Mithril: City of the Golem
Written by: Dierdre Brooks, Ben Lam and Anthony Pryor
Developed by: Anthony Pryor with Stewart and Stephan Wieck
Mithril is an interesting take on the whole “outpost of good and civility surrounded by wilderness and evil” cliché, easily portable outside the Scarred Lands setting, marred by only a couple of small system mistakes.
Overview
Mithril was the first “location” book for the Scarred Lands setting and it dealt with one of the more interesting and unique cities of the setting. Like its successor, Hollowfaust: City of Necromancers, its takes a common conceit (in this case the border town) and mixes it with something common-but-not-really-discussed (the issue of religion in polytheistic fantasy settings, and explicit alignment). The location is evocative – a city of gleaming white, topped by the towering symbol of their God’s grace, protected by holy paladins and pious priests, surrounded by a blood-red sea and orc infested marshes and treacherous mountain passes.
Chapter One: The Divided City
This chapter gives the big picture overview of the city, its divisions and its environs. Mithril is a city steeped in religion and surrounded by weird and dangerous things to kill. The city itself is the merging of the original religious shrines and the lower-classed labour villages that supported the clerics and in turn, depended on them for protection from the various monsters in the wilderness. Then we have a break down of the weather, economics, law enforcement, and the various armed groups that use Mithril as a base of operations (including mercenary units).
Others have focused on the frontier aspect (the variety of terrain and matching opponents from the Beacon Knights watching the mountain pass for Vesh to the Blood Sea and the Drowning Plains) so I’d like to instead focus on the internal divisions of the city. As a city founded by paladins and priests, in a setting where the pantheistic nature of the setting is enforced (i.e. just because you are a priest of Corean (the patron of Mithril), the tricky balance between 7 gods, each with various alignment and familial relationships, is something of a undercurrent throughout the book. The Coreans seem to reluctantly admit the necessity of tolerating other religions, but they do draw the line very firmly between placating the evil gods and actually allowing anyone to actively worship them (so far as to staff the evil shrines with clergy of Corean as caretakers).
Then there is the clergy itself – and the internal divisions within it: the clergy versus the questing knights (the paladins), the various aspects of Corean (who is the God of war, but also of smiths, and knowledge to a lesser extent) and the added stresses of attempting to be both the spiritual leaders while also performing the very temporal/secular duties of civil leaders. These are not common themes in most fantasy settings who manage to hand-wave these stresses as merely part of the background noise instead of honestly pulling them out and investigating them as a potential source of NPC conflicts (where else do we have two paladins of the same religion in direct conflict?) and motivations for adventuring.
Chapter Two: History
Mithril’s history is surprisingly generic. With the exception of the Golem most of it is easily transportable without much effort (simply replace Scarn-specific details like titanspawn with whatever local variety of nasty you want). It reads like a true, idealistic (and often naïve) border town. The local legends are full of the stuff typical of paladins and their more magical counterparts – heroic leadership, battles won against terrible odds, and great amounts of miraculous salvation and sacrifice.
There is also a hint at some deeper secrets – a sort of alternative plotline if you aren’t big on playing out the “we hate Titans” primary plotline in the settings. Lost civilisations (destroyed during or before the Titanswar, including one whose secrets may have played a part in the construction of the Golem), and the ever-present Penumbral Lords (something that is being built up across Scarred Lands sourcebooks) are good for the central elements of a campaign, or just as a refreshing change from endless druid- and Titan-inspired evils.
Chapter Three: The City
This chapter is the bulk of the book, detailing various people and locations in, below and around the city. The lack of a good-sized map (making due with only the smaller copy within the book itself) is a serious detriment, but nothing that ruins the book entirely. The entries cover all the major landmarks and also covers a spectrum of locations for various levels of play (a nod to the fact that not every level 1 PC party will be hanging out at the main temple of Corean). We also see that “religion vs. pragmatic” stress again – the escort service and gambling den tolerated (even frequented!) by the Coreans, while they hold such a firm, even overzealous line on things like seafood (which must be tested every day, and the fishers ever week, for signs of taint). Descriptions also bring to light the social and economic (and religious) stratification of the city – the run down parts have the run down feel in them, the secular mercantile section has the whole materialist vibe and the religious quarter is full of the lovely good-intentioned intolerance and dogmatic nature one expects from a group of lawful good puritan tyrants. :)
Since it covers the people as well as the locations we also get a number of smaller plot hooks: corruption in the watch (despite the best efforts of the paladins), the arcane/divine schisms, heretical cults devoted to the Golem, pirates, thieves’ guilds, illicit love affairs, drug (ab)use among the defenders of the city (well, one wizard in particular), the whole nine yards, even the very slight snubbing of the Titan, Denev, who helped the Gods in their war by betraying her siblings in favour of their divine children.
Anything full of stats (like NPCs) are removed from the main chapter and placed in textboxes (usually hanging around as close to their in-text reference as possible). While I haven’t reverse engineered every NPC here (and those in Chapter Seven) they do seem pretty much spot on rules-wise (no broken characters here).
Chapter Four: Beyond Mithril
Here we leave the comforts of the city behind and head out deep into the wilderness. First up is the small waystop of Mullis Town. Then we head out into the dozens of places to visit (and die). Neighbouring badguys are everywhere – the very carnivorous centauroid Proud (think very pissed off wemics), giant bugs acting rather strange (the Vengaurak), the orcs of the drowning plains and their warbands (who have a diversity of throughs about their gleaming mail and sword neighbours – a refreshing change from the universal “must die in large numbers so they can gain XPs” mentality) are just the big land-based threats. Moving off to the Blood Sea is, as the name suggests, not a nice place full of various types of mutated and druidic evil badness, and then there are the Toe Island pirates – small bandit kingdoms who serve as a sort of counterpoint to the absolutism and imported piety of Mithril.
The chapter is well laid out, but again, I would have liked some pull-out larger maps of the region.
Chapter Five: Adventures
There are five adventures focusing on the various elements of Mithril and its challenges, they vary in development from rough outlines and seed to partially completed short-modules (similar to those pamphlet-sized mini-games). In order of appearance they focus on:
- the Penubral Lord Dar’Tan
- The Blood Sea (and tainted fish)
- The Orcs of Lede
- Investigating the pre-Mithril lost civilizations
- Racism and religious dogma within the Church of Corean
- Invasion of Mullis town
- The Proud and a powerful dragon
I liked a couple of the ideas – the ones that touch on non-Titan plots and deal with the nature of religious intolerance especially (although honourable mention must be give to the last seed and its guidelines on how to run the dragon if you aren’t going to force the PCs to attack him directly). Most are average, but there is room to use bits of the ideas and work from there (for the more nautical I suggest moving the dragon idea to Pisceans and a mutant seawrack dragon, same idea and powerful level).
Chapter Six: Characters in Mithril
This section focuses on rules and roles for Coreanic PCs in a Mithril-based camapign. Included are the guidelines for clerics and paladins of Corean, a prestige class (Order of Mithril Knight – a so-so PrC that isn’t anything to write home about and needs some fiddling to fix – it’s more of the “take base class and add more powers” recipe). There is even an intriguing bit of art and some very loose guidelines for monks of Corean (the Fists of Mithril) – an interesting idea that isn’t fleshed out (seemingly tacked on simply as an afterthought). One element that interests me is that it isn’t a prestige class but a “setting based” modification of a base class, something not seen anywhere else until Masters of the Wild came out (I’m not saying I’m happy with the modification – allowing Mithril Fists to use their unarmed BAB and multiattacks when using longswords seems a bit… wrong). A couple of more pages (and some more thought) on this would have been cool.
Chapter Seven: Personages in Mithril
This chapter is a roundup of the central NPCs of the book – mostly members of the Corean orders. As I said nothing stands out immediately as being broken, and the characterisation is deeper than the usual generic fantasy fare (not a lot deeper mind you, but still moreso than a long-winded variation on the core rules definition of their given alignment). No surprises here, nothing fancy (beyond Dar’Tan’s shadow arm).
Appendix
Well all that’s here is the obligatory OGL and a couple of backpage ads for other Scarred Lands/Sword and Sorcery Studios/White Wolf products.
Final Comments
Mithril was an interesting take on a familiar fantasy concept. The lack of maps did hurt the overall effect but the choice to actually deal with the more social/political issues of such a city did counter this for me personally. And yet, somehow, I did not really react to it like I did with Hollowfaust (which I have not reviewed but which I liked a lot). It is definitely worth picking up for a Scarred Lands campaign, and is a good, if not outstanding, product for idea-mining for other games.
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