BREAK INTO A FIFTY-STOREY TOWER. STEAL THE FORBIDDEN ALIEN DEVICE. TRY NOT TO GET IMPALED.

Ar has had a difficult few years.

Once the greatest city on Gor, it has endured occupation by Cos, humiliation, plunder, political upheaval and eventually liberation. The Cosians have gone, but they left a great deal behind: property, slaves, records, possessions, curiosities and assorted pieces of loot which nobody has yet examined quite as carefully as perhaps they should.

One of them is a small golden sphere.

It has been catalogued as an ornament.

The Initiates know better.

The thing is connected to the Kurii, the monstrous extraterrestrial enemies of the Priest-Kings, and it has ended up stored amongst the accumulated curiosities of Ar’s Cylinder of Art.

The Priest-Kings would rather it did not remain there.

Unfortunately, the Cylinder is a fifty-storey tower inside one of the most powerful cities on Gor.

There are guards.

There are locks.

There are occupants.

There is rather a long way to fall.

So naturally the mysterious agents of the Priest-Kings have decided that somebody else should steal it.

Welcome to Gorean Adventures 01: The Tower of Art.

YOUR FIRST BAD DECISION ON GOR

The Tower of Art is the first full adventure and supplementary sourcebook for Tales of Gor: Gorean Roleplaying, designed specifically as an introduction for a group of four to six newly created characters.

The initial premise is deliberately simple.

The characters have been escorting Io, an unusually personable member of the Initiates, between fortified temples near Ar. They expect payment, food and perhaps the mild satisfaction of having completed a straightforward job without being eaten by anything.

Instead, Io introduces them to Balbus.

The two men know rather more about the Priest-Kings than ordinary Initiates are supposed to know.

They also have another job.

A valuable and extremely forbidden object must be removed from Ar.

Payment is available.

So are favours.

Questions are discouraged.

It is the sort of offer adventurers traditionally accept shortly before discovering why the original employer did not simply do the job himself.

AR AFTER THE OCCUPATION

The adventure takes place while Ar is still recovering from the Cosian occupation.

That gives the city considerably more texture than a generic fantasy metropolis waiting politely for adventurers to arrive.

Ar remains proud.

It remains huge.

It remains powerful.

It is also wounded.

Empty buildings and scars from the occupation remain visible. The populace is suspicious, particularly of outsiders. Wealth has been lost, political confidence shaken and a great deal of property left behind by fleeing or defeated Cosians has ended up redistributed, seized or simply dumped wherever somebody found room for it.

The Cylinder of Art is one result.

Built following the expulsion of Cos partly as a repository and partly as a public assertion that Ar remained magnificent, the enormous tower has become a curious mixture of storage facility, archive, residence and architectural boast.

Some of its floors contain spoils and curiosities.

Others house members of the High Castes whose fortunes are not quite high enough to secure accommodation in more prestigious cylinders.

Scholars, guards, slaves and residents go about their business inside.

Somewhere near the top is a metal sphere nobody understands.

That makes the adventure a burglary rather than a dungeon crawl.

The building is inhabited.

People have reasons to be there.

The guards are doing a job rather than waiting in rooms to provide Experience Points.

Players therefore have to think before the swords come out.

This may prove novel.

THERE IS MORE THAN ONE WAY INTO A TOWER

The scenario deliberately offers several routes into the Cylinder rather than forcing everyone through the front door in initiative order.

The obvious approach is through the streets of Ar.

That means entering the city, dealing with suspicious guards, blending into the night-time crowds and reaching the Cylinder without attracting the sort of attention usually generated by half a dozen armed foreigners asking where the secret alien artefact is kept.

Ar provides plenty of local colour on the way: patrols, drinkers, hawkers, slaves advertising establishments, traffic, citizens and the ordinary nocturnal chaos of a large Gorean city.

Or the characters can use a tarn.

This is quicker.

It is also dramatically less subtle.

A draft tarn can carry the group onto the roof, allowing them to work down through the Cylinder rather than up.

The drawback is that people tend to notice enormous birds landing on important buildings.

This approach therefore introduces a real-time countdown as alarms spread through the tower, guards begin climbing towards the intruders and tarnsmen arrive outside to remove the comforting assumption that the characters can simply leave the way they came.

There is something pleasingly cruel about placing an actual timer where the players can see it.

Suddenly twenty minutes spent debating whether to open a door becomes considerably less attractive.

And those are merely the obvious approaches.

Players remain players.

Somebody will come up with something stupid.

The Games Master has been warned.

FIFTY FLOORS OF OTHER PEOPLE’S PROPERTY

The Cylinder itself is a vertical adventure site rather than a conventional underground dungeon.

The ground floor is guarded.

The basement contains kitchens, stores, workers and access points.

Lower and middle levels hold rooms, residences, storage areas and the assorted clutter which accumulates when a tower has become part warehouse, part apartment block and part national trophy cabinet.

The upper floors are occupied by members of the High Castes who cannot quite afford the truly prestigious accommodation elsewhere in Ar.

Then, near the top, the tower becomes increasingly devoted to the great muddle of objects, records and curiosities for which it was constructed.

This creates a useful tension.

The characters know approximately where the sphere should be.

Approximately.

Unfortunately, the Cylinder’s organisation has some deficiencies.

Finding it requires more than simply reaching Room 50 and pressing the LOOT button.

There are records to search.

People who know things.

People who know things but would very much prefer not to tell armed burglars.

Other objects which may be fascinating, valuable, forbidden or complete rubbish.

And one particularly unfortunate thief on the roof who provides a rather clear statement of Ar’s attitude towards unauthorised entry.

The tower does not need to contain a dragon.

Ar has building security.

THE WRONG GOLDEN BALL

The artefact itself is small enough to carry.

That does not make it harmless.

The sphere is not actually made of gold. It is another metal, decorated with intricate golden patterns, and was once owned by a Cosian merchant dealing in curiosities.

The Initiates believe it to be a machine of the Kur.

More importantly, they regard it as something that must either be recovered or destroyed.

That distinction introduces the larger story behind the immediate caper.

Gor is a low-technology world because the Priest-Kings have deliberately kept it that way. Behind human wars, commerce, slavery, political ambition and ordinary life lies a much greater struggle between two alien powers.

The Priest-Kings have withdrawn further from human affairs.

The Kurii have moved closer.

Their agents and artefacts are scattered through the world.

Most Goreans know none of this.

The player characters are about to learn rather more than is healthy.

FROM HIRED HANDS TO SECRET AGENTS

One of the useful functions of The Tower of Art is solving a recurring roleplaying problem.

Why are these people together?

Gor contains warriors, merchants, slaves, physicians, scribes, criminals, barbarians from Earth and people from cultures scattered across an entire planet.

A random collection of them may not have an obvious reason to spend the next six months wandering around solving one another’s problems.

Working for the agents of the Priest-Kings provides one.

The Tower of Art is therefore capable of functioning as the beginning of a campaign.

Io and Balbus are not merely employers for the evening. Success can earn the characters money, contacts and favour from people connected to one of the hidden powers of the setting.

The published Gorean Adventures line went on to explore a range of situations and locations, but this first scenario establishes a useful common thread: ordinary people becoming involved in the concealed struggle taking place underneath Gorean history.

They do not need to begin as heroes.

They may simply need the money.

Heroism can happen to them later.

AN ACTUAL INTRODUCTORY ADVENTURE

Introductory scenarios sometimes misunderstand what “introductory” means.

They introduce twelve factions, a civil war, six subsystems and a nonlinear murder mystery before asking a group still trying to remember which dice to roll whether Duke Fotheringay’s third cousin is secretly loyal to the Scarlet Compact.

Tower of Art is rather more sensible.

There is a job.

Go to Ar.

Get into a building.

Find the object.

Get out.

Within that clear structure, the players encounter many of the things that make Gor distinctive.

They meet Initiates and learn something about the religious hierarchy.

They deal with money and Gorean social assumptions.

They encounter slaves and Free people in ordinary contexts rather than through an encyclopaedia entry.

They experience the scale and culture of Ar.

They can travel by tarn.

They see the caste system operating around them.

They may discover something of the hidden relationship between humanity, the Kurii and the Priest-Kings.

And somewhere along the way they will probably have to hit somebody with a sword.

A contemporary review summed it up neatly as “Short and sweet” and “a good introduction to roleplaying Gor.”

That is exactly the scale the adventure aims for.

Enough Gor to start understanding the world.

Enough freedom for the players to make decisions.

Enough danger for those decisions to matter.

No requirement to memorise thirty-four novels before game night.

PULP UNDER THE SILKS

There is a tendency for discussion of Gor to become entirely consumed by its sexual politics.

Those are obviously part of the setting.

They are not all of it.

John Norman’s books are also planetary romance, sword-and-planet adventure and pulp science fantasy: lost technologies, alien conspiracies, enormous beasts, spies, warriors, cities, wilderness and people getting themselves into extravagant amounts of trouble.

The Tower of Art leans into that side.

The basic adventure could have come from old pulp fiction.

A mysterious priest hires a band of dubious adventurers.

A strange object has fallen into the wrong hands.

A tower must be infiltrated.

Guards are closing in.

Something alien and dangerous sits amongst mundane treasure.

Get the object.

Get out alive.

The follow-up contemporary review of The Silver Cult observed that Tower of Art had strayed a little into Robert E. Howard territory.

Quite.

That is not an accusation from which we intend to defend ourselves.

EXTRA RULES: SKILL SPECIALITIES

The adventure is only part of the book.

Tower of Art established the model followed by the Gorean Adventures line: each release would provide a scenario while also adding material to the wider game.

Here that addition is Skill Specialities.

A Speciality represents focused expertise inside an existing skill.

Someone may be competent with bows but particularly accomplished with the longbow.

A rider may specialise in a particular style of mounted activity.

A character may become exceptionally capable in a narrow aspect of command, stealth, survival, trade, animal handling or any of the other skills used in the game.

When the Speciality applies, it grants an additional die.

The book supplies a substantial selection of examples across the game’s skills, including combat techniques, practical expertise, survival, social abilities, slave training and the erotic arts.

Because Gor.

Naturally somebody can specialise in that.

This gives experienced characters another avenue for differentiation and also helps make professional expertise more specific without adding an entirely new skill for every conceivable task.

A thief can be a particularly good burglar.

A warrior can become frighteningly specific about weapons.

A survival expert can know one environment intimately.

A pleasure slave can become very, very qualified.

Everyone needs goals.

THE PEOPLE INVOLVED

The supplement provides game statistics and background for the characters likely to matter during the adventure, including Io, the apparently ordinary Initiate whose combination of good humour, suspicious competence and clandestine employment immediately indicates that he may not spend all his time praying.

This material saves the Games Master from having to manufacture important NPCs in the middle of play and gives the opening stages of the adventure enough personality to keep the mission from feeling like a notice pinned to a tavern wall.

The art is credited to Michael Manning, Brad McDevitt, Giorgio De Michele, Joseph Arnold and Daniel Hidalgo.

The book is officially authorised and based on John Norman’s Gorean novels, with Norman’s work used by permission of the author and his agents.

WHAT YOU GET

• A complete Gorean Adventures scenario for 4–6 starting characters; a mission involving the recovery of a suspected Kur artefact from the fifty-storey Cylinder of Art in Ar; material on the Fort of the Initiates and post-occupation Ar; several approaches to the target, including street infiltration and a timed rooftop assault by tarn; the Cylinder as a detailed vertical adventure site; NPCs and game statistics; campaign hooks connecting the characters to agents of the Priest-Kings; and the Skill Specialities rules with a large range of examples.

This is an adventure supplement for Tales of Gor: Gorean Roleplaying and is not a standalone game.

You will need the core rules:

Buy Tales of Gor: Gorean Roleplaying

For considerably more background on Ar, the Priest-Kings, Kurii, castes, creatures, customs and the rest of Counter-Earth, the companion encyclopaedia is extremely useful:

Buy World of Gor: Gorean Encyclopaedia

PAPERBACK EDITION

This listing is for the digital PDF edition.

A physical edition is also available through Lulu.

The paperback is 34 pages, black and white, perfect bound and printed in A5 format (148 × 210 mm).

ISBN 978-1-326-97993-5.

Buy Gorean Adventures 01: The Tower of Art in paperback from Lulu

SOMEBODY HAS TO GO UP THERE

The Priest-Kings are distant.

The Kurii are plotting.

Ar is wounded, suspicious and rebuilding its pride.

Somewhere near the top of a fifty-storey cylinder sits a small metal sphere which everyone else thinks is decoration.

Two Initiates would like you to steal it.

They have money.

They have connections.

They are being worryingly vague about what the thing actually does.

This is probably fine.

The Tower of Art gives a new Tales of Gor group somewhere immediate to go, something clear to accomplish and enough freedom in how they attempt it for the whole thing to become an entertaining disaster.

Go through the gate.

Talk your way past the guards.

Sneak through the streets.

Land a tarn on the roof.

Climb fifty floors if you have somehow offended your own knees.

Find the sphere.

Try not to steal everything else.

Get out before Ar discovers that its newest monument to civic pride has just been burgled by half a dozen strangers working for people who officially know nothing whatsoever about alien technology.

Ta Sardar Gor.