THERE IS A CAVE FULL OF GOLD

Apparently.

Travellers on the fringes of the Northern Forest have begun telling stories about it. A hidden cave. Walls and chambers gleaming with impossible wealth. Enough gold to turn an outlaw into a merchant prince, a merchant prince into something insufferable, and an adventurer into precisely the sort of corpse other adventurers step over while looking for his treasure.

Rumours of free money have never improved human judgement.

Soon merchants are asking questions, bandits are listening to conversations which do not concern them, Panther Girls are taking an interest and assorted dangerous people are beginning to disappear into the forest in search of the same thing.

The characters are sent to find out whether the stories are true.

They are.

Sort of.

Gorean Adventures 04: The Cave of Gold is an adventure for Tales of Gor: Gorean Roleplaying, sending the characters away from the great cities and into the rough border country surrounding the Northern Forest.

What begins as an investigation into a treasure story becomes a journey involving imprisonment, escape, outlaws, Panther Girls, unfamiliar creatures and something which has been developing in the shadows for almost half a century.

There really may be gold in the cave.

The difficulty lies in understanding why it is there.

WHERE CIVILISATION STARTS LOSING THE ARGUMENT

The Northern Forest is not empty wilderness.

That would be safer.

It is an immense region beyond the easy reach of city-state authority, filled with settlements, hunters, fugitives, outlaws and people who have deliberately chosen to live somewhere the law has difficulty finding them.

Most famously, it is home to the Panther Girls: armed bands of women who reject ordinary Gorean society and survive through hunting, raiding, trading and occasionally enslaving the men unfortunate enough to encounter them from the wrong direction.

They have territory.

They have rivalries.

They have their own interests.

They are not wandering wilderness encounters waiting for the Games Master to roll a twelve.

The same applies to the male outlaws and bandits scattered through the region. These are people who live beyond the protection of the cities because they have been expelled, fled justice, rejected authority or simply discovered that robbery offers a more attractive career path than honest work.

The result is a region where almost everyone the characters meet has good reason to distrust strangers.

Information has value.

Weapons have value.

A rumour about a mountain of gold has considerably more value.

This makes the journey itself part of the adventure rather than dead space between the quest-giver and the dungeon.

People have heard things.

Different people have heard different things.

Some are lying.

Some are mistaken.

Some know more than they want to admit.

Others simply want to know what the characters know.

And then somebody gets locked up.

THIS WAS SUPPOSED TO BE A TREASURE HUNT

The published description rather cheerfully promises jailbreaks before the characters even reach the heart of the mystery.

That ought to indicate how well the investigation is proceeding.

The adventure moves through several different forms of Gorean play rather than remaining one long wilderness trek. Characters may need to investigate rumours, deal with local authorities and criminals, escape confinement, survive encounters in the wild and negotiate with people whose relationship with civilised Goreans ranges from suspicious to predatory.

Eventually the players have to work out which stories about the cave are merely stories.

Gold does strange things to testimony.

A man who saw something yellow in torchlight has seen a golden chamber by the time he reaches the next tavern.

A friend of somebody who knew a traveller becomes an eyewitness.

An outlaw seeking recruits has personally carried away fistfuls of treasure.

Someone knows where the cave is.

Someone knows somebody who knows.

Someone will reveal the secret location after one more drink.

Soon enough an entirely conventional treasure hunt begins to develop the unmistakable smell of something else.

In this case, unusually, that last sentence may be literal.

PRIEST-KINGS SHOULD NOT THINK LIKE PEOPLE

The adventure ultimately reaches towards the stranger science-fictional machinery beneath Gor.

Counter-Earth looks, to most of its inhabitants, like a brutal low-technology world of swords, beasts, ships and city-states.

That appearance is artificial.

The Priest-Kings possess technology so advanced that ordinary Goreans generally interpret its effects through superstition, religion or simple incomprehension. They have deliberately constrained technological development across the planet and remain hidden from most humanity within the Sardar.

They are also not human.

That sounds obvious.

Roleplaying games nevertheless have a persistent habit of making aliens into humans with prosthetic foreheads.

They may have four arms, blue skin or an interesting approach to cutlery, but once the conversation starts they think like Dave from Accounts.

The Cave of Gold includes specific Games Master advice aimed at avoiding that.

The Priest-Kings possess different bodies, senses, instincts, social structures and priorities. Their relationship with the world is therefore not simply a human relationship translated into insect form.

A useful portrayal of them requires considering what information they notice.

What they ignore.

What they value.

What seems obvious to them and completely invisible to a human being.

This is especially relevant here because one of the strongest surviving reader reactions specifically recognised the adventure’s connection to Priest-Kings of Gor. A four-star Amazon reviewer noted that its later material follows the broad territory of that novel and thought the resulting module worth buying for Gor fans.

The adventure therefore does something particularly useful for the wider line: it gives the Games Master an excuse to move beyond describing the Priest-Kings and start portraying them.

YOUR NOSE IS PART OF THE GAME

One of the stranger pieces of GM advice in the supplement concerns smell.

Sight dominates roleplaying description.

There is a room.

It is twenty feet across.

There are two doors.

There is a desk.

A suspiciously chest-shaped object sits in the corner waiting for the Rogue to make a poor life decision.

Sound occasionally gets invited in.

Smell normally turns up only when something is dead.

That is a missed opportunity even when everybody involved is human.

With the Priest-Kings it becomes actively misleading.

A species with different sensory priorities may use scent in ways humans use facial expression, clothing, tone of voice or spoken information. Smell can indicate identity, emotion, status, health, danger, territory or communication.

That means an apparently empty passage may contain a wealth of information the human characters simply cannot perceive.

A Priest-King may consider something blatantly obvious which the party cannot detect at all.

A character may know something is wrong without knowing why because the Games Master has been consistently describing a scent that has now disappeared.

The supplement gives advice on bringing this neglected sense into ordinary play as well as using it specifically to make alien encounters feel alien.

It is an oddly small piece of advice with a surprisingly large effect.

Once you start telling players what a marketplace, prison cell, wet forest, Panther camp or frightened animal smells like, the world acquires another dimension.

Some of Gor’s dimensions are admittedly better approached from upwind.

GOLD IS A VERY HUMAN WAY TO DESCRIBE SOMETHING

The central mystery benefits from all of this because the characters initially understand everything through human assumptions.

They hear “gold”.

Gold means wealth.

Wealth means somebody found treasure.

Treasure means somebody put it there, lost it or died protecting it.

Therefore the problem is finding the location before all the other armed bastards do.

Reasonable.

Unfortunately, human beings are very good at looking at something unfamiliar and naming it after the closest familiar object.

A rumour can therefore be accurate and completely wrong at the same time.

The adventure steadily shifts from the recognisable Gorean dangers of banditry, imprisonment and forest survival into something stranger.

The official release describes the final revelation as a plot almost fifty years in the making.

That time span reaches back across much of the history covered by the Gorean novels and gives the discovery a connection to the deeper setting rather than presenting the cave as a random monster-hole which happened to appear last Tuesday.

I am deliberately not spelling out the final answer here.

One Amazon reviewer cheerfully does.

They mention a golden beetle and a decidedly unstable Priest-King.

If that sentence has already told the Games Master more than they wanted to know, blame the internet.

The important point for a prospective player is simpler: the treasure story is only the surface.

A DIFFERENT KIND OF GOREAN ADVENTURE

The numbered Gorean Adventures had already moved through several different sorts of story by the time this appeared.

The Tower of Art offered urban infiltration and a brush with forbidden technology.

The Silver Cult dug into old Gorean sexual politics and revolution.

The Turian Gambit pushed players into the customs, competitions and tribal politics of the Wagon Peoples.

The Cave of Gold goes exploring.

It moves to the ragged boundary between civilisation and the wild, uses recognisable Gorean threats to draw the players onwards and then pulls back the curtain on some of the science fiction beneath the sword-and-planet surface.

That variety is useful for a campaign.

Gor is large.

Characters should not spend every adventure in the same tavern, the same city or the same social argument.

Sometimes they should be navigating the politics of Ar.

Sometimes gambling among the Wagon Peoples.

Sometimes running from Panther Girls through a forest because somebody assured them there was free gold nearby.

A current Amazon reader who had been following the line summed up the cumulative appeal simply: “I really like the Gor rpg system and adventures so far.”

Another four-star reviewer was even less complicated: “Buy it and you will like it if you are a Gor fan.”

Neither is going to trouble Dorothy Parker.

Both at least came from somebody who bought the bloody thing.

WHAT YOU GET

• A complete adventure for Tales of Gor: Gorean Roleplaying, centred on rumours of a mysterious golden cave on the fringes of the Northern Forest; investigation, imprisonment and jailbreak material; encounters with bandits, outlaws and Panther Girls; wilderness travel and strange creatures; a mystery tied to events almost fifty years old; deeper involvement with the Priest-Kings and the science-fictional side of Gor; Games Master guidance for portraying genuinely non-human minds; and practical advice for using smell and scent as meaningful parts of description and play.

This is an adult Gorean adventure. Violence, slavery, captivity, outlawry and the social assumptions of John Norman’s setting are part of the material.

It is a supplement rather than a standalone game.

You will need Tales of Gor: Gorean Roleplaying to play.

For reference material on the Northern Forest, Panther Girls, Priest-Kings, creatures and the wider setting, World of Gor: Gorean Encyclopaedia is the natural companion.

PDF AND PRINT

This listing is for the digital PDF edition of Gorean Adventures 04: The Cave of Gold, written by James Desborough and originally released on 26 June 2018.

A physical edition is also currently available directly from Postmortem Studios:

Buy The Cave of Gold – Print Edition

The original Lulu paperback remains available as well. It is 42 pages, black-and-white, perfect bound and printed in A5 format (148 × 210 mm).

ISBN 978-0-244-09599-4.

Buy The Cave of Gold from Lulu

The adventure was published for the officially authorised Tales of Gor roleplaying line, based upon John Norman’s long-running sword-and-planet setting.

EVERYONE HEARD ABOUT THE GOLD

That is the problem.

A secret treasure known only to the characters would be easy.

Instead, the rumour has escaped.

Bandits want it.

Outlaws want it.

Adventurers want it.

Anyone capable of imagining what a cave full of gold might buy wants it.

The Panther Girls have their own reasons to take an interest.

And somewhere behind all the ordinary human greed lies something much older, much stranger and considerably less interested in money.

The characters have been told to investigate.

Perhaps they will find the cave.

Perhaps they will find the gold.

Perhaps they will even understand what they are looking at.

After the jailbreak, naturally.

Gorean Adventures 04: The Cave of Gold takes a wonderfully simple adventuring temptation — there is treasure in the forest — and follows it until the familiar world of Gor starts becoming alien again.

Go looking for gold.

Try to come back with all your limbs.

And when the cave starts smelling funny, pay attention.