[S/lay] The Red Desert of the Mad Lord

[Eero Tuovinen]

(I've been playing S/lay w/ Me lately, inspired by Ron's prodding. The last episodes were In the Refugium and The Tulpa.)

I played S/lay w/ Me in online chat last week with Sami Koponen: we played two sessions of about 3 hours each on separate nights, which amounted to a single story. About half-speed compared to spoken play, which accords with my other experiences in chat roleplaying. In practice we wrote a Go each and worked on other stuff on the side, so the time was well spent; I found it a pretty relaxing exercise, interestingly cerebral and literary compared to spoken play.

Also, most significantly: because Sami has played the game a few times before, I had the opportunity to be "You" for a change. This was quite nice, as I haven't yet managed to arrange second sessions with either Tommi or Peitsa.

I'm only writing about this now because I wanted to wait for Sami to publish his account of our play, including the full transcript of the story we created. (It's reasonably good stuff literarily speaking - could be polished into a publishable short story in the spirit of the pulps easily enough.) The transcript is in Finnish, but I suppose one could parse it with translation tools if interested enough in seeing how the game runs word-for-word. (Don't get the impression that we don't know how to write if you do that, though - I vouch that we're both quite literate in Finnish, even if Google Translate isn't.)

As for the particulars, here's my hero:

I am myself. I am canny, brutal, experienced. I laugh at the gods. I delight in life. My foes meet death swiftly. I am a lordly knight, belowed by all, but with a mind of my own. My breastplate has innumerable dents, I cover it with an expensive coat. my hair is dirty blonde, but I cover it as well in humility.

And here's my mission (not to the mountains where air is clear and pure):

It was meant to be the last day of the war, but I got lost in the Mad Lord's last spell, and cannot find my way out. I believe that the only means of escape is to seek the Lord and slay him, ending this illusion.

Sami prepped the setting as "I". His vision was of a barren, dystopic desert of red sand; it was strongly implicated that this was the internal vision of the Mad Lord as to what the world should/would be, and apparently he did indeed believe himself to have already won his war.

The Monster Sami chose was the Mad Lord, a mysterious sorcerer in the midst of his dream. We fleshed him and his motivations out during play, discovering the causes of the war I referenced in my mission statement. Apparently this is about how the things went down in the "backstory": the Lord (he never got a name during the story) was one of group of mighty suitors to princess Nealla, the only daughter of the king. He was a strong-willed one, and however the wooing went down, he ended up escaping with the princess. This was interpreted by the old king and the rest of the Suitors as despicable rapine, and in the spirit of chivalric romanticism they rose in arms against the Lord. The "War of the Roses" (thus named for the distinction the Suitors applied upon their arms) brought upon the Lord by the "Council of Suitors" began conventionally, but apparently spiraled out of control as the Lord brought ever-mightier magics to successive battlefields. The Suitors answered as they might, not possessing significant magical power of their own, but preparing the sort of well-informed soldier-scholars that my character, Musa Legi, proved to be. I got the impression that by the end of the war, when we breached his final stronghold, the Mad Lord had worked his way down the ladder to entirely inhuman atrocities that made his vision of red sand and rust fully credible.

The Lover was of course Nealla, the Scion Princess. Sami kept tight wraps on it, but evidently Nealla had originally went with the Lord willingly, becoming his apprentice. She was a mysterious, ethereal and somewhat socially inept figure, or that's how the depiction struck me; Musa Legi spent about half of the story uncertain whether she was human at all, or rather some sick illusion of the Mad Lord's. It fit the story, but sure made it easy for Musa to make up his mind about her.

All in all, everything in this reminded me more than a little of Glen Cook's Black Company. I actually said as much to Sami after his first turn. Strange, considering Sami hasn't read the trilogy as far as I know :D

I was quite in favour of the backstory as it was implied and revealed in shards as play progressed. The psychology of the story was also interesting, as it was an exercise in me attempting to ease up and get more context out of Sami, while he in turn kept everything quite minimalistic, simple and one-dimensional. (We talked about the strategy and tactics of play afterwards, and I think Sami acknowledged that he should have been thinking in looser, less hurried terms.) This back-and-forth showed on multiple levels and in constant cycles: I would play Goes that left opportunity for quiet scenes and exposing e.g. the Lover, while Sami for the most part made Goes that drove the action on. The accumulating effect of our dynamic was that Musa Legi grew as a character in interesting ways: we found that he's a pretty cynical, practical sort of person, and as the story progressed it became more and more clear that his faith in this entire war of the roses business was flagging at best. He treated the princess impeccably, but proved ultimately to have much more faith in duty and hatred he harbored for the vile Lord than he ever had in romantic chivalry. In this way he failed the Suitors whom he served in a most fundamental manner, despite striking the finishing blow upon their foolish war.

The Struggle was mostly about Musa Legi walking implacably towards the red castle in the middle of the desert, attempting to reach it before heatstroke, thirst or microscopic iron dust in his lungs did him in, or the Mad Lord managed to convince him otherwise (the Lord had the habit of screaming in my skull as we made the journey). It is illustrative of Sami's mindset that while I was certain that he'd throw in a break scene of some sort at the castle (would just make sense at that point, as he hadn't hooked me on the princess yet and knew it), that never occurred; vile traps and the Mad Lord awaiting for Musa Legi in a broken tower, that was my lot to be. Fortunately I'm a pro roleplayer, so I beat Sami in the dicing department handily. The final numbers were 6, 6, 6, 4, 2 for me and 4, 1, 1, 1, 2 for the Mad Lord.

In the Climax Musa Legi discovered that the Mad Lord verily thought that he had already won the war, and that the world was finally right. It was pretty distracting for him, being as how he sort of remembered the man the Lord had been before the war - he wasn't the sort that would desire death and utter destruction for his belowed, and their shared world. He was truly mad, that has to be said for truth in advertising.

As it went down, Musa Legi put the Mad Lord down like a dog, which also broke the enchantment of his final spell, causing reality to reassert itself. In addition to success in my goal of escape, I opted for no serious injury and the death of the Mad Lord, upon whom Musa Legi felt a much deeper connection than the poor princess. Accordingly, when the Mad Lord's imaginary castle crumbled, she slipped from the dutiful Musa's grasp and disappeared among the massive stonefall (coincidentally this was what happened to bhikkhunī Thubten in "The Tulpa" as well). Musa himself leaped clear of the falling tower, and all but choked on the red dust rising in billows. When he came back to his senses, Musa found himself back among his comrades, at the petering battle of Brass Gate; his sergeant told him that the Mad Lord had evidently failed in his last spell, despite apparently sacrificing the Princess Scion herself upon his vile altar.

The choice of abandoning the princess might seem callous, but Musa did attempt to save her, if maybe not with any great passion or risk to himself. There was no romantic story to it from his viewpoint, despite that Nealla was clearly still wrapped in romantic notions of rescuing knights; at the end Musa was no longer fooled by the romatic ideal the Suitors insisted upon, and saw her as just another human being wrapped into the madness. Politically extremely foolish, of course, to not die alongside her; now that the realm is irrevocably transformed by a long and total war, the Suitors would become the rulers of whatever was left; Musa could never reveal what had happened, not if he did not want to go against the sainted image of Nealla that would come to be fostered as an unifying idea in a land divided between the remaining Suitors.

Here's the revisions I made to Musa's character after the story:

I am myself. I am canny, brutal, experienced. I laugh at the gods. I delight in life. My foes meet death swiftly. I am a cynical captain, tested by war, but mulish, infinitely stubborn.

After I slew the Mad Lord I hear his voice in my head, like an old friend's. I am respected as one of the great champions of the War of the Roses, but they are also weirded by me, and I know not whether it's me or the Lord that they find erratic.

My breastplate is a light cavalry affair carried under a cloak proof against weather. I tie my blond hair back and wear a wide-rimmed hat so as to shade my eyes.

All in all, clearly the most successful hero we've had so far in this series. It evidently pays to train dicing skills, although I had no idea that training would transfer to online dice rooms as well :D

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Eero,

I hope you'll continue to play, back-and-forth, with at least one of these games. S/Lay w/Me is designed for extended play and has several properties that don't appear until both heroes have been through an adventure or two. You won't see these properties by playing initial sessions with multiple people.

Best, Ron

[Eero Tuovinen]

That's the plan, and I don't have any more first sessions in the pipe-line, either. They've all indicated interest in doing more S/lay, so chances are that once I get back to Helsinki we'll see more.