FIFTY YEARS AGO, THE WOMEN OF THARNA LOST THEIR CITY

Some of them have been holding a grudge.

In Outlaw of Gor, Tarl Cabot arrived in Tharna, a wealthy silver-producing city unlike almost anywhere else on Gor.

Women ruled.

Men submitted.

The ruling women concealed their faces behind silver masks and had overturned the usual Gorean relationship between the sexes.

This arrangement did not survive contact with Tarl Cabot.

Half a century later, Tharna has changed.

The silver masks are gone.

Men rule again.

The old order is history.

Officially.

Some of the women who escaped the fall of the matriarchy never accepted defeat. Their daughters inherited the memory. Their allies retained their wealth, contacts and ambitions.

Now the Silver Cult is ready to move.

And, through a sequence of events which begins considerably less dramatically, the player characters are about to wander straight into the conspiracy.

Gorean Adventures 02: The Silver Cult is a plot-driven adventure for Tales of Gor: Gorean Roleplaying, written by James Desborough and Ron Marshall.

It is political, sexual, violent and thoroughly Gorean.

This time nobody is pretending otherwise.

THE REVOLUTION WILL BE WEARING SILVER

The Silver Cult wants Tharna back.

Not simply the city.

The old Tharna.

The Tharna in which women held political power, men occupied the subordinate position and the Silver Masks represented an order radically different from the rest of Gor.

For fifty years the surviving movement has endured underground.

Its adherents have not spent all that time knitting.

They have retained money.

They have built connections.

They have recruited.

They have waited for weakness.

Most importantly, they have kept alive a historical grievance powerful enough to survive the people who originally suffered it.

Now they believe circumstances may finally permit restoration.

Whether that restoration constitutes liberation, revenge, tyranny or an admirable opportunity to make an extraordinary amount of money is left rather inconveniently to the characters.

They can oppose the Silver Cult.

They can join it.

They can pretend to join it.

They can betray it.

They can betray the people opposing it.

They can attempt the ambitious manoeuvre of betraying absolutely everybody and hoping nobody compares notes until they have left the city.

This is Gor.

Moral clarity is rarely compulsory.

Survival is.

A VERY GOREAN BEGINNING

The adventure does not begin with somebody standing in a tavern and announcing that the future of Tharna depends upon four armed strangers at table seven.

Things begin more naturally.

With girl catch.

Because of course they do.

The Gorean pastime gives the players an immediate opportunity to inhabit the setting rather than merely hear about it. The choices they make here may also tell the Games Master something about who these characters actually are when Gorean custom offers them opportunities they would never encounter in a conventional fantasy game.

From there, a seemingly more ordinary matter involving a man wronged by a caravan master draws the group onwards.

There is money to be made.

There is a grievance to settle.

There appears to be a straightforward job.

There is not.

The journey gradually pulls the characters into something much larger until the question is no longer whether they can deal with one troublesome merchant.

It is which side they intend to occupy when somebody tries to overturn the government of Tharna.

If they intend to occupy a side at all.

OUTLAW OF GOR LEFT UNFINISHED BUSINESS

The central idea deliberately picks up a loose historical possibility from Outlaw of Gor.

Tarl Cabot destroyed Tharna’s matriarchal order.

That tells us what happened to the city.

It does not mean every Silver Mask conveniently changed her political beliefs at the same moment.

Some would have fled.

Some would have gone underground.

Some would have lost family, property, status and power.

Some would have spent decades regarding the new Tharna as an illegitimate regime built upon their defeat.

That is fertile ground for a roleplaying adventure because nobody needs to invent an ancient prophecy or resurrect an evil wizard.

History already supplied the grievance.

The contemporary Emma of Gor review particularly liked this element, calling the surviving Silver Mask conspiracy a “great plot concept” and observing that it felt like an idea which could easily have become a Gorean novel in its own right.

The same review described the adventure as having the “feel of the first dozen or so Gor novels.”

That is a useful distinction from the first Gorean Adventure.

The Tower of Art leaned strongly into sword-and-planet caper: infiltrate a tower, recover strange technology, become involved with agents of the Priest-Kings.

The Silver Cult dives much more directly into the social and sexual conflicts for which Gor is notorious.

Masks.

Slavery.

Dominance.

Submission.

Political power.

Sexual power.

Captivity.

Humiliation.

Revenge between men and women.

Nobody has wandered into generic fantasy country this time.

WHICH SIDE ARE YOU ON?

The interesting part is that the adventure does not require one answer.

A conventional scenario might simply declare the Silver Cult evil and issue the players with swords.

That wastes the premise.

The revolutionaries have understandable grievances.

They also have ambitions which may be considerably less attractive once those grievances are converted into policy.

The current rulers of Tharna represent the order that replaced the Silver Masks.

That does not automatically make them saints.

A Free Woman character may react differently to the cult from a male Warrior.

A slave may have entirely different priorities from either.

A woman who believes Gorean society places unfair restrictions upon her may find the Silver Masks intriguing.

A Panther Girl might find their hatred of male domination familiar while having little interest in replacing one hierarchy with another.

A male character who believes thoroughly in Gorean gender relations has an obvious reason to oppose them.

A male character who has just been captured by them may suddenly discover that abstract political principles feel slightly different while he is wearing the chains.

All of these positions can coexist at the table.

More importantly, they can change.

The adventure gives the conspiracy room to talk before everybody starts killing one another.

This is useful.

People are so much more satisfying to betray after you have heard their arguments.

CAPTURE IS NOT NECESSARILY FAILURE

Gorean stories contain an enormous amount of captivity.

Heroes are captured.

Free Women are enslaved.

Slaves change hands.

Warriors find themselves chained.

People escape, submit, resist, adapt, lie and occasionally discover uncomfortable things about themselves.

A roleplaying game based on Gor therefore has a problem if capture simply means:

“You lost the fight. Roll new characters.”

The Silver Cult treats captivity as playable material.

Depending upon the party’s choices and fortunes, characters may find themselves prisoners of the conspiracy rather than simply dead at the end of a failed encounter.

That creates another route through the scenario.

Captured characters can argue.

Manipulate.

Attempt escape.

Try to influence guards.

Feign submission.

Actually change sides.

Learn what the cult wants.

Or spend a prolonged period insisting that everything is going according to plan despite mounting evidence to the contrary.

Male characters in particular may experience a deliberate reversal of ordinary Gorean power relationships.

That is not accidental.

The cult has ideological points to make.

Some of them are made with chains.

BREAKING PEOPLE

The supplementary rules deal directly with torture, slave-breaking and the erosion of resistance.

These are not especially surprising subjects in a Gorean supplement.

They do, however, require more useful mechanics than “roll once to see whether somebody gives up”.

The system therefore works through Break Points: important moments during an extended attempt to wear down another person’s will.

For torture, appropriate tests are opposed by the victim’s Will.

For slave-breaking, Slave Handling will often be involved, though the precise approach can vary with what the character is actually doing.

Successful efforts gradually reduce resistance.

That makes breaking somebody a process.

One event matters.

Then another.

Accumulated pressure matters.

How a captive has been treated matters.

The result can therefore become a sequence of scenes rather than a binary switch marked DEFIANT / BROKEN.

The rules are particularly useful for non-player characters, where the Games Master needs some consistent means of deciding when intimidation, interrogation or training has actually accomplished something.

For player characters, the material works best with the player participating in deciding what happens to their own character rather than using a die roll as permission to take their agency away.

The machinery is there to support roleplay.

Not replace it.

AT LAST, RULES THAT REWARD ROLEPLAYING

There is another little piece of game design tucked into the supplement which deserves more attention.

The adventure explicitly allows the quality and consistency of roleplaying to affect mechanical resolution.

If somebody is attempting to persuade an NPC, the social skill roll still matters.

The player’s argument matters too.

An especially good, appropriate or persuasive approach can modify the result.

Previous behaviour can matter.

Things characters said earlier can come back.

The way they treated other people can alter how later characters regard them.

In other words, NPCs are encouraged to possess memories.

Revolutionary technology.

The intent is to stop the peculiar roleplaying-game phenomenon where an eloquent, perfectly judged argument is completely ignored because the player rolled badly, while somebody saying “I dunno, I persuade him or something” succeeds because the die happened to land high.

Statistics still count.

What happens in the fiction counts as well.

The two are allowed to meet.

A GAME ABOUT SEX AND POWER THAT ACTUALLY USES SEX AND POWER

This is an adult scenario.

That should be obvious from the logo.

The Silver Cult directly engages with slavery, coercion, sexualised dominance, torture, humiliation and the gender politics of Gor.

Those elements are not decorative wallpaper.

They are part of the plot.

The entire conspiracy exists because of a historical reversal in sexual and political power.

The adventure then puts characters into situations where those structures can be reversed again.

A man accustomed to Gorean male authority may become helpless before women who despise everything he represents.

A Free Woman may discover political possibilities unavailable almost anywhere else on the planet.

A slave may encounter people promising one kind of liberation while pursuing another form of domination.

Someone may sincerely change their mind.

Someone else may pretend to.

Someone may simply ask what the pay is.

That makes The Silver Cult far more representative of Gor than an adventure which carefully keeps all the contentious material off-stage.

The source novels do not.

Neither does this.

Groups can decide how much detail they want when portraying captivity, torture and sexual material, but removing the themes entirely would remove much of the reason the adventure exists.

WHAT THE REVIEWERS NOTICED

There is not a large pile of customer reviews to manufacture a wall of five-star blurbs from.

There is, however, one detailed contemporary review from somebody deeply familiar with the novels.

That review contrasted this adventure with the comparatively restrained Tower of Art, describing The Silver Cult as the much more purist Gorean scenario and saying that it captured the atmosphere of Norman’s earlier books.

The reviewer specifically praised the notion that remnants of Tharna’s old female regime might have survived underground for half a century.

That is probably the most useful endorsement the adventure could receive.

A Gorean adventure ought to feel as though it grew from the setting rather than as though somebody wrote an unrelated fantasy module and added collars afterwards.

This one starts from Norman’s own history and asks:

What happened to the people who lost?

Then it lets the players ruin everybody’s plans.

WRITTEN BY JAMES DESBOROUGH AND RON MARSHALL

The Silver Cult was written by James Desborough and Ron Marshall and originally released by Postmortem Studios on 11 May 2017.

It is the second numbered release in the Gorean Adventures series.

Like the other releases in the line, it combines a playable scenario with additional rules intended to remain useful beyond that one adventure.

The adventure is written for Tales of Gor: Gorean Roleplaying and requires the core game.

Buy Tales of Gor: Gorean Roleplaying

The detailed setting reference is also useful for information on Tharna, Gorean society, slavery, castes, cultures and the wider world:

Buy World of Gor: Gorean Encyclopaedia

If you want to begin with the first numbered adventure:

Buy Gorean Adventures 01: The Tower of Art

WHAT YOU GET

• A complete plot-driven adventure for Tales of Gor: Gorean Roleplaying; a conspiracy involving the surviving Silver Mask movement of Tharna; material inspired particularly by Outlaw of Gor; girl catch, caravan travel, intrigue, capture and rebellion; opportunities to oppose, join, infiltrate or betray the conspiracy; strong roles for male, female, Free and enslaved characters; NPCs and adversaries; additional rules for torture and slave-breaking; Break Point and Resistance mechanics for extended coercion; and rules for allowing good, consistent roleplaying to influence mechanical outcomes.

This is a digital PDF supplement.

It is not a standalone game.

PAPERBACK EDITION

For people who prefer their conspiracies on paper, The Silver Cult also remains available as a physical edition through Lulu.

The paperback is 36 pages, black and white, A5 (148 × 210 mm) and perfect bound.

ISBN 978-0-244-90694-8.

Buy Gorean Adventures 02: The Silver Cult in paperback from Lulu

AND THERE IS MORE

Shortly after publication, Emma of Gor produced a free fan expansion offering additional possibilities for running the scenario.

Postmortem Studios highlighted and linked the expansion at the time.

Find the free Silver Cult fan expansion via Postmortem Studios

A published adventure which inspires somebody to immediately start writing extra routes through it is generally doing something right.

PUT THE MASK BACK ON

The old Tharna is dead.

That is what everyone says.

Its women were defeated.

Its silver masks disappeared.

Its social order was overturned and the city became properly Gorean again.

Fifty years is a long time.

Long enough for history to become legend.

Long enough for old enemies to die.

Long enough for their children to inherit the hatred without inheriting the caution.

Now silver masks are appearing again.

Somebody wants a revolution.

Somebody else wants it crushed.

Somebody will undoubtedly end up in chains.

And a collection of armed adventurers has arrived at precisely the wrong moment.

Or the right one.

That depends who is paying.

Gorean Adventures 02: The Silver Cult takes one of the strangest pieces of Gorean history and asks what happened after everybody assumed the story was finished.

It was not.

Ta Sardar Gor.