Fantasy Heartbreaker, by Russell Bailey

You and Me Against the World

A while ago, I wrote an article on buddy adventure in roleplaying games — loosely defined as two characters alone against a sea of troubles. Swords and deviltry, to put a very fine point on it.

How can we build a fantasy adventure game which takes two heroes, two players, and sets them against the world with only their wits and their swords? Something that really captures the action of a Fafhrd and Mouser story?

To quickly recap my earlier post, the necessary elements of buddy adventure¹ are push and pull.

Internal pull is made up of the common traits that keep the two heroes together. External pull is what draws the characters through the adventure — the prize(s) they seek.

Internal push is the contrasts and competition between the two characters. External push is the trouble that manifests during the adventure.

So, our game needs to encode each kind of push and pull into the story. Characters (and players) need to both cooperate and compete (teaming up and trying to top each other in feats of daring), while facing adversity heaped upon them (by such things as evil priestesses and dastardly wizards).

I’ve always been a big fan of the introductory scene in The Swords of Lankhmar, where Fafhrd and the Mouser alternate describing the scene before them, and Leiber seamlessly segues into a great action sequence. Let’s make that kind of riffing back and forth the basic rhythm of our game.

We’ll start with a core mechanic, as the core of the adventure is the aforementioned feats of daring. Let’s offer a mechanical advantage for describing them, a la Wushu.

When you describe your hero performing a feat of daring, take a red die.

“I vault across the table, scattering the drinks and lunging for my foe’s heart!”

The most effective source of adversity is another player — this is the origin of the traditional GM. With two players and no GM, let’s encourage the players to create adversity for each other’s heroes. Let’s make this a details-for-dice situation as well.

When you describe a difficulty for your partner’s hero, give your partner a black die.

“The drinks spill, causing you to slip and land face first at your foe’s feet.”

Obviously, red dice should help your hero. Let’s say that they contribute to resolving a conflict. Each red die that comes up higher than a target number reduces the conflict’s “hit points” by one.

Each red Success reduces the scene’s Challenge Rating by one.

Less obvious is how the adversity should work. In order to prevent players from either being total jerks or total softies, we need to make players glad to receive adversity.

Well, red dice do “damage” to the conflict, right? So let’s give the conflict the ability to do damage in return. We’ll make red failures (“Misfortunes”) deplete our heroes’ hit points.

A red Misfortune takes away one point of a hero’s Luck (the hero’s ability to dodge trouble and stay in the conflict).

That means that every heroic action carries the risk of mechanical adversity. So let’s have our black dice mitigate that adversity, effectively converting mechanical adversity into narrative adversity.

Each black Success cancels one red Misfortune.

We want a quick back-and-forth between players, so let’s put that into the structure of the round…

On your turn, take a red die or give a black die.

…and make sure that dice get rolled every so often, so that we don’t end up with a giant pile to be rolled at the end of the scene.

When you and your partner have each taken or given a total of three dice, roll your accumulated dice.

So, let’s sum up:

• You have three turns in a round.
• On your turn, pick one:
  • Describe a bold action for your hero and take a red die.
  • Describe a nasty complication for your partner’s hero and give a black die.
• When both you and your partner have taken all of your turns, roll your dice.
• Each die 1-3 is a Misfortune. Each die 4-6 is a Success.
  • Each red Success reduces the Challenge Rating of the scene by one.
  • Each black Success cancels one of your red Misfortunes.
  • Each remaining red Misfortune reduces your hero’s luck by one.

We now have a core mechanic for push and pull between two players. Players are rewarded for both describing bold actions for themselves and narrating trouble for each other. Next, we’ll look at tying this to scene framing.

What do you think?

A Witch menaces a Heroine on the original cover for Howard's "Red Nails."

In the early era of sword and sorcery — that is, the era when Conan was being published but long before he became an icon — female sexual agency is rare, and female plot agency is rarer. Studying C.L. Moore, Clark Ashton Smith, Robert E. Howard, and the early stories of Fritz Leiber, I see five major archetypes for female characters.

Most of the analysis I see of sword and sorcery fiction, especially with regards to female characters, assumes a defensive posture. “I like this so I’m going to say why it’s okay.” By contrast, I’ll admit to being entirely uncomfortable with the portrayal of women in early sword tales.

I’m not going to conceal my biases, but I think I’ve said what I need to already. I also don’t have a particular thesis this time around; I’m simply assessing what’s there.

The strongest focus here is on Howard’s Conan stories, with the others used to illuminate what I find there. Were I, for instance, to analyze Leiber’s career, or even just those of his two famous rogues, this list would look very different. (Also note that the Leiber story treated here, “Adept’s Gambit,” was written within a decade after the other works, but not published until 1949.)

Property

The most common role for women is as property. Often, this involves the woman being treated as property cruelly by one man, and then crudely but well by the hero. (“Iron Shadows on the Moon,” “The People of the Black Circle”). In this capacity, the woman has little agency; she is, by default, the sexual partner of whatever man currently possesses her. One of the best examples is “The Servants of Bit-Yakim,” in which Muriela changes hands with little ado, and is later valued directly against a cache of jewels.

Jirel fights to avoid becoming property in “Black God’s Kiss.”

Most of Clark Ashton Smith’s female characters fall within the property archetype, although a few surprise the male characters by displaying agency of one kind or another.

As property, a woman may possess sexual allure, but rarely posseses sexual agency. She’s also more a plot device than a character with plot agency.

Mystery

The mysterious woman is essentially a transitional archetype. A woman begins as a mysterious character, during which time she’s sexually off-limits (although possibly quite alluring). So it is when Yasmela first appears in “Black Colossus,” and with Ahura in “Adept’s Gambit.” Muriela occupies this role for about five minutes in “The Servants of Bit-Yakim.” One of my personal favorite mysterious women is Clark Ashton Smith’s eponymous “Morthylla.”

The mysterious woman is a well-established trope in other genres, but only occasionally seems to appear in sword and sorcery. She’s most frequently found in Leiber, who was fond of the idea of women as alien to men. (See also “The Girl with the Hungry Eyes” and “Conjure Wife.”) Leiber’s alien woman is arguably an archetype all her own, but going down that road involves abandoning the discussion of sword and sorcery as a whole.

Authority

The Conan stories, as well as Jirel’s saga, have a number of examples of women who wield authority, and wield it effectively. Few of them, however, really want to.

There’s the Devi Yasmina, for instance, the most capable female leader in Conan’s saga. “The People of the Black Circle” presents her as a clever diplomat and brave as any of the male supporting cast in the face of uncanny horror. She’s also at least a passable military commander, rallying her troops to the aid of Conan the chieftain. But she has no true desire to rule; rather, it’s an unpleasant task forced upon her by the assassination of her brother. Yasmina is largely an object rather than an agent in the plot — woman as property — but has a fair amount of sexual agency. She essentially negotiates with Conan whether or not they will have an affair, and on whose terms.

Yasmela of “Black Colossus” is another capable female leader, but again, she leads only because she lacks a brother. (Hers being tucked away in a dungeon.) Yasmela has plenty of plot agency early in the story, and sexual agency at its end. She’s probably the only female character in Conan’s history to persuade him to have sex in direct contradiction to his initial inclination.

In “A Witch Shall Be Born,” Taramis rules without any missing male authority. She’s also presented as a just and beloved ruler, whom a number of men not interested in her sexually willingly follow. She’s perhaps the standout female authority of the Conan stories. Of course, the contrast between her and her sister, Salome, is perhaps the only outright “madonna/whore” juxtaposition in Howard’s work.

Belit, the “Queen of the Black Coast,” is a strong authority figure. Strong enough, in fact, that Conan is content to follow her leadership and play the role of consort. Ultimately, however, she’s also an overreaching authority figure, a Pandora or Ahab who leads her men to death. Notably, Belit seems to have been forced into her role of authority because her male relatives were deprived of theirs.

And then there’s Jirel of Joiry, her own little special case. She’s the military commander of Joiry, and her men are extremely loyal. Little attention, however, is given to the nature of her rulership or how she got there. She simply is, and is unquestioned.

Most of these characters possess some sexual agency of their own, often with the ability to choose and even compel lovers. Their plot agency is also strong. Many of them set significant events into motion for their own reasons.

Witch

The witch is primarily an antagonistic figure, with some crossover with the mysterious woman. Examples include Salome (“A Witch Shall be Born”), Akivasha (The Hour of the Dragon), Ahura when possessed (“Adept’s Gambit”) and the parallel figures of Thalis (“The Slithering Shadow”) and Tascela (“Red Nails”). These characters possess some measure of power over the hero’s survival, and are usually depicted with sexual freedom. Their plot agency is variable but tends to be significant.

The mightiest of these is Jirel’s foe Jarisme (“Jirel Meets Magic”), queen of her own otherworld. Jarisme presents one magic obstacle after another for Jirel to overcome. She’s the perfect impediment to meet Jirel’s plot-driving fierceness. Indeed, her only role in Jirel’s life is as an obstacle. Jirel battles and kills Jarisme while seeking to murder another wizard entirely.

There’s a ton to be written on this topic, but I’m not inclined to at the moment. I’ll note that later creators refine this archetype into the mighty Sorceress, from which figures like Zorayas (Night’s Master) spring. It’s also worth noting that I’ve seen the witch called the “temptress,” but it’s a misleading label. In the works I’m discussing, there’s little to no temptation of the hero, however much a character like Thalis might wish it.

There’s also the literal witch Zeiata (The Hour of the Dragon), who’s notable for being one of the few old women present in the Conan saga.

Heroine

Jirel is the only starring heroine I’ve read from the original Weird Tales era. She possesses most of Conan’s personality traits, save for his ambition. She has some sexual agency, in the sense that she actively denies men who want to compel her to be their lover. She also has a lot of plot agency. Her fierce determination drives her stories more than anything.

Jirel, however, must repeatedly fight to avoid being property, sexually or otherwise. Most of the Jirel stories feature a sequence which revolves around her imprisonment by either force or sorcery. She achieves freedom through her own fierce nature, usually when her considerable physical prowess has been neutralized. Fighting to achieve freedom is the most consistent theme in Jirel’s stories, and usually is what propels the narrative forward. In that sense, she’s made of plot agency.

Belit qualifies, however narrowly, for the heroine archetype. We’re told she’s a fierce warrior; we just don’t see most of it. Her plot agency as a heroine is somewhat less than her agency as an authority figure, but the two are appropriately difficult to untangle.

Valeria of “Red Nails” is an excellent heroine, supporting character though she is. She has the freedom to choose lovers and deals harshly with those who try to take it away from her. Her plot agency is pretty strong; she takes almost as active a role as a fighter and explorer as Conan does, and her backstory implies that she’s accomplished much more.

The ability of these heroines to make their own sexual decisions puts them in interesting contrast to their descendants. The most notable of those, of course, is Roy Thomas’s Red Sonja. Sonja’s made of headstrong plot agency and sword-borne death, much like Jirel. However, her sexual freedom is a foregone conclusion. She’s under magical obligation never to have sex, so there’s never any question what she’ll do with an interested male character.

Conclusions and Questions

Raven, one of Valeria's more dubious granddaughters

The archetypes above are both icons of the classics, and reasons for us to stand back and call bullshit. Perhaps even more so than the pervasive racism of the era, the female archetypes are defining elements of the genre… and for that, simultaneously classic and nauseating.

As a writer and a gamer, that’s hard to come to terms with. Can new work be recognizably a part of the genre without adopting its less pleasant icons?

Today, Valeria-begotten Sonja¹ herself has descendants and reimaginings, as have most of the characters mentioned above. In today’s fantasy, which of these archetypes still hold sway? How have they changed with the passing of years, and what new ones have arisen?

Fritz Leiber is my very favorite author. I’ve spent much of this year researching his career; I’m hoping to take a trip to examine his papers sometime in 2011. Surprisingly, then, I don’t have an awful lot to say about his birthday. Instead, I’ll simply quote the master.

“Only second-and-third rate writers consider sf, supernatural horror, sword-and-sorcery, etc. as genres — word games to be played in idle moments at half-speed creativity and care.”

– Fritz Leiber, letter

As someone who’s so far devoted a career to supernatural horror and the sword tale, Leiber’s quote is affirming. It’s pleasant to think that devoting full-speed creativity and overwhelming care to the subjects is the mark of a good writer, as opposed to a dysfunctional obsession.

James Maliszewksi has updated his Pulp Fantasy Library with a note on The Swords of Lankhmar. He quotes the opening scene, which is of particular interest to me, since that scene’s the single largest influence on the mechanics of To Seek Adventure, my game of buddy adventure. In 2SA, the action scenes unfold through call-and-response, which is directly tied into an economy of dice between the players.

The Swords of Lankhmar is notable for being the only full-volume novel in the adventures of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser. It’s one of their best adventures, with some of the best Mouser scenes ever, including his assignations with Hisvet and his infiltration of Lankhmar Below. Fafhrd doesn’t get quite as much attention, but his interactions with the pair’s quasi-parental wizardly mentors are priceless.

Rose and the Doctor, Fafhrd and the Mouser, Axe Cop and Dinosaur Soldier. Two heroes, simultaneously different yet essentially the same, facing danger and death.

Count Dracula without Felix? The Count personally fucks that noise.

Buddy adventure, whether cops, swordsmen, or time travelers, is pretty much my favorite fiction format. I’ve tried my hand at writing it¹, and it’s been a staple of my gaming forever. Hackan and Marek were pre-steampunk brother swashbucklers. Frankie and London were two kids lost in the night and the city.²

Oddly, it’s a structure mostly ignored in roleplaying games. I suppose it’s partly because the ur-campaigns of Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson featured large casts of rotating (and sometimes short-lived) PCs. Besides enjoying the format, one of the reasons I’ve run buddy adventure so much is that it’s been easier for me to gather and focus two players than four.

Most games work pretty well with two players and one GM, though rules occasionally need fudging. What, though, about two players, no GM? I can think of a lot of times in my life when I’ve had one other gamer available and neither of us was keen to take on the sole GM responsibilities.

There are a few good examples, but the best is Emily Care Boss’s entirely excellent Breaking the Ice, a game that follows a couple’s first three dates. Boss has a particular talent for what I like to call “roundtable” games — roleplaying games that aren’t so much based on eliminating the GM as distributing the traditional GM duties. In addition to the base game, which you have to play with somebody who’s not squicked at telling a romance story with you, I’ve run a number of sessions of Meet Your New Partner, the same rules applied to buddy cops.

Since this is an under-explored design space, where could we start exploring it? A game about two characters should be defined by the push and pull between them, as well as their push and pull with adventure. The character contrasts (push) and compatibilities (pull) are what drive our scenes. Their motives (pull) and obstacles (push) define their adventures.

Traditional GMed games make the adventure’s pushing the responsibility of the GM. Players may or may not bring push between the characters to the table. Adventure push is possibly the defining feature of the referee as created by Dungeons & Dragons. In my experience, it’s one of the first things that falls out when D&D-style groups decide not to use a GM.

What about pull? Most games provide a bit of intra-party pull in the form of the characters needing each other — rules and settings are generally designed to make sure no one goes alone by default. The adventure pull is usually also the domain of the GM, although most games provide a default pull, like “treasure beneath the earth.”

I’d suggest that for a two player game, the mechanics should remind players to provide push and pull. Your adventure push could be as simple as “roll for wandering monsters.” Adventure pull’s a little harder: at some point, somebody’s going to have to say “this is what we want.”

Fortunately, your genre’s going to come to the rescue for both of these things: pushes and pulls are usually familiar constructs. Buddy cops? Pulled by justice, truth, revenge. Swashbucklers? The glitter of jewels and the gleam in dark, pretty eyes. Time travelers? The wonder of the unknown.

You have a relatively finite number of goal types, then, and it’s easy to brainstorm new ones, especially if you have random tables or other such divinatory aids.

What about pushes? The genre and divination tricks apply here, too, but I’ve also come to the conclusion that having players cycle through pushing each other’s characters works really well. In other words, I describe my character’s response to the situation and the complications your character faces, then you take those complications and respond to them, then send some more my way.

"This place reeks of adventure and excitement, Sam!"

Gameplay lends itself towards being both cooperative and competitive, which most heroic partnerships are. Rose and the Doctor try to top each other on one-liners. Legolas and Gimli count kills.

So, let’s boil this down into a quick list of questions, starting from the broadest subject (characters) and drilling down all the way to the combat round.

• Characters:
  • What sets your hero apart from your partner’s hero?
  • What do your hero and your partner’s hero share?
• Adventures:
  • What does your hero want from this adventure?
  • What’s the overall nature of the obstacles your heroes face?
• Scenes:
  • What’s at stake in this scene?
  • What’s in the way of what your heroes want?
  • How can your hero top your partner’s hero?
• Actions:
  • What’s your hero doing?
  • What’s going to complicate things for your partner’s hero?
• Are they fucking? The Internet wants to know.

Those are your narrative questions, which should be a good foundation for plugging into traditional roleplaying games (with more or less time statting the obstacles, depending on your system).

How can we go further, though? How can we embed those questions into the rules, so that gameplay is a series of natural reminders to do the things that make these adventures better?

And how can we build a fantasy adventure game that utterly nails them?

Hyperborea, by Clark Ashton Smith

The encounter with the uncanny is a foundational, though not ubiquitous, convention of sword and sorcery fiction. In it, the protagonist witnesses something which should not be possible according to the reader‘s worldview.

The classic encounter is with an unnatural creature. This is typical of Howard stories, for example, in which the hero exists in a loosely historical world¹, but encounters monsters from outside the historical milieu. The hero has a series of puzzling hints of the supernatural, and then witnesses it directly.

Travels into the otherworld, as presented by Clark Ashton Smith or C.L. Moore, are not necessarily encounters with the uncanny, although the encounter may occur in the otherworld.

Whether or not the encounter is strange to the protagonists is irrelevant. In Fritz Leiber’s stories of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, for example, the characters often deal wryly with the strange.² Conan is rarely impressed with the demons he dispatches.³  What matters is that the encounter is weird to the reader.

The reaction of the characters is secondary, but not totally irrelevant. Much like horror protagonists of the same period, heroes are often given to whimsical or phantasmagoric speculation when faced with the unnatural. Heroes, on the razor edge of wonder and fear, see the same half-formed and eerie ideas that we see when we look down the stairs into a darkened cellar. Critically, a hero’s speculation is usually half-right at best.⁴

Sword and sorcery⁵ diverges sharply here from high fantasy. High fantasy heroes typically have strongly formed ideas of what they do and do not know. That is, a hero might shiver at the unknown, dark shapes passing on the road ahead, but he will not speculate that they resemble a caravan of dead souls, walking eternally in search of their final rest. Not unless he has good reason to believe such a thing is possible.

The divide between the hero’s perspective and the reader’s perspective is critical, because it meaningfully separates the presentation of the encounter in sword and sorcery fiction from its cousin in horror fiction. In horror, the protagonist is typically more surprised and dismayed by the uncanny than the reader.

A common aspect of the encounter is the tease — hints at the supernatural set piece dropped throughout the story. These moments are where the reader speculates as to what lurks ahead, and perhaps pulls back a little, while the hero pushes forward towards his goal, with perhaps a thought spared for morbid and melancholy speculations.

The encounter with the uncanny is not necessarily the story’s final or climactic moment. The encounter is part of sword and sorcery’s shared heritage with horror, but one of the lines dividing early sword and sorcery from horror of the same era is that the plot doesn’t necessarily hinge on the revelation of or confrontation with the supernatural. Often, the revelation of the supernatural will drive the final conflict between the hero and human antagonists.

While a story may contain a number of supernatural elements, there’s usually only a single full on encounter. As I’ve noted before, a sword and sorcery monster is the hook and the line upon which the plot is reeled in. No surprise — not only does a single strong uncanny element hit harder than a profusion of the weird, but a good monster or horror was often the commercial selling point of a story. In a pulp magazine, a naked girl might get you the cover, but a half-described horror would be your slug in the table of contents.

(I will, in the near future, follow this with an article adapting the subject to gaming. For this article, however, I wanted a hard focus on literature.)

Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser

Beginning in 1970, Fritz Leiber’s tales of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser were collected in the Swords series. The stories were ordered and combined with new material to tell the story of the heroes’ lives, from callow youths to middle-aged men.

For Leiber devotees, this is great. The stories were ordered and revised by the original author, avoiding the ungraceful and sometimes bizarre indignities inflicted on Conan when his adventures were put into biographical order.

I’ve seen it stymie new readers, though. The core appeal of Fafhrd and the Mouser is two swordsmen back-to-back against magic and death. Their early years aren’t as exciting if you don’t know who they become.

With that in mind, here are my recommendations for the first stories to read in the Swords books:

Part One: Swords and Hearts

Fafhrd and the Mouser’s meeting, their loves and losses, and their uneasy life in the City of the Black Toga.

Swords Against Deviltry
Also reprinted in White Wolf’s Ill-Met in Lankhmar and Nelson Doubleday’s The Three of Swords.

• “Ill-Met in Lankhmar”: In which Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser meet for the first second time.

Swords Against Death
Also reprinted in White Wolf’s Ill-Met in Lankhmar and Nelson Doubleday’s The Three of Swords.

• “The Circle Curse”: Of promises and grief.
• “Thieves’ House”: In which the twain once again confront Lankhmar’s Thieves’ Guild and learn the dangers of buried secrets.
• “The Price of Pain-Ease”: In which the heroes’ relationship with Lankhmar is finally resolved.

Part Two: Swords and Comrades

Swords in the Mist

Also reprinted in White Wolf’s Lean Times in Lankhmar and Nelson Doubleday’s The Three of Swords.

• “Lean Times in Lankhmar”: In which Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser’s friendship is tested.
• “The Wrong Branch”/Adept’s Gambit: The twain discover that their partnership transcends worlds and histories, and the nature of heroism is revealed.

Swords Against Wizardry

Also reprinted in White Wolf’s Lean Times in Lankhmar omnibus.

• “The Two Best Thieves in Lankhmar”: Short and kinky, much like the Mouser.
• The Lords of Quarmall: In which the twain adventure side by side without knowing it.

Further Reading

The stories suggested above should be about the length of one ordinary book.

If you enjoy those, any of the rest of the series is worthwhile. However:

Swords of Lankhmar, (also collected in Return to Lankhmar) is a proper, full-length novel, a hilarious swashbuckler with great characters and fantastic locations. If you’d rather start with a novel, this is the one… but it also separates the heroes for much of the book, so it’s not a perfect introduction. I’d read it either just after the stories above, or just before.

Dragonsword of Lankhmar. Image from Demian's Gamebook Webpage.

(This one’s for Ethan, Justin, and Srith.)

Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd and Gray Mouser are the definitive fantasy heroes. I love Conan and Bilbo, but my heart will always belong to two half-mad rogues fighting their way across the roofs of abandoned temples, stumbling their way down Cheap Street, or sailing to the edge of the world with a Mingol crew.

Leiber’s heroes are one of the main reasons I got into Dungeons & Dragons in the first place. My first D&D product was James Ward’s Dragonsword of Lankhmar gamebook set.

One of my best campaigns ever — the Adventures of Hackan and Marek — was a steampunk buddy fantasy directly inspired by the twain. We used the D&D 3rd Edition rules. Or parts of them, anyway.

Yet, no edition of D&D has modeled them particularly well. The builds presented in places like The Dragon and the various Lankhmar campaign settings required hacking the system. You needed some levels of thief, some levels of fighter, a sprinkling of Wizard. In fact, it’s the Mouser who suffered the worst¹.

Trying to fit his smattering of magical training into the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons magic system — much less the class system — appears to have vexed many TSR authors over the years. The Mouser used magic from time to time, but it was almost always under Sheelba’s instructions, as in “The Lords of Quarmall.” He accumulated magic books and trinkets in “Adept’s Gambit,” but for the most part couldn’t use them — if, in fact, they did anything at all.

Arguably his most important spell, when he chooses the path of black magic in “The Unholy Grail,” is a spontaneous ritual. And for the rest of his life, he never does it again — perhaps with good reason. Skinning AD&D or my beloved Rules Cyclopedia for got awkward fast.

Once you spliced sheets for Fafhrd and the Mouser together, it was difficult to actually play them. They had to start at advanced levels to capture their knack for survival and allow them those extra classes. High levels plus multiple classes meant they couldn’t level up at the expected rate of D&D heroes.²

3rd Edition fixed some of this. While the rogue class was diluted by thieving abilities becoming skills anyone could take, the twain became relatively easy to model as fighters. The Mouser got along well enough with Use Magic Device, or a level or two of sorcerer.

Still, D&D characters started a bit flimsy for our boys, and there was a new problem: magic items. In the d20 system, balance between heroes and monsters relied on, among other things, those heroes being equipped with enchanted gear.

Which brings us to 4th Edition. The ups and downs of the game have been widely debated, but in my estimation, it’s the first D&D that can build Leiber’s rogues right, and have them play like you’d expect, from first level. So, let’s do it.

Fafhrd

Fafhrd by David Petersen

Fafhrd’s Character Sheet

Brash, red-haired, and secretly in love with civilization. Fafhrd is a fighter, drawing the attention and anger of his foes and then spilling their guts across the floor.

First things first: we’ll be using the Inherent Bonus option, so that both of our heroes gain bonuses as they level without magic weapons or gear. After all, they live by what steel they can steal.

I’m often annoyed by the “raging barbarian” archetype, since it doesn’t fit most of the great barbarians of fantasy literature very well. Even Thongor was fairly clever and cool-headed. When Fafhrd rages, though, as he does in in “Lean Times in Lankhmar” and Swords of Lankhmar, he absolutely cannot be ignored. GIVE ME THE JUG, indeed.

Thus, we choose the battlerager fighter build. Fafhrd’s sturdy, too — Death lends the Mouser some of his strength in “The Mouser Goes Below,” yet he’s still up for a romp with Frix and her airship’s entire crew. Battlerager Vigor, then, is appropriate, leveraging that tough Constitution into temporary hit points when up close to something that needs hitting.³ Battlerager Vigor also favors Fafhrd’s preference for light armor, rather than the heavy stuff used by more knightly PCs.

But wait, it gets better. Battlerager Vigor also gives Fafhrd a +2 damage bonus when using an axe… like that hand-axe he’s been known to throw into a fray. That mitigates 4th Edition‘s bias against fighters using thrown weapons, but it still doesn’t make it an ideal attack, just a good supplement. Perfect.

Leiber’s battles are swift-moving, swashbuckling affairs, and so too the heroes. Thus, we’ll pluck the Combat Agility class feature from Martial Power 2.

We’ll give him a background of Geography – Mountains, getting him the Athletics skill he demonstrates as a climber. He’s been known to talk big to his enemies, so he’ll train Intimidate. As discussed above, his favored abilities will be Strength, Constitution, and Dexterity. Even early in his career, he takes quickly to the streets of Lankhmar, adding the Streetwise skill. And if the Mouser should fall and start making death saves, Fafhrd will be there to back him up and haul him out of trouble — Heal.

Fortunately, we only have to worry about two feats. Improved Vigor makes battlerager powers more effective, and Don’t Count Me Out bumps up most of his saving throws — fairly important in a two-man party.

The power names speak for themselves: Brash Strike, Crushing Surge, Knee Breaker, and my favorite, Bell Ringer.⁴ Footwork Lure fits the swasbuckling, dirty-tricks fighting style we’re going after.

Equipment’s straightforward: Graywand’s a longsword, Heartseeker’s a dagger, and we add on that light axe to round things out.

The Gray Mouser

The Gray Mouser by David Petersen

The Gray Mouser’s Character Sheet

Quick-witted, slippery, and not-so-secretly in love with himself… as well as any passing dark-haired girl. The Mouser is a rogue in name and class, as adept at slipping into palaces as at taunting and outmaneuvering his foemen.

The Mouser is a trickster rogue, and uses Cunning Sneak tactics, which let him stay hidden even while moving rapidly. His Rogue Weapon Talent makes Cat’s Claw deadlier than a dirk in the hands of a lesser man.

From his days as Mouse, the wizard’s apprentice, and his dark departure from that life in “The Unholy Grail,” the Mouser gains the Arcane Refugee background, and thus, the Arcana skill. That’ll give him good insight into magic and occult circumstances, as he demonstrates in “The Unholy Grail,” “Adept’s Gambit,” arguably Rime Isle and dubiously “Lean Times in Lankhmar.” Arcana will also help with those magical trinkets.

Abilities are simple: Dexterity to be nimble and Charisma for a tricky tongue. Skills are Thievery, Streetwise, Acrobatics, and Bluff — all staples of the Mouser’s adventures. He gets Perception, too — he’s sharp, even if he doesn’t act immediately on prickling suspicions.

Remember how I said Dungeons & Dragons doesn’t do the Mouser’s magic right? Well, 4th Edition has a ritual magic system, and the former apprentice can take the Ritual Caster feat in order to use them, using his Arcana skill. He also takes the Weapon Proficiency (Rapier) feat.

The Mouser’s Deft Strike lets him maneuver even as he lunges with Scalpel. We give him Sly Flourish for a core attack, and Riposte Strike for that fencing feel. Positioning Strike lets him move foes into position, and Trick Strike lets him maneuver an enemy around the battlefield for an entire encounter. Perfect for facing duelist rats in Lankhmar Below.

Now, we just need to add Scalpel (a rapier), Cat’s Claw (a dagger), and a few thieves’ tools.

Adventuring

Skill Challenges provide lots of opportunities for Fafhrd and the Mouser to work non-combat scenes together (as in the duel in “The Lords of Quarmall”). A liberal interpretation even allows them to combine their efforts unknowingly from different locations (Swords of Lankhmar, “The Lords of Quarmall,” “The Frost Monstreme” and more).

At level 1, Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser are ready to take on the challenges of “Ill Met in Lankhmar,” before traveling the breadth of Nehwon (and gaining some levels) in “The Circle Curse.”

Most of the twain’s foemen also model well in 4th Edition. Anyone interested in seeing me adapt “Ill Met in Lankhmar?” Or another of the twain’s adventures?

Sword and sorcery monsters represent an encounter with the uncanny. Conan doesn’t typically fight through hordes of monsters the way he does hordes of men, nor do Clark Ashton Smith’s various heroes. Even where Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser confront monsters with steel, they only once or twice battle them in a horde. Elric is the exception, but even then only occasionally.

Even more recent sword and sorcery heroes, like Hercules or Xena, rarely battle more than one true monster at a time — and they live in an age of monsters.

The sword and sorcery monster is, typically an individual horror, capable of menacing all of the characters in a story — and slaying more than a few. In the few cases where monsters appear in groups, the hero’s solution is almost always to run, while villainous or simply less wary men are slaughtered.

As an encounter with the uncanny, the monster is often the backbone of the story itself, or a recurring plot device on the way to the climax.

What does that mean for gaming? Well, the typical monster is a hazard to an entire group of characters. In recent Dungeons & Dragons terms, most monsters are not only solos, they’re effectively adventures in and of themselves… even if the object of the adventure isn’t to slay the monster. (And in early sword and sorcery, it rarely is. Beowulf and Hercules are monster-slayers in a way Conan is not.)

Consider the following hypothetical D&D framework:

• Enter dungeon
• Fight orcs
• Slay dragon
• Get treasure

As opposed to the following more Conanesque one:

• Enter exotic location
• Fight fellow looters (some of whom are killed by the demon)
• Get treasure
• Escape demon (maybe slay it)

These are, obviously, oversimplifications, but they suggest a few things.

First:

• The monster is not necessarily there to be slain. (Though, to be sure, it probably can be. Monsters are generally as mortal as anything else.)
• Most of the lesser bad guys are not minions or cultists of the monster, but rivals of the PCs.
• The monster’s lair is as dangerous to the lesser bad guys as it is to the PCs.
• The monster should be capable of challenging many enemies at once. Claw/claw/bite?

Of course, it’s perfectly acceptable to abandon genre fidelity in favor of good gaming. But I also think that a little rethinking of formulae and set pieces, and some mechanics to supplement them, are appropriate in monster design.

As is often the case with sword and sorcery gaming, horror provides a better model than fantasy adventure. The classic sword and sorcery tale has a lot in common with the “monster of the week” format, except that the monster itself usually isn’t the objective.

The monster is instead a series of hazards and encounters that may, later in the game, blossom into a confrontation.

When Dungeons & Dragons 3rd Edition came out, there was a great deal of argument over its “dungeonpunk” aesthetic and, particularly, the way wizards didn’t look like they were “supposed” to. The pointy-hatted old men familiar from Dragon magazine covers or Will McLean cartoons had been replaced by a confusingly-dressed elf lady and a bare-chested man in leather, buckles, and an underbust corset.¹

All well and good, I suppose, but what do wizards really look like? The Gandalf by way of Merlin types we’d gotten used to didn’t seem quite right to my imagination, though they’ve graced some excellent vans in their time. What do the sources have to say about them?

Well, Fritz Leiber is always definitive, so let’s lead off with a few of his lesser wizards. The Gray Mouser begins:

“Hey, I think our creditors and other haters have hired a third S besides swords and staves against us.”

“Sorcery?”

The small man drew a coil of thin yellow wire from his pouch. He said,

“Well, if those two graybeards in the second story windows aren’t wizards, they shouldn’t scowl so ferociously. Besides, I can make out astrological symbols on the one’s robe and the glint on the other’s wand.²

A robe is not an uncommon piece of costume in Lankhmar, though the better-but-not-best class of people prefer the black toga. The astrological symbols, though, are a distinctly occult touch. More telling, however, are the ferocious scowls, as the Mouser flippantly points out. Presumably, one quick to anger is also quick to grump.

Well, that’s Leiber, but where would we be without that other chronicler of scoundrel heroes, Jack Vance? What of that mighty magician Pandelume, of Embelyon, the Land Who None Knows Where?

“Halt, Turjan,” spoke the voice. “None may gaze upon Pandelume. It is the law.”³

…oh. Well, then. I suppose Iucounu the Laughing Magician will have to do.

Fianosther pointed across the way to a man wearing garments of black. This man was small, yellow of skin, bald as a stone. His eyes resembled knots in a plank; his mouth was wide and curved in a grin of chronic mirth.⁴

These, however, are all wizards of a lesser sort. Surely, those who fling death-spells at Leiber’s twain are only just this side of charlatans like Cugel the Clever or the Mouser himself. And Iucounu seems somewhat over-reliant on and under-cautious of the charms he keeps in his mansion.

Perhaps for a wizard of a wiser sort, we might look to Lloyd Alexander’s Dallben:

Dallben, master of Caer Dallben, was three hundred and seventy-nine years old. His beard covered so much of his face that he seemed always to be staring over a gray cloud. On the little farm, while Taran and Coll saw to the plowing, sowing, weeding, reaping, and all the other tasks of husbandry, Dallben undertook the meditating, an occupation so exhausting he could only accomplish it by laying down and closing his eyes.⁵

Ah, a graybeard again. That seems to be a developing theme. And meditation! While Alexander may have treated the subject lightly, we Dungeons & Dragons players know all too well how critical it is! Let the fighters mock the wizard’s fifteen minute workday. Little do they know how mighty are his mental preparations.

Dallben is that rare sort, a humble wizard. Generally, they’re anything but. Consider Pelias, encountered by Conan beneath the archetypal dungeon of the Scarlet Citadel:

Conan stared, spellbound; then a sound brought him round, sword lifted. The freed man was on his feet, surveying him. Conan gaped in wonder. No longer were the eyes in the worn face expressionless. Dark and meditative, they were alive with intelligence, and the expression of imbecility had dropped from the face like a mask. The head was narrow and well-formed, with a high splendid forehead. The whole build of the man was aristocratic, evident no less in his tall slender frame than in his small trim feet and hands.

This man is intelligent, aware, and physically small while projecting no air of weakness. ⁶ Yet, he is still a man, and the greatest of wizards are more than that. What of Gandalf the Grey?

All that the unsuspecting Bilbo saw that morning was an old man with a staff. He had a tall pointed blue hat, a long grey cloak, a silver scarf over which his long white beard hung down below his waist, and immense black boots.⁷

Gandalf was quite scrupulous in his man-seeming, to the point that his human admirers in innumerable D&D illustrations seem to have considered a fit example of dress, even if they tend to leave off practical concerns like the scarf and boots.

But what of those wizards, no longer human and perhaps pre-human,⁸ who sponsored Leiber’s heroes? We must not forget them, lest we incite their anger, or that of their favored heroes.

Blue lightning glared, revealing with great clarity a hooded figure crouched inside the low doorway. Each fold and twist of the figure’s draperies stood out as precisely as in an iron engraving closely viewed.

But the lightning showed nothing whatsoever inside the hood, only inky blackness.⁹

Sheelba of the Eyeless Face needs no other, inevitably lesser, introduction.

Ningauble of the Seven Eyes, however, would insist upon it. The great gossiper of the gods dwells in his caves of endless, twisting passages¹⁰, and Leiber was perhaps too modest in giving this description:

A little later, having wasted no time in reconnoitering, they stood before the Great Gate, whose iron-studded upper reaches disdained the illumination of the tiny fire. It was not the gate, however, that interested them, but its keeper, a monstrously paunched creature sitting on the floor beside a vast heap of pot-sherds, and whose only movement was a rubbing of what seemed to be his hands. He kept them under the shabby but voluminous cloak which also completely hooded his head. A third of the way down the cloak, two large bats clung. Fafhrd cleared his throat. The movement ceased under the cloak.

Then out of the top of it sinuously writhed something that seemed to be a serpent, only in place of a head it bore an opalescent jewel with a dark central speck. Nevertheless, one might finally have judged it to be a serpent, were it not that it also resembled a thick-stalked exotic bloom. It restlessly turned this way and that until it pointed at the two strangers. Then it went rigid, and the bulbous extremity seemed to glow more brightly. There came a low purring, and five similar stalks twisted rapidly from under the hood and aligned themselves with their companion. Then the six black pupils dilated. ¹¹

A portentious sight, to be sure, even if one can’t help thinking, as do the twain, that there’s more than a little Oz to this wizard. But I’m not sure I’d like to find out what’s behind the curtain.

These are the images conjured to mind when I think of wizards. I acknowledge some gaps, here: I haven’t treated the truly evil wizards, nor did I have a description of Elric at hand. Nonetheless, these are my wizards.

Who and what are yours?

_____