'Rogue Mistress' is a 144-page campaign adventure for Chaosium's Stormbringer game based on the writings of Michael Moorcock. The book was written for the older third edition of Stormbringer, so anyone wishing to play it with the newer Elric or current Stormbringer 5th edition games will have to do some conversion.
Physically, the book is up to Chaosium's usual standards of production quality, with an attractive cover (a raven-haired woman straight off the cover of a bodice-ripper romance, akimbo sixguns strapped to her hips, flanked by a lizard man with a large array of teeth and a large knife, while something resembling a pirate galeoon as designed by Jules Verne floats in the background), good interior art, clean layout, numerous and clear maps, and handouts in CoC tradition - unlike TSR, who used to shoot themselves in the foot by setting all player handouts in the same generic faux-mediaeval script, Chaosium has theirs hand-lettered.
The cover blurb describes 'Rogue Mistress' as "an epic campaign across the multiverse", and that is exactly what this delivers. It's needed occasionally to point out that, despite the idea of multiple planes of existence and travel among them is now a hoary old cliche of fantasy writing and games, the idea had considerable sex appeal back in the day when Moorcock came up with it, and used the multiverse and the idea of travel in it as a sort of metaplot holding together his output of (mostly) sword & sorcery literature detailing the exploits of the Eternal Champion, an adventurer fated to spend thousands of incarnations on parallel worlds fighting on the side of either Law or Chaos, the two great powers in Moorcock's multiverse (and another fantasy cliche he basically started). The most popular incarnation of the eternal champion would be Elric, though Chaosium released a supplement detailing the Bright Empire, setting of the Hawkmoon stories, and recently a third-party supplement detailing the semi-Celtic world of the Corum novels has been released.
The reason for this lengthy excourse? Because the strength of this adventure is, in my opinion, in the way it makes use of the multiverse, not so much copying from it but extending it; the last chapter of the campaign is the only episode that takes place on a plane described in a Moorcock story (at least that I've been able to find), but every location and episode is redolent of the almost surreal atmosphere of the literature. The scenarios and encounters presented here mesh smoothly into the overall context and themes of the setting. Simply put, above and beyond the immediate value you'll get from playing the adventure, the half-dozen planes and other locations described in this book should be enough to kickstart another campaign or three.
The adventure itself is designed to accomodate characters from either the Young Kingdoms (Elric's era and world) or the Bright Empire (that of Hawkmoon and the Runestaff), though since everything beyond the initial meeting which sets up the campaign takes place either in astral space, on shipboard, or on other planes, there's no reason not to use this book completely outside the Stormbringer context; anybody playing in a high-powered Runequest campaign where planar travel is not a rarity would get a lot of use from this book, for example. New rules for technological items are introduced, along with rules covering the influence of Law and Chaos on magic and technology (the higher the Chaos rating of a plane, the less reliable technology becomes, and magic is affected similarly by Law; the concept has been added to the current rules, but is given in much more detail here). Firearms are introduced, ranging from muskets to beam guns; since these are all but useless in the planes frequented by most Stormbringer players, I see little game balance issues here.
The Rogue Mistress herself, a ship capable of sailing between planes across the multiverse, is detailed along with her crew and captain; the ship and crew play a significant role in the adventure and are described in appropriate depth. Though no general rules for constructing such ships are given, it is not difficult for the GM to abstract the statistics for similar vessels from those of the Rogue Mistress.
So as to not give out spoilers, I will summarise my review here, then go on to gush and spooge over the individual episodes of the campaign: anybody who plays Stormbringer and/or Elric needs to have this book. It is amazingly good, atmospherically written, intelligently plotted, and full of fascinating NPCs, locations, items and situations. It is large enough in scope to keep even veteran players busy for quite some time, and the payoff of completing the entire campaign is likely to be very high. It is by no means an introductory adventure, and there are likely to be quite a few PC fatalities in the course of play, but the way the episodes are set up make it relatively easy to integrate a replacement character into play. Overall, this is a must for Stormbringer fans, and players of other fantasy systems would do well to look at this book too, if only to plunder it for ideas.
----- SPOILERS FOLLOW ------
'Rogue Mistress' centers around a plot by the sorceress Polidemia to gain control of an alien being known as the Tenatir, who can navigate the space between planes. Pollidemia has pacted with the Chaos lord Gashoram, and believes that giving him the Tenatir will increase her power; she does not realise, though the PCs will receive several hints of this, that the Tenatir and Gashoram are separate halves of a third being, and that Gashoram seeks them brought together for purposes of his own.
At the beginning of the adventure, the Tenatir is emprisoned by the witch-queen Media, who rules the world of Ildaron, and Pollidemia has sent a demon courier to recruit the PCs and recover the Tenatir.
Episode one, 'Dark eyes, cold hearts', sees the players delivered by a demon to Pollidemia's pocket dimension, where an additional plot element is introduced: after an appropriately eery rite, the PCs are implanted with living hearts magically removed from demon statues. These hearts grant their host a battle-fury which greatly increases hit points and fighting abilities; however, much like WoD frenzies, the rage has an after-effect...chaos mutations which randomly afflict the hearts' hosts. In a rare display of absent-mindedness for a powerful sorceress, Pollidemia completely forgets to mention the mutations, and bungles it badly when she says she will safely remove the hearts once the players have completed their mission (what she means is that, eventually, the demon hearts will burst, swollen with human blood, from their hosts and return to the statues from whence they came, thereby allowing a demon race to enter our universe and bring absolute horror to all existence.) The players' struggle to control and perhaps remove their demon hearts adds a lot of tension to the game as play goes on, and should drive players to maintain a certain pace.
Episode two, 'The Prisoner', takes the group to the plane of Ildaron, which consists of floating islands of various sizes, locked between the poles of Chaos and Law, with rivers running occasionally through empty space; each island tends to have its own society and culture, and magic and technology are at roughly Young Kingdoms level. The players' job here is to rescue the Tenatir from Queen Media, whose island of Syfera is run as a strict matriarchate where slavery and torture are accepted. Once the party has managed to free the Tenatir, the Rogue Mistress arrives to rescue her crewmember. Pollidemia's demon arrives just in time to see the players talking to the ships' crew and promptly gets the wrong idea, denouncing them as traitors before leaving in a puff of brimstone and generally ensuring the players will have no choice but to cooperate with the captain and crew of the Rogue Mistress.
Episode three, 'The Rogue Mistress', takes place on board the ship. It allows the players to meet the captain, Maria de Tres Pistolas (who, unknown to herself, is sister to Pollidemia) and the crew, gather some information, and perhaps enlist henchmen from among the crew. Eventually, the players will be offered help with their demon hearts in exchange for their help in securing a part needed by the Tenatir to repair the drive allowing the ship to travel between planes.
Episode four, 'Ghosts in the Machines', takes the players to the lifeless plane of Klaadii. Here they must board the still-living remains of a biological spaceship to recover the Entropy Configuration, an elaborate crystal structure used by the Tenatir to navigate. The alien ship originally belonged to an advanced telepathic race known as the Engineers; cause of the ship's crash and lingering demise in this bleak place was an attack by bodiless energy beings. There are enclaves of both energy beings and Engineers still on board, and both attempt to interact with the PCs. Aside from the pressing need to recover the Entropy Configuration, resolution in this episode is open-ended, so players can choose to aid either or neither side on board the ship, and can do a lot of exploring and tinkering with alien tech.
Episode five, 'The Web of Chaos', is set on the world of Albyon, patterned on 16th century Europe. Firearms exist on this plane, and it is here that Maria de Tres Pistolas supplies the cannons on board her ship from. The players come here to meet Justin Carrock, an innkeeper and manifestation of the Eternal Champion believed to know the location of the Planar Knife, an artifact with which the characters' demon hearts may safely be excised. Carrock is also the father of both Maria and Pollidemia. Once in Albyon, the players encounter thugs hired by Pollidemia and follow Carrock's trail to the corpse of an old wizard, from whose effects they gather instructions for travelling to the location of the Planar Knife. It appears this wizard, in attempting to reach his home plane from which he had been banished, opened up a gateway through which Chaos has been seeping into Albyon, and Carrock seeks the knife to close this gateway. The Web of Chaos, location of the Planar Knife, is an appropriately surreal and eerie location, with at least one guaranteed moment of numb shock guaranteed for your players. Once the knife has been located, the first player to touch it becomes posessed by the demon Knife; this gives the character considerable powers, but somewhat strange views - the character, while still under player control, has the attitudes and aspirations of a demon, and cannot be bound as would a normal demon. Examination of the dagger and the character discovers that both now have a slot for some kind of controller module. The episode ends literally with a bang, as an explosion resulting from the removal of the knife blows Carrock and the party all the way to another plane.
Episode six, 'The Whispering Sea', finds the party on M'oor Talen, also known as the Whispering Sea. This plane is a waterworld ruled by the chaos lord Pyaray. The plane is haunted both by sea monsters and by Pyaray's fleets crewed by undead sailors, and an artifact called Straasha's Bane secures the Chaos Lord's dominion. The players first meet Andrew Grant, a manifestation of the Eternal Companion, and are told by him to seek the Oracle of the Temple. After a nerve-wracking boat voyage, the players make it to the Temple and are told by the Oracle that their only hope of escape lies in destroying Straasha's Bane, allowing the elemental lord to regain control over the waters of this plane. The players are provided with the means for underwater breathing and sent along to Pyaray's hidden temple under the sea. Along the way, they may meet and befriend a race of benign sentient octopi, or be eaten by something vast and fierce; after the players defeat the Temple's guardians and destroy the artifact, Straasha will be free to return to this plane and return the party to the Rogue Mistress. If the players are careless, however, they may have to deal with an irate Pyaray first...
Episode seven, 'The Dark of the Sun', is set on Uerth, a post-holocaust Earth setting and the origin of Erekose, another incarnation of the Eternal Champion. Here is where the control module for the planar knife can be found. Two societies battle for domination on frozen Uerth: the bunker city of Ralcon 4, a dictatorship with some resemblance to Alpha Complex minus the humor, and tribes of mutants led by an outcast from Ralcon 4. Justin Carrock is fated to die in this battle; the PCs have the opportunity to aid either side and still recover the control module. This section of the adventure favors investigation, as there are several plot threads and levels to the conflict on Uerth that are not readily apparent.
Episode eight, 'The Two Who Are One', takes the party back to Pollidemia's pocket dimension. After a climatic battle against various minions, the chaos lord Gashoram manifests, and it is here that the players would do well to have paid attention to various bits of prophecy scattered throughout the adventure, for otherwise they are probably toast...unless the GM feels like being deus ex machina about it that day. Resolution and defeat of Gashoram bring about the manifestation of the Balance, which will both reverse any unwelcome mutations the players may have as well as dispense rewards.
And there you have it, a synopsis of what is in my opinion one of the finest fantasy gaming adventures ever written. It's tough, it will probably kill a great many PCs, and it will take you forever to play. But I'll bet it'll be some gaming you'll remember for a long time.
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