Rip It & Run! World Building…

One of the crucial things in establishing a roleplaying campaign is the construction of a reality that will engage the players and keep them interested; in short, a world that is well-grounded and built, from that ground, up. A good campaign world will interconnect with itself on several layers, supporting its elements in such a way that no-one involved in it will suddenly stand back and say “what the-? That doesn’t make any sense!”. If this ever happens in your game, you’ll know that it’s all over bar the shouting.

Speculative fiction is a place to see this in action. With a created reality like Tolkien’s Middle Earth, the world has been built in many layers upon a linguistic foundation. If something is encountered during an adventure then there is a word for it. Certain words and concepts imply other words and concepts, and the nascent world starts to grow from there, generating from a series of “if that, then…” logical constraints. As a flipside to Lord of the Rings, Terry Brooks’ Sword of Shannara comes up all hollow, despite using the same type of cloth. Within his world there are Elves and Dwarves too, but there’s no rationale for them such as Tolkien provided: they just are. It’s the difference between mythologically-created entities and guys with pointy ears.

To my mind this is a bit thin. If there’s no depth to the scenario then there’s no sense of immersion into the narrative. Shortly after reading Brooks’ first (not plagiarised at all) novel, I began to move away from fantasy novels as entertainment and looked for more satisfying – grounded – material. This is not to blacken an entire genre with a tar-brush; there are great fantasy writers out there, just none who are writing these days. I’ll take Gene Wolf; I’ll take Moorcock; I’ll take Mervyn Peake – each one of these guys has backstory built into every one of their created environments along with the ability to make their realities seem real.

I read a fantasy novel by Richard Adams when I was young (perhaps too young, really, to fully understand its implications, and not many people perhaps would call it a fantasy novel) called Shardik. I had just finished Watership Down and was impelled into continuing in the same vein - the last few chapters of that book were read by me at night in bed with a torch because – despite being about rabbits, fer chris’sake! – I couldn’t put it down. With my head on fire, I jumped straight into Shardik and found something completely different.

Shardik is set in an Iron Age-ish community in a vaguely-European-although-possibly-Sub-continental forest, and definitely not our world. A very large bear gets burnt in a forest fire and blunders into a human settlement, encountering, but not killing, our protagonist. The giant bear is a holy symbol for the tribe and they see the creature as a harbinger, allowing it to walk amongst them and taking no retaliation when it attacks them, or their structures. Our hero, having been spared a bloody end by means of a paw swipe, becomes something of a ‘chosen one’ and is tasked with tending to the bear’s wounds, something he does knowing that each moment could be his last. From here on in, there’s religious politics, social unrest and …other stuff. To be honest, I didn’t get much further into it; like I say, I was way too young.

A feature that stuck out for me though (apart from the hero’s harrowing encounters with the bear each time he tried to change its dressings), was a single word – “crendro”. In the world of the book, there is a language that is highly developed: crendro is a greeting, essentially “hello”. We are told that it comes from the same root as the people’s word for seeing, and literally means “I see you”. This, although it doesn’t seem like much, is powerful stuff. At one stroke, we have depth in a created world that might have just blown apart at the seams under too much scrutiny. A single funny-sounding word lets us – the readers – know that this is a measured, calculated and old universe of possibilities.

Language is fairly essential to this phenomenon, although not absolute – in essence genre fiction is mostly a written, narrative process so it just follows. When you watch something like “Blade Runner” for example, it’s not just the language(s) and the funny words that hook you in; it’s the sense that everyone has slept in their clothes and sunk into the fabric of the rooms that they walk through. It’s not just the actors either: most of the players in that film have never been better than what they produced there. There’s a sense that this is all real, which is the genius of the piece.

Take another example of world-building done badly: my personal bete noire, “Star Wars”. This is an atrocious piece of rubbish: it’s badly thought-out; it borrows blindly from everything without ever trying to be its own thing; and, at bottom, it makes no sense. In that galaxy far, far away, there is demonstrably, no Roman alphabet and there are no Arabic numerals (except when J.J. Abrams wants to shortcut a sense of distant things getting close by means of range-finding binoculars); and yet we have “X-wings” and “Y-wings”. Is there tobacco? If not, why is there a “Chewbacca”? The planet of Tatooine, which was filmed in Algeria, palpably takes its name from an old French prison there, to where bad boys from Marseilles got shipped in the 50s to be turned into hardened criminals. Everything about the film is strapped, or bolted on from other things, or made up on the spur of the moment. “Darth Sidious”? Please.

What makes “Star Wars” seem to work for most fans is the extensive use of tropes that it borrows from a myriad other places. Simply put, it does what other, better, movies do; it just puts them in a different frame. “Star Wars” is Akira Kurosawa’s “Hidden Fortress” overlain with old storylines from pulp adventure serials as sub-plots and deus ex-machina moments. The only thing about it that is original is the distressed state of the Rebels’ equipment, something that can be laid directly at Dan O’Bannon’s door, a styling he used before it in “Dark Star” and which he carried over to “Alien” afterwards. So, not that original in that regard either.

A thing I used to do when I was running D&D for my cronies as a kid, was to buy the prepared modules and then try to work them into the world that I was building for my players. This wasn’t always easy: I knew that there was this big Demi-Lich at the end of this particular module, but it seemed only reasonable to me that he should be known about outside of his horrific lair. Accordingly, I seeded my world with legends and rumours about Acererak so that, when my guys were able to confront the “Tomb of Horrors” the place wouldn’t seem to have sprung into being, cold, from nowhere. This didn’t always work as well as it could have, but at least I made the attempt.

The same thing can be said about HPL and his Mythos. Writers, especially the Lovecraft Circle writers, were keen to borrow ideas from each other and to extend those borrowed concepts into other interesting areas. This is fine, until you start to pull it all together from an outside, non-literary perspective – for roleplaying, as an instance – and you start to see how things just don’t work so well. Sure, for Writer A it was useful to have a copy of the Necronomicon in the community library of Cibecue Arizona, but is that reasonable given the work’s notoriety? For a compiler like myself, it means I have to work extra hard to make sure that that particular fact makes sense in outlining the world of the Mythos, because – like it or not – once it’s in print, it’s canon. Similarly, Robert E. Howard’s assertion that all surviving copies of Die Unnaussprechlichen Kulten have iron hasps to hold the book shut is bizarre: no publisher in his right mind at the time of printing the book would have signed off on such an outmoded feature. Nevertheless, there it stands, and it has to stand, and we collators have to try and find rationales that work with the material, in order to not let such anachronisms break the roleplaying ‘fourth wall’. Don’t get me started on the fact that Basil Copper’s insidious Trone Tables from The Great White Space are written in Ogham. Just don’t.

In many ways, the Cthulhu Mythos is no more or less bolted-on and strung together from parts than “Star Wars” is; however, just as the new directors are doing with the new films, the established material can be massaged in such a way that it feels right for an audience, and that nothing jars them out of their suspension of disbelief. As we’ve seen, a single ill-considered element can break the entire structure, but, that being said, a well-thought-out minor feature can make the entire construction tick over like a Formula-1 engine.

Thuggery...

It’s an interesting thing how language can veer off into strange wildernesses while no-one’s paying attention. Words that, at one time, had very specific meanings can suddenly loosen up in terms of their definitions, blurring out to cover a range of phenomena – sometimes related and sometimes not – even to the point of becoming woefully vague and flabby. Take the word ‘thug’. I’ve used this word a lot lately, mostly in discussions about football players and their acts of shameless and unrepented criminality, even though I know the term has a very precise, laser-fine definition. If you’ve never heard of Thugs, here’s where you’re about to get edumacated…

*****

In discussing Mythos phenomena, we often talk about what it means to be scared, or what generates fear in others. After all, when we sit down to a session of “Call of Cthulhu” that’s what we’re trying to conjure up – fear; in ourselves and others. HPL tried to present a very specific notion of the fearsome in his stories and the main feature of it is dispassion; a pervasive indifference to humanity as a unit, or as individuals. We see it often in various forms of entertainment media: Gene Hackman’s character in “Unforgiven” when facing the business end of Clint Eastwood’s Smith & Wesson objects to being so despatched because he “has a house”; in Elaine Lee and Michael Wm. Kaluta’s comic series “Starstruck”, there is a spoof on the concept with the Cloistered Order of the Cosmic Veil of the Goddess Uncaring. The randomness of an indifferent universe creates outrage in onlookers and outrage is a major source of fear.

Randomness is at the very heart of Thuggery. Since the Middle Ages, pilgrims in India, making annual journeys to sacred locales within the country, faced the undeniable fact that many of them would not return from such voyages. It was a commonplace notion that, if you undertook your religious duty to travel the many pilgrim trails that cover the Sub-continent, you risked not coming home afterwards. This was put down, in part, to the presence of such things as wild animals, or the actions of bandits – or Dacoits – but there was actually a more sinister agent in play:

Thugs – technically-speaking – are members of a cult dedicated to the worship of the Goddess Kali, an aspect of the consort of Shiva, god of Death. According to legend, a great giant attacked the country and Kali went to oppose it. Unfortunately, whenever a drop of its blood landed upon the ground, it transformed into an exact duplicate of its originator, and soon, Kali was up to her skull crown in undying, Xerox-ed enemies. Fortunately for her, two wily fellows were watching these events from the sidelines: taking off their scarves, they watched where the drops of blood fell and, when the new creature appeared, they strangled it, killing it without shedding any blood, and helped Kali win the day. In gratitude, she took them on as followers giving them the right to strangle other creatures to death as a means of sacrifice to her. Thus, the cult of Thuggee was born.

Until annexation by the British, India had little cohesiveness. The country was divided between religious schisms, regional rulers and an enormous range of physical environments. The Char Dham is a pilgrim trail that roams across the country, taking the faithful on a walking tour of every part of the nation; further there are smaller offshoots to this trail, including the Chota Char Dham which wanders through the Himalayas in the footsteps of the sage Ari Shankara. If someone left on one of these journeys, there was always a tacit acceptance of the fact that they might well never return. Without national policing, a mail service, or telegraph network, the life of a pilgrim was simply in the lap of the gods.

Pilgrims often travelled between inns and caravanserais, congregating in groups in order to provide protection against such things as tigers or wild dogs, and to discourage the depredations of bandits. Since such groupings were ad hoc and made without any notice or notification, when a group of pilgrims vanished without trace, there was little or no follow-up, since one unexpected group of travellers could hardly be differentiated amongst a constant flow of such gatherings. This is where the Thugs fed.

The pilgrim seasons for worshippers of Brahma, Vishnu, Shiva, or any other Hindu deity, all occur during the same time of year, when the harvest was over and when the weather was best for such activity; this was the same time of year that the Thug pilgrim season took place. However, Thugs don’t have sacred sites per se; their devotion had nothing to do with visiting remarkable local features and temples, but in despatching others bent upon such activity. Literally speaking, when the pilgrims were going about their religious duty, the Thugs hit the road to prey upon them. And, for centuries, no-one was aware that they were doing it.

The standard Thug tactic was to inveigle their way into a group of travelling pilgrims. They would approach the leaders of the group over several nights of camping, or stopping at roadside inns, and ask one-by-one under a myriad different cover stories to be allowed to accompany the group, taking advantage of their strength in numbers. Once the entire Thug crowd was installed, they would await a night when the party was camped outdoors and, at a signal from the leader, they would assault the pilgrims in concert, holding them down and strangling them to death. This well-rehearsed routine would often only take a few minutes to accomplish.

The decision to kill or not was a highly ritualistic one, dependent upon the sighting of omens and their interpretation by the Thug leaders. If a butterfly – a creature sacred to Kali - landed on a pilgrim’s head, the party was doomed; if a cow travelling with the group became recalcitrant, the murder spree would be called off. There was a litany of visual and other cues that would allow the Thugs to pounce or not, almost – seemingly – at random.

Afterwards, the goods and valuables of the dead pilgrims – including very small children sometimes deliberately kept from death - were divided amongst the Thugs and they would proceed to cover their tracks. While the murder was being done, lower-ranked Thugs were preparing a gravesite a short distance from the camp, usually under a grove of trees, or by a riverside. Shallow graves were dug and the bodies were carried there to be installed; each body was slashed in a ritual fashion to allow decompositional gases to escape without revealing the presence of the burials. The rumal – or ritual digging pick – used in these preparations became the holy symbol of Thug worship. Once the deed was done and the spoils divided, there would be a ceremony of devotion to Kali during which each Thug partook of a small piece of sacred sugar-crystal called goor; after this, depending upon how much cash had been acquired, the group would shadow off to find more prey, or they would head back to their homes, their religious observations done for that year.

Thugs came from all walks of life and crossed all caste divisions within Hindu society. They were maharajahs and Untouchables; farmers, warriors and tradesmen. Outside of the pilgrimage season, they returned to their normal existences, as if nothing had happened at all. Not having a system of taxation auditing meant that the unexplained wealth of the Thugs was never questioned and – due to centuries of planning put in place by the Kali-worshippers – generally never even noticed.

Still, over time, outsiders did notice that certain people within their community went annually on pilgrimages and never suffered the setbacks of others so doing, even seeming to prosper on such vacations. Eventually, people being people, word began to get out in a small fashion, and other, non-religiously motivated individuals began to join up with the Thugs in the practise of Thuggee. By the early Nineteenth Century, most Thugs in India were in it purely for the money and any religious overtones became lip-service at best. In fact, by then, most “Thugs” were actually Moslems.

Things came undone when a British officer named Sleeman had occasion to sentence a criminal for a crime in his jurisdiction. That fellow requested a pardon and reduced sentence if he could prove that there was a greater evil in the countryside that had wider implications for British sovereignty than the petty crimes of just one man. Sleeman took a gamble and learnt about Thugs; in fact, he went underground, disguised as one himself and aided by his prisoner, in order to get the whole picture. When he emerged at a later stage, he had a story which deeply shocked the world, not only due to its scope, but also due to the wilful arbitrariness of the horror.

Sleeman put the lid back on the box of Thuggee, stifling it once and for all by about 1860. Ringleaders were rounded up and hundreds executed, while thousands were gaoled for their involvement. From then on – what with national oversight, railroads, telegraphy and a mail service – this particular form of Kali worship was finished. As a strange footnote, many large and intricate knotted carpets in Windsor Palace were made by imprisoned Thugs and presented to Queen Victoria.

*****

From the mid-1800s, Thugs became a by-word for creeping horror and random death. The lurid novels of the time became focussed on the actions of Thugs, including the Fu Manchu novels of “Sax” Rohmer. Sleeman published three books about his efforts - Ramaseeana, or a Vocabulary of the peculiar language used by Thugs; Report on the Depredations Committed by the Thug Gangs of Upper and Central India; and The Thugs or Phansigars of India – as well as a book about Indian children raised by wolves which heavily influenced Rudyard Kipling’s Jungle Book stories. A book entitled Illustrations of the History and Practices of the Thugs: And Notices of Some of the Proceedings of the Government of India, for the Suppression of the Crime of Thuggee was published in London by Edward Thornton in 1837. At the height of the Thug revelations, Philip Meadowes-Taylor produced Confessions of a Thug (1839) which was a fictionalised version of the account produced by the prisoner who led Sleeman to his discovery of Thuggery.

MEADOWS TAYLOR, Philip (Introduction by Brian Rawson, ed.; illustrated by Clarke Hutton), Confessions of a Thug, The Folio Society Ltd., London, 1974.

Octavo; hardcover, with decorated cloth boards, gilt spine titles on a green label and endpaper maps; 373pp., top edges dyed green, with a monochrome frontispiece and 14 plates likewise. Minor wear; spine extremities lightly softened. Near fine in a mildly rubbed slipcase.

Later still, in the Twentieth Century – amongst all of the weird fiction iterations of Thug depravity being churned out – Edgar Wallace channelled Thugs in a short story in 1931 and John Masters published The Deceivers in 1952, possibly the best work of fiction written about the cult (and criminally hard to find these days). In films, Hammer Horror released a movie called “The Stranglers” in 1960, and “The Deceivers” was made into a fairly decent movie in 1988 starring Pierce Brosnan.

DASH, Mike, Thug: The True Story of India’s Murderous Cult, Granta Books/Granta Publications, London, 2005.

Octavo; hardcover, with gilt spine titles; 356pp., with 8pp. of colour and monochrome plates. Mild wear; text block and page edges very lightly toned with some spots; top edge dusted. Dustwrapper mildly rubbed; now professionally protected by non-adhesive polypropylene wrap. Very good to near fine.

If you’re really interested in this phenomenon, then you can do no better than read Mike Dash’s history of the cult entitled Thug: The True Story of India’s Murderous Cult. It captures all the basic elements of the phenomenon and outlines the efforts of Sleeman and others to eliminate it. Since its release in 2005, revisionists of varying stamps have tried to cast aspersions upon its contents – claiming, among other things, that Thuggee was a fiction invented by the British imagination as an excuse to clamp down on its Imperial holdings – however, if you know anything about Mike Dash and his work, you know that he’d have written his book about that fiction rather than the Thug reality if this were really the case.

Either way, the notion of such deadly cult extremists is a boon to anyone running a “Call of Cthulhu” roleplaying adventure and lends lots of insights into how such an organisation would exist in the world and how they would confront the players in your game. The Unspeakable Oath Magazine, issue number 16/17 from 2001, has a good article about Thugs, their weaponry and how to integrate them into a “Call of Cthulhu” campaign.

The next time someone uses the word ‘Thug’ in a conversation, you can stop to ponder the extent to which the meaning of that word has wandered since Queen Victoria’s reign. And the next time you see a photograph of Tupac Shakur, you will have a very different insight as to what that tattoo on his abdomen really means…