Adventures in Fiction: Turning the Khlit Stories of Harold Lamb into RPG Adventures!
Our Appendix N Archeology and Adventures in Fiction series are meant to take a look at the writers and creators behind the genre(s) that helped to forge not only our favorite hobby but our lives. We invite you to explore the entirety of the series on our Adventures In Fiction home page. Adventures in Fiction: Turning the Khlit Stories of Harold Lamb into RPG Adventures! by Julian Bernick Spoiler Alert: What follows is a discussion of Harold Lamb’s work and how to adapt some of his themes and stories for DCC adventures. Spoilers, both light and heavy, abound! Don’t worry, you’ll enjoy Lamb’s work anyway! Here in the Goodman Games world, we’ve been rediscovering the works of Harold Lamb. He wrote timeless adventure stories that influenced a bevy of Appendix N authors, most notably Robert Howard. The strength of Lamb’s tales are tight plotting, crisply drawn characters and rich historical detail. But as enjoyable as Lamb’s tales are, they lack some of the cardinal elements of Appendix N literature and DCC RPG adventures: supernatural magic, brooding extra-human entities from beyond space, and the never-ending struggle between Law and Chaos. Without these elements, what can we draw from these adventure stories to enrich our adventures for DCC RPG? For this essay, I’ll discuss the Khlit stories collected in Wolf of the Steppes. These tales are just a fraction of Lamb’s pulp stories, but still provide plenty of useful ideas for DCC adventures. One strength of the Khlit stories is the scenarios that Lamb fashioned for the character. These are no dungeon-delve or rescue-the-princess stories. Each of them is framed as a high-concept scenario testing the limits of Khlit’s strength, resourcefulness, and honor. The breadth and novelty of these scenarios give us a good example of the wild possibilities mostly ignored for traditional module writing: Why shouldn’t the adventure be the defense of a fortress against an invading horde, such as in Changa Nor? Or the infiltration of the headquarters of a legendary grandmaster of assassins, such as in Alamut? Or, as in Wolf’s War, the single-handed routing of a vastly superior force using only asymmetric warfare? Crafting adventures that incorporate these types of challenges forces everyone to raise their game. These are not mere puzzle encounters, but whole premises that can’t be overcome by brute force or exercise of magic. Such adventures are sure to...
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