One of the things I insist upon when running roleplaying games is creating situations that I would love to experience as a player. I want to explore extraordinary places, encounter fascinating characters, find myself confronted with difficult choices, and occasionally experience that peculiar sense of wonder which, for me, is one of the great attractions of fantasy.
Of course, this does not mean that I have no ambitions regarding the sort of experience I want to create. Quite the contrary. I spend a considerable amount of time thinking about atmosphere, dramatic possibilities, and the emotional effect that particular encounters might produce. The distinction is between designing the circumstances from which drama might emerge and attempting to determine the drama itself.
A small adventure I recently adapted for an Al-Qadim campaign illustrates this approach rather well.
An archaeological expedition
Some months ago, I decided to engage in a bit of RPG archaeology. I wanted to revisit Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 2nd Edition, a game I had played extensively in my youth, but whose rules I could now barely remember. And since I was returning to the distant past of my roleplaying experience, I thought I could take the opportunity to try one of the most distinctive settings TSR ever published: Al-Qadim.
I had always been fascinated by Al-Qadim, although I had never explored it. So I went on eBay, bought a collection of second-hand books, and began reading.
Along with that, I started reading The Arabian Nights, also a first for me, to understand the literary tradition that had inspired Al-Qadim, and found myself intoxicated by the richness of both the original stories and the fantasy world TSR had built around them. I devoured the books, moving from the setting material to the stories and back again, discovering new possibilities with almost every page.
For those unfamiliar with Al-Qadim, TSR created a fantasy version of The Arabian Nights, and did so with an enthusiasm and generosity of imagination that I find rather irresistible. This is a world of magnificent cities, crowded bazaars, desert caravans, ambitious merchants, honourable thieves, treacherous viziers, enchanted palaces, and genies of almost unimaginable power. A fisherman might discover a treasure that changes his destiny, a beggar might turn out to be a prince, and a seemingly insignificant encounter in a marketplace might lead to adventures involving creatures older than mankind. Sometimes people make the mistake of seeing it as a historical Arabian setting. It isn’t. It is based on The Arabian Nights, rather than on a historically faithful reconstruction of Arabia.
What particularly attracted me was that Al-Qadim seemed to offer something genuinely different from the usual medieval European fantasy. The setting has its own personality, its own moral and imaginative vocabulary, in which honour, hospitality, generosity, promises, obligations, and the relations between mortals and supernatural beings play an unusually prominent role. There is also an exuberance to the whole thing, a willingness to embrace the extravagant and the marvellous without embarrassment.
The more I read, the more I wanted to experience this world, and, more importantly, to share that experience with others.
I gathered a group, started reacquainting myself with the rules of AD&D 2nd Edition, and began searching through the published adventures for something suitable.
A promising beginning
I eventually settled on A Dozen and One Adventures, a collection of scenarios by Steve Kurtz published in 1993, and decided to begin with the first adventure, Flick of the Tail.
The opening appealed to me: in the great bazaar of Muluk, two men are engaged in a furious dispute over a magnificent fish covered in brilliant ruby-coloured scales. One claims ownership of the fish, while the other insists that it must be released. Matters are complicated by the rather extraordinary fact that the fish can talk, and the argument eventually ends with the unfortunate creature being thrown into a well.
Naturally, the adventurers become involved in the business of recovering it.
I loved this beginning, which seemed to capture something essential about The Arabian Nights: a seemingly trivial incident, a touch of absurdity, and the suggestion that something much stranger is hiding beneath the surface of ordinary life. There is no prophecy, no threat to the existence of the world, and no mysterious stranger offering a quest of great importance. Just two men quarrelling over a fish in a crowded marketplace.
Unfortunately, I was less enthusiastic about the rest of the adventure. The characters eventually descend into the well, make their way through underground passages, and reach an abandoned bathhouse, where they encounter various dangers before confronting a mysterious, ragged old woman who has caught the fish and made herself a very messy lair inside the bathhouse. She happens to be a magical creature who can speak and understand only reversed speech. The challenge of retrieving the fish involves working out how to communicate with her. There are some interesting ideas in the original, but I found this final encounter rather dull, and the atmosphere considerably darker than what I wanted for the beginning of this campaign.
This was not necessarily a criticism of the adventure itself. But I had spent the previous weeks immersing myself in the exuberant imagination of Al-Qadim and The Arabian Nights, and I wanted my players to experience something of the same enchantment.
I wanted splendour, extravagance, humour, and a glimpse of the extraordinary possibilities offered by this world.
(And, I admit, I wanted a wonderful NPC to play.)
The obvious solution was to replace the mysterious old woman with a genie, although I also decided to make another change before the characters reached the lower chambers.
A gang of thieves
In the original adventure, the abandoned bathhouse contains an encounter with snakes. Now, I have nothing against snakes, but in this particular case I found the encounter rather uninteresting.
We were, after all, in the middle of a great city, exploring a building that had been abandoned for years. It occurred to me that such a place would make an excellent refuge for criminals, particularly if the inhabitants of the neighbourhood believed it to be haunted.
So I replaced the snakes with a small gang of thieves who had made the upper rooms of the bathhouse their hideout, and who encouraged its sinister reputation to discourage unwanted visitors. They were quite happy to exploit the building, but they avoided its lower chambers, where they suspected something genuinely supernatural had taken up residence.
It was a relatively modest modification, but one that I thought improved the adventure in several ways.
For one thing, the thieves belonged naturally in the environment. They had understandable reasons for being there, and their presence suggested that the abandoned building continued to exist as part of the life of the city. It was not simply a collection of rooms populated with creatures waiting for the adventurers to arrive.
More importantly, the encounter now involved people who could react intelligently to the players' decisions. The thieves were criminals, but they were not fanatics, and they certainly had no desire to die defending their hideout. They could attempt to intimidate the characters, negotiate with them, ambush them, surrender, or flee, depending on the circumstances.
I was not particularly concerned with ensuring that a fight would take place. What interested me was creating a situation with several possible developments, and allowing the players to decide how to approach it.
There was also a dramatic reason for the change. The thieves provided an entirely mundane danger, the sort of danger one might encounter in any large city. They were greedy, suspicious, potentially violent, and thoroughly human.
And this made what followed all the more extraordinary.
The palace beneath the ruins
(So let us describe this from the POV of the adventurers.)
By the time the characters reached the lower chambers of the abandoned bathhouse, they had endured a rather miserable journey through the underground waterworks of Muluk. They had fought bandits, swum through narrow, submerged passages, struggled through old cisterns, and explored the damp and crumbling remains of a building that had clearly seen better days.
They were soaking wet, their clothes clinging to their bodies, their equipment dripping onto the stone floors. The air was cold and unpleasant, the walls covered with cracked tiles and patches of mould, and the occasional shaft of light did little to dispel the darkness.
Eventually, they found themselves descending along a narrow corridor into what appeared to be the oldest part of the building. Water dripped somewhere in the distance, and their footsteps echoed through the deserted passage.
But as they advanced, they noticed something unusual. A faint golden light could be seen at the far end of the corridor, and from somewhere beyond it came the gentle murmur of flowing water. As they approached, the stale smell of the ruined bathhouse gave way to the delicate fragrance of exotic perfumes, incense, and flowers.
And then they reached the end of the passage.
Before them lay a chamber whose very existence seemed impossible.
Instead of another ruined room, they found themselves looking into an immense and magnificent hall, far larger than anything that could conceivably fit beneath the bathhouse. Its floor was made of polished marble, veined with gold and lapis lazuli, while great columns rose towards a vaulted ceiling decorated with dazzling mosaics depicting fantastic sea creatures, coral palaces, and ships sailing beneath unfamiliar stars.
Golden lamps hung from delicate chains, illuminating fountains and pools of crystalline water. Exquisite carpets covered parts of the marble floor, enormous cushions embroidered with silk and pearls lay scattered around the room, and low tables carried platters of exotic fruits and delicacies. Water flowed through narrow channels, filling the air with a gentle, continuous murmur, while the entire chamber seemed to shimmer in a soft, bluish light.
At its centre was an enormous bathing pool.
Reclining comfortably in the warm waters was a magnificent figure, unmistakably supernatural. He possessed the form of a man, but his skin was a luminous blue-green, and his long, dark hair, adorned with pearls and precious shells, floated around his broad shoulders. His features were extraordinarily beautiful, and he wore enough jewellery to ransom a kingdom.
He was reading a large book, supported by an ornate golden stand beside the pool, occasionally turning a page, taking a leisurely puff from an elaborate nargileh, or reaching for a piece of fruit from a nearby platter.
He seemed perfectly content, and apparently entirely unaware of the adventurers who had just entered his palace.
On a marble pedestal near the edge of the pool stood a magnificent golden bowl, within which swam a small fish covered in brilliant ruby-coloured scales.
I allowed the players to take in the scene, and eventually one of them spoke.
The figure in the pool raised a finger, without looking away from his book.
"One moment."
He finished reading the paragraph, carefully turned the page, and then, apparently deciding that the interruption could no longer be ignored, slowly lifted his magnificent head.
He regarded the adventurers with an expression of mild curiosity, examining their dripping clothes, muddy boots, weapons, and rather undignified appearance.
"Ah. Mortals. Good heavens, whatever has happened to you?"
Before anyone could answer, he raised his hand again.
"No, no, do not tell me. Some dreadful misadventure, no doubt. You people do seem remarkably gifted at finding yourselves in the most unfortunate circumstances."
He closed his book and smiled.
"Nevertheless, you have arrived in the presence of Azhar, Pearl of the Seven Seas, Lord of the Sapphire Currents, Master of the Thousand Fountains, whose wisdom is deeper than the ocean and whose generosity knows no shores!"
He paused, clearly expecting some expression of admiration, before gesturing gracefully towards the surrounding splendour.
"Welcome to my humble abode."
Azhar was a marid, one of the mighty genies associated with the elemental plane of water, and he was immensely powerful, extravagantly vain, and entirely convinced of his own importance. But I did not want him to be merely an arrogant monster. He was cultured, curious, theatrical, capable of genuine charm, and possessed of an almost inexhaustible appetite for admiration.
He was also, in his own rather peculiar way, hospitable.
"Come, come! You must be cold. There is no reason to stand there dripping like a collection of miserable river spirits. Refreshments! Cushions! Towels!"
At his command, small figures formed from the flowing waters of the pool, rising gracefully into the air and moving to attend to his unexpected visitors.
"And do try the dates. They are exquisite. A gift from a sultan, whose name I have quite forgotten. A terribly grateful fellow."
I had an enormous amount of fun playing Azhar, and I think the contrast between his almost comical pomposity and his manifestly extraordinary power was one of the things that made him so effective.
He was ridiculous but his splendour was quite real, and the players had every reason to suspect that offending him would be a very bad idea.
Three stories, and the nature of truth
There was more to Azhar than his magnificence and extravagant notions of hospitality. I wanted him to be genuinely strange, a creature whose immense age and supernatural nature had given him a conception of reality quite different from that of ordinary mortals.
He would ask the player characters many questions about their adventures, occasionally making remarks that suggested his relationship with reality was unusual.
For instance, if a player character described how he had been surprised and wounded by a thief, Azhar might say:
"That is a terrific choice! But why leave it at being wounded? Would it not have been more exciting if you had been bleeding to death when your comrades found you?"
If the characters asked him what he was doing in an abandoned bathhouse beneath Muluk, he would smile, delighted by the opportunity.
"Ah, but that is a most extraordinary tale! In fact, one of these three tales explains my presence here."
He would then recount three stories.
In the first, Azhar had offended a mighty sultan by refusing to surrender a pearl of incomparable beauty. The sultan had dispatched a hundred sorcerers to imprison him, and Azhar had retreated beneath the city to amuse himself while they searched the seven seas in vain.
In the second, he had withdrawn beneath the earth so that the Moon, who had become careless in expressing her affection for him, might discover how unbearable life was without the sight of his magnificent person.
In the third, he had once wagered with a powerful djinn that he could transform the most miserable and abandoned place in Zakhara into a palace worthy of the greatest of kings. Naturally, he had won, and had decided to remain to enjoy his victory.
Having finished, he would lean back into his bath and look at the adventurers expectantly.
"Well, my friends? What happened to me?"
Whichever story the players selected, Azhar would say, "Indeed. And what else?"
Azhar’s opinion of them would depend on their choice. Those who believed he had been hiding from the Moon would immediately earn his affection, having demonstrated a proper appreciation of his irresistible magnificence. Those who chose the first story would strike him as suspicious people, inclined to see intrigues and enemies everywhere, and would insult him by implying that he was weak, while those who chose the third would impress him as individuals capable of appreciating ingenuity, extravagance, and the pleasures of a magnificent wager.
The choice mattered because Azhar cared about it, and his opinion of the adventurers would influence how he responded when they subsequently attempted to persuade him to release Salana.
For Azhar, the past was as fluid as the future, and the mortal insistence that events must have happened in one particular way was merely another example of their limited understanding. Whichever story the players selected would become the truth; in fact, Azhar would treat it for the remainder of the conversation as established fact.
The players were not discovering Azhar's past. They were helping to create it, and in doing so they were determining something about their future relationship with him. I did not need to establish that choosing one story would provide a mechanical bonus to negotiations, or that choosing another would impose a penalty. I simply needed to understand Azhar well enough to play him consistently.
A magnificent host, and a dying mermaid
Of course, there was still the matter of the fish.
The talking fish was not an ordinary fish at all, but a mermaid named Salana, temporarily confined to that shape. Azhar had placed her inside his magnificent golden bowl, which he kept near the edge of his bathing pool, so that he could enjoy her exquisite singing.
Unfortunately, the bowl contained freshwater, and Salana, being a creature of the sea, was slowly dying. Her singing carried her sorrow and despair. Azhar found this quite delightful.
"Ah, yes! My little jewel. Have you ever heard such a voice? Such sorrow, such exquisite melancholy and sadness! I assure you, the finest singers of the courts of Zakhara cannot approach her."
If the characters pointed out that the fish was clearly suffering, Azhar would answer:
"My dear fellow, she is singing! It is the very essence of art to express the deepest passions of the soul. The more she sings of sorrow, the more she suffers, but the more she suffers, the more beautiful is her singing. This suffering helps make an accomplished artist into a great one."
And if they insisted that she needed to be returned to the sea, he would sigh, with the weary expression of someone who has been forced to endure an exceedingly tiresome argument.
"The sea, the sea! Always the sea! One would imagine there was nothing else in creation worth contemplating. I have offered her a golden vessel and the privilege of performing before one of the greatest connoisseurs of beauty in all the elemental planes. An exquisite artist such as she knows fully well why her sacrifice is necessary. Do not try to spoil her moment."
Then he would gesture towards the extraordinary hall surrounding them.
"Look around you! Is this not magnificent? What more could any creature reasonably desire for her greatest and possibly last, performance?"
I don't line mustache-twirling villains. Azhar did not regard himself as cruel, nor was cruelty his purpose. On the contrary, he considered himself generous, and seemed genuinely incapable of understanding why his magnificent hospitality might not be appreciated, or why the mermaid would wish to miss this chance for her art to attain new heights. He considered her suffering and death altogether necessary, although certainly unfortunate, details of the whole situation.
The adventurers were first-level characters, and Azhar was a marid. They could no more defeat him in combat than they could defeat the ocean itself, but that did not mean they were powerless. They could flatter him, reason with him, appeal to his pride, or attempt to exploit the very principles of hospitality and generosity in which he took such immense satisfaction.
There was, for instance, the question of salt.
In the traditions I introduced for the adventure, sharing salt created a bond of hospitality and obligation. If the characters could persuade Azhar to personally offer Salana salted water, they might establish such a bond between them, and then argue that he was obliged to return her safely to the Great Sea, even against “her will”.
I liked this possibility because it emerged naturally from Azhar's personality and the customs of the setting. It was not a puzzle for which I had prepared a single correct solution, nor did I require the players to discover it. They were free to approach Azhar in whatever manner seemed appropriate, and I would determine his reactions according to his character, his interests, and the circumstances of the encounter.
But I had prepared Azhar to take the initiative if the players didn’t find a solution. He had something else on his mind, something which, in his estimation, was of considerable importance. He had been conceiving (or remembering?) a most extraordinary story.
"Tell me," he asked, leaning forward with sudden interest, "are you wise?"
"I don’t mean as wise as I. That would be absurd. But perhaps, among the fleeting generations of mankind, some small measure of wisdom may occasionally be found."
"I have this story to consider. A most remarkable story, involving promises and treachery, love and duty, wealth beyond imagining and sorrow beyond endurance. And I find myself confronted with questions of the most profound philosophical importance."
"Perhaps you would care to offer your judgement."
And without waiting for their consent, he began.
The story of the pearl
I wanted Azhar to tell the characters a tale in the manner of The Arabian Nights, one involving love, promises, obligations, wealth, and a moral dilemma that could not be resolved simply by applying a rule.
The story concerned a man named Harun and a mysterious woman of the sea named Nura. Harun had once offered Nura shelter, and in return she had given him an extraordinary pearl, a treasure of almost unimaginable value, on the condition that it must never be sold or broken.
Years later, Harun found himself confronted with a terrible dilemma. A woman named Mariam was dying, and the only thing that could save her was the water of the First Sea, sealed within the pearl.
Breaking it would save her life, but would also destroy the treasure and violate the promise under which it had been given. Nor was it entirely clear that Harun possessed the right to dispose of it, since the pearl was bound to an ancient compact involving the Caliph's ancestors.
The pearl was valuable enough to make its possessor extraordinarily wealthy, to provide for many people in need, or to fund a life of unimaginable luxury. Its destruction could not simply be dismissed as an insignificant sacrifice, and the promise had been freely given.
As the story unfolded, more characters entered the dispute, each with a different understanding of justice, ownership, loyalty, and obligation, until Azhar eventually reached the crucial moment, closed his book, and turned towards the adventurers.
"Well? Will Harun break the pearl and save the woman? Will he honour his promise and allow her to perish? Will he surrender the treasure to those who claim it by ancient right? Or is there some subtler ending, some path that lesser minds have failed to perceive?"
He leaned back into the warm waters of his bath.
"Come, my friends. Enlighten me. Tell me how it all ended."
What I liked about this part of the encounter was that it gave the players an opportunity to engage with a powerful supernatural being through conversation, argument, and interpretation, rather than simply trying to discover what service they had to perform in exchange for a reward.
Azhar was genuinely interested in their answers, although his vanity made him an unpredictable judge. A clever argument might delight him, particularly if it allowed him to display his own wisdom, while an equally reasonable argument delivered without sufficient respect might provoke his indignation.
And throughout this elaborate philosophical discussion, the mermaid was slowly dying in a golden bowl beside him.
The parallel was deliberate. Azhar was fascinated by abstract questions of obligation and justice, but remarkably indifferent to the obligations he might have incurred himself. Whether the players would recognise this, and whether they would find a way to use it to their advantage, was entirely up to them.
I had created the situation, but I did not know how it would end.
And that was exactly how I wanted it.
What happened at the table
I have now run this encounter twice, for two different groups of players, and it was wonderful on both occasions.
I had initially wondered whether the players might become impatient with Azhar's elaborate story, particularly since we were playing AD&D, a game in which one might reasonably expect to spend a considerable amount of time fighting monsters and looking for treasure. Instead, they listened, became interested in the dilemma, and engaged with the questions it raised.
I particularly enjoyed the discussions, not because I was waiting for the players to arrive at a predetermined answer, but because I was curious to hear what they would propose. And I had the enormous pleasure of responding in character, sometimes approving of their ingenuity, sometimes challenging their reasoning, and occasionally becoming magnificently indignant at a perceived slight to Azhar's wisdom. Nor was it a given that Azhar would accept their proposed ending. If their version of the story lacked coherence, drama, intelligence, or creativity, he would simply say, with evident disappointment, "No. That is not what happened," and ask the next player character. If their version was particularly uninteresting or unappealing, Azhar might even fly into a rage and punish the offending adventurer.
So, after telling you all this, you are probably wondering: how did it all end? Ah, well, dear reader, I don’t think it would be proper to disclose to you a past that, if you ever met Azhar, would be yours to determine.
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