Two Outings to the Hill Cantons: Some thoughts on Marlinko and the Ursine Dunes

 In between stodgy slices of TRoAPW, a brief change of tone. A weekend citybreak, if you will. A visit to Fever-Dreaming Marlinko and to the Slumbering Ursine Dunes.  Both are written by Chris Kutalik, for his Hill Cantons setting. 

Both Fever-Dreaming Marlinko and Slumbering Ursine Dunes are available as PDFs and in solid form. I'm working from the PDFs in this case. 

The cover to Fever-Dreaming Marlinko.
Feverish? Maybe. Dreamy? Maybe not.

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I'm approaching this having read a bit of the background material provided on the Hill Cantons blog, and having picked up the Misty Isles of the Eld in a bundle a while back. But I'm treating this as my first visit to the Hill Cantons proper; the Misty Isles are, well, an isle - suitable to be slotted into a number of settings off the coast. 

With that context out of the way, let's examine what we have. 

Slumbering Ursine Dunes (hereafter SUD) is a pointcrawl in the titular dunes. It is a pointcrawl rather than a hexcrawl not because of the great distances covered, as in Ultraviolet Grasslands with its cross-continental trade caravans, but because of the steep dunes with 'exterior dune faces precipitously rising up to 300-350 feet in height at dizzying 45-50 degree angles.' These are basically impossible to climb, certainly so by the low-ish level parties suggested by Kutalik. 

There are other elements to touch on, but the most striking feature of SUD is the environment players find themselves in. The scale of the dunes themselves I've mentioned, but this is paired with the Persimmon Sea, which 'with its sickly-sweet scent wraps around the Dunes to the south and west'. The eternal spring of the region adds to the strangeness. Both SUD and Fever-Dreaming Marlinko (hereafter FDM) refer to 'acid fantasy' in their online blurbs - the key element of any 'acid' sub-genre (Wikipedia refers to Acid Jazz and the Acid Western, among others) apparently being psychedelia. Well, my experience of acid-[anything] basically extends as far as listening to a few of the songs of actor and musician Matt Berry. At any rate, the dream-like state of the dunes (as if one were Slumbering) offers a certain psychedelic note, which the strangeness of the vast dunes and the sweet-tasting sea only adds to. The colour palette of the cover to FDM above captures this slightly better than the amber-and-indigo sunset of SUD's cover (see below). The soldier bears (hence Ursine dunes) only add to this: we know a bear shouldn't carry a polearm! - but, as with the gorilla with the uzi, nobody's going to tell him that. 

Between the dunes, however, are the actual encounters and adventures that Our Heroes are to meet with. SUD sees both very local encounters in the shape of monsters and hermits - and a larger set of powers that sink their tendrils into the region. These are explicitly divided into Good (Lawful and Chaotic) and Evil (Lawful and Chaotic).  This comes across as less ham-fisted than that sounds out of context, if for no other reason than the sheer character of each faction, either as a group or a personified as an individual. The Eld buck either the Mordor or Mephistopheles characterisations of Lawful Evil types by being a set of slim, fey 'exaggerated space-opera villains'. Of course, merely because something looks a trifle campy doesn't mean it can't kill you horribly. Likewise, the wereshark Ondrj is memorably unpleasant. Even the most apparently normal faction leader, Jaromir the Old Smith is a rather interesting working-out of the setting's greater cosmology. 

The interactions of all the above, plus assorted followers contribute to the Chaos Event Index: things can become very strange indeed in the Dunes. Reinforcements for the other-worldly Eld, eclipses, rains of blood and stronger spell effects are all on the menu. 

The cover to Slumbering Ursine Dunes.

***

FDM, by contrast, is a 'city adventure supplement' within the four contradas of the city of Marlinko. Marlinko, as the Ursine Dunes, is within the Borderlands of the Overkingdom and thus closer to pockets of the weird - like the Dunes or the Misty Isles. So FDM and SUD share that, at least. 

They also share the same Slavic-inspired setting. Names like Ondrej, Kaja, Svetlana, Adela, Janos, Pavol, Casimir, Malinka, Bohimir and Hedviga unite the two.  Reference to Rusalkas and Strigoi strengthen this. A beer in Marlinko is named for Radegost. Further, we learn in FDM that 'two of the major food groups of the Cantons [are] dumplings and halushky'. Both are accompanied by a substance called White Gravy. This flippant bit of delivery (compare: 'two of the major food groups in Britain are suet puddings and kedgeree') is a nice compact effective bit of worldbuilding that drags the setting away from the omnipresent viscous brown stew of some fantasy works, memorably mocked by Diana Wynne Jones in her Tough Guide to Fantasyland.  

(Writers have been mocked for their long descriptions of meals - George RR Martin springs to mind - but actually sitting down and working out where a meal comes from and digging into the agricultural requirements of it all is an interesting exercise - even if you don't need to show your working on the page. Starting with a staple like bread - or dumplings - is a suitable place to begin.)

Marlinko is still, food aside, a city of the Borderlands; indeed, like the Dunes, it has a Chaos Index. There is a lackadaisical air about it, far as it is from the orderly, predictable, focused core. Justice is lax. We are told that 'soft fraudulent crimes are so widespread as to meet tacit cultural approval'. There's something of Lankhmar in it all - a sense heightened by the Town Gods:

'Marlinko was built around the squat, black bulk of the Tomb of the Town Gods, a structure that predates the rest of the city by an interminably long period of time. The ominous edifice sitting in its wide, cobblestoned, circular plaza has retained its position as the dead (no pun intended) center of the city. Four wide avenues radiate from it at the cardinal points and divide the city into four contradas, or quarters. '

A read of 'Lean Times in Lankhmar' will only add to this, as will the discovery of a Black Toga on a list of items and the use of the adjective 'Marlankh'. 

All this aside, Marlinko seethes with social perils as much as any dungeon does with mortal peril. Each contrada has its own character and street life to negotiate, but Bravos, Pedants, Grifters, Drug Addicts and Children form some of the busy throng. A number of well-sketched NPCs with memorable descriptions and personalities offer points of reference in all this. The utterly honest but 'extremely racist' merchant Fraža the Freakishly Honest Curio Dealer stands out as an example. 

Two adventure sites are provided for Marlinko. Lady Szara's House is memorably horrible, but while the form of 'the Catacombs of the Church of the Blood Jesus' makes some sense for Marlinko (an underground cult stronghold), the details of a cult apparently formed by 'an alcoholic, time-misplaced, Irish cleric' are a little out of line with FDM as a whole. I confess that I would be tempted to increase the syncretic elements a little further in order to dilute the real-world influence. 

Another lack (it strikes me) is the absence of chariot rules for the inter-contrada Black Race. A more natural role for the PCs might be sabotage and other shenanigans, but a few points on what they should be sabotaging would be good. But if they prefer a bout of Tiger Wrestling, that's covered.

For all those gripes, FDM does the 'wretched hive' bit of city adventures without throwing the populace into a state of constant gang warfare. Both it and SUD deserve their status as works with 'Conceptual Density' and I'm glad to have read them.