The End of a Long Campaign

When I started my Pathfinder campaign, I wanted three things. I wanted to involve a lot of undead, I wanted killer dungeons, and I wanted an Egyptian theme to the campaign. Luckily, the first two go hand in hand. And when I discovered that Pathfinder's default setting of Golarion has an Egyptian-analogue called Osirion, it was suddenly much easier to set up.

My superobjective (an actor's thing) was that I wanted to have people in the house. A lot of middle-aged men suffer from loneliness and depression because they do not socialize enough. Having gamers in to laugh, kill things, and generally goof around forces me to be social once a week. I have noticed my depression has visited less often since I started the group.

I fused together Pathfinder's Osirion and Green Ronin's fantastic Hamunaptra for background. I didn’t have the time to write my own adventures, but I have a lot of deathtrap dungeons already, and it was easy to fill in with other adventures that fit the theme. I think it worked reasonably well.

The adventures were:

Hive of Villany: from Dungeon Crawl Classics #29, The Adventure Begins (Goodman Games)
The characters started out as prisoners, their sentences commuted by the Temple of Set in return for doing some dirty jobs. Their first assignment was to find out why the temple's bees weren’t producing honey. This properly set the campaign tone as not entirely serious.

Malice of the Medusa: Dungeon Crawl Classics #45 (Goodman Games)
The first actual tomb-raiding. This is a fun low-level adventure with good background, several small tombs, and an entertaining plot.

Forgotten King’s Tomb: (Kobold Press)
I hate to call this disappointing, but it’s a bit simple. I made this a more interesting adventure by allowing the adventurers to negotiate with the involved mummy.

Pharaoh: I3 (TSR)
I bought this 1^st edition adventure back when it first came out. I’ve carried it through many moves for more than thirty years, and finally got to run it. A wonderful adventure, a pseudoegyptian dungeon crawl set in a pyramid with a lot of creativity, plenty of strangeness, and a surprising amount of humor. The backstory provides a good hook that the players can figure out and interact with.

The Rebel's Ransom: Pathfinder Society 02-03 (Paizo)
A particularly good Pathfinder adventure, involving a certain amount of tomb-robbing, but with a twist. A combination of interesting characters, clever traps, and an enjoyable progression make this a great adventure.

Tomb of the Blind God: Dungeon Crawl Classics C9 (Goodman Games)
This was a side-quest that first touched on my own campaign arc. They are initially sent because a girl is kidnapped, and golly, there's grells, grimlocks, and more information about the past than they thought was going to be there.

The Scorpion Queen from In Search of Adventure (Goodman Games)
Maybe not the most inspired adventure. Still, a few puzzles, a little combat. The players didn’t seem to mind.

Imprisoned with the Pharaohs: J1 (Paizo)
One of the adventures that made me realize that a 3^rd edition Egyptian-style campaign was possible. A fine adventure in a pyramid with mummies and all the Egyptian trappings I could want. Also the introduction to the mystery of Aucturn.

The Pact Stone Pyramid: J3 (Paizo)
Following on from the previous pyramid adventure, this was another pyramid dungeon crawl, and had its own contribution to the mystery of Aucturn. I provided my own answer to the mystery, and just about the time we were playing this, Paizo came out with their own. I liked mine better. Nevertheless, this was another fun pyramid adventure from the people at Paizo.

Wrath of the Accursed: Pathfinder Society 2-20 (Paizo)
A city-based intrigue adventure from Paizo. It made for a nice change of pace, giving the characters a chance to do some negotiation, and run through the streets of the city.

The Dog Pharaoh's Tomb: Pathfinder Society 3-12 (Paizo)
A smaller adventure than J1 and J3 above. Still, this was a good, rich adventure with interesting tomb traps, undead to destroy, and links to the future of the campaign.

Caves of the Crawling Lord: Dungeon Crawl Classics #37 (Goodman Games)
This was the adventure where the whole plot basically came out. And the characters learned that leaving the alchemist alone in front of the undead antipaladin was a mistake. Here the players found out about the Dynasty of Jackals, a line of corrupt and demon-consulting pharaohs whose names had been eliminated from official history. They discovered the mummified remains of the majority of the line, but not the ultimate resting place of the Dark Undying One, the last and most terrible of the Dynasty of Jackals. He was so evil that merely speaking his name would bring damage upon the utterer.

Tomb of Horrors: (3rd ed version) (WOTC)
Acererak was the court wizard of the Dark Undying One. The mechanics of Pathfinder mean that the adventure cannot be as deadly as it was originally intended to be. Still, the three pit traps puzzle is something you can't roll dice for, and it got the players, both here and in Necropolis. Good fun. This signaled the beginning of the serious trapped tombs adventures: the next three tombs were tributes to this classic.

Dread Crypt of Srihoz: Dungeon Crawl Classics 25 (Goodman Games)
Srihoz was the chief of the Navy under the Dark Undying One. This turned out to be more deadly than the infamous meat-grinder Tomb of Horrors. While the Tomb was first, the designers of the Dread Crypt also had some very dirty tricks to lay on the characters.

Lost Tomb of Kruk-Ma-Kali: (Kenzerco)
The tomb of the Dark Undying One’s mightiest general. Wonderful tribute to the Tomb of Horrors. But another instance where the extensive magics involved would have been much more expensive than a resurrection spell. But shush, because this one is really good, even though I ignored the wilderness adventure getting there.

The Mud Sorcerer's Tomb: Dungeon #138 (Paizo)
The individual entombed here was the tomb architect of the Dark Undying One’s court. And had directions to the tomb of Mrs. Dark Undying One. An update of a great 2^nd edition adventure, also from Dragon magazine. A sly, thoughtful tribute to Tomb of Horrors, which fit easily with the campaign’s theme of tombs and deadly traps.

The Rolling Tomb: Dungeon #215 (WOTC)
An interruption of the main quest with a delightfully insane premise. The hook is "a full-sized pyramid on rollers is going to squash Pharaoh's favorite oasis. You will do something about this immediately."

StarHaunt Dungeon #207(WOTC)
StarHaunt was a bit of an emergency insertion. I'd made The Rolling Tomb too difficult. But replacing the meteor with an undead god-fetus made this adventure wonderfully macabre. Seriously. Look up "atropal scion" and tell me that isn't creepy.

Crypt of the Devil-Lich: Dungeon Crawl Classics #13 (Goodman)
After a couple of less trappy-deathy adventures, this was back to the meat grinders I love. Lots of traps, and traps within traps. There was a wonderful moment with the hellwasp swarms when everyone was helpless except the Fire Oracle. Who cashed in his chips later this adventure.

Necropolis: Necromancer Games
Sort of Gygax's adventure to top Tomb of Horrors, this is as gonzo and weird as you might expect. Wonderful, and one of the adventures the campaign was constructed to lead up to. Well converted by the people at Necromancer Games, and delightful fun for the players. They destroyed the Dark Undyng One, and the beacon that was drawing Aucturn close, amplifying necromantic spell effects. But that wasn’t the end of it all. Turns out the court wizard, Acererak also had a few lingering threats to the well-being of the world.

Prisoner of Castle Perilous: Dungeon #153 (WOTC)
The players learned that Acererak wasn’t quite as destroyed as they thought he’d been. And he’s mucking about with something in the Negative Energy Plane. Good adventure, and the beginning of the campaign’s endgame.

Return to the Tomb of Horrors: (TSR)
I didn't use the introductory adventure, but the rest was pretty darn entertaining, if a little weird to convert to Pathfnder. Still, this is a solid, puzzling sprawl of a mega-adventure, and I’m quite happy that I finally got to run it.

Tomb of Horrors: 4th ed (WOTC)
This was the third and final Acererak the party faced. I’m a little sad I wasn’t able to reconcile the initial parts of the adventure with my campaign, instead only using the final adventure. Still, I liked this. Unfortunately, the party acted with a little haste before they learned what was going on, and managed to doom themselves. Ah well, such is giving control of the story over to the players. And there’s a lot of potential to having a new Devouring God.

There are a few adventures I wanted to run but couldn't find a way to slip in. Grimtooth's Dungeons of Death, Mayfair's Undead, and the Tomb of Iuchiban from Alderac. But they either didn’t fit the structure of the campaign, or mechanically would have lost too much when converted to Pathfinder. But now we’re onto a new campaign, one starting with zero level characters with random backgrounds and straight 3d6 characteristics. Let’s hope might oaks from small acorns grow.

I want to thank everyone who was part of the campaign, and made it the successful fun it was. Chris, John, Tristan, John, Diane, Shannon, Tara, Alex, Dave, and Nick: thank you all very much. I hope you had as much fun as I did.

Mummies, With Some Insight into My Story "In the House of Millions of Years"

It's hard to love mummies. Mummy fans have precious little to read or watch. Anne Rice's Ramses the Damned is probably the most high-profile mummy book, and it's one of Rice's least well-known books. And there really are only three well-regarded mummy films: Karloff's 1932 film for Universal, the 1959 Christopher Lee/Hammer production, and the 1999 Universal reboot. All of these films spawned franchises, but the follow-ups were poor in comparison. A lot of mummy films that are just cheap horror, with poor writing, terrible acting, and zero production value.



Karloff's mummy Imhotep was only bandage-wrapped for twenty minutes. After that, he transformed into the urbane, sophisticated, magically potent Ardeth Bey, who could pass for human. The follow-up mummy in the Universal series, Kharis, featured in four films between 1940 and 1944, was a stiff-limbed, bandage-wrapped strangler that Jason Voorhees could outrun. And yet, at the core of every mummy film, there's something about the preserved individual from thousands of years past that captures my interest. Unlike the vampire, it does not require sustenance. It is animated purely by magic. Unlike the zombie, the mummy is at least partially sentient. It understands the world around it. My favorite mummies are the Imhotep from the 1932 and 1999 films. A mummy with a mind, who can pass for human, and and no longer fears death because it has already died.



Imagine how terrifying it would be as a mummy? How would the passage of time feel if there was no longer an endpoint? What would it be like to lack biological processes? A mummy, animated by magic, no longer needs to eat or sleep, breathe or excrete. These small things mark time for us. Our stomach tells us time has passed because we're hungry. More time passes, and we get sleepy. What happens when those indicators of the passage of time no longer mean anything, when therer is nothing to break up the day? Ask any insomniac. Sleepless nights are long, without relief. So little is going on, the insomniac is left to wile away the night hours, reading if they can concentrate enough, or watching terrible late-night TV. Yes, I've been there.

What must have been like, to have insomnia before television? Before recoded music? Before inexpensive lighting? Imagine sitting in the dark for long, black hours, unable to sleep while everyone else does. Time crawling by, with the knowledge that the next night, and the next, and all conceivable nights would be as unending as this one. That's the endlessly long dark that I gave to Pharaoh Intef (Horus name Seheratawy, 'Maker of Peace in the Two Lands') as the heart of “In the House of Millions of Years.” How excluded, how alienated the mummy must feel. How long could someone maintain the illusion, to themselves, to others, that they were still human?



In most mummy films, one element carries over from the old life. Desire. The mummy falls in love with the woman of his past, whether she is reincarnated, or a lovely target of opportunity. This is where I departed from other mummies of film and prose. Without organs, with a dried, withered body, would it be possible to love? To feel affection? Or could that depart as quickly as the feeling of humanity? What are you if you cannot feel these emotions? This is what I explore in my story, the inhumanity of someone who no longer feels, no longer has those small moments that mark time. Someone who was human, but no longer is.



Undead and Unbound, which includes magnificent stories by Cody Goodfellow, Damien Walters Grintalis, Peter Rawlik, Glynn Owen Barrass, Willie Meikle, Mercedes M. Yardley, and many wonderful others, is available directly from Chaosium, from Amazon, and your local bookstore.

My Pyramid Texts

My Pathfinder game is coming along nicely.  The PCs are living and working in Osirion, the Ancient Egypt analog of the Inner Sea.  They're doing a lot of tomb raiding, and I'm getting working my font wonkery out by fancying up the messages they find on the walls and in the messages they get sent.

RPGs are more a performance art than anything else.  A session is dull unless you're involved, and it happens in the moment.  And because I want a larger audience for my work, I'm sharing these pieces of ephemera with my readers.  And because my blog posts seem to get more hits when I post a lot of images. 

I won't say they're beautiful props.  But I am enjoying the creation process. 

First, a sad note from someone trapped in a tomb, from Goodman Games' quite wonderful Malice of the Medusa.  I used GIMPshop's oilify tool to make the ink spread a little.  It looks older, and is difficult to read.  My players were able to puzzle it out, and I think the difficulty made them a) irritated but b) more invested in the narrative, because they had to work on it.
  

The 1^st edition adventure Pharaoh is one of the most entertaining I have yet run.  For some background, check out the wikipedia entry.


 Pharaoh is a long-cherished treasure in my collection, one of the reasons that I decided to run a campaign based primarily in Osirion.  After some twenty years, I finally got to run the adventure, and it was delightful.  There's also a lot of text to be 'read aloud' to the players, which easily converted into documents to be fonted up.
 
Instead of just placing the words onto a sandstone background, I also copied the text into a hieroglyphic format, faded it so it wouldn't overwhelm the English text (I love layers).  This allows me to have my cake, readable text, and still have Egyptian Hieroglyphics.  I did this for the majority of the Pharaoh documents.  
  


  
  
Of course, anyone who read this knew it wasn't true.  

  
The unrobbable tomf of Amun-Ra was no ordinary trapped tomb, let me tell you.  There was a lot of backstory, which is part of the reason there was so much text.  Lucky for the adventurers, the individuals involved were obsessive chroniclers.
  
The players never did get the High Priests's name "Munafik" right.  But that didn't bother me, and  they never managed to ask him. 

And in case you didn't think the builders of Amun-Ra's tomb were jerks.  Here they reach out to the party members from 4,000 years ago and thumb their noses at them.  I love those guys.



Here we start a series of documents that are the Pharaoh Amun-Ra's personal chronicle.  I really liked this; it gave the villain of the piece a motivation, and made the guy who built the trap-proof tomb a heart.  He's not a particularly good person, but he's understandable, rather than just eeeevil.  I've altered it a bit here and there to fit into my campaign.  I would have liked to put this on one, long scroll, but I didn't have the printing technology available.  Still, these were a load of fun to make.      









Later, I again turned to Goodman Games, this time plundering their In Search Of Adventure for an adventure of an avatar of the Scorpion Queen.  The adventure doesn't contain a lot of flavor, so I made it up myself.  Dire warnings and all that.  The top is a little muddled because of the darkness of the sandstone and the hieroglyphic text.  But the reading wasn't essential, so I let them struggle a bit. 

 
The picture is a Sandwalker from Kobold Quarterly #7 (which is quite worth picking up).  Great picture, which I mucked with to make it look more like a carving with a hint of color.  The real illustration is much more detailed and pants-shittingly terrifying.  

How I Make My Own Fun

I live in a medium-sized town, and as a a result, I have to make my own fun.  Sure, there's other fun to be had that other people do, but if I really want to have some good-quality fun, I pretty much have to provide it myself. 

In October, I started a Pathfinder game.  For those of you who write and haven't played one of these, a good RPG session is like four hours of brainstorming with freinds.  There's laughter, creativity, the wildness of bouncing ideas off each other, and the satisfaction of getting problems solved.  It's partially an excuse to get people into the house, because most of my social time has been at at my retail job, and thus poor-quality.  I'd been playing minis games (Warmachine, Warhammer) for the past couple of years, and the competitive nature of the games makes them less enjoyable to me than the collaborative process that is RPG playing.  And there's the opportunity to not only buy a bunch of books, but the expectation to pore through them for hours on end.  And that tickles the bibliophile in me. 

I've mastered a fair number of games over the years, and there's a couple of ideas I'd like to share.

1)  Fun.  Everyone is there to have fun.  As the Game Master, its important than the players understand and buy into the premise of the campaign.  In my Call of Cthulhu games, it was the opportunity to face overwhelming odds and have stories to tell about how the characters got killed.  In a later Over the Edge campaign, it was the chance to enter into strange conspiracies and experience massive weirdness.  If the players aren't interested in the premise, then the game master and the players will be at odds as to what the game is about.

That said, different people have different ideas of fun.  I once devoted about half of the run of an entire game to screwing a player's character as hard as possible, in game.  He loved it.  Because he was getting attention, and his character was obviously special.  He could see the light at the top of the very long drain I had dumped him down, and looked forward to climbing through the slime towards the light.  Interestingly, we both had fun doing this.  Me by dumping on him, and him by keeping his eyes on the prize. 

My current game is based in Fantasy Egypt, combining Hamunaptra with the Paizo's own Osirion.  I pitched it to the players as mummies and tombs, and some social campaigning in between.  This gives me the freedom to hand them dungeon crawls and time to prepare and do other stuff in between as they establish a base of operations.  This allows them to not be murderhobos, but gives them a sense of place and belonging.  This also helps the players care about their characters as people, rather than wargame miniatures.  This leads to more fun.   

2) Collaboration.  No one person should be responsibly for everyone's fun.  That would be very difficult.  I work best as a Game Master when I am more of a coach than a dictator.  Give the players some freedom, as well as a structure that involves them in the overall campaign.  Give them a reason to be involved in the plot, rather than just assuming they'll want to go along.  The Pathfinder RPG provides a good one, the Pathfinder Society, which serves as a warehouse of information and opportunities.  I took a slightly different approach, because I didn't want a reliably good-natured sponsor for the players to rely on as a moral center. They were all prisoners comdemned to die... and I thought of this before Skyrim!  In a strange land, the characters must provide their own moral guidance, especially as they gain in power and prestige, becoming more enmeshed in the local politics. 

3) Perparation.  This was a giant bugaboo for me.  I've got work, my current book, and other things I want to do.  Pathfinder, unfortunately, requires a lot of work if you want to customize an enemy.  The advantage to the Pathfinder rule set is that you have a tremendous amount of freedom to build exactly the sort of enemy/individual you want.  Unfortunately, it takes a lot of time and work.  This was beginning to worry me before I found the Dingles Games Pathfinder NPC Generator and Perram's Spell book which allow me to create an NPC and equip them with a quickly-referenced spells.  These applications are tremendous time-savers, allowing me to concentrate on plot and story ideas, rather then mechanics problems.    

And it's working.  I'm definitely more consistently cheery, and I look forward to every Tuesday night.  The players are having a good time and don't mind telling me.  While this takes a little away from my writing, I think that in the long term, it will keep my mood up and stimulate my creativity.  

And hey, fun!

Ra Was a Jerk!

Because I'm that nerd, I like to read translations of ancient manuscripts. If I was a real wonk, I'd be learning languages to get the real flavor of the text, but that's not going to happen. Except maybe with Old English.

Anyway, I've been reading the rather delightful Raymond Faulkner translation of the Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead (or the Book of Coming Forth By Day, if you're more of an Egyptian nerd that I am). It's a pleasant translation, with color pictures of various papyrii makes it a pleasant read.



It's pretty common knowledge that the Egyptian Gods were pretty pleasant to the Egyptians. They had regular seasons, and the Nile's live-giving floods were mostly gentle. Unlike the Mesopotamians, whose gods were capricious at best, partially because the flooding of the Tigris and the Euphrates were highly variable, and could turn deadly without warning.

I'm beginning to question the Egyptian Gods' overall benevolence, as I read the Book of the Dead. It's is a collection of a hundred and eighty-nine spells intended to give the recipient a pass to the pleasant afterlife, as opposed to the bad one. There's a spell to ward off hostile crocodiles, one to transform the recipient into a heron should he so wish, and spells to demonstrate to the gods that the recipient is justified, and so should be able to go to the Field of Reeds.

However, there's a recurring theme that's more than a little disturbing. Spell 102, "For Going Aboard the Bark of Ra":
"O you who are great in your bark, bring me to your bark, so that I may take charge of your navigating in the duty which is alloted to one who is among the Unwearying Stars."

Sounds good so far, right? The Justified individual wants to get to be on Ra's boat, and help with the navigation. Which, hey, at least he's not asking to laze around and be a nuisance when everyone else is fighting off various demons of darkness. But there's a kicker in the very next line:

"What I doubly detest, I will not eat; my detestation is feces, and I will not eat it. I will not consume excrement, I will not approach it with my hands."

WOAH! Man, Ra is a jerk. Luxury all the way, taking control of the Bark that is the Sun, but if you don't say this spell, he's going to feed you shit for the rest of eternity? What kind of food service is there on that thing, anyway? It sounds suspiciously like one of those contracts written where anything not specified is supplied at absolute minimum. "Haw Haw!" laughs the God of the Sun. "You didn't say anything about provisions, so here's a big plate of poo!"

What a jerk.

Pyramid Texts

Adventures with pyramids, who could say no?

Pyramid is an early adventure for the first edition of Dungeons and Dragons. It's a good adventure with many solid ideas, and, rather unusually for a D&D adventure, an sense of humor. The adventurers are begged by the ghost of the pharaoh Amun-Re to rob his magically-trapped tomb. There's a lot going on inside, including excavation by spoon, and Amun-Re's remaining priesthood, which still lurks in the pyramid itself.

I was very excited to hear that Paizo's Pathfinder game was going to include a close parallel to Egypt called Osirion. One of the first adventures they put out involving Osirion was J1, Entombed with the Pharaohs. Adventure structure has changed a great deal since Pyramid was put out. The adventurers expect to be interested in the adventure, not placed at the edge of a desert thanks to actions they had no say in. So there's background, a bunch of stuff that happens before the party even gets to the pyramid, which affects what happens when they're in the pyramid. Quite notable is that the adventure does not stop when the tomb-raiding does. There are hints and riddles of things that may come to pass in the campaign, if the Game Master wishes. It's a nice way to layer on experience, allowing the literary device of foreshadowing in the campaign. yes, I am one of those snobby players who thinks that virtually any literary device can be used to enhance play in an RPG scenario.

Paizo's follow-up has several structural similarities and some very interesting differences from Kortes' first pyramid adventure. Again with the wacky magical traps (and I like wacky magical traps), but there is a logic to these, because this pyramid was meant to be accessed from time to time. As such, it's got a very different feel from the previous two adventures. Also like Entombed with the Pharaohs, there is a breaking of the walls, a hint at something in the scenario that is beyond the confines of the adventure.

It was kind of a shock to read The Lost Pyramid of Imhotep and realize how like the majority of first edition D&D scenarios it was. It's a dungeon crawl; go in, kill the monsters, avoid the traps. There's a lack of description that I find is good for the immersion experience. The monsters, complex traps, and other immediate goals are well described, but there's a flatness to it that leaves me cold.

The Pleasures of a Brick-Based Economy

I seem to have discovered a pattern for myself. During the waning of the sun, I start to noodle around with Ancient Egyptian books and games. This year, it's Children of the Nile: Alexandria. I've enjoyed the Simcity-style building game Children of the Nile for many years, and just purchased the expansion. I love watching my little people build temples, monuments (mostly to my greatness), and tombs, creating a thriving economy.



Perhaps the adoration of virtual citizens is having the right effect. I've sent off two manuscripts in the last two days, and will be sending out a third today.

Farewell to a Mighty Dynasty

I've finally divined much of the reason for my recent unproductiveness: Rome: Total War.

It's a marvelous game, sharing many elements with my previous problem time-waster, Civilization 4. One difference, however, is that Rome: Total War presents the player with a dynasty with which to control the Roman World. Each member of the family has different attributes, and I'm sorry to say that at least twice, the House of Pharaoh was led by a man whose moniker was "the mad."

But it's a wonderful game. A great combination of elements which range from commanding armies in the field to a larger map-based portion from which the player surveys the known world and plans their conquests. I learned a lot from playing. Asia Minor is a hellacious place to get mired into, but ultimately a good, productive stronghold once it is entirely subjugated. With enough money, Byzantium can be bought. Who is running which city is important.

And the Egpyptian archers in Rome: Total War are awesome. One difference between this and Rise and Fall: Civilizations at War is the brightness of the costumes. Rome is a lot less colorful, giving the gameplay a more gritty, realistic feel. You don't want to mess with Pharaoh's Bowmen:



I intended to play it through just once, just to see the Pharaohs of Egypt conquer the Known World and take Rome. However, the combination of complex elements, managing the major cities, plotting to reinforce this city while dealing with that army made the game time-consuming. Enjoyably so, but it wasn't good for my productivity, especially since I faced a difficult project.

So I say farewell to my mighty dynasty of conquering Pharaohs. Your experiences and sacrifices will someday live on in stories.

Wargods of Egypt: Rise and Fall, Civilizations at War

Well, the Egypt thing just isn't going away. Over the last couple of months, I've picked up a couple of computer games that allow you to command the forces of Ancient Egypt.

Rise and Fall, Civilizations at War is a colorful game about raising armies and then throwing them at your opponent. It is also a firm believer in the heroic leader concept: your general is the stompiest badass on the field. In addition to the usual resources of gold and wood, Rise and Fall also uses the concept of glory. Glory can be used to increase to upgrade your hero's level, or to level up units. In Egyptian fashion, the more prestigious your units are, the more clothing they tend to wear. And the more graphically pretty they are.

Gameplay is otherwise bog-standard real-time strategy. Build structures that allow you to recruit forces. Some troops work better against other sorts of troops (spear-carriers do well against cavalry, for example). As an archery fan, I am sad that I can't get the sun covered by arrows effect of massive arrows in the air, but the Egyptian chariot archers that use fire-arrows satisfy me well enough. I tend to avoid the camel-mounted units, since the Egyptians did not use domesticated camels.

Rise and Fall is a good game to play I want to spend an hour beating down Romans or Persians. Once the rather short campaigns are done, all that's left is to play skirmishes against the computer on the various provided maps. Which is too bad, because the on-line community hasn't created a lot of them.

Still, the gameplay is engaging, the graphics are solid. Here's a pic of the Egyptian Ramses among his elite khepesh-wielding troopers:

Still Don't Get It...

As I'm shoveling four inches off the driveway, I still can't understand my obsession with Ancient Egypt. A hot desert land that worshiped the burning sun. What's up with that? Well, back to shoveling...

Suddenly Hungry for Mythic Egypt

I love Ancient Egypt. The culture was so different, the metaphysics so elaborate and the works of architecture so interesting. I love a culture that puts up a big stone stele every time Pharaoh does something noteworthy.




And I love books that posit that Egyptian cosmology works. I own a fair number of books have taken Egyptian inspiration and applied them to already-existing game worlds and game systems.


Hamunaptra sets 3rd edition (or is it 3.5?)D&D squarely in Ancient Egypt. It's full of nuggets of culture, including the calendar, notes on the gods and their domains, and creates a very different setting from traditional D&D. The box set, and it's been a long time since I bought a D&D box set, is a great alternative for anyone who doesn't want to follow the usual tropes of medieval fantasy. I like the authors' take on how to create atmosphere that feels different from the usual D&D. Great Sphinxes take the place of dragons, being the most terrifying creatures around. Like the best dragons, they are also accessible, ready to speak and bargain with petitioners. Of course, anyone who negotiates with an entity calling itself the Father of Terror had better watch what they say. Hamunaptra is a must-read when I'm in the mood for some Mythic Egypt.


Sadly, Wargods of Ægyptus is a wargame I will never be able to play. The game is too narrow to be of much interest to the small wargame community in Bennington. Which is a pity, I think it would be really cool to line up ranks of bronze-age children of the gods and let them fight it out. Crocodile Games did a very nice job with the sculpting of the pieces, but also differentiating the factions from each other. Each of the force follows a different Ægyptian god, both in physical form (usually an animal head) as well as in temperament. The crocodilian children of Sobek are brutal and effective fighters, where the feline Basti are decadent pleasure-seekers. Also, the mythic Ægyptian setting they created for the game is delightful. Who wouldn't want to investigate the Oasis of Tears, or the Shrine of the Dreaming Lords? A marvelous game to read, which provides me with much Ægyptian inspiration.


Games Workshop's Tomb Kings is a source book for playing an Egyptian-themes undead force in the Warhammer Fantasy Battles game. GW has a more developed world than Crocodile Games, and the Tomb kings seldom fight each other, usually challenging other, more traditional fantasy races such as the human knights, Orcs, or vampires. This gives them a very specific place in the world, and they are tied into the Old World's history. They are also all undead. Wargods of Ægyptus gives the player the option of playing an undead force, but the Tomb Kings are all mummies and skeletons. The Tomb Kings are also more heavily magical than their Ægyptian counterparts, giving the forces a very different flavor.


What started this all was Paizo's recent release of Osirion, Land of the Pharaohs. Osirion is an Egypt-analog in Paizo's Pathfinder campaign world. Unlike Hamunaptra, Osirion is part of a larger world that includes a great deal of medieval fantasy. It is part of a larger world, and has kept pace, culturally and technologically, with its medieval neighbors, although it retains many of the trappings of Egypt; a God-king called Pharaoh, pyramids, sphinxes, and a culture thousands of years old. It's also more heavily fantasy than Hamunaptra. The Pharaoh, for example, having the traditional pacts with clans of elementals, as well as demons and angels. The capital of Sothis is build around the carapace of an scarab beetle large enough that the Imperial Palace is contained in it. Osirion is also the setting for several Pathfinder adventures. Both Imprisoned with the Pharaohs and The Pact Stone Pyramid involve pyramids, and there's nothing wrong with that. Both are pretty entertaining reads.

I like that there's a plethora of books that explore the themes and ideas presented by Mythic Egypt. I think game books are often overlooked as sources of inspiration. Setting books are nothing but ideas and background without any connecting narrative.