At Big Bad Con this year, I ran a session of The Black Sword Hack. The Black Sword Hack is a heavily Moorcock influenced game branched off The Black Hack which is an OSR game that claims to branch off the original 1974 version of D&D. But like all OSR things, The Black Hack is very much its own thing and The Black Sword Hack doubly so. I actually really enjoyed both preparing for and playing this game.
I got very self indulgent while preparing the scenario. I did a few things I typically avoid because I associate them with showmanship GMing and railroading. I’ll call them Deep Backstory, The Split MacGuffin and The Lock & Key Puzzle. The deal with myself was that I would try to use these elements as components of the situation rather than ways to force the players to do things. I’m going to describe each and then talk about how they informed play.
Deep Backstory
I think a lot of people think of this as world history or that ever popular buzzword, “Lore”. It’s backstory so far back in time it’s not really actionable in its own right. The danger here is that it becomes a bit of GM created fiction the players can only marvel at. Here’s what I created for this scenario:
Enma Vises was a priestess of Arkyn Kwill, a Lord of Light. One day a plague wiped out a lot of her village and many of her followers. Unable to deal with her grief, she instead chose to embrace and love The Death Goddess. She began construction of a rune inscribed obsidian scythe as a gift for The Death Goddess. When it was complete, she took her remaining followers to the sea, boarded a ship and then sacrificed everyone on board to open a portal to the death realm and sailed the boat through.
The Split MacGuffin
There’s this trope in a lot of adventure media where some artifact or other item gets broken into pieces and everyone runs around trying to collect them. In RPGs it’s often used as an excuse to herd the PCs from adventure site to adventure site. So here’s my Split MacGuffin:
The history of Enma Vises was written down in a book called The Codex of Velphasia which at some point was split in two. The front half contains the story of Enma Vises up to the point of her deciding to craft a powerful gift for The Death Goddess but does not explain what the gift was or what happened to it. The back half contains the information that the gift was a rune inscribed scythe and that Enma Vises sacrificed her followers to sail into the death realm.
The Lock & Key Puzzle
This is a video game term but it’s also another adventure media trope. The idea is that you need to find a specific item and use it in a specific way to gain access to something. Often the item and interaction are non-obvious and other hints and clues need to be interpreted to understand what you need, where to find it, and what to do with it. So here’s my Lock & Key
Puzzle:
The Codex of Velphasia contains annotations in different handwriting from the main text. The front half of the torn book ends with a regional map. Drawn on that map is a sun symbol (indicating the location of Arkyn Kwill’s temple) and a line drawn from that symbol out to sea. The line also passes through a specific island in an archipelago (where an abandoned lighthouse stands). The back half of the codex ends with the annotation, “Enma Vises will return when called by the light of Arkyn Kwill”.
So here’s the actual Lock & Key: Inside the temple is a living statue that’s an avatar of Arkyn Kwill. It has a glowing gem for a heart. If the light from that gem is shone out to see from the lighthouse then it will call back Enma Vises’s ship from the death plane.
The Immediate Backstory
(This obviously includes all of the above, but here’s the bit that ties it to the now.)
So there are these monks that live in a monastery in the mountains. They live in harmony with the local pictish people, mainly helping them with medicinal services. However, the abbot of the monastery comes into possession of the back-half of the Codex of Valphasia. He is so moved by the story of Enma Vises love for the Death Goddess that he tries to replicate her journey into the death plane by having himself and his followers commit mass suicide.
Instead they wake up as undead cannibals. They start having to raid the pictish mountain people to kidnap and eat them. The abbot assumes this is a sign that The Death Goddess rejected him. He is heartbroken and assumes that maybe there was something important in the first half of the Codex of Valphasia. Since he can’t travel by day anymore he hires a mercenary, Ramjax to track down the front half of the book.
In Play
Since this was a single session convention game I handed out a selection of pregens (this is one of those games where there’s a mix of random rolls and pick lists). I only had two players. One took the changeling warlock. The other took the assassin.
I started by telling the players that they had spent at least a month in this large library located in a thriving city for whatever reasons they cared to imagine. I told them that they were familiar with each other, at least in passing, and whatever they felt about one another was up to them.
I then told them that they happened to be in the large central atrium of the library when a confrontation breaks out between a group of men and the head librarian. The leader of the men demands to be given the Codex of Valphasia and the head librarian responds that, that text is located in their forbidden archive and only people with special permission from certain city officials are allowed access to it. One of the men breaks off and starts setting fire to parts of the library. Now, I don’t want to give a detailed play-by-play but I do want to focus on the moments concerning the above elements.
So, they managed to frighten off the majority of mercenaries when The Warlock magically twisted the arm of the guy setting fire to the books to set fire to himself. Ramjax responded by taking the librarian hostage but the players managed to talk him into surrendering. From him they learn about the abbot hiring him to find the book. They ask the librarian for access to the book but he refused giving the same answer he gave to Ramjax.
What ensued was a discussion between the PCs about whether they should bother trying to get the book out of the archives. They actually seemed more upset that some abbot would send mercenaries to threaten the library than what the mercenaries were after. And because I had agreed to keep these elements as just that, elements, I didn’t say a word while they talked except to clarify things when they had questions.
In the end, I think it was The Assassin who decided he wanted to go for the book. They ended up fighting and killing the Snakeman I had prepared as a guardian of the forbidden archive. And thus they acquired the back-half of the Codex of Valphasia which contained the map and annotations.
There was some brief discussion about the map but ultimately their anger at the abbot was stronger. Skipping over some interesting stuff concerning a spy and their first interaction with the pictish people in the mountain, they ended up losing a fight with the abbot and his undead followers. The Warlock (who was explicitly carrying the Codex) went down and The Assassin barely escaped.
Side note here because it’s of relevance to Ron’s recent workshop on death. Like other games in this family, combat is pretty unforgiving. You go down at 0 hp. Only once the dust has settled do you roll a d6 to see how bad things actually are. Only on a 6 do you actually die. There are other nasty consequences on the chart but The Warlock managed to roll one of the tamer results and thus woke up (stripped of gear) on the chopping block about to be served for dinner.
Once The Assassin and The Warlock manage to re-unite they decide to stake out the monastery. Now here’s where I faced an interesting choice. What does the abbot actually do now that he has the whole book? I realized there’s no reason he couldn’t work out The Lock & Key Puzzle himself and decide he’s going to risk traveling by night to act on it.
So, I tell the players that around midnight they observe the abbot and a few of his followers setting out into the mountains. The players decide to follow them until around dawn when they observe the abbot and his followers trying to bury themselves under dirt, and rocks, and other crevices to hide from the light of day. So like a scene out of Dracula they basically gank the abbot while he’s sleeping.
Now that they had the whole book which contained both the whole story of Enma Vises as well as the complete Lock & Key Puzzle, I realized the game had entered a distinct second phase. They discussed a lot of options. Destroy the book? Sell the book? Pursue its contents in hopes of acquiring the weapon described in it? They even discussed using the book to broker powerful positions within city government. I was kind of impressed with the range of options they felt the book presented them. Again, I shut up and primarily listened and answered clarifying questions.
In the end, they decided to pursue the book’s contents but both agreed that it was probably a bad idea and agreed they should bail the minute they felt out of their depth. Following the indicators on the map, they were surprised that it led to a heartbroken crystal statue of Arkyn Kwill whose heart glowed with a sorrowful purple light.
Realizing that this statue had been pining for his lost priestess for like a 1000 years, they kind of went into therapy mode. They tried to come up with different ways to get him to “move on” (there were some dice rolls around this, including some attempts to convince the vagabonds who lived around the ruined temple to reform the cult) but they all failed. So, they ultimately showed the statue the Lock & Key Puzzle which seemed to suggest there was a way to bring Enma Vises back. They succeeded in convincing the statue to travel with them to the coast. They bundled the statue in heavy clothing to disguise the fact they were traveling with a crystal statue of a naked man.
Skipping ahead again they eventually end up in the lighthouse where they tell the statue to think of happy memories of Enma Vises. In my mind this was in no way a requirement of my Lock & Key Puzzle but I enjoyed the idea and described how the dark purple light grew brighter and changed to a hot white light which shined out from the lighthouse and spotlit the silhouette of a great ship on the horizon.
The players row out to the ship where they discover that Enma Vises still has the rune-inscribed scythe, having sailed around the death plane for all this time never finding The Death Goddess to deliver her gift. They tell Enma Vises about how the statue of Arkyn Kwill has been pining for her all these years and that she could return to him. Sadly, this goes poorly. They end up losing a fight with Vises and her crew very similarly to the abbot fight. The Warlock goes down and sinks into the ocean. The Assassin manages to barely escape.
The Warlock scores a nastier result on the d6 death chart but still lives and so ends up washing up on shore the following morning. The Assassin returns to the lighthouse and tells the statue that Enma Vises is gone forever and so I describe the statue just shattering into a thousand pieces except for the still glowing sorrowful heart gem which The Assassin pockets.
Conclusions
I’m always of two minds when I run this kind of scenario. One the one hand, yeah, the players just kind of followed all my sign posts from Point of Interest to Point of Interest. On the other hand, what went down at each point of interest was very open. There were many pivotal moments that could have gone very differently had the players made different choices or certain key die rolls gone a different way.
I would have been perfectly happy if they had left the book in the archive and just gone straight for the abbot. Or if they had just burned the book after the abbot and called it a day. Or if they had managed to reform the cult of Arkyn Kwill and decided healing the heart of a sorrowful god was enough. Or if they had managed to reunite Arkyn Kwill and Enma Vises. Or if they had literally just killed everything they met and took their stuff. Like all of that would have been fine. There was no “story” here to follow.
And yet, I certainly laid out all the points on the map with big, “Cool Shit Here” markers. So, I don’t know, either way I enjoyed the game immensely. I would love to play it some more with less of a contrived context of play.
4 responses to “Love Songs of the Death Goddess”
This is a baby and bathwater thing.
Let’s take any person who learned, long ago, to associate any GM content and any GM activity during play with story management, and has encountered the idea that managing story isn’t actually the “story making play” they thought it was. It’s understandable that when they start dialing down management, they throw out everything they associate with GMing, like prepared and textual content as such, and even any kind of NPC play or situational input as such.
For some (by which I mean specific persons I have in mind, but too many to list), this results in a sense of “nothing” or “chaos,” so during play, they slide back into managing because things feel so wrong. For others (ditto), they retreat into playing “I’m just a bot, because that’s objective and neutral.” For still others, and this applies to a whole decidedly-bad subculture of RPG design and publishing, they figure democratizing and/or improvising content must be the solution, which merely smears the problem around.
So I think your decision is very positive, actually to include content to be played by the GM, and for this content (here language fails me) to have content, i.e., to be assertive, even unavoidable. You’ve stated it clearly:
(and also, to paraphrase another part of your post, “rather than to show off my amazing story skilz and blow their socks off”)
It all goes back to Sorcerer, too, because its core and supplemental texts are indeed all about layered backstory, assertive activity (Bangs), and complicated content like the divided body. I can well imagine, given a person steeped in the “investigation scenario” and “phase 1: the left arm, phase 2: the right leg” campaign scheduling would perceive the texts as contradictory. Here I am saying “Don’t control,” and then, look, all those control devices they know all about! Here I’ll name names: Ken Hite, for example, never grasped what Sorcerer actually was as play instructions, because any content of that sort was forever embedded in him as director-manager delivery material, not as merely things to be in play and to be played.
Let’s manage expectations a little. You may not be crediting how people play together for a while to learn and develop how they relate to content and to one another. A thrown-together group is not ever going to get the first contact lightning strike of perfect prep + perfect play + perfect concordance + perfect proactivity + perfect emergence of unplanned theme. And there’s nothing wrong with that, because you did in fact achieve your personal goal of playing with the complicated content + not railroading. That’s the point, whether you could do that, and if other people thought they were following signs, well, that’s some other thing to learn about some other time, for them, not you.
This all makes a lot of sense and gives voice to things I was intuitively feeling both while preparing and playing. One thing I’m personally working on is trying to be more assertive with my content contributions in play. That if I say there’s a treasure map or a monster that’s unambiguously vicious and awful that isn’t the equivalent of saying “And now you have no choice but to follow/fight it.”
I have two questions.
1. How Moorcokian did it feel? From the description of your prep and to some extent play it seems like something that could be in that sphere of fiction. This is an entirely curious and somewhat selfish question I know, but we engage in certain systems / PLAY to scratch certain itches. I am curious if it did that for you or if it even mattered.
2. System matters. I know the full version of Black Sword Hack is out, but I still mostly play with the original ugly version. How did the players react to the system and how do you feel it worked for the content?
My exposure to actual Moorcock is pretty much limited to what’s in the bibliography of Sorcerer & Sword. So, the early Elric stuff and the first Corum trilogy. My main takeaway is Gothic Acid Trip so that’s what I leaned into with all the focus on Love and Death.
The fact that I only had two players, I think, lent itself well to the material. The fact that it was The Warlock and The Assassin bordered on Elric and Moonglum vibes.
As for the actual system, I think the players took to it well. It’s amazing what you can do by just trashing the D&D spell system and replacing it with… well… anything. The Warlock only used the same demon ability twice but both times it was to great effect.
I personally liked the Doom mechanic. The lazy version of that mechanic would be purely as a press your luck thing where you can just roll it for a bonus and maybe it gets used up and maybe it doesn’t. You can do that but that uses it up automatically which means you’re looking at doing it twice max and once more realistically because the consequences of running out of Doom are so bad.
Instead, you roll it:
1) When the player crit fails.
2) Activating certain abilities.
3) When you repeat an action.
4) When you do some fancy combat maneuvers.
It only depletes on a 1 or a 2 (on a d6 initially, then a d4) but what’s interesting is that its value doesn’t matter. Sometimes you use it in the ability or maneuver you just activated but that feels more like economy. Why roll another die when you just rolled one?
For the most part Doom does nothing except hover there reminding you you’re running out of it whenever you push yourself a little bit. And I liked that at a lot.
I also like the morale rules which basically state that most ordinary people will run away if the players use any magic at all. And then in the healing section it mentions that most people will freak out if they see how rapidly the PCs heal. It really drives home that the players really are singled out by the cosmos as special.
It’s little touches like that throughout the rules that I think do lend itself to the source material. And I will say, it’s obvious from the text that the authors do, in fact, LOVE the source material.