OSR Commentary On The Sorcerers of Pan Tang For The Stormbringer rpg

 

"Pan Tang is a grim island of lurking evil. Wild jungles to the north resound to the roar of a thousand tigers - the animal sacred to Chardhros the Reaper. The Plain of Glass divides the island, a shining wasteland of ancient volcanic catastrophe The farmland to the south is a living hell to the slaves who worl the great plantations."

"The capital of Pan Tang is Hwamgaarl, the City of Screaming Statues. Tigers walk among men and feed when they please Sorcerers study dark knowledge and summon awesome horrors from other planes to do their bidding. The citizens of Hwamgaarl take their pleasure in the Gardens of Pain, gather their knowledge at the University of Lucid Perversity, and propitiate the Lords of Chaos at the Palace-Temple of the Theocrat."

"Jagreen Lern is the Theocrat of Pan Tang, presiding over this nightmare land. A new age is coming, and his armies are ready. Other nations of the Young Kingdoms already plot against Melnibone, and soon those plots bring war. Pan Tang hovers, vulture-like, awaiting the results of the first violent clash of Young Kingdom armies against the remaining might of Melnibone. Though Melnibone has ruled the world for 10,00( years, in only a small fraction of that time will it be destroyed".

  Sorcerers of Pan Tang for the Stormbringer rpg came out in 1991. Sorcerers of Pan Tang made me a 'fan' of the Pan Tangians and this supplement details the island of Pan Tang. According to the Sorcerers of Pan Tang wiki entry;"Shannon Appelcline noted how after the fourth edition of Stormbringer was published, "the best books to date for the line were produced first by Keith Herber, then by Mark Morrison. They consisted of thick, well-written books of background, such as Sorcerers of Pan Tang (1991) and colourful adventures, such as Rogue Mistress (1991)." This book delivers the Pan Tang island in colourful and dangerous detail. This supplement fits right into the Games Workshop 1991 edition of the  Stormbringer Rpg. Games Workshop also did Eternal Champion line of figures. 

Part of the Eternal Champion line of figures by Games Workshop that appealed to me was Pan Tangian army. They were my go to & still are if I can get my figures out of store 'go to' chaos army. There was something very oddly satisfying about playing & fielding the bad guys. 

  Sorcerers of Pan Tang supplement hits all of the Pan Tangian high points with thier Pan Tangian culture, thier twisted society, adventures & this fits the Stormbringer rpg  so well. I'm not the only one thinks this according to the wiki entry; "Matthew Gabbert reviewed Sorcerers of Pan Tang in White Wolf #31 (May/June, 1992), rating it a 5 out of 5 and stated that "Sorcerers of Pan Tang is well-organized and well-illustrated (thankfully, some of the more graphic descriptions of Pan Tangian recreation are left to the reader's imagination). It successfully presents an atmospheric descrption of Pan Tang and I strongly recommend it for any Stormbringer campaign."" The Pan Tangians could and did appear almost anywhere within the Million Spheres. There were stats for the Pan Tangians within various original Dungeons & Dragons games from Kuntz & Ward's Gods, Demigods, & Heroes. We used the Sorcerers of Pan Tang for original Dungeons & Dragons. 

 Within Stormbringer we crossed  the Theocrat Jagreen Lern having raided a Pan Tangian trade ship. This brought us to the Theocrat's attention and we had to flee the plane just to live to adventure another day. 

Balo The Jester of The Chaos Lords & 'The Mad Cap Laughs' For The Stormbringer Rpg By Matt Williams White Dwarf 095 UK

  Let's talk about Stormbringer rpg  or more specfically Games Workshop's third edition of the Stormbringer Rpg. This is & has been my preferred edition of the Stormbringer rpg & everything begins with White Dwarf 095 UK. There are so many reasons why this is such a great issue of White Dwarf, let's see there's the almost but not quite Warhammer role play & Warhammer Fantasy wargame influences. And then there's the Stormbringer Rpg adventure beginning. 

 That's where 'THE MADCAP LAUGHS'  on page 59 By Matt Williams begins. This  adventure of  mad schemes  are  revealed. Here's where the background to a new Stormbringer adventure & mini campaign began for me as a player. My Uncle Jack ran us through this adventure back in '87 & it was a bad ass adventure back then. The whole thing concerns Balo The Jester of The Chaos Lords & who is Balo?! Well according to the Moorcock's Multiverse Wiki;"Balo the Jester is the Court Jester to the Lords of Chaos. He is of demigod status and not a true Chaos Lord, and is the only god able to move between the Realms of Law and Chaos at will. He entertains the Chaos Lords, his masters, with humorous riddles and satires that serve to explain the nature of the Cosmic Balance. Balo juggles enigmas like baubles, laughs at what Chaos holds dear, and takes seriously that which they mock. However, not even the Lords of the Higher Worlds understand his true motives.^[1]

Balo made a distasteful joke that offended the Chaos Lords so he fled from them to Elric's World where he attempted to transform the physical world into a Realm of Paradox under his rule. Elric confronted Balo inside the jester's Singing Citadel and summoned Arioch to take Balo back to the Realm of Chaos. There the mischievous godling was punished for his foolish ambition that contradicted the Chaos Lords' own plans for Earth.^[1]"

Having played through this adventure series I always thought Balo always looked like demented jester from Werner van den Valckert 'Fool With A Smaller Fool' art piece. The first article in the 'THE MADCAP LAUGHS' series added in the Stormbringer rpg airships of Law. Freaking airships ages before Mystara's Voyage of the Princess Ark. We get a short & sweet background on this adventure, Balo's motives, the poor PC's are going to facedown some horrid odds. Personally the on going theory about the Chaos Jester from my encounters as a player with the demigod is that he's a left over god from the previous universe's gods in the Young Kingdom. We get hints of this in Michael Moorcock's Weird of the White Wolf. 

This wasn't the first time our group faced down Balo though. In Different Worlds issue #31 'The Bastions of Balo' we faced down the machinations of the bastard Chaos Jester in one of his dungeons. My PC was slaughtered quite literally by a chaos succubus & drank dry. He died happy but it was a nasty turn. Since then Balo has been on my hit parade for Chaos. 

Balo doesn't fit the normal mold of a Chaos Lord because he mocks both chaos & humanity in equal turns. His issues with humanity dive deep into the final narrative Elric's Young Kingdom. Balo's mockery is a both a laughter & a plea for the cosmic joke of the Lords of Chaos. We would see this play out as more & more of the mythology of the Young Kingdoms & the Eternal Champion come to light in the later books. Not only did my PC's die in 'The Mad Cap Laughs' but the fact that the adventure's name was taken from Syd Barrett's 69 debut album is both ironic & vicious by their very nature. 

Why do I say this? Because you've gotta understand the issues surrounding Pink Floyd & Syd Barrett; "In the second half of 1967 and through to early 1968, when still part of Pink Floyd, Barrett's behaviour became increasingly erratic and unpredictable.^[4] Many report having seen him on stage with the group during this period, strumming on one chord through an entire concert or not playing at all.^[5] In August 1967, Pink Floyd were forced to cancel their appearance at the prestigious National Jazz and Blues Festival, informing the music press that Barrett was suffering from nervous exhaustion. Band manager Peter Jenner and bassist Roger Waters arranged for Barrett to see a psychiatrist (an appointment he failed to attend), while a stay on the Spanish island of Formentera with Sam Hutt, a doctor well established in the underground music scene, led to no visible improvement in Barrett's behaviour. A few dates in September were followed by the band's first tour of the United States.^[6] At this point, Barrett's condition grew steadily worse.^[7] At a show at The Fillmore in San Francisco, during a performance of "Interstellar Overdrive", Barrett slowly detuned his guitar; the audience seemed to enjoy such antics, unaware of the rest of the band's consternation. Sometime in October, Jenner transferred tapes of "In the Beechwoods", two takes of "Vegetable Man", and a 5-minute backing track called "No Title", which Jenner hoped Barrett would finish eventually.^[8]

Around Christmas 1967, guitarist David Gilmour, an old friend of Barrett's from Cambridge, was asked by the other members of Pink Floyd to join as a second guitarist,^[9] initially not to replace Barrett, but cover for him, because his unpredictable behaviour prevented him from performing. For several shows Gilmour sang and played guitar while Barrett wandered around on stage, every now and then deciding to join in playing guitar and singing. Waters and fellow band members keyboardist Richard Wright and drummer Nick Mason soon grew weary of Barrett's on-stage antics and, on 26 January 1968, when Waters was driving his bandmates from London to a show at Southampton University, they all agreed to go without Barrett: according to Gilmour's recollection, one person asked, "Shall we pick Syd up?" and another said, "Let's not bother."^[10] Since Barrett had written or co-written 10 of the 11 songs on their debut album, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, as well as the band's three singles up to this point, the original plan was to keep him in the group as a non-touring member − in a similar arrangement to what The Beach Boys had done with Brian Wilson − but this soon proved to be unworkable.^[9][11][12] At his last rehearsal with the band, he presented a new song entitled "Have You Got It Yet?", which proved to be deliberately unplayable as the others attempted to join in, until they realised the joke of the title. On 6 April, the group officially announced that Barrett was no longer a member of Pink Floyd.^[9][13] Upon leaving the band, Barrett said to Melody Maker: "I suppose it was really just a matter of being a little offhand about things"" 

Truly I think that Barrett's behavior & antics  during this album are also woven into & inspired quite a bit of Balo in 'The Mad Cap Laughs'. 

One thing that can truly be said about 'The Mad Cap Laughs', never ever take Balo The Jester of the Chaos Lords lightly. He's like an evil version of Superman's Mister Mxyzptlk. And their true forms might be very similar. Never take The Jester of Chaos lightly..ever. 
Coming up we're gonna Stormbringer 3rd Edition By Games Workshop.. And possibly more installments in'The Mad Cap Laughs' series. Stay Tuned & keep those dice rolling. 

Pan Tangian Memories - Deeper Reflections into the Stormbringer rpg & OSR Campaign

 

 

The nation of Pan Tang is by far one of the biggest threats within the Young Kingdoms in the Stormbringer rpg. But those glorious Games Workshop Eternal Champions figures were awesome. For someone in America staring at these figures from the works of Michael Moorcock made them more then a bit exotic. 

As some of my comtemporaries have said Games Workshop's Stormbringer rpg was both a Chaos god sent & a royal pain in the behind. The reason why it was a pain in the behind is because of the infamous spine issues with the book & it falling apart, repeatedly. But that glorious content folks is what really makes the game. The chance to play PC's within the Young Kingdoms was part of the lure of the Sword & Sorcery game itself. 

The part of the Eternal Champion line of figures by Games Workshop that appealed to me was Pan Tangian army. They were my go to & still are if I can get my figures out of store 'go to' chaos army. There was something very oddly satisfying about playing & fielding the bad guys. 

The figures had many of the aspects of the Pan Tangians that I'd come to expect from their portrait in both the Stormbringer rpg & the 'Sorcerers of Pan Tang' book. The Theocrat Jagreen Lern having sent his military forces to the ends of the Young Kingdom & beyond. 

The Pan Tangian military were my go to bad guys across a huge number of planes of the Million Spheres even appearing in various original Dungeons & Dragons games as well. The Pan Tangian tigers claimed many a PC.  The Pan Tangians were far more dangerous in my mind as a DM then any demon. 

The Pan Tangians could appear anywhere in the Million Spheres looking to further their unholy master's twisted Chaotic agenda. And there's been more then few times that the Pan Tangians have appeared in various original Dungeons & Dragons games from Kuntz & Ward's Gods, Demigods, & Heroes. 

For  White Dwarf 095 UK's Stormbringer adventure 'The Madcap Laughs' the Pan Tangian military were a constant threat. A random factor that could show up to take down the adventurers at every turn. Thi is part of their very nature a nature of corruption, insanity, & Chaos itself. 

In fact in part three of   'The Madcap Laughs' were introduced to a hunch backed Pan Tangian sorcerer Ylastraraa Taar who has an agenda all of his own for the PC's. This NPC managed to survive the events of 'The Madcap Laughs' & then plague the PC's for more then a year of play.

Along Moonbeam Paths - Further Mediations on The Stormbringer rpg & OSR Campaign

 White Dwarf issue# 97 marks a transition from old school rpg White Dwarf to the golden era of Games Workshop's Rogue Trader game & Warhammer Fantasy Role Play. Its also the final part of 'The Madcap Laughs' Stormbringer rpg adenture in this issue. 

If the armies of Pan Tang were a constant threat over the heads of the PC's in my games then about to talk about the real enemies. The masked NPC warriors who not only threatened my Stormbringer rpg group but terrified the living Hell outta of them. They chased them across the multiverse & back again.. 
So let's back up here & our group of adventurers had dealt with the events of 'The Madcap Laughs' & we had died numerous times. Not only did I get a chance to play but we often took turns being the dungeon master.  Our PC's  died by bandits, by random encounters, by demon encounters, and the list goes on from there. But two our wizards got a crack at the Whispering Codex which is the Necronomicon for the Chaos god  'The Pyaray Whisperer of Impossible Secrets'. 

One wizard ate his dagger because he went completely mad from reading the 'Codex of Impossible Secrets'. The second wizard however went temporarily insane & used a demon of transportation to plane jump our entire party to some random plane of the million spheres.
 We ended up on a null plane someplace at the ends of the muliverse & the party was in real trouble but how much we didn't know. The enemy NPC's also trapped on this featureless plane of grey sand were from the Tragic Earth. And  this was meeting with our long running enemies from Hawkmoon's world. 

Charles D'vere The First Duke of La Roy & the second grand inquistor of the Emperor of Europe. A member of the Praying Mantis division of the scared church of science  introduced himself along with his wolf & boar bodyguards. He then tried to have us murdered for the demon of transportation in the necklace that our wizard wore. Our party would not see the last of  'The Pyaray Whisperer of Impossible Secrets' nor be a part of the machinations of Balo Jester of the Chaos gods. The second grand inquistor Charles D'vere The First Duke of La Roy began his attack when some of the null  elementals of the plane made themselves known to our group. Charles was a product of  the foul Granbretan empire. While he was very well mannered he came straight out of the '87 box set of Hawkmoon from Chaosium. Charles became our mortal enemy after two of his body guards were cut down by our party during the melee. 
We knocked the wizard around until in a moment of lucidity he activated the demon of transportation again. But it required a sacrifice to feed on to get us out of there & while not in the Stormbringer rpg rules we roll played it out sacrificing the soul of one of the boar masked  bodyguard guards. The null plane that we had found ourselves on was leaching Pow out of us at an incredible rate. We found ourselves flattened on the moonbeam roads. Bleeding, battered, insane, & really out of options at this point. But we had to get moving and moving fast! We were lost among the million spheres & lost. But we saw the mantis masked  Charles D'vere  enter the moon beam roads pursuing a group of children armed with a flame lance. We managed to make our way to the children just as a very greviously wounded Charles collapsed on the road. 
Our party was able to gather the 'Children of the Grail' & with a casual snap of their wrists  we found ourselves upon yet another plane this time creepily  simliar to the Young Kingdoms. 
And we came face to face with the children's caretaker Unvia Von Bek a very pretty albino woman weilding a sword of Law known as 'The Dawn of the World'. Unvia Von Bek was the children's guardian & teacher. The children were mutants from the Tragic Europe era who did 'The Rune Staff's handiwork' in their words. They cured our wizard of his insanity & we were able to rest outside of  Unvia Von Bek's home. But during the coming dawn we found ourselves on the shores of a strange plane surrounded by strange wrecks of cosmic ships. Things were about to get very strange & dangerous for the PC's we took a path down by the beach into some woodlands & were assaulted by Fairies. Then we found ourselves within a strange snow storm only to come out on to woodlands of the forrests of Troos. 

Frank Brunner's In The Forest of Troos artwork  plate was the inspiration for what happened next! Our party found out that twenty years had passed since we had tripped into the madness of Balo's schemes. The Young Kingdoms was in shambles & things were going from bad to worse mostly at the hands of Elric! Our party did mercenary work for the rulers & around the Forrest of Troos for a while but our encounter with 'The Children of the Grail' was far from over. We were getting mixed up in the machinations of the Arthurian, The Devil & The Von Beks! 

Pan Tangian Memories - Deeper Reflections into the Stormbringer rpg & OSR Campaign

 

The nation of Pan Tang is by far one of the biggest threats within the Young Kingdoms in the Stormbringer rpg. But those glorious Games Workshop Eternal Champions figures were awesome. For someone in America staring at these figures from the works of Michael Moorcock made them more then a bit exotic. 

As some of my comtemporaries have said Games Workshop's Stormbringer rpg was both a Chaos god sent & a royal pain in the behind. The reason why it was a pain in the behind is because of the infamous spine issues with the book & it falling apart, repeatedly. But that glorious content folks is what really makes the game. The chance to play PC's within the Young Kingdoms was part of the lure of the Sword & Sorcery game itself. 

The part of the Eternal Champion line of figures by Games Workshop that appealed to me was Pan Tangian army. They were my go to & still are if I can get my figures out of store 'go to' chaos army. There was something very oddly satisfying about playing & fielding the bad guys. 

The figures had many of the aspects of the Pan Tangians that I'd come to expect from their portrait in both the Stormbringer rpg & the 'Sorcerers of Pan Tang' book. The Theocrat Jagreen Lern having sent his military forces to the ends of the Young Kingdom & beyond. 

The Pan Tangian military were my go to bad guys across a huge number of planes of the Million Spheres even appearing in various original Dungeons & Dragons games as well. The Pan Tangian tigers claimed many a PC.  The Pan Tangians were far more dangerous in my mind as a DM then any demon. 

The Pan Tangians could appear anywhere in the Million Spheres looking to further their unholy master's twisted Chaotic agenda. And there's been more then few times that the Pan Tangians have appeared in various original Dungeons & Dragons games from Kuntz & Ward's Gods, Demigods, & Heroes. 

For  White Dwarf 095 UK's Stormbringer adventure 'The Madcap Laughs' the Pan Tangian military were a constant threat. A random factor that could show up to take down the adventurers at every turn. Thi is part of their very nature a nature of corruption, insanity, & Chaos itself. 

In fact in part three of   'The Madcap Laughs' were introduced to a hunch backed Pan Tangian sorcerer Ylastraraa Taar who has an agenda all of his own for the PC's. This NPC managed to survive the events of 'The Madcap Laughs' & then plague the PC's for more then a year of play.

Balo The Jester of The Chaos Lords & 'The Mad Cap Laughs' For The Stormbringer Rpg By Matt Williams White Dwarf 095 UK

 Let's talk about Stormbringer rpg  or more specfically Games Workshop's third edition of the Stormbringer Rpg. This is & has been my preferred edition of the Stormbringer rpg & everything begins with White Dwarf 095 UK. There are so many reasons why this is such a great issue of White Dwarf, let's see there's the almost but not quite Warhammer role play & Warhammer Fantasy wargame influences. And then there's the Stormbringer Rpg adventure beginning. 

 That's where 'THE MADCAP LAUGHS'  on page 59 By Matt Williams begins. This  adventure of  mad schemes  are  revealed. Here's where the background to a new Stormbringer adventure & mini campaign began for me as a player. My Uncle Jack ran us through this adventure back in '87 & it was a bad ass adventure back then. The whole thing concerns Balo The Jester of The Chaos Lords & who is Balo?! Well according to the Moorcock's Multiverse Wiki;"Balo the Jester is the Court Jester to the Lords of Chaos. He is of demigod status and not a true Chaos Lord, and is the only god able to move between the Realms of Law and Chaos at will. He entertains the Chaos Lords, his masters, with humorous riddles and satires that serve to explain the nature of the Cosmic Balance. Balo juggles enigmas like baubles, laughs at what Chaos holds dear, and takes seriously that which they mock. However, not even the Lords of the Higher Worlds understand his true motives.^[1]

Balo made a distasteful joke that offended the Chaos Lords so he fled from them to Elric's World where he attempted to transform the physical world into a Realm of Paradox under his rule. Elric confronted Balo inside the jester's Singing Citadel and summoned Arioch to take Balo back to the Realm of Chaos. There the mischievous godling was punished for his foolish ambition that contradicted the Chaos Lords' own plans for Earth.^[1]"

Having played through this adventure series I always thought Balo always looked like demented jester from Werner van den Valckert 'Fool With A Smaller Fool' art piece. The first article in the 'THE MADCAP LAUGHS' series added in the Stormbringer rpg airships of Law. Freaking airships ages before Mystara's Voyage of the Princess Ark. We get a short & sweet background on this adventure, Balo's motives, the poor PC's are going to facedown some horrid odds. Personally the on going theory about the Chaos Jester from my encounters as a player with the demigod is that he's a left over god from the previous universe's gods in the Young Kingdom. We get hints of this in Michael Moorcock's Weird of the White Wolf. 

This wasn't the first time our group faced down Balo though. In Different Worlds issue #31 'The Bastions of Balo' we faced down the machinations of the bastard Chaos Jester in one of his dungeons. My PC was slaughtered quite literally by a chaos succubus & drank dry. He died happy but it was a nasty turn. Since then Balo has been on my hit parade for Chaos. 

Balo doesn't fit the normal mold of a Chaos Lord because he mocks both chaos & humanity in equal turns. His issues with humanity dive deep into the final narrative Elric's Young Kingdom. Balo's mockery is a both a laughter & a plea for the cosmic joke of the Lords of Chaos. We would see this play out as more & more of the mythology of the Young Kingdoms & the Eternal Champion come to light in the later books. Not only did my PC's die in 'The Mad Cap Laughs' but the fact that the adventure's name was taken from Syd Barrett's 69 debut album is both ironic & vicious by their very nature. 

Why do I say this? Because you've gotta understand the issues surrounding Pink Floyd & Syd Barrett; "In the second half of 1967 and through to early 1968, when still part of Pink Floyd, Barrett's behaviour became increasingly erratic and unpredictable.^[4] Many report having seen him on stage with the group during this period, strumming on one chord through an entire concert or not playing at all.^[5] In August 1967, Pink Floyd were forced to cancel their appearance at the prestigious National Jazz and Blues Festival, informing the music press that Barrett was suffering from nervous exhaustion. Band manager Peter Jenner and bassist Roger Waters arranged for Barrett to see a psychiatrist (an appointment he failed to attend), while a stay on the Spanish island of Formentera with Sam Hutt, a doctor well established in the underground music scene, led to no visible improvement in Barrett's behaviour. A few dates in September were followed by the band's first tour of the United States.^[6] At this point, Barrett's condition grew steadily worse.^[7] At a show at The Fillmore in San Francisco, during a performance of "Interstellar Overdrive", Barrett slowly detuned his guitar; the audience seemed to enjoy such antics, unaware of the rest of the band's consternation. Sometime in October, Jenner transferred tapes of "In the Beechwoods", two takes of "Vegetable Man", and a 5-minute backing track called "No Title", which Jenner hoped Barrett would finish eventually.^[8]

Around Christmas 1967, guitarist David Gilmour, an old friend of Barrett's from Cambridge, was asked by the other members of Pink Floyd to join as a second guitarist,^[9] initially not to replace Barrett, but cover for him, because his unpredictable behaviour prevented him from performing. For several shows Gilmour sang and played guitar while Barrett wandered around on stage, every now and then deciding to join in playing guitar and singing. Waters and fellow band members keyboardist Richard Wright and drummer Nick Mason soon grew weary of Barrett's on-stage antics and, on 26 January 1968, when Waters was driving his bandmates from London to a show at Southampton University, they all agreed to go without Barrett: according to Gilmour's recollection, one person asked, "Shall we pick Syd up?" and another said, "Let's not bother."^[10] Since Barrett had written or co-written 10 of the 11 songs on their debut album, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, as well as the band's three singles up to this point, the original plan was to keep him in the group as a non-touring member − in a similar arrangement to what The Beach Boys had done with Brian Wilson − but this soon proved to be unworkable.^[9][11][12] At his last rehearsal with the band, he presented a new song entitled "Have You Got It Yet?", which proved to be deliberately unplayable as the others attempted to join in, until they realised the joke of the title. On 6 April, the group officially announced that Barrett was no longer a member of Pink Floyd.^[9][13] Upon leaving the band, Barrett said to Melody Maker: "I suppose it was really just a matter of being a little offhand about things"" 

Truly I think that Barrett's behavior & antics  during this album are also woven into & inspired quite a bit of Balo in 'The Mad Cap Laughs'. 

One thing that can truly be said about 'The Mad Cap Laughs', never ever take Balo The Jester of the Chaos Lords lightly. He's like an evil version of Superman's Mister Mxyzptlk. And their true forms might be very similar. Never take The Jester of Chaos lightly..ever. 
Coming up we're gonna Stormbringer 3rd Edition By Games Workshop.. And possibly more installments in'The Mad Cap Laughs' series. Stay Tuned & keep those dice rolling.