“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.
