Demon Bone Sarcophagus: Some Thoughts

A recent edition to my library is Demon Bone Sarcophagus, the latest production from Patrick Stuart (of False Machine) and Scrap Princess (of Monster Manual Sewn From Parts). The two have cooperated jolly successfully on several other things (Deep Carbon Observatory, Veins of the Earth, Fire on the Velvet Horizon), so I rather wanted to see what this adventure would be like.

[I imagine that everyone who reads this little scrap of the internet knows who Patrick Stuart is, but I do sort of feel I have to for the one lonely stranger who wandered in out of the cyber-cold.]

Of course, I wanted to see it so badly I backed the Kickstarter and you are reading the words penned by a TRAITOROUS CLERK. Beyond that, I'm a semi-regular correspondent with Stuart via blog comments and so forth. I don't think anyone was coming here drawn by the steely-white glare of my absolute objectivity, but that's how things stand, anyway. 

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I'm not certain one should really try to describe what's going on in Demon Bone Sarcophagus (hereafter DBS). The discovery is part of the charm. Suffice it to say that there is a underground tomb to house the titular sarcophagus, ancient fire elementals, corporate overlords, china dolls and baboons. As you pick through the below there will be mild spoilers, at least.

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The most obvious thing to mention and get out of the way: DBS had a troubled production, and the final product is less than perfect. Troubled production sounds like a euphemism - but it's merely the result of the sort of international disruption of which 2022 has seen plenty.  

There are errors in the text. Typos, portions outright missing, a few misplaced paragraph breaks. Page 60 refers to a carnifex where I'm fairly certain it should refer to a carnyx. Mind you, a trumpet that makes the sound of butchered swine and tortured minds* seems like a very Patrick thing.

I can't pretend I much like this, but I also can't pretend that that sort of regularity was what I was reading DBS for in the first place. The False Machine needs somebody to work on this - Obnoxious Pedantic Smilodon, perhaps?

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Triangles: I hope you like them. It's thematically apt (the Fire Triangle) and acts as a form of constraint: the room shapes and entrances are going to be near-identical so the contents and inhabitants are what matters. The back fly-leaf has a player-facing map that gives away the structure upfront, even.

It would interest me to see how many dungeons or dungeon-like things come from this set in strict geometrical megastructures.  Crossing hexagon after hexagon of some vast hive. The megastructure angle is interesting, and ties DBS to Deep Carbon Observatory (hereafter DCO) - not just as portions of some elemental quartet of adventures, but the presence of the great chasm in the Observatory and the vast dam echo the fifty-foot triangles. 

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DBS starts, well, rather in medias res. Not only do Our Heroes come across the site of an awful massacre (somewhat like No Country for All Men**), but it ties into the history of exploitation by the Frictionless Blue Glass Merchant Company and the vast tomb complex below them, which itself has been used and abused by different parties. It's all so much that it requires three pages from the charming Backstory Gastropod to explain it. Not that the energy built up by all this is discharged all at once, but unfurls gradually as the players (hopefully) get deeper and deeper into the tomb.

This is a Patrick Stuart speciality by now: see the beginning of DCO, or Silent Titans - "You Fools! My Dementia Bomb has wrecked your very minds!" One suspects that he knows this, and that this is why the proposed next part of Broken Fire Regime will be a heist - a matter of careful premeditated plans and calculations. Presumably. Until it all falls apart.  

I quite like all the backstory and strange opening scenario. It makes the whole thing more than a glorified travel guide. 

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Speaking of the backstory, the Ancients and the Nobility of Fire are good. There is an element of the appropriate alienness to this. Part of this is down to the third sex, I suppose, but really it seeps in throughout: the vast strangeness of the war against the ice, the toys and treasures sealed up in the tomb, the shadows of power.

The characters encountered throughout are all quite nicely drawn. Some are notable as whizz-bang fascinating sights, but others have a little more to them.

The Ice Demons are highly unpleasant and persistent in their own hyper-focused varieties of particular cruelty. This is so much worse than most depictions of a supernatural generalised or abstract malevolence.

Anaracket Bonvive...Hmm. Well. There are a few books I have noted over the past few years, speculative fiction, that depict (or attempt to do so) a flawed female protagonist grappling with a vast (usually imperial) power structure. Some I've only read the blurb of, or a review, or other word of mouth. Some I've read, and quite possibly enjoyed. Ms Bonvive strikes me as in this vein, but living up to the hints of the publicity material of the above books. Twitchy, rebellious, paranoid, destructive of self and others.

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I'm not good at talking about art. Or I don't think I'm very good at talking about art. Patrick Stuart has by this point, worked with artists other than Scrap Princess (IE, Dirk Detweiler Leichty) but their collabotation is pretty well estalished by this time. It's difficult to conceive of illustrations of Stuart's material not in the many-lined scrawly style Scrap has worked to develop. John Blanche or Klaus Kopinski maybe, some of Blake's neater stuff; for somebody cleaner perhaps this chap's stuff - though that's a little close to the 'dark, grimy painterly' style referenced here.*** (Wish I had a better term for that.)

Anyway, despite the Scrap-typical spiky images of the baboons or the angular scorched Flamethrower Skeletons or the hook-monster Reductor, there are some interesting variations on line and colour, as in the Obsidian Assassin or Boreala or Mordant Kaust.

This is on top of the twining fire-language glyphs and murals. These bridge the gap between intelligibility and alienness well. While looking like tongues of flame (Oh....). Map segments keep the overall big illustration designs while compressing it as suitable for presentation as part of a larger scheme. Actually, reading DBS over felt like staring at one of the more complex Gothic cathedrals and trying to identify saints and kings and twining floral motifs - and then somebody guides you through it all statue by statue with a telescope, and then you can step back and see the whole design again. Very different from, say, DCO's journey upriver or the slowly unwrapping Silent Titans.

Design and layout is not simple - but neither should it be. The colour and font choice fits the impressions of what is being discussed beautifully. There's a suitably arcane twisty font for titles and a few shades of beige and umber for backgrounds that hint at fire without trying to make a book with vermillion pages. Praise is presumably due to Maria Ku.

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Maybe I could say more, but to attempt a summary... this isn't really like anything else you have on your shelves, even (really) other things by Patrick Stuart. Harping on originality when we have been told for centuries that there is nothing new under the sun isn't so very useful, but at least this shake of the kaleidoscope put the sequins in a very pretty arrangement. Take a look while there are still physical copies available. 

*Doubtless the first album of a Ruritanian Death Metal group.

**Josh Brolin sees the morass of dead baboons, wounded sloths, &c and mutters to himself "Bugger this for a game of Tiny Knights."

***Degenesis (a name I kept forgetting until I started saving the link) uses a lot of this. 

Four Moderately Bizarre Musket Balls

1. "...you are pleased to smile, I think. You conjure that these little silver orbs, that they are blessed? That they make your children grow strong and your wife smile, make your enemies stumble into the nettles and make your organ of generation pendulous? No. Very much no. The School of Malicarn, it does not deal in such superstitions. Perhaps you do not believe a humble village reader, from a little place up in the mountains? You may talk to Magister Liutprand in the Great Hall in Pandolfstadt. He will tell you just as I have. Perhaps even better. These do one thing, and they do it very well. They have been stamped with a symbol that ghosts dislike. Fire it at them and - off they go!"


2. Musket balls of meteoric iron, despite the name, are not forged from falling stars. Rather, they are enchanted to pick up dust or powdery substances in a trail behind them, and keep it there until a spark hits them. This makes reloading rather easier: no wadding is needed to keep the bullet in the barrel. As for the name, you may roll them through the sand and watch them pick up little comet-tails.


3. Piotr Ploughdriver was, as anyone might tell you, a prudent man. He was also a highly envious one, for there was a shooting match held in the town every year just before the King's Birthday, as part of a little fair. Piotr was known as a good shot, and was a popular hunting partner for this reason, and was well liked they had. Still, Casimir Towheaded had won the match for the last ten years, and he was not even known to go after waterfowl, let alone wolves.  So, when Piotr heard of a mage passing through the district, he decided to pay her a visit. The mage was in the best room of Fenenna's Inn. Fenenna had issued instructions that she was not to be hassled, badgered or disturbed - and so there were at least five people who were trying to sneak into her room after dark. Piotr stood in the inn's courtyard and watched two heartbroken maids, one fat merchant, a curious boy with irrepressible hair and Fenenna's gouty husband approach her room with their own strange variations on stealth before deciding that the time was right.
     He was a little disappointed by the mage. Her manner was far from mystical, and the dirty plates from dinner remained on a side table. She had a slightly puggish nose, like Piotr's sister and her breeches, if strange in cut, were made of dull cloth and were slightly stained with sausage grease. Piotr would say that he tried not to show that he thought any of this, and the mage's abrupt manner may simply have been the result of her many visitors.
     Piotr's wish was simple: that his musket balls would fly straight and hit the bull's eye. He had a goodly sum with him to pay for just this. Easy enough, said the mage, and asked if he had the musket balls with him. Piotr had. Marksmen made six shots in the competition, but he had been obliged to leave home hurriedly that evening, and had had to bring his entire stock with him in a small chest. He extracted his half-dozen bullets, and laid them before the mage. Then he stopped, thinking of the weight of the chest, of the steep fee. How many more could the mage enchant? As many as you like, said the mage, and she stifled a yawn. Piotr put the lot before her.
     On the day before the King's Birthday, Piotr, Casimir and a dozen other shooters gathered to compete. The lots were cast, and Casimir was to come before Piotr. Casimir made his shots and they were all good ones. Spectators clapped. Piotr then took up his gun and stepped forward. He looked at Casimir and smiled. He took out the enchanted bullets and his powder horn, loaded, aimed and fired.
     There was a bang and a puff of smoke, same as always happened when Piotr fired his gun. But not a mark on the target. Then there came an awful lowing, and the sound of something falling over. Someone had brought an ox to sell, and Piotr's ball had struck it in the eye, despite the fact that the poor beast had been penned behind the shooters.
     Piotr didn't really notice this, and he was loading and firing for a second time. The musket ball tore right through the dead bull's flank, and carved a neat passage to its undestroyed eye. By this time, everyone had put two and two together, and made Piotr. No-one quite knew what he'd done, and he was in no hurry to explain, but he was forced to pay for the dead bull. He had to carry it to the butcher's himself, and he was not given a good price for the carcass.
     In paying for the bull, Piotr was obliged to sell (among other things) his little stock of ammunition, and seethed mightily. Piotr's balls were purchased by a travelling salesman, and have since appeared in quite a few places. They have shattered little round windows in the mansions of the district, decapitated oxeye daisies and perforated jars of boiled sweets. A gentleman from Caspianstadt bought one, and went out to a little island all by himself in the sea, and fired it off straight up into the air. He follow the path it made with a telescope: apparently it was flying towards the constellation called the Charging Bull.
     Apparently, one even hit the dead centre of a target - but only because it was the quickest way to put a hole in a new portrait of Lord Fowlhead's prize bull. 


4. Sir, that is a most natural question, the most natural in the world. It shows you to be a man with a quick eye for detail, which is a fine feature to have. Here you sit in a surgeon's house, with all manner of medical curiosities in shelves around you. You pass over that distended liver, pass over the ghastly face of that stillborn manticore pup leering at you out of the alcohol, and you fix on a leather-covered jar on the bottom shelf. In what is, I confess, the darkest corner of the room.
     Well, Sir, no doubt I can tell you. Let us place it here on the desk. Your glass is full? A good succulent madeira. Toothsome. There are some little biscuits here that go with it well.
     Ah, then I shall remove the cover.
     You see them? Eleven, in total. Quite round.
     Yes, uncannily like, Sir! Uncannily like it.
     Perhaps a little snuff? No?
     Where precisely they came from is somewhat difficult to say. I know where I was, or think I do.   As some of my effects here may have shown you, I was once on campaign with the Duke of Sorghomme, in the Malach country by the border with the Prizelands. I was a young man, and perhaps callow.
     You may not know it, but a physician is not quite at home among miltary men. It is clearly, sir, clearly a necessary role, and is filled by someone who is if not a gentleman, then very close indeed. Still, he is not part of the officer's fraternity. So it was that I fell in with a mage, a young man and one who felt quite as much a civilian as myself, given that he was a simple earthmover. His name was Hilaire.
     Hilaire was a good friend of mine, and I am sorry that this story is not about him. I am also sorry, I think, that I must tell this story involving him.
     Hilaire knew an older mage, a veteran. He had left Malmery many years ago as a young man, for he had been part of the fallen rebellion that called themselves the Ascendancy. His name was Domhnall Sheridan and was ever full of advice for us. At the lightest persuasion he would tell you about his past - how he had failed to hear the last sermon of Achitophel, about the Passage to Tyrconoway - and endlessly about the ferocity of the Davidian troops.
     Perhaps I have made him into a man of one story, but in truth he had spent far more time away from Malmery than on it by now, and was a seasoned war-wizard. He had acquired a soldier's appetite for drink, sir, and spent no little time trying to pass it on to us.
     I am now far more, sir, far more moderate in my habits.
     It was a spring evening, I recall that much. A little time after a battle for a little village called Genevcourt. A far smaller action than those that were to come later that season, no-one remembers it now. Indeed, I mainly remember a trickle of wounded men brought to me.
   But they were all healing nicely now - or, sir, they weren't, sad as it is to recall. But that day at least, I was able to relax a little. Both Hilaire and I were used to the smell of powder, you see.
     We had been billeted with Domhnall, which was largely convenient. He had brandy, and wanted to share it. Now, apart from the events of his youth, Domhnall had all sorts of innovation he would talk about. His was the profession of arms now, and he made it his business to work well at it.
     That night he showed us a box of painted wood: a wide horizontal slit in one side, and a little ramp into a trough out the other. He had spend years making it, and there was a little trick to it which he showed us. He took a slab of lead, and had us weigh it. We got scales from a quartermaster, who clearly knew what Domhnall was doing, and rolled his eyes. Then he pushed it into the slit of the box. There was a whirling noise, and out came around a dozen musket balls.   Perfect spheres, and when taken all together, weighing exactly the same as the slab he had had us weigh.
     Well, we were suitably impressed, and had another glass of brandy.
     You must take one yourself, sir, should you wish. Good!
     Then he explained to us the advantages, the lack of spilt molten metal and off-cuts. Well, we were more impressed, and listened to his theories for some time longer. More brandy was taken.
   Hilaire was inspecting the box, with professional curiosity, and was prompted to ask how Domnhall kept his fingers from going into the box. Surely they would interfere with the workings?
     Domnhall turned to him sharply, and said that they certainly would not, and that they would work as well on fingers as any thing else.
     I have noticed, sir, that when men are in their cups they can become very careful, very careful indeed - but only about one thing at a time. Hilaire snatched his fingers away from the box as quick as if it had been quite white-hot.
     The trouble, of course, was that he had aroused our grisly interest. What more could this box do?   So I left them opening another bottle and went out and found a - pig's trotter.
     It was something the cooks had left out, which I thought odd at the time.
     Anyway, I got back and had to take a bumper to catch up with the other two. The - trotter sat their on the table. I had found a little basket to carry it. I believe Hilaire called attention to it first.   We weighed it,  hefted it, and pushed it slowly into the slit.
     The whirling noise was not quite same this time, and neither was the sound of balls rolling down a ramp. Lead is a soft metal, sir, but still a metal.
     There were a dozen of them, and quite round. I felt obliged to inspect one closer, despite my revulsion. I draped a napkin over my hand and then hefted them, prodded them, rolled them.   Eventually, I felt obliged to go a step further and slit the pink flesh of one with my pocket knife. There was blood, sir, and fresh blood at that. What is more, there was bone beneath. I do not know how many bones you have seen, but they should not be quite that smooth. Nor do I know any bones that are a perfect sphere.
     The three of us did not feel like any brandy after that, so I used it to preserve them as best I could. I was unwilling to return them to the cooks, and felt like even the midden would be ashamed by these.
     Perhaps I shall put the cover back over them now, and perhaps, sir, perhaps you would enjoy another drink?