My second Gor RPG adventure is now available to buy!

My second Tales of Gor adventure module has just been released! This, like the previous one, is ‘authorised and approved’ by John Norman, though I doubt very much he has actually seen it personally… 

He has an agent to do that for him, I suspect.

Anyway, it has all the fun and whimsical humour you come to expect from my take on Gor, and can now be purchased as either a quick and speedy download, or as a printed paper copy that will swim towards you through the old fashioned postal service. 

NEW! The Tales of Gor RPG adventure - Rosalita of Telnus (part seven)

“Please sister, will you bring up the food and wine from the courtyard in a bit? I think I'm going to need to refresh myself," you say as you tighten your grip on Michelle's leash once more.

“Yes, Rosalita.” Rosanna glances at Michelle and then back at you with a respectful nod of her head, for social customs dictates that she acknowledges your authority as head of the family. She takes a couple of steps towards the courtyard but dawdles as best she can without being too obvious in doing so, for she is interested in seeing what you intend doing next. Your sister is even more curious than the average kajira, and the average kajira of course is a very curious animal indeed.

The Tales of Gor RPG adventure - Rosalita of Telnus (part six)

You smile to yourself beneath your veils. The Earth girl is so out of her depth, and yet she doesn't realise it yet. She thinks that you are equals. She has no idea. And she is nervous from her encounter with Isabel's men. She has seen the way they looked at her.

"I'll tell you how the men looked at you,” you say, ignoring for the moment her last question. “They looked at you and they wondered what you would be like in the furs, didn't they? They wondered what pleasures you'd bring them?"

The Tales of Gor RPG adventure - Rosalita of Telnus (part five)

She's been branded. Actually branded. 'Is she insane', was your instant thought and reaction on seeing the kef sigil on Michelle's left thigh. Is she really so naive that she doesn't know what it means? But of course she's right in a sense that she cannot play the role of a slave with out it. The kef brand will be expected if she is to be ultimately convincing. And yet, even so, the brand will remain on her long after her mission for the Kurii ends.

You regard the girl on her knees now before you – quite the change from the woman in the sumptuous gown who reclined on your outdoor couch as if she owned the house. Then all her words come together in your mind and you realise she is actually naïve and she has no comprehension of what her role entails.

The Tales of Gor RPG adventure - Rosalita of Telnus (part four)

It takes you a moment or two to fully digest the scene in front of you. This Earth girl has come into your home to play the part of a slave, and she has dared to help herself to your clothes, your wine and your food without your permission. Furthermore she has established herself in front of your sister as a supposed Free Woman.

You are obviously not happy about any of this.

The Tales of Gor RPG adventure - Rosalita of Telnus (part three)

It's a lot to take in, but on the surface it sounds like you have been awarded a promotion of sorts. Certainly Isabel and through her, her Kur Masters, is implying you are now a handler of another, junior agent. But an Earth girl? No doubt she will be totally untrained and unsuitable to be a Lady's house slave, despite the expectation that she will play such a role. Does Isabel expect you to have to train her? As a woman of High Caste you have a moderate skill in handling slaves ((1)) – you understand the basics at least of training them, forcing compliance, and bringing a new slave to understand their altered state of being, but it is not something you expected to have to do for the Kurii.

The Tales of Gor RPG adventure - Rosalita of Telnus (part two)

You smile softly as you watch your sister lean against one of the crenellated ledges of the wall overlooking the harbour below. Dante is fifteen years her senior, but with his age stabilised at twenty four the age difference doesn't look so obvious to your mind. Nevertheless he will be experienced with women by now. You frown, thinking of how he will no doubt be the typical kind of man who sates his desires with the slave-girls owned by his family. That is what men do after all. He has never Free Companioned to your knowledge, maybe because his work for his family takes him so far afield across the waters of the Thassa on a regular basis. But most men do Free Companion at some point, if only to establish a dynasty and to arrange political and social matters to their convenience. Love can come into it, but not necessarily. There would be an expectation for Rosanna to bring with her to the Free Companionship ceremony some advantage in social, political, financial or military terms. Dante's family was powerful and wealthy within Telnus, and no doubt many High Caste women would look favourably on an alliance with his house through the noble and lofty ceremony of Free Companionship. It would certainly be good for the Sanchez family name.

The Tales of Gor RPG adventure - Rosalita of Telnus (part one)

“Rosalita! Come quickly! The round ships are coming back! You must see!”

Your concentration this morning was disturbed by the sound of your excitable 19 year old sister breathlessly running across the marbled floor of your study as you gazed thoughtfully at the common copper tarsk coin in your hand. It had been delivered to your house in Telnus this morning and handed to you silently without any explanation, for it needed none. It was the cryptic method of communication between you and the Kur agent in Telnus, the beautiful Lady Isabel Clara Saffini. As you turned the coin over in your hands, your fingers found the tell tale indentation on the rim of the coin. If you considered the coin to be a clock face as you looked at the engraving of noble Lurius of Jad (looking rather slimmer than he actually is, you couldn't help but notice – there was no sign of his jowls underneath his fat chin for example), then the position of the notch would indicate a time – the tenth ahn of the day, corresponding to noon. This would then be the time that a palanquin would arrive to quietly convey you to whichever rendezvous spot the Lady Isabel had chosen in order to speak with you. No doubt she had news or perhaps work for you to do.

NEW! Tales of Gor RPG: Lady Rosalita and the city of Telnus

Background for the Tales of Gor RPG adventure that will be commencing on this blog very soon now.

The Lady Rosalita lives in Telnus on the coast of the island of Cos which like all Gorean cities is a bustling, thriving and colourful place in which to have adventures. I like to flesh out settings and so this is a short list describing some of the locations that the gentle Lady Rosalita will be familiar with at the start of the interactive Tales of Gor role-playing game. Any of these places can be visited and more locations will be created as the story unfolds.

NEW! A Tales of Gor interactive RPG adventure!

So, this is going to be a little different from my usually heavily planned out in advance and scripted stories. Astute readers of this blog will be aware that a rather fabulous official Gor role-playing game was released earlier this year, entitled 'Tales of Gor'. Like all role-playing games it can either be played tabletop face to face with friends (around, um, a table...), or, as is becoming quite popular these days, via the Internet. A couple of weeks ago chloeK (the talented artist who does all the Emma of Gor pictures) and I were messing about with some back and forth writing improvisation just for fun and I suggested, since she seemed to be enjoying it, that we could try something more formal as an RPG adventure on this blog site.

So that's what we're going to do. chloeK has created a Gorean character using the rules in the Tales of Gor book and I'll be running an adventure story on a very regular basis (several times a week is the idea) for her to react and respond to. It will read a bit like a story that is serialised in bite size chunks, albeit written in the second person, and crucially I'm not fully in control of where the story goes.

Yikes!

An Introduction to Gor trailer! (Gor in under 3 minutes...)

Okay, so it's actually a trailer for the (really good) Gor RPG and source book which I reviewed many months back, but it suddenly occurred to me that as a trailer for Gor in general it's not a bad way to introduce someone who just stumbled across my blog by accident to the basic Gorean mythos that I use in my stories.

I'd be hard pushed to summarise Gor in under three minutes quite so well, so I'm going to let James Desborough do it for me.

Go take a look!

Sadly no dancing girls this time around, but don't let that put you off...

- Emma x

Designing the Gor RPG (video link)

Okay, so I actually meant to post this link ages ago but seem to have forgotten! That's me having a blonde moment I guess. It's a 25 minute video in which James Desborough (the designer and publisher of the Gor RPG) talks about the long journey from initially obtaining the licence from John Norman for a Gor game to finally publishing the finished product this year. James is a very good raconteur on youtube and his thoughts and observations always make for fun listening. This then is him musing on Gor and its potential for tabletop and internet gaming. Hope you find it as interesting as I did.

Oh, and it has a slinky dancing girl in the early bit! See... I knew you'd be interested if I said there was a dancing girl... ;) 

- Emma x

Shadows of Gor - Chapter Four (of Eighteen)

Chapter Four: My Fate and Other Nightmares

“No, I’m not going to give the bitch the satisfaction. I'm not.”

“For God’s sake, Emma, she’ll probably kill you if you refuse. You won't believe how angry she was last night. Simon has gone to great lengths to calm her down and plead on your behalf for mercy. All you have to do is beg for your life and she’ll let you live.” Chloe knelt beside me as I lay on a pile of soft furs in one of the slave pens. All around me the other girls watched and listened. I lay on my stomach of course because the whip marks were still fresh and painful across my back.

Review: 'The Game of Worlds' (A Tales of Gor RPG supplement)

'The Game of Worlds' review

For me, one of the most compelling aspects of the Gorean milieu is the 'Great Game' that is played out in the background by the two alien races, the Priest Kings and the Kurii, with us humans acting as their playthings or expendable resources. And tied in to it is one of the core concepts of the Gor series – the ships of acquisition that travel through space bringing humans from one world to the other, most often women, and most often against their will.

Agents of the Silver Masks - an adventure module for the Tales of Gor RPG

Agents of the Silver Masks

An 'add on' adventure module by Emma R. for the 'Tales of Gor' role-playing game.

Overview

This isn't a stand alone adventure module as such, and so it isn't really written to be played on its own without a lot of work (and without losing a lot of the context). To use it you will really need a copy of the 'Tales of Gor' scenario, 'The Silver Cult' (you can read my review of it here: The Silver Cult review ). 'Agents of the Silver Masks' plugs a gap in the main module in Scene Three (Degradation and Diplomacy) where the player characters are captured by the Silver Mask conspiracy and they face being thrown into the silver mines in chains.

'The Silver Cult' adventure module (Tales of Gor RPG) review

'The Silver Cult' (Tales of Gor RPG)

Postmortem Studios (33pp)

It’s only been a few weeks since Tales of Gor appeared in pdf and then print form, and already we have the second adventure module, which pleases me no end as I do like to see a steady stream of supplements for a new game system.

Now, whereas the previous module, The Tower of Art, could probably be classed as ‘Gor light’ since it took a rather PG rated approach to the more notorious aspects of Mr Norman’s saga, this time around the authors deliver a far more ‘purist’ adventure that ticks pretty much every Gor box you’d expect. If Tower of Art strayed into Robert E Howard territory a bit (and that’s no bad thing – REH is one of my favourite writers) then The Silver Cult is instead an adventure with the feel of the first dozen or so Gor novels.

Straight away we’re delving into ‘Outlaw of Gor’ territory as the central plot involves a resurrected Silver Mask conspiracy 50 years on from the fall of the Matriarchal regime in the silver rich city of Tharna.

Gorean Character Generation for the 'Tales of Gor' RPG

Or how to ensure your 'Tales of Gor' character is truly Gorean...

Like any sane, rational person with a modicum of impeccable good taste, I was extremely pleased to see Postmortem Studios' 'Tales of Gor' RPG appear earlier this year. As it stands it's already a fully realised project with enough material contained in the primary two books for Games Masters and Players alike to roam the surface of Gor in a clash of steel and a swish of pleasure silks. In time I hope this franchise will spawn many excellent supplements, but until then, just to keep interest in the game ticking over, I thought I'd pen a couple of extremely unofficial articles in support of it. None of what follows is endorsed by the game author, nor is it meant to be the opinions of John Norman, but what I hope it succeeds in doing is inspiring a few people to create characters for this game that would do the books proud.

More so than most games, 'Tales of Gor' cries out for players to create characters that seem a natural fit to the thriving and detailed world they live in. This is not really the campaign setting for you to foist a generic D&D adventurer on. To get the most out of the Gor setting you'd do well to consider the kind of people that live on the Counter Earth. While you don't have to play 'typical Goreans' – the game after all makes the point many times that Gor is yours to interpret as you will - what follows is a guide to character creation if you want to truly capture the flavour of the kind of people who live, fight and lust throughout the Gorean cycle.

The Tower of Art (Tales of Gor RPG) review

The Tower of Art (Tales of Gor RPG adventure) review

34 pp (£6.99)

Snapping hot on the heels of the newly released Tales of Gor RPG like a scent-frenzied tracking Sleen, is the first supplementary adventure entitled, 'The Tower of Art' that comes in both pdf and hard copy form in a reassuringly early 1970s style font.

As adventures go, it's reasonably short and aimed at introducing new players to the complex world of Gor where men are men, and women seem to like them that way. Following the timeline of the books it appears to be set in the current period of the Gorean cycle where the forces of Cos have withdrawn from their sneaky occupation of Ar and the Priest Kings have more or less fallen silent as far as humans are concerned.

Tales of Gor: Gorean Roleplaying Game review

Tales of Gor RPG (Postmortem Studios) 

It’s fair to say that Gor has something of a polarising opinion on people.

And that's putting it mildly.

While ostensibly derived from the same pulp ‘swords and planet’ genre that spawned adventure romps by Edgar Rice Burroughs, Robert E Howard, Leigh Brackett and Michael Moorcock amongst many others, Gor from an early age ensured its commercial popularity and courted controversy at the same time by making slavery an integral part of the setting, to the point where nowadays that is pretty much all it is (in)famous for.