All right! In our readthrough of Torg, the roleplaying game of let’s-throw-everything-in-and-see-what-happens, we have started reading the original core rules, found out that we needed to read a novel trilogy to understand the original core rules, done that, gone back and finished reading the original core rules, and made an initial trip to the Living Land. Now we’re heading to everyone’s favourite cosm, the ridiculous pulp reality of the Nile Empire!
Though I would again like to point out that it would stand out more if Torg as a whole wasn’t already ridiculously pulpy. Look, it just bugs me, okay?! Anyway…
The Nile Empire has appeared over Egypt, natch, and is spreading in every direction. It’s a place of roughly 1930s technology mixed with isolated displays of ramshackle super-science, the subtle influence of brooding gods, ritualised magic, and an odd tendency for people to put on a mask and go jumping between rooftops at night. Its High Lord is Doctor Mobius, who is a sort of proto-supervillain out of schlocky 1930s pulp fiction; maniacally evil, larger than life, and always embarked in a new sinister scheme or a new fiendish invention.
Mobius comes from a cosm called Terra, which is entitical to Earth except that everything is more cheesy and bombastic. He was the son of an ancient Pharao who tried to usurp his older brother and got killed, but the descendents of his followers recently resurrected him with a magic ritual and he set about mastering the sciences of the new era. He become a Recurring Villain (TM) for a number of the heroic “Mystery Men” of Terra, but then suddenly disappeared. He had found a Darkness Device called the Kefertiri Idol in the shape of an ancient Egyptian statuette of a crocodile-headed deity, and used it to disappear into the cosmverse, plundering worlds of their possibility energy. A number of Mystery Men have since gotten wind of this and have followed him to Core Earth on the principle of, “this time I will put an end to Doctor Mobius’ reign of evil! For justice, righteousness, and mom’s apple pie!”
There’s a list of Mobius’ long-term goals, none of which are very surprising – he wants to become all-powerful and live forever, basically, and he’s interested in any kind of technology or magic that promises to help with that. We also get his stats. For a world-conquering uber-villain they are relatively modest, though he does have a value of 37 in Weird Science, in a system where 15 is respectable, 20 is impressive, and 25 effectively superhuman. So basically, he can probably do just about anything you can imagine if he just gets the time to cobble some gadget together.
Relation to other High Lords is what you’d expect, he has a loose alliance with Baruk Kaah because he figures the lizard dude is too pathetic to be a threat, he is actively hostile to Jean Malraux because Jean Malraux a loser and everyone hates him, and he’s wary of the other three.
We get an outline of the Nile Empire’s government, including a bunch of NPCs. Basically, Mobius has a couple of ministers with specific areas of responsibility, and below those he has a mini-boss squad of ten “Overgovernors,” most of them are some kind of colourful criminal mastermind in his or her own right. Some of them are loyal, some of them are plotting against him, some are even starting to reconsider their evil ways. One that stands out is Wu Han, who’s a Fu Mancho expy who is a sinister Orieeeeeeeental who likes poison and traps and other things that no decent Englishman would ever stoop to, no sirree. I feel like that’s kind of stepping on the toes of Nippon Tech, since their whole deal is that they’re negative Asian stereotypes (admittedly Japanese rather than Chinese ones) so this is just another way that the Nile Empire just does what the setting as a whole is doing, only sligthly more flamboyantly. And yes, Wu Han has ninja minions, because of course he does.
Many of Mobius’ followers obey him out of religious devotion and because he’s promised to restore the glories of ancient Egypt (though he has no plans of actually doing that). It’s noted that he’s gotten a lot of converts on Core Earth by promising to restore Egypt’s fortunes there, and apparently that has gotten a ton of impressionable people on board. I don’t know enough about Egyptian culture to be sure here, but I don’t think that makes sense – the people who live in Egypt today aren’t even that closely related to the people who lived there in ancient times, ethnically or culturally, and certainly I have trouble seeing a devoutly Muslim country being excited about bringing back paganism. But, I guess we can chalk that up to it being a pulp reality where ridiculous schemes stand a genuine chance of working as long as that will make things more dramatic.
There is a rundown of Mobius’ army, which is your basic World War Two setup with tanks, propellor planes and infantry. The only thing I’ll note here is that tallying up the numbers listed, it seems that Mobius has about 70,000 men or so. This is in contrast to modern Egypt, who has an army of 300,000, while Israel – who is only one of the countries Mobius is fighting against – has twice that. Ah well, chalk it up to slapdash research in the pre-Internet era, though it does add to the difficulty of being overly worried about this guy actually conquering the world… Anyway, Mobius fights his war by dropping “reality bombs” over areas he wants to horn in on, which causes the axioms to switch over to Nile Empire ones for a brief time, during which he rolls in with his armies and trounce the defenders, whose 1990s-era weapons and vehicles are suddenly too advanced to function. Then he raises a ton monuments all over the place, some of which are actually stelae, thus adding the area to his realm.
There’s a long section about the major cities of the Empire and some specific and generic locations. Cairo has become a sort of anything-goes city ruled by gangsters and home to a thriving black market, since Mobius has decided that trying to control it is more effort than it’s worth. He instead rules from his palace in Thebes. There are a lot of descriptions of crusading journalists, hardboiled private detectives, weird pagan cults, mysterious curses, grubby-but-not-monstrous criminals like smugglers and spies, and pretty much anything you would expect in a period adventure story that wasn’t trying over-hard to be realistic. It does all paint a pretty vivid picture of what sort of adventures you could set up here.
Likewise, there is a section on the land outside the cities. There are scorching deserts with mysterious and possibly cursed oases, an island populated by amazon warriors (most of whom weren’t amazon warriors a few months ago, but who have embraced girl power by way of hitting things with a sword in a big way), secret laboratories where Mobius’ scientists work on new super-weapons, steaming jungles filled with tribes of noble savages and tribes of savage savages (because it’s the Nile Empire, so everyone is either a positive stereotype or a negative stereotype). There are underground gold mines where Mobius sends Israeli prisoners of war to work them to death and I SEE WHAT YOU DID THERE.
The state of the war! Mobius is basically in a slow stalemate on every front. He’s not advancing into Libya because Qaddafi has threatened to set off a nuclear bomb in the middle of country’s oil fields if he comes any closer, so for now Mobius is just extracting a regular tribute in crude oil and calling it a day. He’s not advancing into Israel, because the Israeli are fighting back like mad bastards – understandably, given that they’re being invaded by what seems like a bizarre mix between the Pharao of Exodus and an even-crazier versus of Adolf Hitler, which I’m sure is hitting every cultural trigger they’ve got. He’s not advancing into Ethiopia because the altitude is playing havoc with his military equipment, and he’s not advancing into Sudan because in Sudan a bunch of African countries have banded together with some Soviet support and are giving as good as they’re getting.
Actually, I’m honestly not sure why the Communists aren’t all over the Possibility Wars. The Americans have trouble enough on the home front, but the Russians actually beat back their invasion before it started, so why aren’t they running around bailing out smaller countries with troops and thus also putting them firmly under their thumb? “Never fear, proletarian brethren, Soviet Union will come to rescue! Unlike American imperialists pigdogs, who are too busy getting eaten by dinosaurs! Getting eaten by dinosaurs is ineeeeeevitable consequence of decadent capitalism!” I think there’s some mention in a later book that Nippon Tech is doing sneaky things behind the scenes to keep the Kremlin too tangled up and inefficient to launch any sort of coherent action, but it still seems a bit iffy.
Anyway, we move on to world rules. First are the axioms. Social and technological development are, again, at the level of the 1930s or, though women have full equality. The spiritual axiom is a lot more powerful than it is on Core Earth, and religious miracles (specifically tied to Egyptian paganism) are a fact of life. Magic is a little more modest and has to be mastered through rigid formulas – no flinging fireballs around all willy-nilly. There are two schools of magic, mathematics (which function by tying magical effects to the movement of the heavens) and engineering (which functions by tying magic to architectural or mechanical designs). Interestingly, that means that they’re basically “magic that’s half religion” and “magic that’s half science,” indicating that the lines in the Nile Empire are a little blurrier than elsewhere. Add that to the fact that “weird science” are effectively “technology that might as well be magic” and you have a pretty fun and flavourful mix.
In addition to the axioms, there are also World Laws that set the cosm apart. Firstly, the Law of Morality states that each person is either basically good or basically evil. You can go from one to the other by being corrupted or redeemed, but everyone falls into one category or the other at a given time. The definition of “good” here amounts to “unselfish” or “community-minded”; a good person thinks about others before themselves, a bad person thinks about themselves first and others never. Secondly, the Law of Drama commands the GM to keep adding complications and raising the stakes at every turn. Finally, the Law of Action gives heroes extra power; when spending a possibility for an additional roll on an action, a Storm Knight can spend a second possibility to make two addtional rolls and choose the better one to add to his total.
Pulp powers! They’re basically superpowers, but rather less comprehensive than your typical caped flying brick. You can take pulp powers for your character before the game starts, but each one you take has a possibility cost, and you’ll need to pay it out of your acquired possibilities after each adventure, and if you fail to pay up even once, you lose the power, permanently. Powers are things like flight, invisibility, force fields, the ability to grow or shrink, the ability to talk to animals, and similar handy but not godlike feats. You can also take power flaws, which are specific weaknesses (possibly but not necessarily connected to your pulp powers) that grants you possibilities whenever they come into play in a way that actually matters (exposing you to your weaknesses under controlled conditions doesn’t count, therefore – it has to be when it’s really inconvenient to you to take a beating from them), thus helping to pay that extra possibility tax on pulp powers.
How do you get pulp powers? Ehhhh, you were probably hit by lightning or something, don’t think too hard about it. Welcome to the Nile Empire.
Gizmos are the creations of weird science, which can coincidentally recreate the effects of pulp powers, though they can also just add some extra bonuses to perfectly ordinary skills and abilities. There is a long, complicated description of how you create gizmos, which include drawing up an actual blueprint with all sorts of interesting symbols representing the gizmo’s abilities, energy consumption, sturdiness, and all that sort of thing. Each thingamabob you add makes the gizmo harder to create, but you can offset that somewhat by adding special make-it-easier thingamabobs. And then, at the end of all that, you’re cheerfully informed that you’re of course not supposed to actually use these rules, they’d slow the game down way too much and the Nile Empire is all about the fast-past action, silly!
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… Torg, ladies and gentlemen. I mean, I actually find it kind of endearing. These people sat down and created a mathematically precise, highly flavourful subsystem that no one was supposed to use, that was just there to give you an idea of how things would work mechanically if you were to resolve them mechanically. That’s some serious commitment to the game-as-simulation-engine ethos, you can’t deny that.
Magic! Nile Empire magic relies on astronomy, in particular on the position of the planets. To cast a spell, you need to figure out where some subset of the planets are, and if they’re in a particularly auspicious position, it makes your spell stronger. There is a helpful description of why the spell that raised Mobius from the dead had to wait until the planets were correctly aligned, and precisely what sort of bonus his cultists had on their casting. Like I said, commitment! Anyway, it all serves to give Nile Empire magic a slightly grittier, more ritualistic quality than the sort of spellchucking an Ayslish mage can pull off.
Mathematics (as in the magic school) can do some slightly Egyptian-themed things like command crocodiles, create an oasis in the desert, raise mummies and heal with rays of sunlight. Engineering has a few spells that lets you loft heavy blocks, find or dismantle traps, or find a path through a maze, but its main shtick is binding spells or pieces of technology to architectural designs. In effect, it lets you create the sort of underground maze full of still-miraculously-working-after-centuries traps that the Nile Empire is full of. Not sure if it’s something that a player character would have much use for, but it certainly fits into and justifies the setting.
Miracles make use of the same astrological requirements and enhancements as magic, so there’s another way that the two overlap in the Nile Empire. Egyptian priests can do things like lay down curses, spread plagues, blight or bless fields, bring fortune in war, and other high-level stuff. Again, more flavourful than actually useful for a player character – I think these are mostly meant to be used by Mobius’ minions, with the players focusing more on pulp powers (not that that’s too shabby).
The section of critters has a number of giant animals (apes, insects), as well as “walking gods” who guard pyramids and take the form of actual deities, but aren’t quite as all-powerful as all that. Gospogs are present as in all cosms, here they take the form of increasingly deformed and disturbing mummies in their later plantings. Also, there are Martians who look kind of like big spiders when they’re not masquerading as humans through their technology and are on some sort of mission from (Terra’s) Mars that no one is quite sure what it is.
The equipment section is mostly forgettable, but I want to note that includes rules for using a bull whip as a weapon, if you want to get your Indiana Jones on. And then, after a bunch of pre-generated characters from the Nile Empire, the book draws to a close.
I’ll admit that I can see the appeal of this one. It’s a weird kitchen-sink mess, but it’s also got an odd sort of specificity and flavour to it, a sense of how it’s all supposed to work. The weakest part of it all is really how little interest the writers seem to have had in the actual place of Egypt, its people and its culture – there are some hand-waves about how the pulp tropes are meant to have an “Arabic slant,” but they don’t seem to have really known themselves what that meant in practice. It feels more like ancient Egypt mushed up with 1930s America, without any attention paid to the (mostly Arabic, mostly Muslim) state of the modern (or for that matter 1930s) northern Africa. That’s something the Living Land (and as we’ll later see, Aysle) benefited from; the writers actually felt comfortable with the original state of the place they were transforming, and it made it all the more vivid how it had been forcibly changed.
But oh well. I understand that’s a common criticism of the game, and it doesn’t change the fact that the Nile Empire, too, seems like a fun place to adventure in.