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[bryant]

I went on a mini RPG binge this weekend, and wound up with quite a bit of good stuff, but the gem of the lot was Charnel Gods, by Scott Knipe. It's a PDF supplement for Sorcerer, and it's so good it prompted me to buy that game, but it stands perfectly well on its own; at five bucks, there's no excuse not to buy it if you've got any interest in -- but I'm getting ahead of myself and reaching for the conclusion already. Tsk.

So what is it? It's an innovative and original take on the pulp fantasy genre. By pulp fantasy, I mean stories like Conan and Karl Edward Wagner's Kane books, and Scorpion King on the lighter end of the genre. Charnel Gods is not light; it's a grim world in which the heros bear the blasphemous Fell Weapons and battle the Nameless Ones, because the Old Gods are dead and can no longer fight. Magic is almost non-existent, with the exception of the Fell Weapons. The battleground -- the world itself -- is formed from the corpses of the gods, which are the only barrier between humanity and oblivion.

Not light at all.

The game is designed to be episodic. The heros are more fated than any White Wolf character, but the rules include a mechanism for inheritance; after each epoch ends, and each epoch will end, another will form atop the corpses of the gods and new heros will take up the Fell Weapons. This structure permits wide variation of genre inside the basic theme, and ameliorates feelings of futility, which is very elegant. Now that I've read it, it's only natural that opening up the possibilities for the campaign also relieves the potential depression inherent in the setting, but I wouldn't have thought of it on my own. Pay special attention to the maps of the sample epochs, by the by.

The balance of lost humanity (unavoidable for a bearer of a Fell Weapon) and impending doom of the epoch is masterful. The two downward trends are wholly separate and unrelated, except insofar as the Fell Weapons were created to battle that doom, which provides for excellent contrast. There are certain ambiguities about the setting which I won't spoil, but which heighten that contrast. There's a bit of the cliche in the ultimate weapons created to battle evil which corrupt the wielders, but I think that's muted by the fact that the weapons weren't created for humans. It doesn't fly as a parable for nuclear weapons, for example.

That sort of elegance permeates the book. Another example: we all know players are gonna read the rulebook. So in Charnel Gods, knowledge of the Fell Weapons and the Old Gods and the rests is one of the things that separates heros (I should, perhaps, be saying "protagonists") from the rank and file. Another: in Sorcerer, sorcerers can sense the Humanity level of other sorcerers. So in Charnel Gods, there's a really good reason why the heros would want to do this. The economical synergy between rules and setting is very impressive.

As I mentioned, the game's intended for use with Sorcerer. I think you could use it as a standalone, with whatever ruleset your heart desires. This may be blaspemy, but you could even pound D20 into working -- perhaps by using something like the rules in Mutants and Masterminds. I don't think stock D20 would work; since Charnel Gods is a low magic world, most of the D20 balancing methods would be absent. Something like Over the Edge would be great. You'd just need to include some sort of Humanity mechanism, since that's essential to the setting.

It's five bucks. The layout and art are really nice. I'd have paid $15 bucks for it and not felt ripped off. Go buy it.

Comments

[robotnik.livejournal.com]

Yes!
I've been wondering about Charnel Gods (cf my post about being sucked back in to meat-headed testosterone-fuelled genres). I've picked up the two Sorceror supplements (S&Sword and The S's Soul), and they're both great reads even without owning the Sorceror rules.

The Fell Weapons. Just has such a great ring to it. "Ready the Fell Weapons." "I loose the Fell Weapon." It's almost hard to say without adopting a macho sword & sorcery voice.

Conan, what is best in life?

[mgrasso.livejournal.com]

You know, I don't think there's been a day in my life where I have not wanted to crush the enemy, see them driven before me, and hear the lamentations of the women.

[robotnik.livejournal.com]

Hee hee hee. A friend of mine had that clip as his answering machine message for a long time. (Amazingly, he still got dates.)

[jeregenest.livejournal.com]

I found Sword and Sorcery intensely disappointing and it solidified my opinion that pdf games weren't worth my time.

Just being contrarian here.

[bryant]

You contrarian bastard! And I haven't even met you...

I am very much looking forward to the day when CafePress obsoletes all these dinky little PDFs. In the interim, I print them out double-sided and use Circa rings from Levenger to bind 'em. I don't much fancy PDFs, nope.

Charnel Gods stands fairly well independent of Sorcerer. I've read the latter, but don't own it; although Charnel Gods did convince me to buy the base game I'd recommend it as a generic supplement.

But PDFs do suck.

[bryant]

I might wind up having to run this. It's just too cool, and I'm feeling pretty confident about my ad lib ability these days.

Oh, so I don't forget as I fall asleep:

Old Man of the Mountain, LA Kings, Sacramento Kings, Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Park. Jerry Lawler, the /other/ King of Memphis, who was overthrown for love of a woman on March 3rd, 2001, but returned from the dead nine months later. And there are an interesting number of military facilities at Kings This and Kings That.

Also, of course, Marlin is -- dare I say it? -- a Queen.

More on this in the recap letter. Just wanted to get some of it down before I crash.

[robotnik.livejournal.com]

I might wind up having to run this. It's just too cool, and I'm feeling pretty confident about my ad lib ability these days.

Keep me posted. It might scratch my Heavy Metal gaming urge (the music genre and the magazine) without me having to run it myself. You could, as you say, port it to some other system, but I'd be curious to give Sorceror itself a whirl.

Jerry Lawler, the /other/ King of Memphis, who was overthrown for love of a woman on March 3rd, 2001, but returned from the dead nine months later.

I should keep a list of all the things I wanted to work into the game but couldn't. Wrestling, while in Memphis, was one of them. I'm not enough of an aficionado to have gotten it right (didn't know about Lawler, for instance), but didn't Memphis use to be sort of a mecca of old-timey wrestling? And nowadays, don't they have WWE events and such in the Memphis Pyramid? [Memphis Pyramid? occult symbolism much?]

[bryant]

Memphis was in fact one of the strongest territories in the days before Vince McMahon stamped out the territory system. Jerry Lawler had a very legitimate claim on the title "King," too; he was the center of the territory, both wrestling and writing the shows. You really can't overestimate his popularity. Memphis was the very last territory where television stations paid the wrestling promotions to air shows, instead of the other way around.

Quite a few of the stars of the 90s and today came out of Memphis, too. Lawler himself, of course; the Rock, Jeff Jarrett, Randy Savage, the Rock and Roll Express, Kamala the Giant, and so on.

Unsurprisingly, the Memphis style was pretty influential. Lawler really pushed the envelope in terms of violence and bloodshed. I believe the first match in which someone went through a table was down in Memphis. It is perhaps notable that the decline of Memphis corresponded with the rise of Paul Heyman's bloody and brutal ECW promotion, in Phillie... and Paul Heyman was Lawler's replacement as WWE color commentator during the nine months Lawler was away.

Somewhere in the back of my mind I have the outline of a small time indie promotion that's run by an Eastern Cryptomancer; after all, wrestling is all about lies. Wrestlers blade in the ring, so there's an epideromancer; they take risks, so there're a couple of entropomancers; and so on. The ring itself has been used as the stage for more magickal acts than any other object in the United States. Someday someone outside the promotion is going to figure this out...