Tuesday, May 27, 2014

Barbaric Texas

“Vast treeless plains swept away to merge with hazy horizons. In the distance, to the south, a great black cyclopean city reared its spires against an evening sky, and beyond it shone the blue waters of a placid sea. And in the near distance a line of figures moved through the still expanse. They were big men, with yellow hair and cold blue eyes, clad in scale-mail corselets and horned helmets, and they bore shields and swords.”
- Robert E. Howard, Marchers of Valhalla
Marchers of Valhalla (1977) cover by Ken Kelly
I will forgive the reader for thinking the prose above is a scene from a lesser known Howard tale set in a Hyboria or Atlantis or other time-forgotten exotic place, strangely its setting is something much closer to home, Texas. Obviously it is neither the Depression-era Texas of his time nor the cartoonish trainwreck Texas that I live in, but an antediluvian mythically-projected Texas.

The deeply odd short story, which was rejected by Weird Tales and first published as late as 1972, is a strange melange of Swords & Sorcery adventure tale and creation myth. Reading it is an uncomfortable experience, the idea of blue-eyed Aryans swooping down to destroy a brown-skinned city of decadents seems too close to the well of bizarre race-based occultist ideas that the Nazis would also be drawing on in this period.

But there is a deep level of mythic resonance to the tale and some compelling fantasy touches, as there is to much of Howard's writing, something that has been explored here before. The semi-famous old school Texan historian (you know the kind that used to write histories as great sweeping narratives) T.R. Feherenbach once wrote that there was a “vast residue of violence leftover from the making of Texas” a theme that heavily inspired Cormac MacCarthy's masterpiece Blood Meridian.

Weirdly reading Marchers this weekend it made me want to game it. Well not “it”, not the actual story itself, but a early medieval fantasy version of this state.

It's an idea I have flirted with before. You can see some throwaway, jokey references in the Tree Maze of the Twisted Druid to the Duke of High Brazos, the Big Thicket and the Free City of Houston. That all reflects a weird transition time circa 1981 for me when my dungeon-focused Holmes campaign was busy morphing into AD&D. I hadn't bought the World of Greyhawk yet (or the Players Handbook for that matter) where the campaign would eventually find its home and was too intimidated about creating my own world whole cloth. What I had instead was a thinly-veiled and vague place set in the cedar-covered hills and plains around my birthplace Austin Texas.

Coming back to this is a deeply broken idea from the get go, but hey bear with me as I try to exorcise this idea-demon to stay focused on the current campaign.
Barbaric Texas
The campaign would open a 1,000 or so years after a less horrific version of the Marchers of Vahalla. Somehow it is a place stuck out of time tens of thousands of years ago but with reflections of today.

The vast big plateau sundered and flooded by Poseidon and Ishtar's wrath at the end of the story has been broken and reborn as the tiered tablelands and hills of Texas's current biomes. I would use an actual bioregion map of the state to fill out a large-scale hex map.

The dark-spired city of Khemu exists as taboo set of ruins mired on flats of one of the long Texas barrier islands (read ruined city pointcrawl). Private in-jokes make me want to put it right where Port Aransas sits today.

The current majority population of the region—those afraid of miscegenation can piss off back to their Stormfront forums--are now mostly the mixed descendants of the blue-eyed raiders from Nordheim and the presumable Native Americans of Khemu. “Purer” descendants of both people exist but are in the minority.

These “Old Texans” live in a patchwork of early medieval-like (read Dark Ages) petty kingdoms with nothing more than rough palisaded towns as seats of power. Longhorn cattle raids, bloody feuds and other border violence are weekly occurrences. It is a violent rough place.

Religion is a bizarre syncretisic mix of Norse, Mesoamerican, DDG Native American and Hyborian deities (so you'd have Snake Man rubbing shoulders with Ymir). I am tempted to throw in a Pecos Bill equivalent and other dumb Texas tall tales but that line perhaps should not be crossed.

The residue of violence has some actual existing supernatural manifestation. Driven mad by it beserker bands roam around and the undead are fueled by sheer hate.

Megafauna from Pleistocene Texas abound. You've got Columbian mastodons, gylptodons (giant proto-armadillos), giant sloths, giant bison, dire wolves, sabre-toothed cats and the like. Hell maybe there is a lost valley of dinosaur critters in Palo Duro canyon out there.

A Comanche equivalent rules the high plains and raids the hell out of the Old Texan settlements. These horse nomads aren't the brutal savages of Texas Anglo myth nor noble savages, just some highly dangerous folks with their own thing going on. Part of me wants to go goofy and say they are the wolf-riding Elves of Elfquest (this whole tone being way, way grimmer than what I enjoy in the Hill Cantons).

Rules? Hmm...Stormbringer first edition or full circle back to an uneasy and ungodly mix of Holmes Basic and AD&D.

Idea-demon exorcized, back to writing about Slumbering Ursine Dunes.

14 comments:

  1. God Bless Texas a/k/a The Sound of His Horn. This is my standard bearer project until second-generation Dwarf-Lands sprout. Brilliant and profound. If you need to justify it in there here and now you can seed the Cantons with strange parallel dreams from that world and then maybe some day have a Conjunction of Spheres event.

    Stormbringer. Because largely Cormac McCarthy man-to-man scale and magic is rare, big and scary -- and "trollball" (which our teams evolved into) is a trivial port across.

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    1. That's a compelling case for Stormbringer (or probably more accurately my own Stormhack variant). The game should be nasty brutish and short in feel. Plus I could work in some Pendragon Pass (hell I could call it Aransas Pass).

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    2. An Aransas Pass layer would be sweet to model at least three things: (a) racio-cultural conduct standards (b) personal weakness (c) how the story moves on after the Stormhack combat system turns your current character into burger.

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  2. Or actually play it under Hawkmoon for the crazy.

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  3. Great idea. At very times I've started a "mythic/post-apoc North America" setting mainly based around the Southeast, but I never got much beyond some basic ideas.

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  4. If you do this I will put that Mormon Atlantis game on the bucket list for some time this decade.

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  5. I like it, I say go with dangerous elven nomads. I was mulling necro-fey mongol (since they live on the plains, they have no trees, and with thier metal allergies everything is enchanted bone - an easy to get material for herder types) style civilization a while back, and mongols make the best horse nomads, because they're all civilized, they just don't believe it's a good thing, and they don't believe non-nomads are.

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  6. 7' tall Karankawan Native Americans with bows as tall as they are, covered in alligator grease to ward off mosquitoes gliding through the swamps in poled canoes.

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    1. Oh hell yes! Human flesh eaters too guarding the barrier isles and ruined Khemu.

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  7. Y'know I've used the Hill Country as geographic inspiration given its ruggedness and limestone caverns, though I also went with more bizarre iterations of limestone like Madagascar's tsingy.

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  8. A good chunk of the southern part of the Hill Cantons physically looks like our own Hill Country. In what game did you use yours?

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  9. I've often thought that there's great potential in a post-apocalyptic, prehistoric, or alternate-universal version of North America as a fantasy setting. I'll have to track down that REH story and give it a read - besides Stirling's 'Dies The Fire' series, there's not a lot of inspirational material that I know of. Thanks for sharing!

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  10. Yoink! I've been on a kick of drafting "4-page campaign settings" recently, and I think this is itching to drive the next one.

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  11. I am working on something similar although I am sticking closer to actual geography than you seem to be. I have Anglo-Saxon kingdoms in what is now eastern Washington with irrigation agriculture along the Columbia and large wilderness areas in between with Nez Perce and others (how did horses get there? How did A-S kingdoms get there? not sure yet). I like that the geography is pretty much a solved problem.

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