OUT HERE, “STRANGER” AND “ENEMY” ARE THE SAME WORD

The Priest-Kings have another little job.

Naturally, it involves travelling into a wilderness full of people who would prefer to kill you.

Somewhere upon the vast Plains of Turia lies the Silver Star, a strange artefact believed to be connected to the Kurii and the larger Game of Worlds being played behind Gorean history.

The object has fallen into the hands of the Paravaci, one of the four great tribes of the Wagon Peoples.

This is inconvenient.

The Paravaci are poor, proud, violent, xenophobic and spectacularly uninterested in helping outsiders.

Once they were among the wealthiest and most respected of the Wagon Peoples. Then, nearly fifty years ago, they committed an act of betrayal which left them despised by the other tribes and stripped of much of their former wealth.

They have not become more cheerful as a result.

Now the characters must find them.

Make contact.

Convince them not to kill everyone.

Discover who has the Silver Star.

Acquire it.

Then leave.

Preferably in that order.

Gorean Adventures 03: The Turian Gambit is an adventure for Tales of Gor: Gorean Roleplaying, written for a typical group of four to six experienced characters. It trades corridors and urban conspiracies for open country, tribal politics, diplomacy, cultural negotiation, wagers, races and the occasional desperate need to get away from somebody very quickly.

A good sword will help.

A functioning understanding of other human beings will help considerably more.

FIRST, TURRETS. THEN BARBARIANS.

The adventure begins in Turia, the richest and greatest city of southern Gor.

Behind its enormous walls lie markets, high-caste citizens, merchants, slaves, soldiers and all the comforts of urban Gorean civilisation.

Outside those walls lies the Plains.

The contrast is deliberate.

Turia gives the characters one final opportunity to behave like civilised people before heading into a society where many of the assumptions they rely upon cease to apply.

The characters must gather supplies and information about the Wagon Peoples, learn what they can about the Paravaci and prepare themselves for a journey across dangerous open country.

They also have to collect an agent of the Priest-Kings.

Unfortunately, she has arrived in Turia somewhat incorrectly.

Her name is Tamar.

She is an Earth-born woman implanted with advanced Priest-King technology intended to help the party locate and recover the object they seek.

Due to a slight transportation mishap, she has ended up for sale in the local slave market.

These things happen.

Apparently.

So before the party can even leave Turia, they need to locate Tamar, acquire her and decide how to handle the awkward fact that the sophisticated alien intelligence directing their mission has supplied them with an operative currently wearing bells and a slave tether.

Gor seldom permits dignity to survive an entire briefing.

THE PLAINS DO NOT WANT YOU

Leaving Turia produces the first major change in the adventure.

There are no streets.

No walls.

No inns every few pasangs.

No municipal guard to become somebody else’s problem.

The Plains of Turia are enormous grasslands occupied by dangerous wildlife and the four great nations of the Wagon Peoples: the Tuchuks, Kassars, Kataii and Paravaci.

The characters may encounter predators, the remains of failed travellers, mounted warriors looking for sport and slaves who know considerably more about surviving the region than the people ostensibly rescuing them.

The Wagon Peoples test strangers.

They threaten them.

They charge towards them on kaiila to see whether they flinch.

They challenge them.

Displays of cowardice may mark an outsider as prey.

Displays of courage may earn respect.

Or a duel to the death.

It is a very particular form of cultural exchange.

The adventure expects the players to learn.

The tribes are not random encounter tables dressed as people. They have customs, values, taboos and assumptions which can be exploited, respected, misunderstood or insulted.

A group that treats every problem as an excuse to reach for weapons may discover that killing one mounted warrior is perfectly achievable.

Killing his relatives, neighbours, allies, slaves, sleen and everyone else who comes running after hearing the commotion is rather less so.

Diplomacy is not the soft option.

It is the survival skill.

THE PARAVACI HAVE REASONS TO BE DIFFICULT

The party’s eventual destination is Paravaci territory.

The Paravaci occupy an awkward position among the Wagon Peoples.

Historically wealthy and influential, they suffered catastrophic disgrace following the events surrounding Turia almost fifty years earlier.

Their status collapsed.

Their former allies despise them.

Their wealth diminished.

Their pride did not.

This produces a culture particularly suspicious of outsiders and touchy about respect.

Marching into their camp and announcing that you have come to retrieve their interesting silver object is unlikely to produce an optimal result.

The players first need a recognised reason to be there.

The adventure supplies several.

None is entirely comfortable.

BECOME USEFUL

One route is to earn an Acceptance Brand.

Certain foreigners who provide something the Wagon Peoples value may be permitted to move among them.

Entertainers can attempt to earn this status through performance.

Merchants and other useful strangers may also qualify under the right circumstances.

The process is not exactly a modern visa application.

The performance must suit the audience.

Praise, blood, courage, sexuality and appropriate cultural references can help.

Sophistication may not.

Insulting the people currently deciding whether you deserve to live is generally inadvisable.

Success marks the stranger as someone permitted to pass among the Wagon Peoples.

Failure can have rather more permanent consequences.

The whole sequence rewards players for paying attention to the culture instead of merely locating the highest number on the character sheet.

Knowing your audience has seldom been so literal.

HOLD GRASS AND EARTH

A more prestigious route is the ceremony of holding grass and earth.

This is a powerful bond of friendship and mutual obligation between warriors.

A Wagon Person who offers the ritual accepts responsibility for the foreigner and, in return, the outsider gains something approaching the rights and standing of a member of the tribe.

It is not handed out casually.

Saving a warrior’s life may earn the honour.

So might defeating him properly in single combat without humiliating him afterwards.

That last qualification is important.

Victory is useful.

Making your opponent look like an idiot in front of his friends is less so.

Once the bond is formed, the two men share honour and disgrace.

Your behaviour reflects upon your sponsor.

His reflects upon you.

This creates one of the adventure’s more interesting social tools because obtaining status does not simply unlock the next scene.

It creates obligations.

A character who finally earns acceptance among the Paravaci may discover that belonging somewhere is considerably more complicated than sneaking through it.

OR BECOME A SLAVE

There is another way into the camp.

It is extremely reliable.

The Paravaci permit slaves to live among them.

Obviously.

Characters who fail catastrophically at diplomacy, lose the wrong confrontation or voluntarily choose an unusually committed approach to infiltration may end up entering Paravaci society from the bottom.

This is not necessarily the end of the adventure.

It simply changes it.

The setting’s social hierarchy becomes immediately practical when characters lose their freedom, possessions and status but retain information, relationships and whatever opportunities they can manufacture.

A mixed party can even end up occupying several social positions at once.

One character may have been accepted as a respected guest.

Another carries an Acceptance Brand.

Someone else has successfully bonded with a warrior.

The fourth is chained to a wagon and developing increasingly strong opinions about the group’s planning process.

All of them still need the Silver Star.

LIFE AMONG THE WAGONS

Once inside Paravaci society, the adventure slows down in a useful way.

The players are given time to observe.

The camp is not merely a hostile fortress.

It is where people live.

There are family wagons, livestock, slaves, children, guests, warriors and households.

Men hunt, boast, compete and gamble.

Women oversee households and slaves, gossip and work.

Bosks occupy an almost sacred position in Wagon People life.

Sleen guard property.

Kaiila provide mobility across the Plains.

Honour matters.

Hospitality matters.

Wagers matter enormously.

This is the part of the scenario where successful players stop asking, “Where is the quest item?” and start asking, “Who owns it, what does he care about and how can we make him want to give it to us?”

That is progress.

Possibly.

THE WAGON PEOPLE WILL BET ON ANYTHING

The Paravaci love wagers.

Property.

Money.

Weapons.

Animals.

Slaves.

Prestige.

If something can be owned, valued or argued about, somebody can probably gamble it.

The adventure includes material for several common games and methods of wagering, giving the players ways to win money, gain respect, lose everything they own or manipulate the local social order without immediately starting a massacre.

Simple bets such as seed counting can become little exercises in Gorean local knowledge.

More spectacular competitions involve physical skill, animals and risk.

The important cultural point is that a sufficiently exciting wager can persuade a Wagon Person to risk something enormously valuable.

Such as, hypothetically, a mysterious Silver Star hidden inside his wagon.

Funny how these traditions work out.

THE SILVER STAR

Eventually the characters can discover that the artefact belongs to a Paravaci named Orsonio.

He keeps it carefully hidden.

That produces two broad solutions.

The impatient can steal it.

This requires getting into a defended household whose inhabitants are extremely serious about family loyalty and considerably less serious about the long-term health of burglars.

The patient can wait for the Wintering.

Wintering is a period of celebration and competition when grand wagers are traditional and warriors prove themselves through games and contests.

Orsonio is particularly fond of gambling.

Under the right circumstances, he can be persuaded to stake the Silver Star.

That turns the climax of the adventure into something wonderfully Gorean.

The fate of a piece of alien technology in the secret war between the Kurii and Priest-Kings may be decided by a barbarian gambling contest.

The universe is vast.

Its mysteries are profound.

Sometimes you still have to win the bloody race.

KAIILA RACING

One of those contests is kaiila racing.

The adventure uses its expanded race and pursuit rules to make speed contests something more substantial than a single Athletics roll.

Progress is tracked across distance.

Riders compete through repeated tests.

Mounts, skill and circumstance matter.

The structure is reusable for other races well beyond this adventure.

Tarn racing.

Foot races.

Mounted competitions.

Escape attempts.

Anything where the interesting question is not whether somebody can move, but whether they can move faster than somebody else who wants very badly to catch them.

Which leads neatly to the additional rules section.

CHASES AND PURSUITS

The Turian Gambit expands Tales of Gor with dedicated mechanics for racing, chasing and pursuit.

These rules recognise that a chase is not simply two movement rates being compared until the mathematics announces a winner.

Terrain matters.

Cover matters.

Stunts matter.

Different modes of movement matter.

Someone on foot, somebody riding a ground mount and a tarnsman in the air are playing very different games.

Characters can use appropriate skills to create obstacles, take risks or make themselves harder to catch.

Pursuers must decide whether to follow.

Distances change.

People can escape.

People can be caught.

Someone can inevitably fall off something at speed.

These rules are useful far beyond the Plains of Turia.

Gor is full of pursuit.

Tarns.

Kaiila.

Tharlarion.

Ships.

Slaves running away.

Guards chasing thieves.

Raiders pursuing caravans.

Characters fleeing the consequences of their own decisions.

That last category alone should justify several pages.

LANCE AND TOSPIT

The Wagon People also practise lance and tospit, one of those cultural traditions which immediately answers the question, “Are we definitely still on Gor?”

A tospit fruit is held in the mouth of a slave girl.

A mounted warrior attempts to strike the fruit with his lance without striking her.

Accuracy matters.

Nerve matters.

The slave’s nerve matters quite a lot.

This can be used as one of the Wintering contests if the kaiila race fails to produce a decisive result.

It is dangerous, theatrical and absurdly specific.

In other words, perfect roleplaying-game material.

The characters are not merely rolling generic Contest Skill.

They are participating in the customs of the people whose trust they have spent the entire adventure trying to earn.

THE GAME OF WORLDS CONTINUES

The Silver Star is not merely valuable.

It is part of the concealed technological struggle between the Priest-Kings and the Kurii.

That allows The Turian Gambit to stand on its own as an expedition among the Wagon Peoples while also connecting directly into the larger metaplot introduced in The Game of Worlds.

The characters do not need to understand the full picture.

Indeed, the people employing them have probably decided that understanding less is healthier.

Recover the object.

Give it to Tamar.

Ask as few questions as personal curiosity permits.

Watch the inexplicable advanced technology quietly disappear.

Then go back to living in a world where the most sophisticated thing you normally encounter is a crossbow.

Perfectly reasonable.

For groups using the wider Game of Worlds material, however, the adventure supplies another point where ordinary Gorean politics and alien interference overlap.

The tribes think they are gambling over treasure.

The characters know slightly more.

The Priest-Kings know considerably more.

The Kurii presumably know enough to make the whole situation worse later.

WRITTEN FOR EXPERIENCED CHARACTERS

Unlike The Tower of Art, which was deliberately suited to beginning characters, The Turian Gambit expects a group with some experience.

The original adventure specifies four to six experienced characters, ideally people who can handle themselves socially as well as physically.

That qualification is important.

A formidable swordsman can survive a duel.

He cannot necessarily negotiate entry into an alien culture without causing six more.

A socially capable character may do more to keep the party alive than the deadliest warrior.

Performers have opportunities.

Survival skills matter.

Riders matter.

People able to observe customs, negotiate wagers, read a room and resist saying precisely the wrong thing at precisely the wrong moment can carry entire sections of the scenario.

It is a pleasant change of emphasis.

You are still playing Gor.

There will probably be violence.

You simply have to earn it.

REVIEWS: NOT MUCH TO QUOTE

Unlike The Tower of Art and The Silver Cult, I have not found a substantial contemporary prose review of The Turian Gambit which can be honestly mined for a useful quotation.

The surviving Amazon listing has accumulated five customer ratings averaging 3.8 out of 5, but the accessible search record does not expose enough written review text to quote reliably.

So there is no conveniently glowing sentence pasted here under somebody else’s name.

Better no pull quote than a fake one.

The module itself is unusual enough to make its own case.

WHAT YOU GET

• A complete adventure for 4–6 experienced characters on the Plains of Turia; extensive play among the Paravaci and wider Wagon People culture; material on Turia and its markets; wilderness encounters across the Plains; multiple ways to gain acceptance among the Wagon Peoples; Acceptance Brands and the ritual of holding grass and earth; households, customs, wagers and tribal complications; the hunt for the Silver Star, a Kur artefact connected to the Game of Worlds; the Wintering and opportunities to win the artefact through competition; rules for races, chases and pursuits; kaiila racing, lance-and-tospit and other Wagon People games; NPCs, adversaries and campaign hooks; and connections to the wider struggle between the Priest-Kings and Kurii.

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

Buy Tales of Gor: Gorean Roleplaying

For the wider conspiracy involving the Priest-Kings, Kurii and Earth:

Buy Gorean Adventures: The Game of Worlds

For a broad reference to Gorean cultures, geography, creatures and terminology:

Buy World of Gor: Gorean Encyclopaedia

PAPERBACK EDITION

This listing is for the digital PDF edition.

A physical edition remains available from Lulu.

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

ISBN 978-0-244-03327-9.

Buy Gorean Adventures 03: The Turian Gambit in paperback from Lulu

CREDITS

The original PDF credits James ‘Grim’ Desborough and Uri Kurlianchik as writers, with artwork by Michael Manning and Brad McDevitt.

The current Lulu bibliographic listing names Uri Kurlianchik as the author of the physical edition.

John Norman’s works are used by permission of the author and his agents, Richard Curtis Associates, Inc.

GO MAKE FRIENDS

Somewhere on the Plains is an alien artefact.

Unfortunately, it belongs to a man whose culture regards strangers as enemies, wealth as something to gamble, courage as a minimum requirement and social embarrassment as a perfectly respectable prelude to murder.

The Priest-Kings want the Silver Star.

The Paravaci have it.

The party stands between them.

There are several possible solutions.

Fight everyone.

Become entertainers.

Win a duel.

Save somebody’s life.

Acquire a brand.

Join a household.

Become slaves.

Make friends.

Gamble.

Steal the thing.

Win the thing.

Run away with the thing.

The last option is precisely why the book includes chase rules.

The Turian Gambit sends the players somewhere a sword cannot solve every problem and then gives them plenty of opportunities to draw one anyway.

Learn the customs.

Watch your mouth.

Never insult the bosk.

And if Orsonio asks whether you fancy a wager, make sure you know exactly what you are betting.

Ta Sardar Gor.