Alien Weirdness In X2 Castle Amber By Tom Moldvay As Old School Campaign Set Up

Its Saturday six thirty A.M. in the morning, we've come through a rather nasty Nor Easter here in Connecticut & most of New England. The wife is quietly sleeping & we've had a relatively good time of it compared to some folks in New England. I busted out the Clark Ashton Smith again this time his "Captain Volmar" sequence of novels offers a stark contrast to 'the devil may' care attitude of Edgar Rice Burroughs's characters  that's been crossing my literary palette as of late. 
""Marooned in Andromeda", the first entry in his "Captain Volmar" sequence, was the cover story in the October 1930 issue of Wonder Stories. illustrated by Frank R. Paul" 

 In my mind the "Captain Volmar" sequence of novels by CAS take place in the same universe as his Mars stories on a post Colonial Mars with its fading grandeur & strange alien Martians quietly watching the humans colonists arriving. They secretly know that their planet wide god will be waking up in the eons to come.
Vulthoom is a part of the greater Great Old One seen in both Dweller in the Gulf, The (1933) &  Seedling of Mars or The Planet Entity.  All of CAS's Martian sequence slot into his  "Captain Volmar" stories nicely giving a deadly far future timeline & one that I've coupled with events in my 'Old Earth' campaign sequence.
The commercial metropolis of Mars - Igarth, with its 'old quarter' has in my mind stood in the long shadow of Edgar Rice Burroughs Helium. CAS's Mars material was more compelling because it brought a back alley alieness to the Martian landscape.

• Dweller in the Gulf, The (1933)
• Mnemoka (1955) Fragment
• Vaults of Yoh-Vombis, The (1931)
• Vulthoom (1935)
• Seedling of Mars or The Planet Entity (1931)
  (An alternative background to the proceeding 4 stories]

At first this doesn't seem likely that the events of the "Captain Volmar" or the Mars cycles would have anything to do with a Dungeons & Dragons style game. But this Clark Ashton Smith given the length & breath of the man's imagination its not hard to connect the puzzle pieces here. Puzzle pieces that could connect back into some of my other ideas. Imagine if you will that your adventurers wander into Tom Moldvay's Clark Ashton Smith's love letter adventure X2: Castle Amber (Chateau d' Amberville) during the Thirty Years War.
"Trapped in the mysterious Castle Amber, you find yourselves cut off form the world you know. The castle is fraught with peril. Members of the strange Amber family, some insane, some merely deadly, lurk around every corner. Somewhere in the castle is the key to your escape, but can you survive long enough to find it? "

Not only does the party find itself at the mercy of the forces of the Amber clan but its also possible that they might have their backs against the events of the Bohemian Revolt.

"Without heirs, Emperor Matthias sought to assure an orderly transition during his lifetime by having his dynastic heir (the fiercely Catholic Ferdinand of Styria, later Ferdinand II, Holy Roman Emperor) elected to the separate royal thrones of Bohemia and Hungary.^[30] Some of the Protestant leaders of Bohemia feared they would be losing the religious rights granted to them by Emperor Rudolf II in his Letter of Majesty (1609). They preferred the Protestant Frederick V, elector of the Palatinate (successor of Frederick IV, the creator of the Protestant Union).^[31] However, other Protestants supported the stance taken by the Catholics,^[32] and in 1617, Ferdinand was duly elected by the Bohemian Estates to become the crown prince, and automatically upon the death of Matthias, the next king of Bohemia."



We know that Stephen Amber was dabbling in forbidden magicks but perhaps he had stumbled upon an ancient Elven gateway deep within the catacombs of Château d'Amberville. Could some of the sources of his forbidden magicks in fact be the Great Old One Vulthoom?The Averoigne stories of Clark Ashton Smith use many traditional mythological elements in twisted & Weird Tales ways. Could the Fey creatures seen  throughout X2: Castle Amber (Chateau d' Amberville) actually be merely the Fairyland root extensions of the forbidden plant god?
I've used both Dark Albion & Cults of Chaos's OSR tool kits to set up & flesh out much of the backgrounds of the various cults & what not within my own home games. Those venturing into Chateau d' Amberville are not simply risking the encounters in the adventure location but the forces of both the Protestant & Catholic churches. Anyone wandering into Chateau d' Amberville is risking the time lost curse of the place & perhaps its forbidden weirdness just outside its walls.

X2: Castle Amber (Chateau d' Amberville) is a fairly timeless module & gives the DM a solid module to customize to their own home campaigns. The Chateau d' Amberville is steeped deeply in the occult & dangerous timelessness of the chaotic nature of Fairyland already. Blood thirst pagan cults outside its walls & dangerous fairies within its woods make
X2: Castle Amber (Chateau d' Amberville) highly adaptive. The fact that the module is connected with Clark Ashton Smith is a bonus.



The Edgar Allen Poe events of the module could trap a wide variety of time lost travelers & adventurers within its mad Fairyland location making X2 an adventure campaign point. This could move PC's from the Lion & Dragon retroclone game over into the events of Dark Albion with the forces of Fairy making a chess game of the player's PC's.


We'll get into the hows & why's of Fairyland's alien chaos cult in our next blog entry!

"The feet of animals, if not of men, had continued the path they were following, and had made an easy way into the wood of fabulous evil. The drooping boughs enfolded them with arms of soft verdure, and seemed to draw them in; and shafts of yellow sunshine rifted the high trees, to aureole the lovely secret lilies that bloomed about the darkly writhing coils of enormous roots. The trees were twisted and knotted, were heavy with centurial incrustations of bark, were humped and misshapen with the growth of unremembered years; but there was an air of antique wisdom about them, together with a tranquil friendliness. Adele exclaimed with delight; and neither she nor Olivier was aware of anything sinister or doubtful in the unison of exquisite beauty and gnarled quaintness which the old forest offered to them." Satyr, The (1931)

OSR PC Workshop Or Pulling in OSR Sources To Help Create PC's in Your Old School Campaigns

 Today was a character workshop with one of my players, he had some ideas for a half Elven PC. But I had some ideas already in play in my current OSR campaign. Here's where events for the PC's took a bit of a different twist in development.

 

 I had a long talk with one of my players about porting over the Cyrmic race from Dark Albion instead of the usual half Elf PC race. Cyrmic are the descendants of human slaves who worked for the Elves in ancient times in Europe in Dark Albion.  

I've already had different elements & hints bubbling up across the board when it comes to the identities of  Elven kings. There are indications in some ends of Arthurian literature & mythology that he might have been a Merovingian king & sorcerer. In my own games he sold his soul for immortality & gained godhood merging with the previous king of the fairies of which there are many. His connection to  connects him with the Norse of AS&SH second edition


The Reconciliation of Titania and Oberon by Joseph Noel Paton



"Oberon's status as king of the fairies comes from the character of Alberich (from Old High German alb- "elf" and -rîh-, "ruler", "king"), a sorcerer in the legendary history^[which?] of the Merovingian dynasty. In the legend, he is the otherworldly "brother" of Merowech, whose name is the eponym of the Merovingians but whose actual existence is unproven. Alberich wins for his eldest son, Walbert, the hand of a princess of Constantinople.^{[citation needed]} In the Nibelungenlied, a Burgundian poem written around the turn of the 13th century, Alberich guards the treasure of the Nibelungen, but is overcome by Siegfried." There is also a huge Arthurian & French connection with the character of  Oberon. 
"The name Oberon is first attested to in the early 13th century chanson de geste entitled Les Prouesses et faitz du noble Huon de Bordeaux, wherein it refers to an elven man of the forest encountered by the eponymous hero. Huon, son of Seguin count of Bordeaux, passed through the forest inhabited by Oberon. He was warned by a hermit not to speak to Oberon, but his courtesy had him answer Oberon's greetings, and so gain his aid in his quest. Huon had killed Charlot, the Emperor's son, in self-defense, and so he must visit the court of the amir of Babylon and perform various feats to win a pardon. He succeeds only with Oberon's aid.
This elf is dwarfish in height, though very handsome. He explains that, at his christening, an offended fairy cursed him to dwarfish height (an example of the wicked fairy godmother folklore motif), but relented and gave him great beauty as compensation. Alberich features as a dwarf in the Nibelungen; the dwarfish height was thus explained.^[2]
The real Seguin was Count of Bordeaux under Louis the Pious in 839, and died fighting against the Normans in 845. Charles l'Enfant, a son of Charles the Bald, died in 866 of wounds inflicted by a certain Aubouin in the circumstances of an ambush similar to the Charlot of the story. Thus, Oberon appears in a 13th-century French courtly fantasy that is based on a shred of 9th century fact. He is given some Celtic trappings, such as a magical cup (similar to the Holy Grail) that is ever full for the virtuous. "The magic cup supplied their evening meal; for such was its virtue that it afforded not only wine, but more solid fare when desired", according to Thomas Bulfinch. In this story, he is said to be the child of Morgan le Fay and Julius Caesar.
A manuscript of the romance in the city of Turin contains a prologue to the story of Huon de Bordeaux in the shape of a separate romance of Auberon and four sequels, and there are later French versions, as well."

So what your looking at is a royal NPC with deep connections across history whose been manipulating events across worlds for centuries. He's been putting his own bastard children into key points in human history & across worlds.

Illustration of Oberon enchanting Titania by W. Heath Robinson, 1914

Here's one of the the things that helps keeps  Dark Albion in OSR play; " 80% of the book is system neutral, so can be used with most role-playing games. " This means that a good percentage of the setting book is usable with other systems especially games such as Astonishing Swordsmen & Sorcerers of Hyperborea second edition.


Over the course of the last couple of years here & there I've indicated the presence of weird ruins & other dangerous adventure locations all belonging to the Elves of the ancient empires. We did a lot of cross comparing of the PC material in Dark Albion with existing OSR retroclone systems such as Swords & Wizardry & Labyrinth Lord to see what's going to fit our PC's needs. Bardic material in the setting was especially enlightening as to how to fit the PC class  into an existing campaign. For example we talked at length about how the PC might have had interaction with the Midderlands campaign setting.

Since the expanded setting's kickstarter ends in a few days, I figured now was a good time to get a bit of the green tainted Gloomunion laden action.
"The Midderlands setting gets bigger, expanding out into Havenland (the country that The Midderlands is set in) and its bordering lands, in a dark, twisted, and viridian version of the British Isles." This U.K. setting ticks all of the boxes of  OSR weirdness that I'm looking for and it appeals to the Dark Albion setting with abandon. So now its a matter of taking full advantage of the cracks in the Midderlands to marry it up with the back waters locations of Albion.



Given the strong & deep connections between Merlin from the Arthurian literature & mythology with Wales. There is no doubt in my mind that there is more then a bit of Elven blood mixed strongly with Merlin's demonic parentage that needs to be exploited far more then humanity suggests. Merlin is a very useful NPC that can help to explain more of the gaps in the Albion setting.



So now two PC's in my home game are from Dark Albion, it makes for a different & somewhat interesting wrinkle. I'll have to let folks know as this second leg of the campaign develops. There are lots of variations of system to go over yet even while the setting itself sets some of the tone. I will keep everyone abreast as to how things within the game continue to develop.