Chariot II

So, once the book versions of We Don't Go Back, On a Thousand Walls and Cult Cinema are finished, I'm going to do a second edition of Chariot.

Funny thing about Chariot. I wrote it nearly three years ago now, I crowdfunded it, I laid it out, and I played it with my friends for a while, and then I put it away and did some other stuff. And you do, that's what you do, isn't it? You put it to one side.

And about eighteen months after I last looked at it, I looked at it again. And it's full of typos, which it would be, because no matter how good you are at proofreading, you don't proofread your own work; and some of the art I'm still happy with, in an outsider art sort of way, and some of it I'm less happy with; and some of the rules need to be explained more clearly and given better examples. I came up with a better way to do the card mechanics.

But for all that, I read this, and I thought, by God, this is good.

Errata: Alternative Boons for the Lover

I should first offer an apology for not having posted for a couple of days. Life got in the way, mainly and while I knew the pace of the blog wasn't going to be one I could keep up forever, I still hope to post if not daily, at least five times a week. I still have several essays about pop Atlantises and fractured histories to write, and a bunch of game stuff.

But today, I want to fix something in Chariot. 

A map

Lemurian bodies

Pren

They tower even over the Rmoahals, a full seven cubits high, broad shouldered, narrow-hipped, their long arms and short, bandy legs, neither of which ever fully straighten giving them an immediately recognisable profile. Atlanteans find it hard to tell them apart. Male, female, and the dual-sexed third gender that constitutes a good quarter of Lemurian society, all look very similar to the smaller peoples, with their shallow jaws and flat, wide-mouthed faces and their golden-brown or deep yellow skin. The Lemurians can tell. It amuses them that other peoples can't, and have you heard a Lemurian laugh? It is like huge stones grinding.

Small, sharp, widely spaced eyes in black, deep blue or violet stare out from under a heavy, fleshy brow. Coarse brown or sometimes white hair sits on the tops of their head, but doesn't grow over the back, where, in those Lemurians who are exceptionally talented psychically, there sits a third eye. Draped in skins dyed in bright shades of red, blue and green, carrying wooden or stone spears, the Lemurians have not taken on the technologies of the younger races. And why should they? They sing the Akâsha. It gives them all they need. Lemurian songs aid in the hunt, calm beasts, heal wounds, and lift and and move colossal stones.

The beasts they herd, the earth reptiles and the mammoths, serve as riding beasts, beasts of burden, and sources of food, clothing, ropes, bone bows and arrows, dyes and paints; no part of them goes to waste. 

Teeth made for chewing eat barely cooked steaks; huge gnarled hands work on intricate weaving projects and finely pulled thongs. 

They smell of blood and earth and the sweat of beasts. They rarely speak, but often sing in voices so deep and rich that a choir of Lemurians can stop a charging army in its tracks, no exagerration. Once, a few thousand years ago, an army of the White Sun with its land chariots and sky chariots came to take the City of Conical Stones. The Lemurians sang the army to stillness, and sang the flying monoliths that yet fill the skies of the South East down on their heads, and all were destroyed, and the stones serve as their graveyard still. 

Your Direction to a World of Miracles

How many maps of Atlantis are there? Loads, that's how many. 

Everyone who writes about Atlantis has their own map: Lewis Spence, Ignatius Donnelly, Graham Hancock, Charles Berlitz, Otto Muck, all different (Murry Hope uses other people's). Scott-Elliot has six of them, all at different stages, each superimposed on a map of the present world. I'm drawing my own, which loosely draws on the form of Scott-Elliot's map of Atlantis at its height, the third one.

It's liberating in a way, finding places to put a mythology. Putting names for people who never really existed in a context. For a project like this, maps matter.

In a lot of ways more work has to be done setting up cultures and conflicts than in the sorts of games I'm used to writing, the modern day horror, the near-future stuff, since the world needs a sense of place. It's going to take a while, the map.

Muvians, the Fourth People

Pharomenes, a Muvian Captain.

According to the diplomats and travellers of the Atlanteans, no culture offers as much threat to the rest of the world as the Justified Children of Mu, the Fourth People.

Lemurians

The Lemurian from my dad's book. The one that started all of this.

Lemuria is old, older than thought, older than memory, and its original inhabitants are barely recognisable as people at all, or so say the treatises and gazetteers of the Atlanteans.

From the sketchbook

A Lemurian.