Several years ago before Covid-19 pandemic and lockdown of 2019; so here we are talking about more than five years ago but less than ten, perhaps it was ten years ago, time seems to fly faster and faster the more of it I soak up; two RolePlaying Games were released commercially, both of which I fell in love with. But to understand this, first we have to sidestep temporarily into a slightly different yet related tale of events...
Sorcerers of Ur-Turuk
Graham Bottley, who heroically did a kickstarter to put Marc Gasgoine's Advanced Fighting Fantasy gamebooks (accredited to Ian Livingstone and Steve Jackson who along with John Peake founded The Games Workshop later of Warhammer fame, in Nottingham in 1975) back into print for another generation, published by Arion Games.
A game system and world setting I love, having grown up on it and having been heavily involved with my evil mates Facebook AFF group 'Chalice of Storms' more than ten years ago. An infamous campaign which ran for three years very publicly before he and his gelfing disappeared into darkest Europe to avoid the curse of Brexit which has financially ruined the UK. I still have all the original editions along with quite a few of the Fighting Fantasy gamebooks which I occasionally play through with my son, me doing the reading and him making the decisions.
Graham Bottley produced Sorcerers of Ur-Turuk and more recently the City Guide to Ur-Turuk, illustrated with watercolours reminiscent of those produced by 19th century explorers of Ancient and (19th century) Egypt. Initially the setting reminded me of a truly wonderful 1985 boxed roleplaying game consisting of a map of the City of Gate and a lot of curious picture-and-question cards, Everway, published back when Wizards of the Coast were good, before they went woke and screwed Dungeons&Dragons completely and for all eternity.
The world of Ur-Turuk is largely a desert wilderness environment inhabited by 'lions, gazelle, giant lizards, aurochs and sword-horned oryx'. The city is populated by 'slaves and gladiators, thieves and murderers, nobles and priests'. It reminded me immediately of Conan (specifically Arnie the Barbarian movie and Conan Exiles video game) and elements of John Normans Gorean novels.
Ur-Turuk is a city where a Wizard and their retinue, a small outfit all played by the same Player, join forces with others of the same, played by a different player, whose Wizard knows an entirely different type of magic, to go into the desert to raid ancient temples left behind by the extinct and missing ancient Gods, to discover trinkets imbued with Magic so the Wizards can use them to continue to develop their studies into practical uses of their own forms of magic.
In some ways Sorcerers of Ur-Turuk is like Ars Magica by White Wolf Publishing (before they fired Mark Rein-Hagen and flooded the market with too much milking of the cash cow), with simplified (thank fuck) rules and placed in a different world setting inspired to an extent by romanticised Babylon, Assyria, Egypt, and especially Iraq of the ancient past.
This is why it is perhaps better for one GamesMaster plus between one to three Players, than for a larger group of six plus. Not only because it makes the Sorcerers and their magic more important but also because each Player represents half a dozen characters which is a lot to keep track of. Having said this, to populate a city with every living Sorcerer and their retinue involving a larger playing group could be a lot of fun as far as world-building an epic series of movies is concerned. There is always the option all the Players take a character each from one Sorcerers retinue and be happy with that. It would be more like 'normal roleplaying groups' to do it that way.
Unlike the thousand ISBN franchise of World of Darkness Mega-Munchkinism, Sorcerers of Ur-Turuk is ripe for expansion and needs it. Learning a complete new rules system and enjoying that Ur-Turuk city itself changes a lot every generation simply because "when a Sorcerer dies, so too do all their magics die with them" plugs us directly into the Arabian Nights atmosphere in feeling and theme. In practise it is a lot of work to go to given that 'you survive the arduous journey through the desert wastelands to a not previously raided temple'... did I mention this is Tomb Raider the Lara Croft video game and Indian Jones and probably some HP Lovecraft short stories with mythical Bronze Age protagonists? ...'only to discover there is not much content in the rule book outlining exactly what the ancient gods citadels were like to explore or what is to be found there'. There is reference to a lot of ancient art depicting the Gods eating of Humans who they grew like animals in slave pens for this purpose.
Unfortunately the lack of deep development is one of two minor criticisms I have of Sorcerers of Ur-Turuk, perhaps unfair given how many other inspirational sources exist to personalise the World and how important the Sorcerer characters individuality has upon this. That is the direction to go in to do the game justice. It is suppose to be simple yet highly adaptable. It gains a boon in that it is not highly expensive to get into this, requiring more core books than I have shelf space for.
The only other criticism I have is how difficult it is to transpose the vibe of Ur-Turuk into the Players imagination unless they also read the rulebook cover to cover to 'get it'. Developing a way to do that is challenging for even an experienced GamesMaster. It is the bulk of the work involved in training Players up to enjoy it both in designing their Wizards base and in playing City based scenario so they can get a feel for the place, the culture, the scents, which are invoked by reading the book and aspiring to bring this vision to life.
I designed a bunch of Sorcerers and their retinues and bases, their personalities and backstories. It took a week. Then got distracted by the other things in life and regrettably had to put the whole thing on the shelf, for a decade. It deserves dusting off. It deserves a very dedicated play group who love it and want to put the time needed into collaborating to bring it to life. To do it justice, Ur-Turuk will take at least six months of your own and your friends life, even for a basic game (a round-trip tomb-raid). Thankfully even a basic game of Ur-Turuk is exceptionally exciting and rich with storytelling potential and flavour. The more ground work you put in, the better.
It makes you want to prepare Karkade (Hibiscus tea) and eat spicy, aromatic food and baklawa with your fingers while listening to Duduk music and respecting belly dancing for raising kundalini flow as a highly skilled art form studied by the gems of an otherwise dry and desolate culture such as the wilderness of modern civilisation happens to be for the most part for most people. And you know what? You should.
故事 高骚 市
JadePunk: Tales from Kausao City
In ten years I still have not yet properly learned to spell Kausao without having to look it up.
It doesn't matter.
Tonight I will look it up a long way.
故事 Story
高骚 Gao Sao
市 City
There is a hidden language here.
故 old, past
事 thing, matter
高 tall, high
骚 coquettish, flirtatious, playful sexual attraction, disturbance, chaos
市 city
So then...
JadePunk, Tales of Kausao City is
A world building on an attractive, sleazy past.
JadePunk, city of old matters of highly seductive disruption.
JadePunk, city of old things grown high and extravagant.
Jade relates to nobility and wealth, a protector of generations;
while feeling Jaded is weary bored and restless.
Punk is a derogatory term for an unimportant degenerate, young troublemaker
opposition to authority expressed through outlandish and criminal behaviour.
This secret revealed instructs how to GamesMaster JadePunk, how to handle the City politic. It is all about who fancies who, who fancied who a generation ago and what was done about that. Who had secret affairs with who. What are the secret relations between the elder generation who are now the institution and infrastructure we are growing up in? Does it matter that they are killing each other What of the generation before that? Does it matter now that many of them are dead of old age?
Everyone has eyes on the Jade.
KauSao City is situated on the biggest Jade deposit the world knows, the source of its wealth.
Who are the Houses and Institutions running the show?
How did they get to be running the show?
Digging up Jade is digging up the secret past. One is symbolised in the other. The cunning GamesMaster thinks about his own family background and those around to make right wrongs and air graces to the graceful heirs. I dared not delve into this mystery before finding the structure to superimpose what I know upon the Society and Underground of Kausao City. But dare I do it?
JadePunk is Film Noir Gangsters of the 1840s - 1940s. Except this industrial revolution is not of steam, steel and oil; it is Jade and the mystical supernatural powers it brings to some people. It is a Wild Western blended with Martial Arts in Wuxia fashion. It is a turn-of-the-century technological development where the next generation are about to skyrocket in directions which the previous generations had not and could not have anticipated. Each to their own world, leave the new ways for the young and the old ways to die out in forgotten memory. Best leave it that way, perhaps. Except for here is a way to offload, teach and train so much which is worthy of being shared and remembered. Here is a City, a place where overlaps overlap until something new and unexpected emerges as if nature had planned it that way all along. We were too caught up in our own drama to anticipate.
JadePunk is about the families then. Family as in blood and family as in syndicates. The youths drive for recognition, the infamous elders discretion and desire for obsolescence lest the crimes of their own youths and dubious aspects of their private adult lives catch up with and expose them.
I was having difficulty discovering direction in a game world which felt somehow deeply personal but simultaneously aloof and indifferent. Writing this blog has given direction. Kausao is huge so its easy for those pulling the strings to have their own strings cut and for no-one to notice, despite how fast things are changing due to the uses to which Jade is being put these days. The game system would benefit from establishing two or three stages of its evolution, the old world and the new world, those to whom Jade was a rare treasure and a minority of its mystical abilities explored slowly over generations then suddenly, abundance and chaos.
JadePunk reminds me of 1st edition Shadowrun. The players consisting of an underground crew overpowered in their abilities but undermined and overwhelmed by the State and older generation of criminals alike. Characters exist in the shadow where the boundaries blur, only moral righteousness or its lack or the turmoil clash of decisions between affect every individual, ethics compete with the oh-so-human need and greedy aspiration to better oneself through fame and wealth, power, to establish oneself into the infrastructure of a culture whose rules quickly change but have always stayed the same. The eternal game played in the speakeasy, a drinking, gambling and whoring den where the life happens because we love to feel alive, knowing how irrelevant we truly are. Except to that sleazy cloaked figure. That one is willing to pay a lot of money to whoever can help him/her hit the mark, no questions asked.
Its ten years since I read and fell in love with JadePunk: Tales of Kausao City. Writing this I'm falling in love with it all over again. It has a much deeper exotic meaning now than ever it did. Perhaps that's what I felt about it long ago. Its potential for some deep and meaningful, light hearted fun.
