Lets Read Mythus pt20

Ah me, where does the time go? It seems like only yesterday that I first jokingly broached the idea of a Lets Read of Dangerous Journeys: Mythus (and for the life of me I can’t remember why that ever seemed like a good idea). Now here we are, 20-odd weeks later, still deep in the Combat chapter, facing yet another wodge of text, tables and wonky formatting.

Today we exhume the Advanced Mythus rules on Weapons and Armour, which sprawl across pages 235-256 in a bloated abandon reminiscent of an orgied-out Roman emperor. Those last few hardened, dead-eyed souls still playing along at home may wish to charge their glasses with something nice and paint-stripping now.

Weapons and Armour Information and Tables

The section opens with a couple of paragraphs of introductory busywork. In brief: "here are tables of stats for war gear, uses them." (a paraphrase, not the original gygaxian prose) The customary intro is followed by a column of text explaining what all the abbreviations in the forthcoming tables mean.

These abbreviations.

Sub-Area -- what weapon skill sub-area you use to bash people.
WP -- Weapon Points. How much the weapon adds to your skill.
C -- Composition; what your thwackenstick is made from. (M for metal, W for wood, C for combination)
S -- Speed Factor. Not ‘SF’? I’ve no idea why not.
DT -- damage type (P for piercing, C for cutting, S for stunning, B for blunt, etc.)
Dam -- base weapon damage
Reach -- striking range (in yards)
Price -- price in Mythusbucks.

Additional notations for missile weapons:

T -- thrown weapon? Y/N distinction.
Price -- given in a ###/## format. The number before the slash is weapon price, after is price per shot
ROF -- rate of fire per round (before modification for skill level)

Not sure if any of these are worth toasting as OMJ (Original Mythus Jargon - gateway to liver damage since Feb 2012); with the exception of 'WP' and 'SF' they’re all pretty standard RPG jargon.

Weapon Tables

Remember the weapons tables back in the AD&D PHB; the ones that sprawled across a page or so, and which were so lovingly parodied in Hackmaster? Well, the Advanced Mythus weapon tables cover four pages: pp236-240, the whole of pages 236-240. That's two pages for listings of melee weapons, one page for missile weapons, and then another page of missile weapon ranges, of which there are five: Point Blank, Short, Medium, Long, Extreme. Why five? Because three range brackets would just be soooooo unrealistic, of course.

In total the tables give stats for:

Melee Weapons -- 18 swords, 9 shields, 59 others -- total 86
Missile Weapons -- 8 bows, 9 xbows, 23 others -- 40 total

Almost all the special rules and footnotes from EGG's iconic AD&D weapon tables are in there, along with a few new ones. There are 13 special weapon abilities all told, and it looks like this is where all the special attack stuff I was lamenting the lack of last week has been hanging out. Want to unhorse/disarm/entangle? See here:

Yeah, lotsa combat options, all hidden away in the footnotes.

Its nice to see some familiar old friends (hold at bay, prod off horse, etc.) poking out of the sanity-devouring accretion of Zalchisian proportions that is the Advanced Mythus rule set. But - and isn’t there always a ‘but’ - I do have one small niggle with these super secret esoteric rules of doubleplusobscurity. Namely, that the half-written rule problem which so often plagues Advanced Mythus rears its ugly head again. For example:

Ok, great. But what DR are you supposed to test against? A straight DR "Hard"(x1) roll? A DR derived from the relative weapon skills of the participants (in the manner of a contested K/S vs. K/S roll)? Does the guy you’re trying to do stuff to get an Avoidance roll? Are we told? Are we hell.

The footnotes to the missile weapon tables are much simpler, with only one special rule and a couple of notes on ammunition cost. But then what else did you expect regarding a series of variations on a theme of string and twigs? It's not like anyone armed with a bow was ever instrumental in winning a battle; no, not like Gary's beloved pole-arms.

Wassat? "Gunpowder weapons?" Wash your filthy mouth out!

A couple of other takeaways from the Advanced Mythus weapon tables:

• Pike, Mancatcher and (Bill-)Guisarme(-Voulge) are slow as owt at SF 10. Enjoy your going last.
• Rapier, Scimitar, Mancatcher and Lance practically do your fighting for you, adding 10 WP to your skill (12 if you pick up a heavy lance). Sure, coz lancing is super-easy and takes no practise at all...
• Daggers are able to unhorse opponents. Nope, it says so right there on page one of the grand unified melee weapon table.
• Long bows and crossbows negate the first 5 Armour whenever they hit. Some melee weapons (particularly the Renaissance-era ones: halberd, 2H sword, morningstar, pick, pike) ignore even more; anything up to 2x their inherent WP!
• Some weapons are officially useless against armour, either doubling armour values per hit, or causing 0 damage.
• Throwing a rock at someone? That's Hand Weapon, Missile (sub-area: darts). ¿Que?

Weapon Descriptions

As well as the four pages of tables for 120+ types of weapon, we’re also offered no less than eight pages of text defining those weapons. The weapon lists are pretty much what you'd expect of a Cold War-era militaria nerd's knowledge base: the majority of stabbinators are European or Japanese, with a scattering of notorious weapons (bolas, blowgun, shaolin shovel, cho-ko-nu, tulwar) from other cultures. I spotted no African, Amerindian, or Polynesian weapons, and very few Indian and SEAsian ones, so all you maquahuitl, tlinga, katar or chakram fans are SOL.

But fret not knife-on-a-stick fetishists! All the classic Gygaxian pole-arms are there. All. Of. Them. Because a game without glaive-guisarmes and six alternative names for the ranseur(!) is no game at all.

Each and every killtoy gets one paragraph of potted description covering such germane information as:

• general appearance,
• cultural origin,
• use in combat, and
• minimum strength requirement to wield.

The minimum strength requirements are, to put it mildly, problematic. For one thing I've no idea why this particular rules wrinkle wasn’t defined earlier and integrated into the weapon tables: it’s not like a there’s a lack of space. For another thing more than a few of the requirements seem rather over-inflated. Min PMPow (Str) of 13 to use a katana? Min Str 15-16 to use a pole-arm? In a game where normal humans have Str 10? That seems steep to someone used to RQ's 'Min Str 7/9' requirements. To cap it all there's no mention of any penalty for using a weapon that's too heavy for you, just a blanket ‘you must be this high to ride’ number. PMPow 15 and you want to use a PMPow 16 weapon? RULES SAYS NO!

Dear oh dear. That is no way to run a whelk stall...

A couple of weapons from the tables ('chopper', 'generic shield') are missing text descriptions, and there are a few other odd Easter eggs hidden among all the wordswordswords:

• Pig feathers (a metal version of the classic sharpened stake) don’t even belong on this table; they’re an emplaced battlefield obstacle, not a weapon.
• Manopele? An armoured sword-breaking gauntlet covered in blades and spikes. METAL as all hell.
• A Foot Bow (Long) - or possibly a Foot (Long) Bow - is basically a giant crossbow that uses you as the body. See that wacky scene in Hero [link].
• Get your bow wet and you lose *at least* 50% range and any bonus damage. Get your compound bow wet and its 75% likely to come unglued. Bow users: enjoy your 'hostage to a dick GM' status.

Finally we come to the all-important question of utility. Is this section useful?

Arguably not. If you've read the AD&D weapon rules you've had most of the benefit of this section, and the writing herein is the worst sort of completist, minutiae-obsessed game writing. I’m not going to take EGG to task for failing to anticipate the later prominence of Google and Wikipedia, but I know for a fact that handbooks of medieval warfare and weapons (produced either by game designers or by general interest publishers) were readily available in the 1990s. Eight pages spent defining a spear, katana or pike is naught but just needless busywork and completism.

And then there’s this particular weapon description:

Argh! the obvious! I'm blind! I’m completely blind!!!

Is that subtle self-parody, or just complete loss of proportion? I don't even know any more.

Advanced Mythus: Chaos plot?

Armour Tables and Descriptions

Just when you thought it couldn't get any fiddlier and pixel-bitchy, we finally come face-to-face with the Advanced Mythus armour rules in all their infernal glory. They're only six pages in toto*, and include rules for natural (monster) armour, for humanoid (suit) armour, for barding (animal) armour, and no less than three variations on the theme of  simplified Advanced Mythus armour. Yes, you read that right. Mythus even manages to make a meal of simplifying thing.

* Wait, did I really just write 'only six pages of armour rules'? What is this game doing to my head?! More worryingly, why are the armour rules lodged in some poor little Scottie dog?

The crux of the Mythus armour system is the Armour Categories table:

Because a dozen armour locations makes sense in a game with four hit locations.

You can only have one piece of armour per Category, but each piece of armour grants its protective bonus to all the listed Hit Location Areas. Does that make an oz of sense to you? Thankfully there are a couple of paragraphs of worked examples and rationales for the hopelessly confused. The self-awareness test is again failed with a helpful suggestion that "...it would be a good idea to create an armour sheet to help you keep track of it all."

Natural Armour

Monster armour in Advanced Mythus is weird and a bit irritating in that completely negates the benefits of multiplied damage from hit location rolls. No, seriously. Read this:

So, according to this, rolling for Hit Location on a monster is nothing but busywork.

The above conclusion is not just me interpolating meaning for dramatic effect. This textual WTFery is entirely supported by the example gratis offered as elaboration and clarification. Consider the armour schema of a Mythus monster:

Because a unified 'All Others' column would never work.

Argh! That's just stupid! A single row of 'Normal' armour and note to the effect of "deduct this from damage before multiplying for Area hit" would cut that whole over-elaborate table down one value, two modifiers, and a footnote, and all in a grand total of three lines. Watch:

Stone Golem
Armour, Non-Vital 20* (Electricity 10, Blunt 5)
* deduct from damage taken /before/ multiplying for hit location

Natural Armour? Nothing natural about it! Kill it with fire, salt the earth, and start from scratch!

Human(oid) Armour

Rules for artificial armour. Cost for bigger suits scales in a linear fashion (+100% for each +3' of height above human norm), while protective value scales not at all. So a 12' tall giant's suit of armour costs three times the human norm (no, not eight times) and blocks exactly the same damage that a human size suit does. I'll just leave that bizarre little nugget o’ Mythuslore there to enrage anyone who understands cube-square mathematics, shall I?

The introductory paragraph of madness is followed by another para' explaining the abbreviations used in the tables on the following pages (a bunch of damage types, "AP Cat" = Armour Protection Category, "SF Pen" = Speed Factor Penalty). This is delicious jargon, and we drink to it. (*gluk gluk*)

After the decompression of OMJ terms into English we're then given something that, at least in a bad light, looks a little like an armour encumbrance rule:

Running: -1 yd/BT per -1 SF penalty.
Walking: -1 yd/AT per -1 SF penalty.
Dodging: impossible in armour with SF 5+. Why SF 5 or more? Because phuque, that's why!

Whether you’ll care enough to remember something as fiddly as this in play is up to the conscience of the reader. I wouldn’t give it a second look myself.

Armour Tables

Cover pp248-249. Listings of all the information you could ever want or need for both individual items and for full suits of armour. Annoyingly there's no 'bespoke' vs. 'off the peg' organisation, everything is all mixed in together in alphabetical order. Could have been handled better IMO.

Page 2 of 2, page 1 is just more of the same.

There are several footnotes at the base of the second page, and the old Mythus crime of using both bullet points (·) and askterisks (*) in a font where there is almost nothing to distinguish them rears its head again. "Bad editing staff! No cookie for you!"

All those different numbers by damage type probably relate, in some subtle way, to the Weapon-vs.-AC tables of AD&D fame, but I'm blowed if I can tease out any correlation beyond the most obvious.

Astute observers will note that shields make a reappearance, this time giving their defensive stats rather than Speed Factor damage. A rational mind (as opposed to the mercilessly Martian logical one that actually laid out Advanced Mythus) would probably have hied the shields off into a single unified table all of their own.

Armour Descriptions

Pages 250-253 are a primer on the art of armour, from the evolution in styles of full plate right down to the subtle delights of Cuissarts, Demi-Jambarts and Tuilles. (Nope, me neither without checking) One paragraph per suit or piece of oddly shaped metal. The Speed Factor penalties from the armour tables are reproduced in the description. My cursory flick-through turned up no text/table conflicts.

Barding Descriptions

Armour for animals. Warhorses (+elephants +monsters) only. Work and riding horses are unable to wear barding. Why is not explained, they just can't. Barding of a particular type always protects per the table. I assume the listed price is to bard a horse rather than a war-elephant or something equally rock-and-roll. Nothing is said about the price of armouring other creatures. Presumably it's an "If sir has to ask, sir cannot afford" situation...

The table is pretty self-explanatory to anyone familiar with the human(oid) armour tables.

• "SF Pen" percentage is actually a penalty to the mount's speed.
• Chamfron and Front Plates are additional 'bolt-on' armour. Everything else is a big coat of horse reinforcement.

A textual note that creatures of Phaeree cannot wear any ferrous-metal barding (iron, steel, adamantine) and must wear bronze reveals that the latter metal offers only 70% of the protection of steel. This implies a whole other level of detail regarding non-iron weapons and armour, a world of which we (perhaps mercifully) know nothing.

Useful? Depends on how fiddly you like your tinned horse rules...

Cost of Weapons and Armour

Price of stabbers and tinbitz varies by quality.

Quality in turn affects only the amount of damage your shiny toy can take in parries. Spending 10x the normal amount on a weapon of "Unsurpassed" quality modifies its innate Weapon Points, Speed Factor penalty or encumbrance effect by precisely 0. You want a better weapon? Go kow-tow to the Heka-slinger: they have the monopoly on improving weapons.

"Silly muggle! All mundane quality is equally worthless; only magick has mechanical benefits in Mythusworld."

Price variations with no useful purpose in-game? *pffft* Seen better. Heck, written better.

Damage To And Repair Of Armour

An opening plaint on the complexity of modelling wear and tear on armour before we're informed that if a piece of armour takes maximum damage 10 times (ie: blocks damage, but some still gets through to you) it falls to bits. That drops to "5 penetrating hits = crumple" if its a buckler. Again, no variations for quality.

We do find the limits of Advanced Mythus armour fiddliness though:

Note Gary's polite use of the word 'purist'.

Averaged Armour

Most of pages 255-256 is spent in tacit admission that the default armour system of Advanced Mythus is overcomplicated to the point of absurdity. The reader who might actually want to play a game of Mythus some time before the heat death of the universe is offered three alternate system of simplified armour calculation.

The first alternative system is Average Armour, and it offers three levels of coverage (half, 3/4, full) in six remarkably familiar types.

Half armour = byrnie (coat) only
three-quarter = byrnie + greaves and gauntlets
full = the above + helm, shield, brassarts

The armour types are (stop me if you've heard this one before):

Hello old friends. What are you doing in a dump like this?

Want simpler? Pick an off-the-peg Averaged Armour, Simplified suit: all the joy of damage types with none of the number-juggling of pick'n'mix armour.

Want simpler even than that? Choose Averaged Armour, Unified Damage Types, which is basically the Mythus Prime armour system.

The numbers are run for you in one last page-spanning table:

Start simple, get more complex? Such is not the Mythus way!

-----

And that's the skinny on arms and armour in Advanced Mythus. Wasn't it both fun and infinitely useful for your nice, simple, rules-light Classic game?

...

...

"Pwa-hahahahahaha!!!"

Sorry, no. Couldn't keep a straight face there.

Seriously, some stuff here might be of interest to AD&D players, or to RuneQuesters who want a bit more mechanical fiddliness to their arms and armour rules. Almost anyone else should probably take these weapons and armour rules as a cautionary example of the dangers of excess.

I think I’m going to go and read classic super simple Brit-gamer RPG AFF: Dungeoneer until my desire to hunt down the surviving members of GDW’s editing department and make them eat pages of Dangerous Journeys: Mythus while screaming "You! You let this happen!" abates. I may be some time...

Next Time: Dazing, Permanent Damage, Shock and more. And that's just what's going on inside my head...

Pic source: Dangerous Journeys: Mythus rulebook, teh netlowubz

Lets Read Mythus Interlude 1

Précis-ing the Combat chapter of Advanced Mythus into a form comprehensible to the human mind is currently kicking my ass (appropriate really). So, while I try to get my head around the intricacies of killing doodz in the very hautest of haut gygaxian games, here's some supplemental insight on the true meaning of Mythus derived from the long out-of-print Mythic Masters Magazine (hereafter MMM).

This "...NOT a magazine; it's a game supplement" was a bucket of gygaxian musings on-, defences of-, and errata for Advanced Mythus circa 1993. The contents are thick and glutinous in their density of information and opacity of language: this is Gary the wordsmith, unconstrained by an editor, and proudly clad in full no.1 ceremonial dress uniform of the Vancian wordsmith's guild. Even MMM editor Frank Mentzer makes a joke about shuddering when EGG handed him the disk containing these articles.

I'm not going to parse the whole thing. That's an exercise for the (hypothetical) morbidly fascinated reader. Believe me though, it's an eye opener. Here's the contents page. See for yourself if anything tickles your perverted fancy:

Reads like a list of blog posts, doesn't it? Makes yer fink...

The main reason I've taken a digression from drunkenly lashing Advanced Mythus with whips of scorpions is to draw attention to one particular section of MMM: skill errata. Several pages of skill errata. You might not care for it, but as someone who's just spent six weeks trudging the wilds of the K/S Area system this is relevant to my (morbid, horrified, unable to look away) interest.

Feature Section: Knowledge/Skill Areas
The errata on offer here isn’t a simplifying clean up (dear me, no!) of the existing Advanced Mythus skill system: instead it’s full-on American luxury* elaboration. Which is nice. Because I'm sure that we all agree that the sole and overriding problem with the Advanced Mythus skill system was a paucity of detail.

* more = better, and hang the quality.

I've grown accustomed to the sheer baroque density of the Mythus skill system, but this still has to be seen to be believed.

• Whole new K/S Areas (including Conversational Foreign Language, Dance, Judgement, and the ever-necessary Plumbing);
• New uses for skills. Dance (Spirit skill: ORLY?) now hones Physical Attributes, Yoga now allows you to sit in fridge for extended periods, while knowing about chess, riddles or wargames grants bonus Mental armour;
• More new sub-areas than you can shake a stick at. Seriously, if a K/S Area (even a lowly Physical one) stands still too long it gets 6-12 tumours sub-areas slapped on it. Three-and-a-half pages are taken up just listing the things, let alone defining what you can use them for!
• A revision of how sub-areas are acquired, with even less internal rhyme-and-reason than the original rules.
• Rules for sub-sub-areas (by product) within the new Economics/Finance sub-area of Mercantilism. Because the fandom was crying out for even more detail on earning a living;
• A new Rudimentary Knowledge rule, which gives players another option with which to short-change themselves.
• Page after page of amended and corrected skill cross-feeds. Tharsends of 'em!

Reading this article at one gulp is, well, let's just say bewildering. The Stankhanovite 'all must be codified' madness: It. Just. Doesn't. Stop! In fact, the combined experience of reading Advanced Mythus and then MMM on the subject of skills is more than a little akin to watching Red Army marchpasts from back in the Soviet era. Behold and fear the relentless tread of a bizarre and grandoise philosophy alien immune to rational argument.

I suppose this article does answer some of my bitching about rules insufficiency in the published DJ:M rulebook. But it hardly lightens the load on the poor bewildered player who just wants to play a game of Lets Pretend with his mates.

Advanced Mythus: "What you mean: chargen mini-game? Mini is for the weak!"

There's plenty on offer on top of the "needs moar baroque! MOAR!!!" elaboration of the skill system in MMM. This little volume offers page after page of text confirming that, no, Gary really wasn't kidding when he wrote Mythus; he meant every damn word.

EGGnu. Not joking.

Mystical Manifestations: Mythus Game Rule Expansions
As well as expended skill rules we're also offered revised and corrected rules on skills by age and inherited wealth. These make geriatric toffery an ~even more~ optimal character creation option in Advanced Mythus.

• Being older grants both more K/S Areas, and additional STEEP points to spend on them.
• High social class grants bonus skills, languages, special connections, ~and~ the possibility of inheriting supplemental starting swag up to manors, ships, or stables of fine mounts.

Young and/or poor people? They get, well, spat upon. Actual penalties to number of skills and to skill levels in the skills you have left are supposedly balanced by a couple of NPC contacts, Quirks, and maybe a second language for the especially lowly. Right-oh.

Sweet merciful Anansi! I though GURPS Goblins had unjust social standing rules. Its like a socialist utopia by comparison with Advanced Mythus! To favour rich old farts once in your RPG character generation system may be considered an oversight: to do so twice indicates a settled policy.


As well as vouchsafing unto the devout Mythus-ites additional Switzer madness in the chargens, and walking us once again through the risibly simple process of generating an Advanced Mythus character, and introducing his new alternate history Weird Science-Fantasy (or, as we call it: soft scifi) setting, Gary also has some editorial/authorial points to make.

And boy! does he make 'em.


The Town Cryer's Gone Mad
No, really. That's the title of Gary's editorial/soapboxing column in which The Man Himself takes strident issue with the 'whispering campaign' against Mythus, and excoriates those too stupid to understand his simple little game.

Yes, because Mythus is the epitome of simplicity and lightness, and anyone who thinks otherwise doesn't understand how to use a reference book. Seriously? That's your counter-argument? It would maybe hold water coming from someone who'd mastered the art of efficiently formatting information (see: That Damn Table, my endless bitching about poor layout, disgressive waffle and lack of page references, etc.). As it is, it just reads like a 'stupid people need not apply' tract.

Of course - as later events illustrated - this 'us and them' ranting about uninformed, unprofessional "so-called reviewers" in certain publications turned out to be something other than merely the paranoia of a man at war with an incomprehending world. Still, this is a little embarrassing to read. I kinda wish Frank Mentzer had spiked it.


Gamespeak...the DJ Patois
A two page(!) essay on the True Scientific Realism of the game systems in Advanced Mythus, and on why this makes an entirely new lingua jargonica a logical necessity.

"During a CT the HP will probably need to know his BAC, WP, FAC, or make a Link, or expend ACE heka (as indicated by casting Grade) to start a casting, and then add more heka points for R&D considerations. Those are the highlights."
-- EGG, Mythic Masters Magazine #1, p4

Yes, 'highlights'. Also *gluk gluk*, because that last deserves a stiff drink.

Gary is seriously calling this reasonable. I've looked long and hard, and even run magnets over the page, and I can't detect a hint of irony in his assertions. Just remind me EGG: what was that you said about "The game is too complex" being 'crap' and 'hogwash'?

We're also presented with the following assertion:

"Those imposing [Dangerous Journeys] books are daunting to the dilettantes and casual participants who believe that shallow milieux with minimal rules enable easy play and empower those employing such devices. Wrong. What these sorts of games do is limit the scope of play to the particular genre and milieu and force conformity through lack of choice."
-- EGG, Mythic Masters Magazine #1, p3

So there you have it. All that fun you've been having with your fast, light, 'rulings, not rules' games: mere delusion arising from false consciousness. You haven't really been having fun at all. How could 'dilettantes' suffering 'forced confirmity' in such 'shallow milieux' possibly be enjoying themselves? You poor deluded fools! Don't you know that simplicity constrains creativity?

Let's just take a moment to savour it fully, shall we?

"...minimal rules [...] force conformity through lack of choice."

That single statement is nothing less than a Genesis Bomb of assbackwardry. It is the totipotent seed for the entire ecosystem of Spaceyan WRONG! we now know as Advanced Mythus. It is a signpost on the primrose path to the perdition of systematised fantastic banality wherein dwell GURPS, RoleMaster and D&D3E.

It's hard to believe - and a little sad to think - that this comes the same man who once asked "Why have us do any more of your imagining for you?" Oh Gary. What happened?


TL;DR: If you have any interest at all in the creative mind behind D&D and/or Mythus - or in the study and treatment of logorrhea - then go read Mythic Masters Magazine.

The potted highlights above don't do justice to the full experience. To fully savour the crazy you simply have to read MMM for yourself! It's a truly rich and heady brew (albeit probably not in the way the author intended). Part rules supplement, part 'how to', part soapbox, and in toto a surreal time capsule from another universe; MMM is a quantum window showing us that even Hackmaster's Gary Jackson(tm)(c)(r) was naught but a pale shadow of the crazy uncle Father of the Game.


Next Time: Combat (contingent on me finally wrestling that SOB of a chapter to the ground)

Pic Source: Mythic Masters Magazine, Philip M. Jackson's Spider & Scorpion

Lets Read Mythus pt15

Dangerous Journeys: Mythus + opinionated gabshite + alkyhol: mix and stand well back.
You know the drill by now.

A note to the confused: You will see references thought-out this stream-of-consciousness jabbering spree to something called That Damn Table. I include it here again for reference purposes:

To know it is to loathe its ubiquity.

Today we’re going to cover the last batch of Advanced Mythus K/S Areas, then have a brief rant on how I’d have done things differently (and arguably better), before finally talking about the incidental art of this section of the book. It’s gonna be a long one, so charge your glasses.

And we start this week’s final thicket-thrash with:

Mediumship
Described as the reverse of Exorcism, this is the art of inviting spirits to appear for the purpose of wasting everyone's time with table-rapping "Your grandfather sends platitudes but no useful directions to where he buried the gold/hid the title deeds" antics. No compelling of spirits is allowed, and failure/fumble "...could bring a hostile or malicious entity..."

Bored now.

We're offered two paragraphs of rules for séances. Said exercises allow the Partial or Full Physical Manifestation (given their own TLAs as P-/FPM *gluk*) of spirits through ectoplasm (or, as the Victorians knew it, oiled muslin) leeched from the Physique TRAITS of séances participants. The benefits of having a spirit Physically Manifest escape me. I've checked the index, and that either sends you into a "refer to" loop, or to an entirely unrelated appendix. F--ing amateurish. Rules for resisting potential unwelcome ectomonglers? Left in the lap of the GM, presumably as extra credit homework.

Bored and irritated by half-assery now.

Characters with the Mediumship K/S Area also gain access to Medium Castings in accordance with the inevitable reprinting of That Table. According to all the tables relevant to this section Mediumship does generate Heka, but there's no mention of this in the text.

Bored, irritated and wishing this skill description would die in a fire now.

Would I touch Mediumship for an Classic RPG? As written, no. In fact: Hell no! Advanced Mythus Mediumship reads like it belongs in an Arcana Victoriana game like Forgotten Futures 4 and 8 or For Faerie, Queen and Country: it’s gutless, deracinated spirit magic for the bored middle classes in a pre-TV age. I get that it’s also supposed to represent the character invoking ancestor spirits, genius loci, ideolectic gestalts, etc. but the flavour text and rules on offer are far too Derek Acora [no link, the man is vermin] for my tastes.

Metaphysics
We’re given the better part of a paragraph of definition of metaphysics before EGG cuts to the chase and explains it in game terms. It turns out that under all the philosophy syllabus waffle this is a non-evil equivalent of Demonology with the option to make "roll to detect celestial influences" checks. So, angelology for a world with stabbable spiritual entities. ("Jeez EGG, that’s all you had to say.")

As well as generating Heka, which is pretty standard issue for an Advanced Mythus Spirit skill, Metaphysics also has a half-baked ‘gain Spiritual strength’ rule. At 41 skill, and at every 10 points gained thereafter, a person may make a "Hard" (x1) difficulty Metaphysics roll to gain a point of SMCap. After gaining two points thus the difficulty of future rolls increases to "Difficult" (0.5). Hey, free stat points. Shame that none of the Physical or Mental skills enjoyed such an advantage.

Metaphysics skill as written is all over the place. It’s academic metaphysics, and stat-enhancing meditation/spiritual exercises, and an detect angelic meddling skill, AND a spotter’s guide to celestial beings too. I’d probably break this into a couple of skills if I were going to make use of it at all.

Multiversal Spheres & Planes
Knowledge of the position and makeup of the multiverse, divided up by plane.

Eleven sub-areas:

1. Alternate Material Planes
2. Elemental Planes
3. Shadow Plane
4. Negative and Positive Planes
5. Aethereal Plane
6. Nether and Pandemonic Planes
7. Empyrean and Concordelysian Planes
8. Entropic and Celestial Planes
9. Temporal and Panprobable Planes
10. Abyssal Plane
11. Astral Plane

All that lot fits together in a manner which may look more than slightly familiar to AD&D veterans.

Yes, because the problem with AD&D’s Great Wheel cosmology was that it wasn’t complicated and prescriptive enough.

No useful information or stealable moving parts in this skill description. It just sits there without even a helpful reference to the Mythus Magick book where the cosmography of Advanced Mythus is actually explained. More and more I begin to fear that this game isn’t actually comprehensible without the Mythus Magick book in close attendance: not quite 400 pages of crippleware, but dangerously close.

Musical Composition
You can make up instrumental music, but not write lyrics (because that’s an entirely different discipline, roight?). The Musical Composition skill generates Heka if you have all three of Spellsongs, Music and Poetry/Lyrics. A character with this skill can also read music with a DR of "Easy". Even someone afflicted by the bane of music dyslexskia (like Skwizgaar Skwigelf "I do nots wish to talks about it") finds this last a bit eyebrowish. Is sight-reading so risibly easy?

Musical Composition has no skill cross-feeds (no, not even to the obvious ones) and no sub-areas. I find that last a bit peculiar, as what constitutes ‘good’ composition in, for example, the classical Chinese musical tradition != ‘good’ in the traditional West Asian or European modes.

Mysticism
Ooh, this sounds like it might be cool. So what kind of mysticism does Advanced Mythus deem worthy of coverage as an entire skill in its own right? Sufi? Buddhist? Taoist? Qabbalist esoterica? Blakean whackdoodlery? Nope, this is 70s Californian mysticism, so we get two pages of rules about crystals and crystal-derived woo-powers.

Ah yes. Those powers. A mystic knows eleven of them, listed A-K:

A. Self-Improvement: meditate 1 hour/day and make an Easy skill check to gain +1 per 4 bonus to AP/General awarded. That means "25% bonus to XP" in standard gamer.
B. Self-Healing, Heart & Mind: meditate 2 hour/day and make Hard skill check to heal 2d6 damage to both Mental and Spirit TRAITS. 1/day.
C. Mental/Spiritual Defence: presenting your crystal as a shield awards Armour vs. magic effects that harm mind or spirit according to the table below:

D. Mental/Spirit Offence: allows the crystal-waver to attack manifested spirits using 50% of their Mysticism or Dweomercraeft skill.
E. Mental Heka Force Amplification: meditate 1 hour + Hard skill check to boost one Heka-using skill by 50% for 5 minutes. 1/week only.
F. Heka Concentration: meditate for up to 2 hours + make Hard skill check to dump 1 Heka/minute in crystal.
G. Visions: using Mysticism to "clue me" is one DR easier than normal when using a crystal as a focus.
H. Self-Healing, Body: as power B, but a Difficult skill check. 1/day.
I. Heal Others, Mind & Heart: as power B, but base difficulty of Hard, +1 DR per additional person healed. 1/day.
J. Heal Others, Body: as power I, but for others. 1/day.
K. Scrying: "Easy" skill check to see invisible presences. Rules on types of crystals required to scry other planes.

Access to the above powers are governed both by state of mind and by the purity of the crystal the mystic has attuned (navel gaze for 7 hours, Easy skill check). The requirement that mystics "...must be sane, sober and not Dazed to use a crystal with any degree of success" which just goes right against the grain of verisimilitude for what we actually know about Californian mysticism.

As well as dictating your ability to use your skill crystal quality also gives modifiers to base DRs ~and~ determines the Heka storage potential of your pet rock. All these factors are determined by crystal price, which makes hearty mock of the outmoded concept of mystics as people who abjure earthly wealth.

A textual note says that high quality rocks can be X2-3 the listed price. I wouldn't have objected to this information as a second footnote to the table.

In addition to the powers above the Mystic gains Mystic Castings according to That Table, generates Heka, and has access to two additional perks:

Dreams & Visions: another "obtain clue" skill, with DR determined by how often in the past month the mystic has bothered the sublime crystalline entities (or whatever) that his little tchotchke(sp?) resonates with. The reading referee is cautioned in special invisible to players italicised text not to dish out too many clues in response to "clue me" skills. EGG sagely reminds us to "...always make the HPs work for most of their information. [...] Thinking is worth a score of successful die rolls."

Detect Spirits and/or Magick: a Mystic, or maybe his crystal, will *ping* in the presence of spirits (detection DR is dependent on magnitude of manifestation) or magic (Base DR "Extreme", one DR easier per 100 Heka expended), or if the Mystic or his friends become the subject of a magical Link. No idea about what this last entails, but I console myself with a delicious soothing beverage. (*gluk*)

The downside to using a pretty stone as a lever to move the world? Anyone else touching your crystal scrambles the attunement (hippies don’t share well); your crystal crumbles to dust if you ever fumble a Mysticism roll; and lastly, you are a pretentious crystal-gazing woo-monger.

As you may have surmised by now this skill contains the makings of a pretty comprehensive patchouli-scented Hippy Crystal Chick class, if that’s something that floats your boat.

Nature Attunement
This is Druidism as skill. Unfortunately it’s not the cool ‘20 years of training, then you get buried alive in a flooded coffin to compose your dissertation in verse’ druidism the Romans wiped out, but instead tediously worthy ‘listen to the land’ crying Indian/GROLIES one. I’m really not kidding:

purity, sense, feel: nice of Gary to highlight the hippy detection keywords for us

Doing any of the things listed above is DR "Hard". Users of this skill can also blend into natural surrounding at a base DR of Easy, modified by terrain and vegetation.

Finally Nature Attunement has five non-standard sub-areas:

1. Growing Things
2. Natural Cycles
3. Personal Relationship
4. Animal Husbandry
5. Exotic Places

Instead of actually doing anything useful in their own right all these sub-areas do is provide cross-feed to other skills:

Growing Things gives 10% cross-feed to Agriculture and Herbalism,
Natural Cycles cross-feeds to Ecology and Geology.
Personal Relationship (grossly mis-named) actually benefits your Hunting/Tracking and Survival skills. Go figure.
Animal Relationship cross-feeds to Animal Husbandry, but not at all to Riding or Animal Handling.
Exotic Places cross-feeds to Phaeree Flora and Fauna and Subterranean Aerth knowledge.

The highly developed spiritual and metaphysical connection to the living world granted by Nature Attunement does not generate Heka in any way shape or form.

Necromancy
One of the bad-boy rock star magic skills. I’m sure you don’t even need this defined for you, right? Ha! This is Advanced Mythus, of course it gets defined! Cue one very skippable paragraph of thesaurus abuse (*gluk gluk*) telling you what necromancy is. Of course it generates Heka, and of course you gain access to Necromancer Castings according to That Table.

Most of the word count in this skill description is expended on 3 rather unimpressive abilities you gain by virtue of sending off for your mail order skull ring. I’m almost embarrassed to expose EGG’s nomenclatural shame here, but:

1. Coldbody - lower body temperature by 1° F per skill point for up to 1 AT (5 minutes) per STEEP. One/day AFAICT.
2. Darksee - infra- and ultravision by other names. You see in the dark as if it was twilight. Always on.
3. Shadowskulk - hide in shadows. DR Easy (total darkness) or harder. Lasts 1 BT (30 seconds) per STEEP. One/day.

So sad. You’d expect a fan of Vance, KAS, et al to be better at evoking the terror and majesty of Death Magic (yes, it rates the caps) in his ability names, wouldn’tcha? I mean, I can throw "Chill of the Grave", "See in Darkness" and "Enrobed in Night" down as substitute names with precisely zero thought on the matter.

Anything worth stealing here? Naaaah. Advanced Mythus necromancers can’t even animate zombies from the look of it. You’ve probably written a better necromancer class yourself, or know a guy who has.


Occultism
Knowledge of the names and hierarchies of ghosts, elementals and similar entities: a handy skill for mediums, conjurers or anyone else determined to get bossy with those bodiless folk in the spirit world. By contrast with the needless wordiness of many Advanced Mythus skill descriptions this one actually feels rather like a précis of a (missing) longer section on spirit magic and Truenames.

Learning about spirits is easy; a simple d% roll determines whether or not you learn the name of a useful entity. On a success skill check the character learns a spirit’s name and then rolls two more d% to determine whether they know it’s supernatural rank and/or leverage-enabling Truename (see table below).

Spirit entities have a crazy number of names, anything from three for the lowliest up to eighteen names for the most powerful. I’ve no idea what use this information actually is; it’s just thrown out there with us left to infer it by reference to other Spirit skill descriptions (Conjuration, Sorcery, etc). Creatures of Major status or above have multi-part Truenames that can’t be wholly learned through Occultism. Don’t ask how you can learn their full Truename though; the text is stonily silent on the matter.

Occultism has no sub-areas or cross-feed to any other skills: an all-or-nowt skill. It does grant Heka = STEEP, but there appear to be no Occultism castings, so for once there’s no Special Guest Appearance from That Table.

Whether you’d ever make use of this skill in your non-Mythus game depends on whether you care for Truenames, or for creatures having a dozen or more situational epithets. Personally I’ve always found that "I am known by many names" mythology shtick a bit pretentious and vaguely absurd. Too many aliases = cheap and shifty in my book.

Painting (Artistic)
Distinct from Painting (House), which seems to be missing (*tsk*). Characters with this skill can make pretty pictures [link], assess the value of artwork (toe-trampling makes Appraisal skill saaaad), and also know art history. Painting as a Spirit skill though: is that right? Let’s just take the snide historian gibe about art history not being a proper intellectual discipline as read and move on, shall we?

Pantheology
Mythology knowledge. In a world with manifest divinities this is probably something more than just a gateway field of study for geeks; knowing which god to make propitiatory obeisance to may actually be useful. The skill grants broad general knowledge about all pantheons in the game world, but the further away a pantheon is from your home culture area, the harder are skill checks required to remember salient information. Proximate pantheons are "Hard", those more distant "Difficult" or "Very Difficult".

Sub-areas can be taken (to no apparent benefit), and there are nineteen of these listed, from Atlantean to Voudoun.

This skill is simultaneously vague and game world specific; a lot of work for the player and GM. Pass.

Phaeree Folk & Culture
Distinct from the Phaeree Flora and Fauna skill this is "...the study of the many intelligent races inhabiting the Aerth’s counter-world": poxy pixie politics.

There are six sub-areas to this skill: three Races of [faction] Nature and three Culture of [faction] Nature sub-areas. You can pick the Seelie, Borderer or Unseelie factions as fields of, for want of a better word, interest. No cross-feeds to other skills, and you’re limited to a ceiling of 35 in your skill until you spend time in fairyland.

This is a boring, unevocative take on faerie lore. All the legwork is left for the GM, or to a later (never published) Mythus Phaeree sourcebook.

(Oh, and that misspelling, like Magick and -craeft, just gets more annoying with time.)


Philosophy
Front and centre: "...philosophy adds 10% of its STEEP to the Influence K/S Area" (you remember that particular mess, right?), which is yoking the ‘philosophy and rhetoric = trufriends4eva’ connection a little too tightly for my tastes. What’s the skill good for in itself? Well, aside from being another "clue me" skill philosophy also makes you "...a sophisticated kind of person...", and one "...not easily misled by sophistries and falsely persuasive arguments."

Pwahahaha!!! Oh my sides! I can only wonder how many philosophers EGG ever met.

Poetry/Lyrics
Good for writing odes, sonnets, ballads, librettos which don’t grate on the ear (DR "Easy" or harder). The skill also covers critical analysis and history of poetry and music.

Poetry/Lyrics has no sub-areas, but does cross-feeds 10% to Etiquette/Social Graces, which bonus "...applies across all cultures and societies", as we are informed in italics most grave. Poetry/Lyrics also grants Heka to a character provided they have some ability in all three of the Spellsongs, Music and Musical Composition K/S Areas.


Priestcraeft (sic)
This chunky page-long description open with two paragraphs on determining Full or Partial Heka Ability, which is practically a reprint of the similar section in the Dweomercraeft skill description. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: not the right place for this rule.

After this we’re introduced to the requirements to become a full-fledged priest. These are:

• Full Heka Ability
• STEEP of 31+ in Religion K/S Area (q.v.)
• Exclusive devotion to one god of one pantheon
• Vow of Faith/Pact with Evil (depending on whether your god is white or black hat) to chosen god

In return for all the above you gain both crazy Heka and access to a bunch of special Tutelary Castings specific to your ethos. In return you are at the beck and call of an inscrutable, omnipotent egomaniac (already a familiar experience to many players). Non-priests with the Priestcraeft skill gain somewhat less Heka and have access to non-Priest Castings in accordance with That Table.

We’re informed that, unlike many skills, Priestcraeft has ‘insular’ sub-area. Once the pomposity has been hacked away (I kid you not, the word ‘Ethoi’ is used no less than three times in one paragraph!) it turns out this means: "pick the sub-area of Priestcraeft that matches your god, abjure all others; that’s you now."

The five Ethoi of Priestcraeft are:

Balance - disinterested neutralism. Taoists, nature worshippers, etc. Has some overlap with the Elemental School of Magic. Basically this guy:

Gloomy Darkness - black hat maltheism. Combines chaos with tyranny for delicious full-fat double evilburgerness. Has so much in common with the Black School of magic it ain’t even funny.
Moonlight - ‘little from column A, little from column B’ omnivorous ethos. Moon and sea gods.
Shadowy Darkness - grey hat darker-and-edgier antihero ethos. Non-evil gods of death (Osiris, Hades, etc.) hang out here. Has a lot on common with the Grey School of Dweomercraeft.
Sunlight - white hat light and order. Sun gods, lawgivers, etc. Corresponds to White School of Dweomercraeft.

Not much of use here for Classic RPG gamers. Classics players generally already have god-bothering rules to their satisfaction.

Religion
Knowledge of the rites and rotes of any one religion and pantheon, which must be chosen when the skill is taken. A STEEP of 31+ in this skill is required to be an ordained Priest of a temple. The skill generates Heka, but appears to have few if any in-game uses.

Sculpture
The art of making sharp, vivid, three dimensional images from physical stuff. A necessary skill for anyone with a yen to shape golems. Sculpture offers no sub-areas, because the skills involved in casting bronze, carving stone or wood, shaping clay, or shaping jade are all same-same. The skill offers no skill cross-feeds, mainly because as written it's just too broad and vague to meaningfully apply to Masonry, Forging/Welding, Carpentry (another mentioned-but-MIA skill), Jewellery, etc. But hey, those are just lowly Physical skills; it’s not like they do actually matter in Mythus-world.

Sorcery
The other bad boy rock star magic skill. This is the one that lets you grow a goatee, dress in full Halfordian mode and generally act like the villain in the film adaptation of a Dennis Wheatley book. Provided you have even a smattering of skill in the Demonology K/S Area, and are prepared to make a Pact with Evil (Vow of Faith by another name) forfeiting your soul, this is the full-on demon magic.

Yeah, almost exactly like that, wicker man and all.

What do you get in return for selling 21 grams of spiritual self?

• a non-trivial multiplier to the Heka generated by this skill. The text says anything from double to ten-times normal, but I think we all agree that x6.66 is the most thematically appropriate.
• access to Sorcerer Castings per That Table.
• the ability to call up infernal entities to do your bidding, Faust-style

Which segues us nicely into the half-page of demon invoking rules. These are largely a copypasta of the Conjuration rules with specific reference to evil-themed paraphernalia. The Heka cost and difficulty of upsetting the MADD element is given in a table coyly named "Called Beings":

But wait! There’s more. A sorcerer also gains five innate ‘in the inverted pentagram club’ minor powers. The names of these last aren’t as groan-inducingly bad as those listed under Necromancy, but they’re still not much to write home about.

• Delusions - win a contested K/S roll to mentally troll ("Look again. You’re eating maggots.") a person within one chain (66ft), up to 3/day.
• Flamesdance - control flames. Flames can be made to flicker, dim or expand in size by up to x6(.66) for damage + chance of setting things afire. Usable 1/day.
• Impsummon - you get a squeaky little infernal minion to order/kick about. Usable 1/week.
• Kiteseyes - you can see through the eyes of any carrion bird out to a maximum range of 6 leagues. 1/day.
• Ratseyes - you can see through the eyes of rats. Mean-spirited mice and black squirrels are also "...good candidates for being pawns of this power!" 1/day.

There is a Carcosa-style suggestion that you can exploit the knowledge provided by this skill to fight evil, so long as you don’t summon demons, make pacts, or cast the naughty Sorcery spells. ("Goat Boy finds that disgusting. Where is the fun in that?")

Is there anything here usable for a Classic D&D game? Not really. AD&D already has a string of mid-to-high-level summoning and binding spells that form a perfectly adequate demon-bullying mini-game in their own right. It is refreshing to see EGG just plain not giving a phuq about possible ‘RPGs are satanic’ clucking though. The sorcery skill has a definite air of "This is the subject matter under discussion and honi soit qui mal y pense".

Streetwise
The ability to fit in and not embarrass yourself among sub-cultural groups within your own culture. Examples sub-cultures listed include urban proletariat, rural peasants, mercenaries, beggars, etc. You know one sub-area of non-standard etiquette per 10 skill points. The skill is also good for identifying those groups traditionally shy of local law enforcement.

Thespianism
"All that fuss. Why not just try acting dear boy?" - Laurence Olivier to Marlon Brando
Includes both ability to act and knowledge of stagecraft. No cross-feed to Disguise, Persuasion or to anything else you might think related. I’m still not sure if this skill doesn’t render the Impersonation superfluous.

Witchcraeft
Dunno why this is distinct from Sorcery, other than Gary had a Witch class bug up his butt right from the early days of D&D. IIRC it was an example class as far back as OD&D. Whatever the reason we are informed that "...any individual practising Witchcraeft is of vilest malevolence and dedicated to Evil."

Sooooo Evil! Burn immediately.

After a couple of paragraphs of introductory matter which might as well have just read "refer to Sorcery" (*gluk gluk*) we’re treated to a column or so on the all-important administrative requirements of being a witch. We’re told of the benefits of regular attendance at Sabbats and Esbats (basically bonus Heka: so much for turning up; more for being boss hag; even more "...if especially honoured for evil works." I can’t believe that known punster Gary missed the mentioned in Esbatches gag...), and of the swingeing punishments inflicted on witches who fail to keep their covens up to regulation strength: "If ever a coven should have exactly seven members for even as short a time as seven hours, the remaining members are lost, for their Pacts are foreclosed, and each and every one is doomed!"

In return for their dedication to the infernal bureaucracy witches gain their bonus Heka, access to Witch/Warlock Castings per That Tables, and two witchy-themed minor powers:

• Eyebite - give someone the Evil Eye. This is basically a pre-incarnation of the SRD’s silent/still spell feats.
• Beastform - the witch can adopt the form of a totemic carnivore (wolf, bear, or big cat) between midnight and dawn on nights when the moon is either full or dark.

Could you use this as the basis for a Classic RPG witch class? Not really. Half the skill is a recycling of the (already half-recycled) Sorcery skill, and the non-spell abilities of Witchcraeft are pretty duff. There’s nothing here to appeal to anyone who wasn’t aroused by the internal politics of the AD&D Druid class (one boss per area, fight to advance, etc.).

Writing, Creative
You can make stuff up and write it down, or polish non-fiction into an entertaining read. I’m surprised there’s no self-pitying authorial plaint on the difficulty of writing here; maybe EGG got that out of his system back in the Difficulty Ratings section of this chapter. Creative Writing cross-feeds 10% to the Influence K/S Area, which I suppose represents speechwriting and such.

Yoga
Don’t expect a thorough-going examination of the magic(k)al benefits of a 5,000 year old mystic tradition here, Mythus yoga is fakir tricks, pure and simple. The skill description covers the better part of a page, but the core of it is that the skill grants "...resistance to Mental and Spiritual attacks, immunity to normal fires, the ability to heal Mental, Spiritual and Physical wounds, and the ability to slow physical body functions." All these benefits, as well as innate resistance to Insanity-causing effects, are granted per the Yogi Abilities Table (reproduced below):

As well as making you an unkillable pucnic-basket- plundering hobo the Yoga K/S Area also generates Heka, and cross-feeds 10% to Hypnotism, Perception, Acrobatics/Gymnastics, Endurance, Mysticism and Nature Attunement. Yes, all of them.

You’ve seen this skill before in your Classic D&D game. Split the abilities up among a bunch of levels and you’ve pretty much got the Monk (aka Mystic if you speak BECMI). The body control thing? That was right there in OEPT all the way back in 1975.

And, having reached page 200 alive and (relatively) sane, I am glad to report that is the end of the Advanced Mythus K/S Area descriptions section. 64 seemingly endless pages of:

Mythus skills: my face when

Was it worth the swedge? Arguably not: an average of a couple of possibly interesting elements for your game per dozen pages really doesn’t justify the effort expended. I’m just glad I did it so that no one else has to.

How I’d Have Done It Differently

Before we call finis on this gibbering horror for all time I’m just going to indulge myself with a brief retrospective of the Advanced Mythus K/S Areas section, why it sucks, and how it could be made better. Trust me, this is a necessary exorcism for someone who’s just spent six weeks staring into the void.

The number one improvement would come from having a guy like this on the staff:

"Hello. I'm here to edit your text."

Everything else flows from there.

For starters, the universal skill lists on pp100-101 would have been moved to the K/S Area Descriptions section, with *copious* page numbers and textual references in the Vocations section.

Second, each and every skill would have to justify its existence in the book. If you’re going to have a comprehensive skill system, then it has to be comprehensive, not half-done and lopsided.

Duplicate another skill? We have that thanks. Off you trot.
Stupid number of sub-areas? They get purged and/or the skill gets split up into two or more separate skills, which then have to justify their own existences.
Vapid waffle text? Expand skill description to a meaningful degree, or cut: pick one.

Then, and only then, I’d have put the surviving Heka-active skills in a section of their own, maybe called something sensible and obvious like Heka-Active Skills to indicate that they are not quite like their mundane counterparts.

All the skills would be collected into one table with a fat wedge of relevant information all in one place. Thus:

Name	TRAIT	Heka from	Casting Access?	Sub-Areas?	Other Abilities?
Arglbarglism	M	Skill+MMFoo	Y (Arglbargl)	Y (# of)	Y/N (see pXXX)
Chodmancy	M	Skill+PNBar	Y (Choddery)	N	N
Gonkology	P	Skill only	N	Y (# of)	Y (see pXXX)
Murblnurfism	S	Skill+Ssblah	Y (Murblnurf)	N	Y (see pXXX)
etc	etc	etc	etc	etc	etc

There’d be one, and only one, instance of That Damn Table, renamed to something logical like Casting Access for Heka-Active Skills. The newly renamed table would have a header or footnote explaining that all Heka-active skills that gave casting access did so according to this one table; no exceptions.

After that, Heka-active skill descriptions, edited down to the needful information. Got a bunch of setting material and/or worked examples? That’s what the Mythus Magick book is for. The Rulebook is for the rules you need to play the game. The clue is in the name.

There’d also be one clearly marked and logically placed explanation of the process of checking for Full or Partial Heka Ability in characters. This also would be page referenced to within an inch of its life because we have respect for the time, effort and money the reader has expended upon our game.

Bosh! Greater clarity, ease of reference, ~and~ a bunch of pages saved for more actual substantive content. The whole section would actually read like a usable rulebook rather than as a bunch of half-thought-out fob-off skill descriptions interspersed with setting essays, authorial advice, worked examples and over-stuffed uber-skills.

Job done. I am rock!


Art of the Section
Before I finally collapse into a gibbering heap for the rest of the week I’d just like to mention the three b+w pictures which *ahem* grace the Spirit K/S Areas section of the Advanced Mythus rulebook. All three are b+w incidental art, rather than the full page colour spreads we’ve come to know and loathe.

• p182 - Daniel Gelon pic of a Faerie Prince and his court, complete with robed eminence gris naturally. Odd bits of this picture include the weird black dot doll eyes of the prince and the Bowie homage(?) focus on his groin as the focal point of the entire composition. This piece is WTF Mythus? territory.
• p195 - Not visibly credited (Mitchell?) pic of an Ogre standing before a Mycenaean-looking tomb. The ogre is characterfully drawn with a slightly pathetic air which gives the impression that beating on this guy would have a slight whiff of 'bullying the local weirdo' about it.
• p198 - Ellisa Mitchell pic of a generic Conan-style fantasyburg. This architectural style in this picture will be more than slightly reminiscent to anyone who saw the opening reel of the execrable Solomon Kane film.

Next Time: K/S Areas Use for Economic Gain, in which Ernie Gygax and his old man expend seven pages laying down the law on earning your keep in /Advanced Mythus/.

Pic Source: Dangerous Journeys: Mythus rulebook, Mythus Magick, Action Philosophers, the intarwubz

Stealing Back the Dead

This latest mental eruction is in response to SuperNecro's recent post that argued the case for raise dead (and other such tamperings with life and death) being the exclusive preserve of decidedly dodgy necromancers. Although not entirely converted to the SuperNecro way I have to agree that raise read/resurrection as written in pretty much all iterations of D&D is, well, dull.

Raising the dead as written in the holy books of our hobby:

1. PC goes "blarg! I's ded!"
2. Mates drag body to nearest non-Evil temple (or cross the party scroll of de-deadification off the inventory list).
3. Bright lights and choirs,
   
4. *Ding* back to life,
   
5. Our ersatz Lazarus - maybe a little woozy and a level short, but otherwise no worse for wear - is quickly back to the adventuring grind.

OK so far as it goes, but where's the fun in that? Ever since Save vs. Poison's post on Eldritch Weirdness reminded me that even low-horsepower magic can (should?) be freakish and uncanny I've been gnawed by the thought that raising the dead should mean more than an expended spell slot. Call me old-fashioned, but returning a soul from death is something noteworthy that marks everyone involved. Even in a world of magic and dragons breaching the bounds between the realms of life and death should be an adventure in itself.

Questing through the underworld to steal back a departed soul from the chthonic gods is one of the archetypal myths. If you're a top-notch mythic figure you travel through the underworld and rescue the dead. Isis and Kali did it; Orpheus tried and failed; Hercules succeeded (IIRC); Demeter hunted for Persephone; the Norse gods sent Hermod to try and redeem Baldur from Hel; Jesus raised Lazarus and harrowed Hell. The quest for the departed soul of the beloved is a cliché in itself.

Nearer to home, even the sometimes cheesy (oh yes it is!) Conan the Barbarian movie managed to make the ritual of returning a soul to the realm of the living exciting and a bit spooky. The lands beyond do not return new arrivals easily or willingly, even if they're tied down and swathed in more black cloth and weird facepaint than a goth.

So, what's the point of these latest wemblings?

Simple enough: IMG, as of now, no res spells. No raise dead. No resurrection. No 'dead, but playable' Ghostwalk antics. None of that. Heroic escapes and supervillain immortality, fine. But the old king gets to rest in peace; the death of the young is tragic; the death of a hero is a fitting end to their saga. Dead is dead, lest the final journey becomes a daily commute, and the bourn from which no man returns becomes just another poxy "save negates" status effect.

If, instead of just building a pyre, chanting elegies over the corpse and then squabbling over the loot of your departed swordbrother, if the players actually want bring them back, then they're going to have to work for it. As in 'turn the rightful order of the world on its head' work for it. That's a big ask, but that's exactly what heroes are for. They're going to have to do at least one of the following:

The Dreamquest
Looks like he's got himself lost in the bizarre shamanism afterlife. It's time for the the weird liminal stuff: spirit pacts with the otherworld, vision quests, lotus overdoses, induced comas, and suchlike heavy mojo.

Rescue Mission
The god of the dead holding your buddy against his will. Time to wander down to the underworld and get him back. Quixotic hunt through mystic underworlds full of hostile guardians, vengeful godlings, strange sights and death around every corner? Sounds a lot like the day job.

Favours Owed
Given sufficient incentive those weird formaldehyde-smelling priests of the gods of death may be able to help. Their especial position as the mediators between two worlds might allow them to beg the return of a soul from their masters' halls in extrordinary circumstances. At best this will be for a temporary purpose that benefits the temple (think quest spell), not a permanent arrangement.

Too Badass to Stay Dead
Unfinished business is a good excuse for allowing a well-loved but departed character to be in at the climax. Whether it be "Use the force Luke", or the shade of Druss at the Eltabar(?) Wall in Gemmel's Legend, or Conan's sunstroke-induced "Huh? Valeria?" moment in Conan the Barbarian, there's definite precedent for an unexplained 'one last encore' scene in the right circumstances. The character isn't back in the game permanently (no hero undead, thank you), but at least the player gets to sling dice with an old character one last time.

Clarkian Hoodoo
There might be odd thaumobiological cloning pods somewhere deep in the dungeons. These can function as resurrection lite, in that they're effectively save points for a character as he was at point X in his career. Getting to them in time to rescue the revived clone is another matter entirely. And don't ask what else the weird dungeontech is doing with their DNA, that information is proprietory and part of your NDA agreement. ;)

Pact with Strings
So you did a deal with some serious people. They did what you asked, but they haven't called to collect. Yet. And the more you think about it, the less cut-and-dried the deal you cut seems...

Put Back Together Wrong
The DM shouldn't necessarily monkey's paw everyone who makes a deal (Faustian, or otherwise) to come back from the dead, but having something come back with/instead of the expected returnee has a lot of precedent and can be fun. The newly revived might be a repository of mystic knowledge, suffer a peculiar yearning or strange dreams, be a focus of hostile/hungry spirits, or they might now be an unwitting open conduit to something other. hack/'s Raise Dead Too Boring? table is a gleefully vicious start here.

A quest to restore to life a departed comrade might seem to suddenly derail the current direction (or "arc", in buzzwordese) of our heroes' adventures, but that's fine in my book. Having someone who was a much-loved fixture in your life taken from you untimely causes massive changes in outlook and direction. What better reason to put the search for gold, glory, fame, booze, chicks and more gold on hold for a while than getting the gang back together?

"Let down the curtain, the farce is over." -- last words of Rabelais

Death Frost Doom - Losing is Fun!

"You will die, but first, you will suffer."

Bleak, stark, unforgiving - this module is very, very much the product of a particular personal vision of what old school adventure is about. Death Frost Doom has some lighter moments, but it maintains an air of 'damned-if-you-do; damned-if-you-don't' pessimism that borders on the nihilistic.

DFD is absolutely and unapologetically not a 4E module: James E. Raggi's world is not a place in which 'status effects' disappear on a successful save or at the end of the encounter. This is a module where anything your players do will have consequences. Many of these consequences will be permanent, most of them will be negative. Remember, this was produced by the man who brought us the Green Devil Face collections: anything you touch can kill you... and your buddies... and everyone else in the area... DFD is old school as horror; it's D&D as Fantasy Feckin' Vietnam.

That caveat given, I have to say that this is one of the most immersive, thematically unified modules I've read in a long time. Many of the descriptions are richly evocative of the sort of creeping, 'in over our heads' horror that is rarely seen in D&D. The descriptions of the crypts had me almost smelling the musty scent of earth and corruption which would break lose as the PCs looted the sepulchres. The situations and some of the trappings would be right at home in a "Call of Cthulhu scenario".

Certain tropes of classic fantasy adventure make an appearence, either used straight (bottomless pit? check!) or with a particular twist (purple lotus powder random effects table), but the absence of other expected cliché elements can be used to disorient players and put them on their guard. JER helpfully makes a point of explicitly calling these aspects of the scenario out in what is almost a mini-masterclass in horror.

What? The loot? Yeah, there's loot. Some of it has strings attached, other parts are just uncanny in a cool way. Although, in a module with at least two ways of catastrophically reformating your campaign, and a number of other lesser (but still substantial) horrors on offer, I honestly think that even the most profit-motive driven players will be less interested in Greyhawking the place than they will be in just getting out alive.

The impressionistic monochrome artwork by artist Laura Jalo meshes well with the bleakness of the module. The cartography is clear and workmanlike. The writing clear and entertaining throughout. Heck, there's even an Elder Futhark easter egg for you to play with!

My one petty quibble is that some details - like the activity cycle of weird hermit Zeke - are overstated. Perhaps a simple table would have laid the information out more clearly than a couple of paragraphs of prose?

All-in-all, money well spent. Howls of anguish and curses will rain down on the name of James E. Raggi IV, and his laughter will echo about the icy northern wastes.

But wait! There's more!

DFD includes, as bonus feature and further evidence of the unrelenting blackness of JER's cold and twisted heart, the very Green Devil Face-ish trick/trap/locale The Tower (previously seen in Fight On! #4). This is a masterful deconstruction in three pages of the Arthurian/Disneyesque rescue the sleeping princess trope. It may not be to all tastes, having more in common with the bleaker Metal Hurlant strips than a traditional fairy tale, but it is an interesting exercise in 'give them enough rope' DMing.

So, Death Frost Doom. You get to support a hobbyist creator. Your players will whine and bitch. You will remember why you love this game all over again. Totally worth the money.