"THE GATE IS OPEN! THE GATE IS DEFENDED!"
- Dying Edict of the Ash Witch
These were the final words of the Ash Witch and the first words of the Wasted Lands of Yog campaign.
.jpg "Photo by Francesco Ungaro: https://www.pexels.com/photo/serene-desert-sunset-over-misty-dunes-32901661/")
Last week, I was discussing the makeup of Yog: Dying Earth, Zothique, Hyperborea, Gor, and an assortment of other sword-and-sorcery, weird fantasy, and cheap paperback fare that I have put together over the years. I brought up this idea. The Dying Earth is clear on the fact that we are all going to die; Yog asks what we plan to do about it beforehand.
I mean to start putting some answers to that this week. An oddly fitting catalyst has presented itself in the form of another world in its death throes.
Dark Sun is making a comeback.
Wizards of the Coast announced at Gen Con that Athas will be back in 2027 as D&D’s first mature-rated setting. I am looking forward to it. I have always been fond of Dark Sun for the sorcerer-kings, the city-states, the perilous magic, and the feeling that the world has gone to hell in a handbasket and those remaining must make do.
But the news has stirred up an old conversation. What does one do with the hard parts? Slavery, tyranny, genocide, brutality, and ecological ruin. These are what make Athas, yet they are at odds with much of today’s heroic fantasy.
I don’t know how Wizards will handle it. I haven’t read the new material, so I am not going to judge it now. I wouldn’t want to try and make Yog into some version of "Dark Sun done right." That would be silly and a bit juvenile.
Athas is one thing, Yog is another.
The real question is how to put genuinely disturbing matters in a roleplaying context without either sanitizing them or making a spectacle of the whole affair.
How does one handle the hard topics?
This Is a Warning
Let me be extremely plain about this.
Yog is a brutal place. Here, one will find slavery, torture, exploitation, religious oppression, sadism, and sexual violence implied.
For centuries, the Priest-Kings have held sway over their city-states through fear, tradition, and violence. Their economies run on slaves born into bondage. There are professional torturers and priests whose duty is to sanctify the social order. Some make a living from it; others simply like it.
It is an important distinction. Sometimes cruelty is the work of an evil system, sometimes the system allows an evil person to be what he wants to be.
But there is another side to it.
I have made Yog brutal, not so the players can bask in it, but to give them something to fight for.
I have no use for pages of description detailing the degradations of the enslaved or graphic accounts of every atrocity under the Priest-Kings. At some point, "mature" content is just spectacle and says nothing of value. I am after consequences.
Take Constance, for instance. She is from Yog, and she has had terrible things done to her.
I won’t go into exactly what they were. There is no need. One can tell from the world she inhabited and the sort of men who held the reins of her life. The implication is enough.
I am not in denial that the worst happened, but I see no reason to make of her suffering some kind of entertainment for the reader's edification.
What matters is Constance. And the people who later step up for her. Deirdre helps her. The Ash Witch sees to her escape. Once free, Constance starts to help others. In a sense, that is the true beginning of her story. I want to know that the players meet Constance and see that she creates a new life. And then I want their characters to do the same for all the other Constances still left on Yog.
I have a particular affinity for Constance because she is, in an odd way, a mirror to one of my other characters, Candy Mercer from the Jackson, IL game.
Candy is a sweet girl in a world where awful things happen. Yet Candy has her protections. She has a family and friends who care for her; there is a trio of witches and a host of teenagers who have made it their business to stand between any trouble and one of their own. With all that, Candy is able to put down roots. She gets to grow up. Later, she makes a life for herself as a nurse, becomes a mother, and I she becomes someone who helps others.
Constance is what you get when you take away those safeguards from Candy. Not out of weakness or any notion that she is due for a different fate. It is simply that nobody was there in time. That is, until they were. Deirdre says no. The Ash Witch will not have it. And Constance is free to be the one who can say no on behalf of the next person in line. That is the kind of game I want Yog to be. Constance is only one, after all. There are thousands more who are still waiting for someone to make an appearance.
Look at it this way. I see a distinction between acknowledging something and putting it on display. A game can let someone know that sexual violence is part of the setting without making the players part of it. It can have slavery in its world without dwelling on the lot of the enslaved. One can have sadists in the mix without the game itself turning sadistic. Implication is not always a form of cowardice; it can be restraint.
But I am not going to solve matters by feigning these things do not exist.
You cannot solve a problem until you are willing to look it in the face.
Slavery is evil, as is religious tyranny, and the treatment of another human as property or as disposible. I don’t believe fantasy is made better by shying away from such truths, nor does a setting become mature just for the sake of having them. Maturity isn’t a matter of how much blood is spilled on the page but the understanding of what that blood signifies.
Which is why we come to the player characters.
The slavery in Yog is not for the players to have a go at living in a slave-holding world. It is there to be broken. The Priest-Kings are not meant to be admired for their decadence, but to be overthrown.
That is not to say every outing in Yog will be an insurrection against a city-state. Characters will still be robbing tombs and sifting through ancient ruins in the sand. They will encounter necromancers who have no qualms about using the most plentiful resource in the world, the dead. There are assassins, witches, strange monsters, and dying gods, and things so old one can’t tell if they were ever alive. It is a swords and sorcery game, plain and simple.
But the Priest-Kings are part of the scenery. Perhaps the merchant outfitting an expedition the PCs are guarding is quietly passing fugitives from one city to the next. Or the caravan they are hired to protect is carrying something other than wares. Maybe that old magical weapon just uncovered is enough to put a Priest-King in the ground.
The characters will have to decide.
And to be clear on one point: the witches did not put resistance on the map. The people of Yog have been at it for centuries. They have hidden children and fugitives in villages, poisoned their masters. Priests have turned a blind eye to orders; soldiers have done the same. People have escaped.
People fled into deserts, where they might die, rather than remain somewhere they would certainly suffer.
Rebellions broke out. Most of them were put down. There were heroes, though their names have been lost to time for the most part.
I have no desire to present the Thorn Witch, the Red Sorceress, or the Ash Witch as some kind of powerful outsiders who had to show helpless folk what freedom was worth wanting. The people already had that in them. What the witches did was of a different order.
For centuries, the oppressed have been putting up a fight. The witches’ contribution was to show that the Priest-Kings can bleed.
That is a matter of some consequence.
A slave market goes up in flames. A slaver is gone, and then another. The Red Sorceress has a mind for some trouble, and the soldiers the Priest-King sends after her never return. Word gets around that the Thorn Witch made short work of the soldiers after an escaped girl; someone else will tell you the tale another way. Then the Ash Witch makes her mark.
The stories take on a life of their own. They are sung, prayed over, and scratched into walls. Some are threats. Whether only half of them are true is beside the point.
The Priest-Kings can bleed. And if they can bleed, they can be beaten. In a society that holds its rulers to be beyond reproach, that notion is more perilous than any act of the witches.
But the Ash Witch does something worse still. She provides a destination.
The Witch Gate
I have mentioned the Gate before. For the witches who created it, it was simply The Gate, but the oppressed people of Yog have named it something else. The Witch Gate.
I will leave the details of the Gate, and where it might lead, to the imagination of the players and the characters. Those in Yog who are downtrodden call what lies beyond it *Haven*. The Priest-Kings have a word for it too: *Hell*.
Spoiler: The Gate leads to West Haven, where the Witch Queen waits on the other side.
Their priests are quick to denounce the witches as demons, preaching that the Ash Witch has opened a road to damnation and is stealing souls from the natural order. But those making a desperate bid for the Gate are not much moved by such theology. More to the point, in their minds, nothing on the other side can be worse than life here.
Prior to the Witch Gate, any escape was fleeting. One could put distance between themself and a master or a city, or hide with strangers in the desert. Yet they were still on Yog, subject to the next slaver or law that would see them in chains. The Witch Gate offers an actual way out, not just a chance to run a little farther and hope the slavers give up.
Opinions differ on what the Gate is. Some say the Ash Witch found a road that was always there; others say that she has made a new world. Some think Haven is a kingdom, some a city, some nothing but freedom. The Priest-Kings insist on Hell. Perhaps they are all wrong.
With this Gate, the Ash Witch alters Yog more deeply than she ever could with a blade to a Priest-King’s throat. She leaves behind something that will outlast her. The witches are a legend, but the Witch Gate is a permanent fact of the world. And a dangerous one at that.
First, they learn the Priest-Kings can bleed.
Then they can lose.
Now they understand the Priest-Kings do not have the final say on whether you remain.
That last bit is likely to unnerve them.
And it is the most important part of the campaign.
The Ash Witch Falls
And then she is dead.
This is the point at which I want the game to start. Not in the middle of the great witches’ exploits, but in their wake. The Ash Witch, The Thorn Witch, and The Red Sorceress. They have had their day and left their mark on Yog in ways the Priest-Kings cannot undo. Now they are gone.
There is no standing behind the Ash Witch and letting her sort things out. She dies.
As she falls, her voice is heard across the land. Maybe they hear it with their ears. Maybe they hear it in dreams. Maybe a Priest-King wakes, breathing heavily, because the words are suddenly inside his head, louder than any scream he has caused.
Maybe an enslaved woman working in a field stops what she is doing and somehow knows that, somewhere beyond the horizon, a dying witch has just spoken.
It doesn't really matter how the message travels.
Everyone hears the final Edict of the Ash Witch:
THE GATE IS OPEN! THE GATE IS DEFENDED!
These are the campaign’s opening lines as much as they are the last of the Ash Witch. And the second carries as much weight as the first.
The Gate is open; you can escape.
The Gate is defended; they won’t be able to just take you back.
As for who is doing the defending? I will not say in the game. The Priest-Kings would have you believe it is demons. Some maintain that the dead Ash Witch herself is on the other side. A few witches will only smile if you put the question to them, while others claim the Gate is its own protection. What is beyond dispute is that the Ash Witch is gone and the Gate is still there.
A slave owner may wake to an empty room and find no sign of where his property has gone. A Priest-King will have his sermon ready on the soul-stealing ways of witches, though someone in the pews will be hearing something quite at odds with his intentions. There is an exit. And once that is known, the cage loses its permanence.
This Is Where the Heroes Come In
One can get used to almost anything, but that does not make it right. For as long as anyone in Yog can remember, the Priest-Kings have been saying this is the way of things. Their forebears lived so. The temples call it sacred, the merchants necessary, the soldiers call it law. Given time, the monstrous becomes normal when one has no memory of an alternative.
The world has made a habit of suffering. The heroes have not.
I could make no more telling statement about Yog.
Perfection is not required of the heroes any more than of the witches. Some are vengeful or prone to killing where another witch would show mercy. After a lifetime of battling monsters, one has to wonder if the line has been crossed. Resistance is not a blanket justification for every deed.
But heroism can be as straightforward as looking at what has been accepted and saying:
No. This is wrong.
And then acting on it.
That is the distinction between Yog and a fantasy world done up in dark colors for the sake of it. I have no desire to see how much misery I can cram onto a map; I want to see the response to it. Which brings me to the talk around Dark Sun. Not because Yog is superior, or that Athas ought to be handled my way. Athas is what it is. But it is worth asking why we put such material in a game.
With Yog, I know why. To be opposed.
Let the sun go dark in time. Let the kingdoms and towers and Priest-Kings become yet another stratum under the sand. Everything dies. But there are chains to be broken in the present. There are people like Constance who require someone to come to them now.
The Ash Witch, the Thorn Witch, and the Red Sorceress had their say. They are dead and cannot see it through. That is as it should be in a role-playing game.
The Ash Witch’s last words are the campaign’s first.
From here on in, it is up to the player characters.
