Part four in this increasingly infrequent series is an elf I played in Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay game run by Matt Hyde, some of whose online creations for Chaosium's Elric! system – set in Moorcock's Young Kingdoms – can be found here and here, if anyone's interested. But I digress.
WFRP was a pretty interesting gaming system, really. The world, which was developed when Games Workshop weren't soley predicated to the merchandising of tabletop wargames (I said soley) was a gritty one, reminiscent of our own Europe circa the 1700s (The Old World), except with the addition of marauding beastmen, trolls, orcs and the like. Principally set in a Germanic Empire, one of the things which helped set the slightly mordant gothic tone (aside from the political intrigue, and incursions of a mutative sorcerous blight known as Chaos, from the wastelands of the north) was the game system itself – which based character progression around a series of career paths – and the combat rules therein, which were realistically perilous, and came complete with a gruesome 'critical hit table' to determine injuries if a foe landed a particularly telling blow.
So to cut it short (literally), this chap here had his right leg lopped off after being on the receiving end of one such injury, probably at the hand/claw/tentacle of one the ubiquitous beastmen, I think, whilst on a boat. Having sorcerously healed the wound, he set about carving himself a peg leg, scrimshaw style, from some Ivory that happened to be lying about. This was probably highly impractical, given that Ivory is probably softer, more expensive, and more attractive to your average passing vagabond than wood, but what the hell.
He later got a magic sword, and a magical amulet thingy that Matt informed me had been stolen between gaming sessions. Matt! no fair!
His name was Tanis, also the name of the half-elven guy out of Dragonlance, but shucks, I didn't know that then.
2 comments:
Matt - never the most merciful of GMs. I remember spending the best part of a week drawing and writing out background for a sickly Melnibonean prince with a penchant for drugs and poetry, a sort of combination of Elric and Baudelaire, who lasted 2 game sessions before he was bisected by some sort of energy weapon being weilded by a masked soldier from the Hawkmoon universe. Cheers Matt!
Yeah, what with him and Sir Peter Kipling, you didn't have a good run in the Moorcock Universe with Matt. Still, I have fond memories of some freewheeling gaming sessions with him, rambling round the multiverse...
I'm guessing that would be one of 'The Mantis Guard' by the sound of it.
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