I like immortal characters. So did Roger Zelazny, and so that’s one reason I enjoy reading his work so much. Or perhaps, I enjoy Zelazny and his work has made me appreciate immortal characters. One of the two.
I’ve read somewhere (probably something written by Steven Brust) that Zelazny liked writing about immortal characters because they’d lived long enough to do interesting things. So, when I played Amber, I played a character who was a lot older than everyone else’s. They were thinking of young characters – perhaps only a couple of hundred years at the outside. I was thousands of years old – I’d done interesting things. Flawed things. Things that would come back to bite me later, but I had this great, barely-defined backstory that I could draw on just to have fun with.
That character, who went by the names of James Conway, “J.C.” and Taliesin depending on my mood (the initials were inspired by Moorcock), managed to have a fantastic career in the Amber game we played. He may (or may not) have been killed by one of his sons in the end. It’d certainly be in keeping with the Amber tradition to have him bumped off in that way, but OTOH…
I wrote a couple of short-stories featuring him. Copies of those stories have disappeared into the aether (one was published in the magazine “Single Card Strategies”, a publication from a couple of my friends which didn’t survive past the second issue). I don’t know if I have the text any more – although I might have an archive CD-ROM with them on. Or maybe not. It’s been ten years or more since I wrote them.
(No, I don’t think they were good short stories. I’m not a good writer. I write a lot of blog entries and other posts on message boards, but it’s all scattershot. Editing myself is something I’ve never got the hang of).
Anyway, the reason I’m writing about Immortals at the moment isn’t just because my copies of Zelazny’s shortstories have arrived (glorious publications – can’t wait for the final two volumes are released!). No, I’ve won an auction on e-bay for an old D&D module: IM2 – The Wrath of Olympus.
Back in the day, (the day being around 1987), TSR were finishing up their expansion of the Basic line of D&D. Where AD&D was fairly set in stone as far as what it covered (dungeon and wilderness adventures and not really much else, despite lip-service to territory acquisition), the Basic line under Frank Mentzer had planned out the entire rise to fame and fortune of the PC: Basic dungeon adventures, Expert wilderness adventures, Companion added in realm acquisition (or serving the rulers of such realms) and Master was trying to ascend to immortality. By that time, you’d reached about 36th level, as high as the system went.
The Immortal rules gave another 36 levels of advancement as Immortal beings – gods, if you like, except that the D&D designers at that time were very careful to not call them that. Immortals or Powers, if you please. I’m not sure how successful the rules were. Later on, they got revised as Wrath of the Immortals for the 1990 re-release of the Basic line (which also saw the Rules Cyclopedia come into print). Three adventures were written for the IM line, of which “The Wrath of Olympus” is the second.
Is it any good? Not a clue. It’s not playing immortals as I like them, but hey, you’re powerful and you can have fun. Well, as much fun as you can when you have to pose as mortal for a section of the adventure. Not all of it, admittedly, but it seems odd to forswear your immortal powers (which, this being a low-level D&D Immortal module you’ve just acquired) and go back to being mortal.
Not sure if I’ll ever get to run it, but I’m going to have fun reading through it.
I’ve never played this edition of the game but I do own the Immortals boxed set from BECMI edition. When I first got into D&D really properly, playing & running my first true campaigns in university, I started to pick up older material from the second hand bin of my FLGS…. and after buying the Basic kit, for some reason Immortals was the next I grabbed.
From my reading of it it’s quite odd, almost a seperate sub-game which you happen to play after playing D&D for a while – it doesn’t really feel even remotely like the level 1 dungeon crawl you presumably started your campaign with. As you say, it takes pains to call everything Immortals, Powers and other totally-not-blasphemy-honest names whiles till using historical gods names like Thor, Ra etc as sample names.
I’d really like to play more of my games, but to be honest I’m not entirely sure what I’d do with the Immortals set. Perhaps I need to hear more about this module to find out what the example adventures given for this game set are to really grab it.
George Q