[Dragaera] Loraan vs. Blackwand: Flawed Victory

[Jose Marquez]

Erik Holmes wrote:
> I've heard on the list before that Vlad started out as an RPG character. I
> had thought that it was D&D but does anyone out there know for sure?
>   
>
Since the archives are down, I searched mine (I vaguely remembered a 
conversation about the original RPG, called Piarra, from which Dragaera 
was born). I've quoted a very long message from David Silberstein to the 
list below, where he forwards an e-mail from the GM of the original game 
to the list. I didn't bother editing it for length, so beware; this is long:
> I sometimes have sudden attacks of the curiosity, which impel me to
> try and search out as much as possible of whatever it was that made me
> curious. 
>
> In this case, I wondered if the name "Zivra" meant anything, perhaps
> as a Hungarian word.  Googling on the word found some Czech & Turkish
> web pages, but also a few in English.  The ones in English proved to
> be the most fruitful in furthur research, and I e-mailed the owner of
> one of them, with the exchange you may read below (with a few lines
> snipped here and there). 
>
>
>
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> Date: Wed, 29 Jan 2003 02:48:43 -0500
> From: Robert Sloan
> To: David Silberstein
> Subject: Re: Concerning the origins of Piarra
>
> Greetings... Reply Inserted...
>
>   
>> >From: David Silberstein
>> >To: "Robert A. Sloan"
>> >Subject: Concerning the origins of Piarra
>> >Date: Tue, 28 Jan 2003 15:58:08 -0800 (PST)
>> >
>> >Greetings,
>>     
>
> [snip]
>
>   
>> >I hope I am not imposing too much if I might ask some questions
>> >regarding Piarra?
>>     
>
> Sure, not a problem! If you've been reading my LJ, you know that
> Chazho is in its penultimate stage of editor requested Substantial
> Rewrite -- this is final line edits and proofreading. Catching little
> continuity problems like a character's name spelled sometimes Deka and
> sometimes Decca (I settled on Decca) and other little tidbits. The
> fine polish stage, which is going a lot faster than the massive cuts I
> did to get it to this point. The book's all the better for the massive
> cuts. I lost no details on it, only a lot of pointless adverbs and
> some clunky infodumps. Especially when the infodumps weren't all
> relevant to this volume and are adequately shown, not told in later
> volumes, it's much more fun to leave oblique little clues that should
> make the first book far richer on a reread -- yet stand on its own
> well. (Evil GM Laugh). 
>
> At the time I did the rough draft of book one, I didn't know all that
> was behind the onion layer conspiracies of the bad guys. Reworking it
> after five years of more volumes, I now know everything those poor
> characters are pulling up and, of course, readers will find out more
> in every volume. If I really do this well, you could start on any
> volume and explore the Piarra setting novels holistically. I wrote
> them chronologically, but they may not be published in that order.
>
>   
>> >I have been a fan of Steve Brust's Dragaera stories for a while, and
>> >he has always been careful to acknowledge yourself as the original
>> >source for some of those ideas.  I have also seen a few hints that
>> >indicate that the original role-playing game that became Dragaera was
>> >called Piarra, but I don't know much more than that.  I tried asking
>> >Steve for more details about this, but he was unable to explain it in
>> >other than very vague terms, given that it had been so long ago (and
>> >it sounds like it wasn't very rigorously defined anyway). 
>>     
>
> Way back in 1974, I went to the University of Minnesota where I
> promptly started flunking out on cold weather and large campus. I also
> discovered Dungeons and Dragons. A few months later, I started my own
> campaign with a hand-me-down set of brown booklets and discovered all
> my RPG pals, who usually ran 20th level characters (some evolved in
> the original playtest group with Dave Arnesen!), knew those booklets
> by heart. They ate my dungeon. They just chewed through it with their
> freshly rolled first level characters and then kept on about the great
> past adventures of their wonderfully developed old characters who were
> too tough to play any more. 
>
> Grrrrr. Okay. One embarrassing game session and I was fiddling with my
> notebooks, going into writer mode. Gone was every encounter on the
> charts. In went anything I could think of that would confuse and
> torture them, most of all with plot. I decided one thing early on.
> Power was meaningless. 
>
> I had read Conan, all the volumes -- and what they had with old
> characters was characterization. What those old characters didn't have
> was anything their own size. Thus grew the previous world,
> undocumented in anything at all, a Ringworld ala Larry Niven but with
> magic. On which I built anything and everything as long as it was a)
> interesting and b) tougher than the PCs. Some of my more original
> ideas evolved, mutated and came through in the Piarra backstory. I did
> a successful campaign based on the King Crimson album "Court of the
> Crimson King" and translated every line of that allegorical song into
> a series of mythic encounters. I was also reading Zelazny's Amber
> series where power did become meaningless and localized, but finesse
> and information was everything. 
>
> Then I got the idea of doing an Arthurian fantasy set on an original
> world.  I wanted a world unlike any other. I read Darkover -- and saw
> how MZB mutated the Lovecraft mythology names of Hastur, Cassilda and
> all to create a wonderful, immersive setting that was nowhere near as
> close to medieval Europe as it looked. So I started sketching Piarra
> and at the time Empress Zivra was the "Arthur" character. I was doing
> up that version of "Sword and the Stone" much more than looking at the
> love triangle or its tragic end. I had Nightslayer, which began as my
> D&D character based on my sword, in someone else's campaign, and so I
> sent the young Empress into the Paths of the Dead to find the Orb and
> recreate her magical people's lost Empire. 
>
> I ran the very first game in a Minicon, might have been 1975 or 1976. 
> Probably 1975. It started in a hallway and I'd been reading a lot of
> Moorcock. I was fed up with the apocalyptic end of worlds as end of
> series thing, and thought kicking off at the end of the civilization
> before Zivra was a great opener. So I stuck the PC's who could be any
> race they wanted or one of the native races, in the city while Zivra's
> dad went blooie with the Orb on meltdown mode and they escaped with
> some assistance from Sethra Lavode through burning rain, streets of
> blood, many cool encounters and so on. One cat-centaur PC returned the
> favor by letting Sethra the ancient undead (yes, just as Steve
> describes her) ride her back. 
>
> I was throwing together the core mythology at the time and using the
> game as ways to develop the world, while pounding on the events before
> the players entered so that I'd get some idea of what went into
> Zivra's mythic quest. I had the idea that Zivra's reign was a Piarran
> Camelot and would wind up revered that way long through history. I
> already knew I was going to do geological time, having played with a
> calculator and powers of seventeen. 
>
> The magical system originated on the theory that all the magical
> systems I knew of on Earth that were real had sacred magical numbers
> -- and I wanted one that hadn't been used in reality. Most were
> primes. Wow. 17 is a prime number. A bit big but if it was their
> zodiac and their moieties and their culture's root they'd have a Mayan
> view of time. Way cool. I had fun doing the Cycle. What I did not know
> at the time was that I would do the Cycle, get the whole group
> brainstorming the Cycle along with Steve, who did name the dzur (This
> one has to be a good one, Steve, it's the cats. I am into cats. This
> is the cool house). He sneered and pronounced it. I practiced. I
> pronounce it correctly. He sneers good. 
>
> Jhereg is compiled from what was once Vereg. I'd created Piarrans who
> had a prehensile tentacle, then unnamed, from the base of the skull
> down to just above the hips that was their psychic organ. Steve's two
> biggest changes to turn Vereg into Jhereg were that he reduced the
> psychic powers of the Dragaerans to something reasonable for his world
> and eliminated their tentacle, which is now called a lirai since
> they'd have their own word for an organ that important. I had the
> intent of turning the core mythos into a shared backstory ala
> Lovecraft -- and retained right of deciding what was canon. When he
> wrote Vereg and turned his character Vlad's adventures into a cracking
> good book at a time I was completely blocked (and constantly sick, not
> that I took that into account), we came to a friendly agreement. 
>
> Dragaera is a genuine parallel alternate world. We agreed that at the
> time of the separation. Steve would make enough changes to make his
> world his own but use some shared characters, especially on the mythic
> level like Nightslayer and Sethra and Zivra. I would consider my
> versions of same to be another world and probably make some changes
> along the way in the process. Boy, did I ever do that. I lost the
> original Cycle and reconstructed a bunch of times. It's only hit final
> form now. I had to add one last House that took the place of a much
> weaker House and write a short story about it to get the Piarran Cycle
> perfect. So in a way, neither of us is writing Version 1.0, because
> that would have to be compiled out of Steve's notes and mine. I lived
> an adventurous life and paper didn't last. 
>
> Sadly, the original map of Piarra that I drew and the gorgeous poster
> sized map Jim Odbert (illustrator of the Sanctuary map for Thieves'
> World and many Analog issues at the time) made for me is also long
> lost, so is his ink drawing of a cat-centaur woman. Jim Odbert is
> personally responsible for why the cat-centaurs have feline heads
> instead of humanoid faces with slightly catlike teeth. She was
> gorgeous, it was priceless, I knocked around too much and had trouble
> keeping paper. 
>
>   
>> >In case you ware wondering how I found you, I recently did a web
>> >search on "Zivra", since that name occurs in "The Paths of the Dead".
>> >Of the few hits that were in English, your journal came up, in
>> >conjunction with the term "Piarra".  On seeing your name, I realized
>> >that you must be the same person whom Steve mentions in his
>> >acknowledgement ("Robert Sloan aka Adrian Morgan").
>>     
>
> Yes, I'm Robert A. Sloan who used to go by Adrian Morgan. That's me
> all right. I am the one who ran the game and started my book first but
> took that long to get it right. I had adventures and I was somewhat in
> denial on why they never led to my managing to get enough time free to
> sit down and write a book, once I'd managed to break through the
> terminal writers' block that hobbled me. Recently I've come to
> recognize that has a whole lot to do with chronic fatigue and the need
> to have uninterrupted time to sit still if I want to get novels done. 
> During my New Orleans adventures I finished a short comedy novel
> "Wizard's Whoops" and the now-existing SF novel "Raven Dance" during
> two brief periods of windfalls that let me drop all the
> energy-intensive survival occupations I had-- and I wasn't surviving
> by crashing on couches and running roleplaying games. I lived in quite
> a few homes essentially serving as traveling storyteller/live gaming
> is more fun than TV, so I consider that a great apprenticeship in
> plotting. I sang for my supper well enough to eat and still be around
> to write! 
>
>   
>> >Given that you are in fact still working on Piarra (as a universe), I
>> >was wondering if you could give some more of the details about:
>> >
>> >
>> >1) What was Piarra, when it was first created as a game?  From what
>> >Steve mentioned of it, it sounds as though each player made up their
>> >parts of it - was it more of a joint collaboration?
>>     
>
> It was my world, intended as the setting for the untitled Empress
> Zivra novel, and I was using the roleplaying game to thrash the
> details. I got waivers from all the players that I might use their
> characters in a book, and also explained my Lovecraft-styled series
> concept: that I would be happy to share the Mythos as I developed it,
> would credit additions to the Mythos, would keep continuity for the
> Mythos and not ask money for things other people wrote in it as long
> as they ran it past me for continuity and I had final say on the
> Canon. Only one of them was remotely interested in writing in it:
> Steve Brust. 
>
> Steve was the only Vereg player. Steve had a lot of influence on House
> Vereg. All the players contributed alien names, we did some
> brainstorms of syllable juggling. He also developed the Eastern
> culture where Vlad's ancestors came from. I'm sure they migrated from
> Hungary. He did a great job adapting them to a high-magic alien world,
> and since that Eastern kingdom was his, it kinda dropped off my map at
> the separation. I'm not sure either of us named it at the time we were
> playing. 
>
> Some of his artistic differences had to do with the over the top magic
> I used, which was intended to counterbalance hideously powerful MCs
> and ultimately create a theme that runs through all my novels. Much of
> what I built wasn't relevant to Steve's plotlines. Everything he
> wanted to change was integral to mine. Piarrans gesture with their
> lirais. Piarrans look at lirai, not eye expressions, something a few
> plot points hung on in a couple of Piarran stories. The race prejudice
> was there. Jheregs are a lot like veregs, but four legged thanks to a
> great cover artist Steve got. 
>
> Everyone always knew I was going to write it. I didn't know how long
> it would take for me to do it -- but I didn't have Steve's night job,
> determination and immediate circumstances. I wandered, he wrote, he
> sold Jhereg and we renewed our agreement after sorting out that yes,
> Draguera is his and Piarra is mine and they're *similar* due to that
> parallelism. We just might have created the first Non-Earth Parallel
> Worlds thingie, though I couldn't say for sure. 
>
>   
>> >2) How does Piarra differ from Dragaera, as you understand it?  I note
>> >that at the very least that you make mention of the 17 Houses, at
>> >least one of them with the same name (Dzur) as in Dragaera.
>>     
>
> Okay. He had the original Cycle. He made some changes. I lost the
> original Cycle. I made a bunch more changes. I dropped some of the
> Houses entirely but created equally colorful ones and so the
> underlying structure of a Cycle of 17 is still there with some points
> congruent and some emphatically NOT. This is going to make it very
> interesting when worlds collide. 
>
> Phoenix, Dragon, Dzur, Hawk -- the first four Houses are the same. It
> goes in and out from there. Vereg and Jhereg are parallels, House
> Vereg is the House of Corruption and a whole lot like Jhereg, I didn't
> change it much. However, I have developed many different aspects of
> it, and on Piarra I've paid a lot of attention to the Left Hand. Also
> with some more esoteric, mystical aspects of Corruption that Vlad
> never got into because he was an Easterner and a witch. I've even
> fiddled with Second Empire flying castles like Castle Black... and
> Morrolan, who was John Robey's character, had an influence on both
> worlds. Character on Dragaera, he also had a parallel (reconstructed)
> on Piarra who will appear more in the Zivra novels -- which begin more
> at her childhood now. I've got the opener of her novel sketched along
> with its premise, including of course her quest into the Paths for the
> Orb. I now *finally* know why she had to go naked carrying the Sword
> in order to do that without major blasphemy against Cosmic Powers. 
>
> I developed quite a bit of the backstory long after, but I had it all
> sketched in during the game. What I've done now is deepened what I had
> and explored a lot of its more magical corners. And continued to make
> changes up to the final version of Chazho, since anything unpublished
> is still mutable and subject to random chaos. :D
>
>   
>> >3) How you currently envision the Piarra Multiverse?  How many novels
>> >do you have planned for it?
>>     
>
> I have written 29 novels in the Piarra Multiverse, not all of them on
> Piarra. Some relevant events took place off Piarra, but Piarrans came
> into the books when they wound up way outside the known gate realms.
> I've developed my version of the Tuatha (and apologies to any elf fans
> who want a united explanation of what Elves and Tuatha are, mine are
> the ones I wrote just as my vampires are the ones I wrote) and a
> prehistoric Empire as vast as Piarra that is its mortal enemy -- the
> culture that the Demon Goddess Vala (Verra is her sister or her
> daughter or her clone or something)  originally flew from,
> colloquially termed "Hell" in the Vala scriptures. She has a great
> mythology worked out in much more depth. Several major deities support
> her: the Four Pillars are the Orb, the Sword, the Paths and Dzur
> Mountain. Yep, Sethra's a goddess. However, so is any individual
> hasatsyi, so it's a matter of how *skilled* a goddess she is too. They
> were just 'sacred undead' in the game but now I've coined a term. 
>
> Nightslayer, the Sword, is Vala's First Consort and the first male
> thing she respected, alternately the first male thing she loved. She
> was a *little* angry at men when she abandoned Hell for Ascension. She
> got over it and retained her succubus nature, developing fertility and
> a passion for creation. She also marries the male gods of any place
> Piarra conquers, resulting in the "Valakedra" ritual at the big walled
> city I renamed Jhandavor because it used to be Chandrasekhar and I
> didn't realize I'd named Jim Odbert's 'Gods, Jim, that's the size of a
> country!' city after the doctor in 2001: A Space Odyssey. She got
> bisexual with goddesses. She had affairs with mortals and elevated
> them to deity. She slept with the animals of the Cycle in a pretty
> neat little bit of folklore I wrote recently and might post on my
> website, resulting in at least one sentient race for each House of the
> Cycle in addition to the Piarrans, whom she created. She brought in
> humans and settled them in the East with the Spine of the World as a
> big natural barrier to prevent permanent conquest of either. The idea
> that her cult was a lot like Hinduism with multifarious deities, yet
> as absorptive as Roman and holding a bit of Shinto element with the
> ancestor worship deepened to a well developed religious structure. I
> still use gods as characters in some novels, just as I did back in the
> game. I have let people roleplay gods, since most ancient gods can
> encounter heroes who can whip their butt. 
>
> Basically, the Piarra Multiverse is my favorite setting. I attach
> everything to it a lot like a future history. I am now working on some
> early historical stuff, the Cycle of Darthavan stories and the Zivra
> novel to finally explore her period, having done most of my books way
> in the future. Chazho connects Piarra in the reign of Emperor Kynan
> with Earth in 2001 -- an Earth, there are more than one naturally. I
> also intend to expand the circle of writers who will either pick up
> their periods of history or their variations, depending on whether
> they write with permission within the Canon or just next door to it
> the way Steve did. 
>
> Steve and I kicked around the idea of a collaboration establishing how
> Dragaera and Piarra connect, it does look to me as if his world took
> more of the blast in the Chaos Spot since Piarra only has Juvonanka
> Swamp in its place -- of course there's been a lot of time for that
> bit of meltdown to settle down and be absorbed in the vegetation. The
> concept will probably involve his assassin-hero Vlad teamed up with a
> Piarran assassin-hero of House Dzur and a completely different
> tradition of what assassin means. 
>
>   
>> >I might want to forward your reply to the Dragaera mailing list.
>> >Is this something that you would be OK with?
>>     
>
> If you don't mind its being this lengthy! I've been keeping it under
> wraps for a while, and it's fun to think back to what I was doing when
> I first came up with it. Don't presently have a bibliography of titles
> I have done in rough, but eventually I'll get that sorted out. Of the
> 29 existing completed rough drafts, at least one is getting trashed in
> favor of writing it again from outline to make it congruent with the
> series it's in, and most are being broken apart from a "series format"
> to separate stand alone novels, pairs of novels, trilogies and one
> seven-volume series of fantasy sea stories. Dorayan of House Dzur,
> hero of Chazho, will have a series -- but most of the books feature
> other main characters even if they're in the same time frame and many
> take place mostly on worlds other than Piarra. 
>
>    http://www.pele.cx/~robertsloan2/
>
>  is my authorsite, connecting all three of my Weblogs. I have one on
> Blogger as well as the LiveJournal and I've started a third,
> Prolific's Progress, which is mainly a listing of daily progress on
> writing projects. It became hard to chart the final polishing rewrite
> of Chazho because I have to do it as one giant Word document, but I'll
> post it when it's done and sent. 
>
> Then we all cross our fingers and wait. :D
>
> The rest, you can get from my LJ -- I'm doing "2003: Year of the
> Rewrites"  and the great restructuring will let me send out other
> Piarra novels and Piarra related novels simultaneously with Chazho and
> the beginning of Dorayan's saga. He's still my favorite hero. Though
> that could be simply that I'm working on his first book at the moment. 
>
> The best thing I've ever written is always the book I'm working on
> right now. :D
>
>   

-- 
Jose Marquez             | There are 10 types of people in
jhereg69 at earthlink.net   | the world: those who understand
http://www.hackwater.com | binary, and those who don't.