you that which you seek."
The king took the sorcerer then to a high tower and looked out upon his perfect city. "Can you cheat time, then? Can you see to it that the sands of age never wear away the empty stones that will lie tumbled here long after men have left this place?"
The magician stood there in the winds high above the city, and she thought. "Three forces govern the world, O King", she said, "and they stand all in balance. All is created, all things endure for a time, and all things must end. Even the merest of mages know this, and can craft a carpet that feet will not wear away, a shield that blades will not pierce or crack, or a blade that will bring ruin to all it cuts. Yet the balance is maintained, for every magic has its price."
The magician paused here, and the king grew impatient. None had before offered him hope before, yet here stood a mage who did not realise that gold held no allure for the king and for his city he would pay any price.
When the king told the magician such, she laughed. "The price, great one, is not mine but the spell's to decide, but it will and it must be paid." Thinking he understood the king volunteered his life for a price, pausing for not even a heartbeat's space. The magician only shook her head. "The price will be nothing so trivial", she said, and the king felt fear. Yet he agreed for the magic to be worked.
So it was that for one day the Magician walked in the darkness beneath the city among the great stones that shouldered the burden of that wondrous place. She walked for one day in the light, and laid her hands on the holy altars of the city's temples. All through those days she worked her spell and the people looked on her with curiosity. While they slept on the second day, the Magician completed her work and the spell fell across the face of that city like a mourner's veil.
The King had his wish, as he was promised; but the price was steep, as he was warned. As the long days of that perfect city unfolded, the king saw that no traveller came from afar to look in awe at its perfect streets. No person dwelling in that perfect city ever perished, for there the natural order of life was defied and there it was rejected. No murals were washed away by the Sun's light, but the great artists made nothing new. Sometimes, when looking out from his high tower, the king found the surrounding lands strange and unfamiliar. One day, after a span of years beyond the counting of men, the king found he could not even remember his city's name.
So it was that the Shining City passed from the minds of men and lived forever. None remembered her golden towers, and none praised her great libraries. None marvelled at her sanctuaries and temples, and no voice gave honour to her wise king.

Karakatha heard these words and, laying down his blade and mail, walked in Dharuta's footsteps all his days.

The Silver Demon

2009-07-06T15:41:00.000-07:00

The Silver Demon

A Tale of the Fortress Eternal

From The Time Before

Listen, for this is the tale of the lost Agniska, and of how they wandered far and forsook the Lands.

In the time of Taera the Bloodied Axe when Yogesh stood as Warlord over five of the tribes on the Great Plain, the chief among the Agniska peoples swore to his bride that their children would be ignorant of terror. Scorning the tribe's Star he walked far from the paths of his fathers, and his people walked with him.
It is said that they came upon a fertile valley and knew three good summers there, but Yogesh sought them out and they fled before him.
It is said they were happy in the hill country for a time, and that a stone of thanksgiving yet stands there that was raised by Agniska hands, but Yogesh sought them out and they fled before him.

In despair the chief turned his face to the East and the Agniska walked among the High Mountains - the Pillars of the Sky. Wild beasts gathered about them, and the people knew great hardship. Many were left at the path's edge, their spirits asleep, long awaiting their kin's return. There it was Yaegu made his name - among the Pillars of the Sky he walked before his people, and at night he stood over their tents and slew what wild beasts the darkness made bold. Here Yaegu slew the greatest of the mountain dragons, and fashioned a war club from its rib to split the skulls of its kin.

Not the chief it was but Yaegu guided the people, as the journey crushed the tribe's father. Yaegu it was whom they called Hero, and Yaegu it was who first crested the rise that brought the Agniska before the Palace of the Gods.

Hewn from rock before time the Palace stood, stone piled high upon stone. Towers touched the sky, and thick walls cast the Agniska into shadow. A mighty door of black wood stood wider than ten men before them.

For three days the Agniska stood before the great gate and it did not open. No axe could split the wood, and no fire could grip it. On the third day, a boy of the tribe saw a dark hole high upon the wall. Yaegu spoke up to claim the honour of entering the Palace, yet the Chief stood before the people and denied him. The next day the Chief it was who placed his hands upon the stones and climbed, his spear on his back and his face before him. The eyes of the tribe saw him crawl into the darkness and vanish.

All that day and the next they waited, sheltering against a terrible wind. Through the summer they waited, and yet the chief did not return - nor did Yogesh seek them out. As the mountains grew cold and winter gathered about them, the door opened and then it was that the Agniska beheld the Silver Demon, and knew they stood on ground sacred to the gods.

The Silver Demon had the face of a man, but a man like no other. Paler than death he stood, clad in silver and bearing a silver blade upon his hip. When he beheld the Agniska he cursed them, opening his mouth to loosen a terrible howl. The Demon's curse chilled the blood of the brave, and all saw the end of their tomorrow's in the creature's terrible eyes as he looked upon them, weeping blood.

The Demon turned to dust where he stood, yet his scream is said to have filled the valley for a day and a night.

When the Demon was gone, the Agniska found his silver armour and his silver blade. Gathering their wisest, the tribe set to use these totems to break the blood-curse the spirit had uttered when it walked among them, but Yaegu stepped forth and took into his hand the war-things of the Silver Demon. None dared deny him.

Yaegu slept under the sun in those days. Under the moon he walked about the camp, his sword a challenge to its silver master to retrieve it - if he dared. One morning as winter drew its knife, Yaegu declared the wanderings of the Agniska at an end. There he proclaimed himself Guardian of the Sacred and demanded a wall be built to protect the Palace of the Gods and the holy grounds. So in time sons would walk where their fathers had died, and the Agniska would put aside their spears as they put aside their yesterdays. Yaegu commanded this, and none dared deny him.

Among the mountains Yaegu walked and spilled the blood of those he met, man and beast alike. The Agniska knew twenty hard winters, but they lived, and their secret was guarded whilst their leader kept a great tent before the Palace of the Gods.

In time five sons were born to Yaegu, each a strong warrior in his own right, each the son of a great chief. So it happened that Maenu and Ar-Yaegu returned from the hunt and saw their father's armour shine in the distance. Going to greet him, they came upon him bathing in a stream, his armour and blade standing by a tree. It was then that the Silver Demon's curse stirred in their hearts and two sons saw not their father but only the glory of the silver sword, and the splendour of the silver breastplate. It is not known who moved first, but the sons of Yaegu cast their father beneath the waters and never let him rise. When Yaegu was in the Earth, his sons split his armour among themselves, and Maenu took the terrible silver blade for his own.

Yet the curse would not be still, and Maenu's blade won him no glory when Sartesh his brother stole into his tent and strangled him, claiming the sword as well as his father's helmet. Fear then gripped the Sons of Yaegu, and each among them vied for the strongest of their people to stand guard over their tents while they slept. These warriors agreed, holding in their hearts the story of the day Yaegu their lords' father usurped their vanished chief. And so did son turn against father, brother against brother, the Silver Demon's curse claimed the Agniska, and the wind claimed all that they left behind.

It is said that one hundred winters later the great doors of the Palace of the Gods opened and the Chief of the Agniska came forth from the shadowed eternal halls. He wept for his people that day as he stood amid their ruined homes and beheld their sun-scoured bones. For long days after he walked among men, but he had been touched by the gods, and all were fearful of him.