The presence of a villainous sorcerer is fundamental to a good  Swords and Sorcery tale.

While the setting of Life and Death, the post-magical apocalypse setting of The Shattered Lands, is very low magic in keeping with genre expectations, the bad, mad and downright dangerous to know are out in force as antagonists in the books collection of adventures.

Bilgen,  is very much your young unpleasant black magician in training. He’s very much modelled after obnoxious wanna be sorcerers I met in my real life student days. Petty smelly types who call other people “norms” or “mundanes” taking great pride in their knowledge of Magick without ever really doing much. Bilgen has a handful of spells that make him useful to the bandit chief, who also is deluded and thinks he’s a powerful Merchant Lord, and allows him to terrorise the local peasants.

Tel-Kar-Nath is the real deal.  He is a sorcerer who is fit to be the player character’s nemesis and is a worthy adversary.  He’s been a powerful court magician in a previous life whose machinations brought down reality, been imprisoned in hell for his crimes and is now back a monstrous thing with a psychotic personality.

Tel-Kar-Nath talks in a deep monotone about the joys of death. The finality of it all and the absolute power-mastery it brings. He is more than happy to demonstrate his power upon a hapless captive. However he does not attack the characters directly…

If they attack him, he uses his magic to evade and escape and his zombie followers to hold them off. He is more interested in playing the role of the enigmatic magical master than dealing with the characters, whom he believes are beneath him.

The King in Chains was once a sorcerer of immense reality blasting potential like Tel-Kar-Nath, but is now a husk of his former power. He has been brought back into being as an undead creature, by a ruthless Necromancer who uses him as a magical power source and channel for raising more Zombies. Even in this half-dead state there’s something that realises that this isn’t a good state of affairs and who knows what vengeance it will wreck if the player characters ever loosen those chains.

The Chained King by David M. Wright

Life and Death is a collection of four adventures that make up a mini-epic tale of a struggle against the forces of Undeath in a world recovering from a magical apocalypse. It is a conversion of an existing OpenQuest adventure, for Crypts and Things and other Class/Level based Fantasy RPGs with all new art by David M.Wright (the artist who illustrated Crypts and Things in its entirety.  Its currently been worked on for a release later this month.

Previous Posts about Life and Death Zarth Edition

• Life and Death – Zombies.

Life and Death Zarth Editon – cover by Jon Hodgson

I freely admit that I have a thing for the Undead in the same way as some fantasy gamers have a big thing about orcs and other green skinned monsters.

Rather than splurge on the various Zombie RPGs that have come out since the 90s, I’ve always channeled my love of these undead through my own adventures.  My upcoming re-released Life and Death Zarth Edition, for Crypts and Things and other OSR RPGs, really is my fantasy tribute to the films of George A. Romoro.

This first Zombie is encountered in the second adventure of this four adventure collection. He is recently deceased, like the rest of the Zombies encountered in the old Sorcerer’s Tower that forms the basis of Dust of Eternity, and like a cruel joke his previous personality and some memories linger in his now dead body.  The Dust of Eternity is a low-level introductory adventure, but one I intended to show the principle of Monsters are People too even the Zombies who normally lack a personality. The inspirations came from the fact that I had recently been playing Bioshock – where in the the sunken city of Rapture its inhabitants have been turned into mockeries of their formerselves by the use of biogentics, yet still remember their former life and go around moaning and lamenting about the humanity and relationships they had lost.

Young Zombie by David M.Wright

The idea of a dead civilization that choked to death on its own evil practices thousands of years previously has always tickled my fancy. The third adventure Dead Pot Country explores this theme as the adventurers venture into dried up river valley and wander through the ruins of a once glorious civilization. A civilization that buried its dead in large pots in fields surrounding its main city…a practice that leads to minefield of danger when the undead inhabitants of said pot burials come back into the light of day.

Pot Burial Zombie by David M.Wright

I always liked the idea of Zombies as victims and embodiment of a viral plague, and this theme is played out in the final adventure, Life and Death, where the city of Miraz is in the grip of a plague whose victims are resurrected as shambling undead like the one pictured below. Miraz is in many ways is an ancient Mesopotamian city state complete with mudbrick houses and even a Ziggurat which is home to the God-Tyrant of the city.  The plague is symptomatic of the collapse of order that the city is undergoing when the adventurers arrive in the city. Not only has the Tyrant lost control of a third of his city to the plague, but his sons are at war with each other and a rebellion amoung the peasants is brewing.

Plague Zombie by David M.Wright

Life and Death Zarth Edition is currently in the final phases of production and is due out April/May this year.