Faceless rage is a magical disease of evil and chaos that affects only humanoids. It transforms its victims by erasing their face and turning them into murderous savages.

TRANSFORMATION: Whenever a victim of the faceless rage suffers ability score damage from the disease, they must succeed at an additional Fortitude save (DC 18) or be transformed according to the faceless rager template.

Fortitude save (DC18); Infection contact/injury; Incubation 1 day; 1d6 Int/1d6 Wis, plus transformation (see above).

TEMPLATE: FACELESS RAGE

Noppera-b? (??????, faceless ghost) from the Buson Youkai Emaki (??????)

“Faceless rager” is a template that can be added to any humanoid or giant (referred hereafter as the base creature).

Size and Type: The base creature’s type does not change, but the creature gains the shapechanger subtype.

Hit Points and Hit Dice: Same as the base creature. To calculate total hit points, apply the faceless rager’s bonus to Constitution.

Attacks: A faceless rager loses the bite attack of the base creature (if any), but retains all other attacks of the base creature and and gains a slam attack (1d6 damage for Medium-size faceless ragers).

Special Attacks: A faceless rager loses the gaze attack of the base creature (if any), but retains all other special attacks of the base creature and also gains the special attacks described below.

Disease (Ex): Any creature struck by the natural attack of a faceless rager (including its slam attack and steal visage abilities) is exposed to faceless rage. The save DC is Constitution-based.

Improved Grab (Ex): To use this ability, the faceless rager must hit a natural attack (including its slam attack).

Steal Visage (Su): If a faceless rager succeeds at a grapple check against any humanoid, its victim must make a Fortitude save or have its face removed. The victim is left blinded, deafened, and mute. As the victim has no mouth, it will risk starvation if its face is not restored. Restoring a victim’s face requires a regeneration spell, just as if it were a severed limb. The save DC is Constitution-based.

Special Qualities: A faceless rager retains all special qualities of the base creature, and also gains those described below.

Blindsight (Ex): A faceless rager has blindsight 60 feet.

Incurable Disease (Ex): A faceless rager can no longer recover naturally from the faceless rage disease that afflicts them. Only magical treatment can restore the victim, specifically a remove disease spell followed by a greater restoration. Once cured, the faceless rager loses this template. A faceless rager’s face can only be restored after the disease has been magically cured, and requires a regeneration spell, just as if it were a severed limb.

Mindless Rage (Ex): A faceless rager must seek out and attack the nearest humanoid. If no humanoids are present, it will attack the nearest creature. If no creatures are present, it will wander randomly until it finds one. In this mindless rage, a faceless rager gains a +2 morale bonus on Will saves, but suffers a -2 penalty to Armor Class. They cannot use any Charisma-, Dexterity-, or Intelligence-based skills (except for Balance, Escape Artist, Intimidate, and Ride), the Concentration skill, or any abilities that require patience or concentration, nor can they cast spells or activate magic items that require a command word, a spell trigger (such as a wand), or spell completion (such as a scroll) to function. They can use any feat they have except Combat Expertise, item creation feats, and metamagic feats.

Abilities: Faceless ragers gain +4 to Strength and +4 to Constitution.

Challenge Rating: Same as base creature + 1. However, levels in a spellcasting class count only one-quarter towards their challenge rating (since the faceless rager cannot use spells). (For example, a faceless rager based on a 4^th-level wizard would be a CR 2 challenge.)

Alignment: Always chaotic evil.

SAMPLE FACELESS RAGERS

DISEASED CARPENTER (CR 3) – Expert 3 – CE Humanoid (human shapechanger)
DETECTION – blindsight 60 ft., Listen +3, Spot +3; Init +1
DEFENSES – AC 9 (+1 Dex, -2 mindless rage), touch 9, flat-footed 8; hp 23 (3d6+12)
ACTIONS – Spd 30 ft.; Melee slam +4 (1d6+2 and disease); Ranged +3; Space 5 ft.; Reach 5 ft.; Base Atk +2; Grapple +2; SA improved grab, steal visage (DC 13)
SQ blindsight 60 ft., incurable disease, mindless rage
STR 14, DEX 12, CON 14, INT 12, WIS 10, CHA 10
FORT +3, REF +2, WILL +5
FEATS: Skill Focus (Craft (carpentry)), Skill Focus (Craft (carving)), Skill Focus (Knowledge (wood))
SKILLS: Balance +1, Craft (carpentry) +8, Craft (carving) +8, Diplomacy +8, Escape Artist +1, Hide +1, Knowledge (architecture/engineering) +6, Knowledge (wood) +8, Move Silently +1, Ride +1, Search +6, Sense Motive +6, Use Rope +1

DISEASED SOLDIER (CR 5) – Warrior 5 – CE Humanoid (human shapechanger)
DETECTION – blindsight 60 ft., Listen +3, Spot +3; Init +0
DEFENSES – AC 8 (-2 mindless rage), touch 8, flat-footed 8; hp 33 (5d8+10)
ACTIONS – Spd 30 ft.; Melee slam +8 (1d6+3 and disease); Ranged +5; Base Atk +5; Grapple +5; SA improved grab, steal visage (DC 14)
SQ blindsight 60 ft., incurable disease, mindless rage
STR 16, DEX 10, CON 14, INT 12, WIS 10, CHA 10
FORT +6, REF +1, WILL +3
FEATS: Alertness, Improved Unarmed Strike, Run
SKILLS: Appraise +1, Bluff +1, Climb +3, Craft (wittling) +1, Forgery +1, Gather Information +3, Innuendo +1, Intimidate +8, Jump +3, Listen +3, Search +1, Sense Motive +2, Spot +3, Swim +1

D20 Rules by Justin Alexander
This material is covered by the Open Gaming License.

The first sensation I had while reading the sequels to the exemplary Gateway was one of disjointedness.

First, the narrative of Beyond the Blue Event Horizon jerks around in an uneven fashion. It’s one of those books where (a) there are multiple protagonists; (b) sometimes nothing interesting will be going on with one of those protagonists; but (c) the author feels compelled to periodically spend a chapter telling you about all the non-interesting stuff happening to that protagonist as if some sort of Equal Time for Equal Narrators (ETEN) lobby existed.

Second, the book is jarringly different from its predecessor. At first it feels as if it might be the different main characters or the different narrative focus creating the disparity, but eventually I figured out what was really going on.

Pohl switched genres.

The gritty, hard science fiction of Gateway is abruptly replaced with Golden Age Space Opera studded with Heinlein heroes. The fallible and interesting Robin Broadhead of Gateway is transmogrified into the Richest Man in the Universe married to the Beautiful Super Model Who Is Also A Genius. Together they fight crime and single-handedly solve all of the galaxy’s problems. Even the most ultimate and terminal of setbacks only result in giving the main characters superpowers.

Even this, by itself, wouldn’t necessarily be catastrophic. Unfortunately, it’s badly written space opera. This is Heinlein fan fiction by way of the brain eater.

The entirety of Heechee Rendezvous, for example, consists of absolutely nothing important happening. A bloated cast of characters go caterwauling around the galaxy, but they never seem to actually accomplish anything. The entire “plot” of the novel, in fact, appears to be leading up to nothing more than a “surprise revelation”… which might make some sense, if it wasn’t for the fact that the “surprise” had already been revealed at the end of the last book. (It’s as if someone made Citizen Kane 2 as a film entirely focused around revealing to the audience that Rosebud is… wait for it… a sled.)

Pohl’s aping of Heinlein’s brain eater years includes his beautiful-and-brilliant protagonists having lots and lots of sex. Not because this has any relevance to the plot or elucidates the characters in any way, but just because Pohl really likes to tell us about all the hot, hot sex that his Mary Sues are having. It starts out puzzling, becomes annoying, and then resolves into boring.

The mysterious and enigmatic Heechee themselves are transformed into nothing more than a momentary (and largely irrelevant) speed bump for the Heroes to cruise over. This is part and parcel of the switch to over-the-top space opera (conforming to the “Humans Are the Awesomest Awesome That Ever Awesomed” branch of the genre), but is nonetheless a terrible, squandering waste of one of the most intriguing and evocative creations of the genre.

In many ways, Pohl’s failure with the Gateway sequels is very similar to Arthur C. Clarke’s failure with the Rendezvous with Rama sequels (except that Pohl doesn’t have a hack co-author to shoulder the blame). The first volume of each series is a beautiful exercise in engima, creating evocative riddles that provocatively suggest the contours of their solutions without ever providing concrete answers. They force every reader to provide their own closure to the questions they raise, creating an endless panoply of possible truths.

The sequels attempt to provide the definitive answers to every single question and (perhaps predictably) fail.

Perhaps it would be impossible to provide any answer as satisfactory as the non-answers we create for ourselves in reading the first books. But if they were going to try to answer those questions, I wish they’d come up with something more than vanilla pablum that could be found in dozens of other science fiction books before and since. You’ve got a blank check: Take some risks.

The only questions Pohl doesn’t try to answer in the Gateway sequels are those which he has apparently forgotten about. For example, in Gateway a relatively big deal is made out of a golden spiral device in the Heechee vessels — it lights up with sparkling light when the ship reaches the mid-point of a journey and gets hot at seemingly other random times. Nobody knows what it does, exactly, but everyone is very curious about what its true purpose might be.

In the sequels, however, it becomes nothing more than an indicator light and the mystery of its “true purpose” is completely forgotten.

But these types of raggedly hanging loose ends are just a rather specific example of a wider problem in the books: Huge, gaping continuity errors are to be found everywhere. Within any given volume these errors are usually of only a minor sort, but between volumes the Gateway sequels fail to have any sort of consistency. For example, in the last five pages of Heechee Rendezvous you are authoritatively told that characters X and Y have gone to location A. Within the first five pages of the next book, only character X has gone to location A and character Y has instead been killed off-screen in a helicopter accident. Similarly, an entire ship full of people is miraculously resurrected because Pohl apparently forgot that he killed them all in the previous book.

These books are, in the final analysis, a complete and utter failure. By the time The Annals of the Heechee blatantly breaks the fourth wall, thus shredding any credibility the books have left, the sequels have already firmly established themselves as the literary equivalent of Highlander 2: Exercises in mediocrity interrupted only by stretches of atrocious self-indulgence which you would be well-advised to avoid even on their own sub-par merits. At the same time, they are the sort of work whose existence you must scour from your own mental reservoirs in order to enjoy the excellent work which lamentably gave them birth.

The fact that Gateway is a better novel than Highlander is a movie only makes it worse.

And the quality of the Gateway sequels continues to deteriorate from one volume to the next.

For example, I have a pet peeve about authors who feel the need to summarize the plots of the previous books in a series. First, it is unlikely that anyone is picking up Book 3 of a seven book series without having already ready Book 1 and Book 2. Second, the little snippets of information presented in awkward expository lumps they do include are insufficient to the task of bringing new readers “up to speed” — which means that (a) the extant readers are bored and (b) the new readers are still lost.

Some authors in series with less tightly-woven continuity do an excellent job of incorporating such details through the simple expedient of writing each book as if it were a stand-alone narrative. One of the tricks here is that they don’t try to summarize the plots of other books. Instead they simply drop in the necessary details from their protagonists past lives just as they would with any such detail. The difference is subtle and requires a certain mastery of your craft. Bujold, for example, has practically perfected the technique.

Pohl, unfortunately, has not.

What begins as a predictable drag on the narrative pace of the books eventually becomes something ludicrously disastrous: My copy of The Annals of the Heechee is 275 pages. Despite this brief length, 100 of the first 120 pages are spent finding clumsy ways to reiterate the narrative from the previous three books. And much of this material is studded with the familiar (yet baffling) errors of continuity.

Combined with the fact that Pohl treats his readers like idiots (by repeating the same bits of exposition over-and-over again just in case we missed it the first time) and structures his narratives around solving “mysteries” by revealing things that he he already revealed in the previous book the entire series quickly becomes completely interminable.

In short: Yes, that is an actual F- on The Annals of the Heechee. It deserves it.

GRADES:

BEYOND THE BLUE EVENT HORIZON: C-
HEECHEE RENDEZVOUS: D-
THE ANNALS OF THE HEECHEE: F-

Frederik Pohl
Published: 1980 / 1984 / 1987
Publisher: Del Rey
Cover Price: $14.95
ISBNs: 0765321777 / 0345300556 / 0345325664
Buy Now!

I’ve recently been reviewing The Esoterrorists by Robin D. Laws with an eye towards how the core design ethos of the system — that the PCs always find every clue that can be found (as discussed in more length as part of my essay on the Three Clue Rule) — could be adapted to more generic purposes. (And quickly coming to the conclusion that is, in fact, so completely antithetical to the reasons that I play roleplaying games that it won’t work for me in any form.)

HARD AND SOFT LIMITS

But the game has prompted me to give some fresh thought to hard limits in system design, and the effect they have on scenario design for and the utility of a roleplaying game.

For example, let’s consider hit points: Imagine a hypothetical system in which the PCs have 20 hit points each. If each PC loses an average of 4 hit points each time they get involved in combat, then after four combat encounters the system is essentially mandating that the PCs stop fighting things (because the fifth encounter will kill them).

For simplicity’s sake, let’s assume that in this hypothetical system there’s no way for a PC to heal or restore their hit points except to rest for 1 week without stressful activity. That becomes a hard limit for scenario design: If you design a scenario that requires the PCs to fight more than four times in a single week, then your scenario is most likely going to end in failure (as the injured PCs either retreat or die).

This is, basically, how D&D 4th Edition is designed. The math is more complicated due to healing and variable encounter difficulty, but when the party’s healing surges run out (or, more accurately, when the healing surges for a single PC run out), the adventuring for the day is over. It has a hard system limit on how many combat encounters you can have per day, and you cannot design encounters with more combat encounters (or more difficult combat encounters) without house ruling the system.

By contrast, previous editions of D&D used hit points as a soft limit because there’s no limit placed on how much magical healing a single character can receive in a day. Of course, there are practical limits to the amount of healing any given adventuring party will have available to it in a single day, so you can’t simply ignore the issue of depleting the party’s hit points across multiple encounters. But it’s a soft limit precisely because there are ways (within the rules of the system itself) for overcoming that limitation.

For example, imagine that you wanted to design a scenario in which the PCs were in control of a fortress and needed to defend it from an army of the undead. In 4th Edition the scope of this scenario is dictated by the system: You can’t have more than X encounters of Y strength because the PCs will run out of healing surges. In 3rd Edition, on the other hand, you can make the siege last for any number of encounters, as long as you’re willing to provide the PCs with the necessary resources (like wands of cure light wounds, for example).

The reason I bring this up is that in most traditional roleplaying games there aren’t actually many hard limits to be found. I’ve found them to be quite a bit more prevalent in indie games, but in most cases they’re also fairly obvious in such games.

For example, 3:16 Carnage Amongst the Stars features a core mechanic for each mission in which the GM is given a budget of threat tokens equal to 5 x the number of PCs. The GM constructs encounters by spending threat tokens, and when he runs out of tokens the mission is over. This limit isn’t hidden in any way. Knowing it is recognized as being an integral part of running and playing the game. (Which, when you get right down to it, is true for all hard system limits. It’s just that 3:16 acknowledges it.)

HARD LIMITS IN GUMSHOE

The GUMSHOE system used in The Esoterrorists, on the other hand, looks like a traditional RPG… but its design is riddled with hidden hard limits.

Allow me to explain the two core mechanics of the game:

(1) For any investigative task, the PC uses the appropriate skill and automatically succeeds at finding any of the appropriate basic clues in the scene. In addition, a PC’s ranking in an investigative skill gives them a pool of points which they can spend to buy additional clues using that investigative skill that are non-essential to the adventure, but interesting in one way or another.

(2) For any non-investigative task, a difficulty number from 2 to 8 is secretly assigned and 1d6 is rolled. If the roll is higher than the difficulty number, the PC succeeds. A PC’s ranking in non-investigative skills also give them a pool of points which they can spend on checks using that skill to give them a +1 bonus to their die roll.

Pools for physical skills are replenished every 24 hours. Pools for non-physical skills are only replenished when a scenario ends.

And there’s your hard limit. Or, rather, your many hard limits: Each and every skill is turned into a 4E-style hard limit. For investigative skills this is relatively muted by the “mandatory success” mechanics of the system, but this same mandatory success results in a very flat playing experience if it’s not being periodically spiced by pool buys.

In practice, these hard limits severely restrict the length of an Esoterrorist scenario.

These limits, of course, aren’t entirely without their benefits. For example, once you recognize the hard limit, you’ll also realize that the system is silently mandating a diversity in the design of a scenario (so that you don’t rapidly tap out a single pool) — which, on the balance, is likely to be a positive more often than a negative.

But the negatives seem quite significant to me.

For example, in designing the investigative portions of a scenario you have two ways of dealing with the GUMSHOE hard limit:

(1) You can budget the number of “bonus clues” available in the scenario to make sure that the PCs will always have the points required to buy them. This avoids the problem of running out of points early in the game and then being forced to only engage the scenario at the most passive level available, but it raises the question of why the pools exist at all: It’s like sending you to a typical garage sale and then enforing a strict budget of spending no more than $1,000,000. Theoretically that’s meaningful, but in practice you’ve got all the money you need to buy everything on sale so it’s not a limitation at all.

(2) On the other hand, you can include more “bonus clues” over the course of the scenario than the PCs can afford. This means that the PCs will have to budget their points and only spend them selectively.

But here’s the problem: The players don’t know which of these approaches is true in any given scenario. (Particularly since most GMs aren’t going to read this essay and, therefore, aren’t going to make a deliberate decision in either direction. In practice, it’ll be a crapshoot from one scenario to the next which of these true. And which is true for which pool of points.)

And, furthermore, the design of the system is such that you often don’t know what you’re buying.

So either I’m giving you a million bucks and saying “buy everything at the garage sale”; or I’m giving you $5 and telling you to buy a random grab bag of stuff. It’s a feast or a famine and you don’t know which it is until it’s too late.

The problem becomes more severe for non-investigative tasks. Here the players need to spend the pool points in an effort to boost a random die roll above a target number that they don’t know. And they have to make that decision without any real knowledge of how many more die rolls of the same type they might be called upon to make.

So you’re bidding in a (frequently life-or-death) silent auction in what may (or may not) be a long series of silent auctions, the exact number of which you have no way of guessing.

CONCLUDING THOUGHTS

Of course, the argument can be made that I’m being relatively harsh on a game system which was probably designed to provide nothing more than a semi-useful scaffolding on which to hang some group improv.

But I belong to that school of thought that believes that system matters. And I don’t come to that belief merely from a background in game design. It’s also derived from my experience as an improv actor: The improv structures you use have an impact on the creativity that happens. Being aware of the strengths and weaknesses of an improv structure is the first step towards (a) choosing the right improv structure and (b) mastering the improv structure you choose.

In any case, hard limits are something to watch out for in a game system. They’re the points beyond which the game either Fails Completely or, at best, Stops Being Fun. That needs to be taken into account: Generally to be steered clear of, but sometimes to be taken advantage of.

So against all common sense, you find yourself hankering to write up a railroad for your roleplaying group. You dream of a land where the rails are straight, the wheels are locked, and the players submissive.

Well, you’re in luck, because today we’re bringing you — courtesy of the Serpent Amphora trilogy — an educational primer in the Art of the Railroad with a step-by-step breakdown of the track-laying process.

STEP 1: MAKE SURE ALL OTHER FORMS OF TRANSPORATION ARE FAILBOATS

Remember: Your goal is not to design a robust scenario which will ensure that the adventure remains enjoyable and usable despite the players trying to make decisions for themselves. Your goal is to design a Disneyland ride to carry them past all the Exciting and Interesting Things you’ve designed for them to see. If the players try to tamper with their teacup, your adventure should throw up its hands in exasperation, take its ball, and go home.

The PCs decide to quickly check out another lead before abandoning it on the say-so of an NPC? They fail the entire mission.

The PCs decide to attack a group of elves preparing to ambush them? They fail the entire mission.

The PCs decide not to hire a guide and trust to their own Survival skill? They die.

You can earn bonus points by issuing Failboat boarding passes on the basis of die rolls that the players have no control over!

They fail a Diplomacy check to convince someone to help them? They fail the entire mission.

They fail an Intelligence check to remember a key piece of information? They fail the entire mission.

No trip by rail is complete unless the train has a casino car where the only game is craps and the penalty for a bad roll is a bullet to the back of the brain.

STEP 2: ALL TICKETS GO TO ALBUQUERQUE

It costs a lot of money to offer train service to all the major metropolitan areas. On the other hand, if you don’t offer that kind of service a lot of people won’t ride your trains. Fortunately, the solution is easy enough: You can advertise that your trains will take people to many different places, but the reality is that there’s only one train and it only goes to one place.

This is particularly effective if you replace the “WELCOME TO ALBUQUERQUE” sign with a welcoming message from whatever town the PCs thought they were going to.

For example, the PCs fail the skill check to convince the boat captain to sail through the night so that they can get to their destination faster. When they finally get there, they discover that the villains got there just before them! Now they’ve had time to set ambushes! Oh no! If only they’d made that check or found a faster way!

… what? They made that skill check? Well, it’s a good thing they did, because this way the villains only managed to get there just before them! They’ve had time to set ambushes! Oh no! It’s a good thing they made that (meaningless) check!

STEP 3: HIRE CONDUCTORS TO TELL THEM WHERE THEY’RE GOING

Remember that both the train and the railroad tracks are invisible. This will occasionally confuse the PCs, who may forget that they’re on a train and will try to head off in their own direction. The quickest and easiest solution is to hire sock pupp– Err… Conductors. Why bother making it possible for the PCs to figure things out for themselves when you can just speak through your “conductors” and tell them what they should be doing?

It’s important to remember that “providing meaningful assistance” is not in the conductors’ job descriptions. Their job is to make the passengers jump through hoops, not listen to reasonable requests.

To make sure that the PCs understand who’s boss, try to make the conductor’s failure to supply necessary support completely irrational. For example, when a conductor shows up and tells them that the Gods Themselves(TM) have conjured up a coastal tsunami so that the local river will reverse its flow and speed their boat journey, then by god they are going to turn around, get back on their boat, and head upstream.

If the PCs ask why the 16th-level spellcaster telling them this divine message couldn’t just cast a teleport spell and instantly send the entire party to their destination, you might think that the correct answer is, “Shut up! That’s why!” You would be wrong. The correct answer is, “Think you I am sitting by idly? I and many others labor even as you do against the machinations of the Serpent Mother, assisting you in ways you cannot see, on battlefields other than this one.”

If the PCs point out that casting a teleport is surely easier than summoning hurricanes and reversing the flow of entire rivers, then they clearly haven’t learnt their lesson. And since they haven’t learned their lesson…

STEP 4: IF THE PASSENGERS GET OFF BEFORE THEIR SCHEDULED STOP, PUNISH THEM

The PCs respond to the encounter you’ve carefully crafted to show that they’re completely outmatched by your NPCs to conclude that they’re completely outmatched and go for help (despite the fact they aren’t supposed to go for help)? Then you should feel “no guilt” for killing them.

Arrest them, cripple them, or kill them — doesn’t really matter. They’ve been naughty, naughty children and they deserved to be punished for their willful ways.

STEP 5: IF THE TRAIN IS RUNNING OUT OF STEAM, ADD MORE ENGINES

Okay, you’ve done everything right: You’ve created an overwhelming combat encounter that the PCs can’t possibly defeat so that they’ll have no chance of stopping the NPCs from stealing the artifact and kidnapping their friend.

But the passengers have thwarted you by either (a) clever planning or (b) lucky rolling, and now the monsters who were supposed to be stealing the artifact and/or kidnapping their friend have been killed with their mission unfulfilled.

Don’t panic. The solution is simple: Add more monsters.

Should the dragon somehow be stopped from reaching [their friend], don’t worry — the PCs will still have to recover the [artifact]. The results, ultimately, are the same. If it didn’t get the [artifact], though, [their friend] should be captured instead, so that the PCs still have reason to go to the Hornsaw. If the dragon can’t take him, for some reason, and also didn’t get the [artifact], then simply have two more storm hags bear [their friend] away instead.

That didn’t work? Don’t worry. You can just keep adding monsters until it does!

STEP 6: PUT A BRICK WALL ON YOUR TRACKS

Everybody knows that the best railroad tracks are built with brick walls, right? Trains never run better than when they run into a wall.

To achieve this all-important effect you can make really poor assumptions about what the PCs are likely to do. For example, if you design an adventure in which they need to make a copy of a powerful magical ritual from the walls of an ancient tomb and then return that magical ritual to their employer, it’s probably a safe bet that they won’t spend a few extra hours to make a copy for themselves. That way you can assume that the bad guys will be able to steal the “only copy” of the ritual by kidnapping an NPC and “force them” to pursue the bad guys to get back the “only copy”.

You can score bonus points by making the assumption ludicrously easy for the PCs to overcome. For example, there’s no logical reason for PCs preparing to engage in a long overland journey to buy horses; therefore it’s perfectly reasonable to make the timing of events depend on them definitely not buying horses. And since that’s not ridiculous enough, you should make sure to plan for encounters (mandatory ones, of course) in which the PCs will fight mounted opponents… and still continue to assume that they won’t have any horses to ride after defeating them.

The important thing is that it doesn’t matter what the PCs do. You’ve got a schedule to meet and a story to write, and no one is going to get in your way.

I’ve recently been reading The Shakespeare Wars by Ron Rosenbaum and writing a few essays in an effort to dissect some of the irrational examples of scholastic exuberance he highlights in the book. This essay, however, changes the focus to Rosenbaum himself.

The topic: Shylock.

Rosenbaum’s position:

It’s the most truthful and the most terrible Shylock I’ve seen. Truthful, in part, because it’s a throwback to the original, a throwback to the deeply repellent character Shakespeare created. A throwback that has no truck with contemporary cant of the sort that attempts to exculpate Shakespeare and Shylock, evade or explain away the anti-Semitism. It doesn’t fall victim to the intellectual fallacy, the comforting but deluded evasion that has pervaded many recent productions of The Merchant of Venice: the belief that if you make Shylock a nicer guy, play him with more dignity, play up the cruelty of the Christians as well, you can somehow transcend the ineradicable anti-Semitism of the caricature.

The problem with the warm and fuzzy Shylock, the feel-good Shylock you might say, is that it doesn’t diminish, it actually exacerbates, deepens the anti-Semitism of the play as a whole. The more “nice” you make the moneylender, the more you end up making the play not about the villainy of one Jew, but the villainy of all Jews, a deep-seated villainy that subsists beneath the surface even in those who appear “nice” on the surface. The more warm and fuzzy you make Shylock, the more you make it a play about the fact that even such a Jew will not hesitate, when it comes down to it, to take a knife and cut the heart out of a Christian.

The central contention of Rosenbaum’s argument is that Shylock’s final act (when he attempts to commit an act of legalized murder) is a piece of unforgivable villainy that confirms the bigotry of the anti-Semitic. Thus, the nicer you make Shylock, the worse the message becomes: No matter how nice a Jew may seem, the truth is that all Jews are murdering monsters.

THE PROBLEM

But for Rosenbaum’s thesis to stick, he has to overcome a rather sizable hurdle. In The Merchant of Venice, Shylock says:

Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions; fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, heal’d by the same means, warm’d and cool’d by the same winter and summer as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that. If a Jew wrong a Christian, what is his humility? Revenge. If a Christian wrong a Jew, what should his sufferance be by Christian example? Why, revenge. The villainy you teach me, I will execute, and it shall go hard but I will better the instruction.

If you prick us, do we not bleed? This is one of the most beautiful and heart-rending evocations of the basic humanity which transcends all bigotries. And if The Merchant of Venice is, in fact, as viciously anti-Semitic as Rosenbaum claims, then it seems painfully out of place.

In short, the only way to accept an anti-Semitic reading of The Merchant of Venice is if you can explain away what may be the most eloquent skewering of anti-Semitism ever written. Rosenbaum, seeing the problem, writes:

But what about Shylock’s famous speech in his defense: “Hath not a Jew eyes? … If you prick us, do we not bleed?” one is inevitably asked. Some might argue that this indicated that Shakespeare had a more advanced consciousness than the medieval anti-Semitism that persisted into his time. Perhaps. But if the speech is read to its bitter end “do we not bleed” bleeds any poignancy dry as it turns out to be a rationale for vengefulness: If we are alike in these respects, “If you wrong us shall we [just as you] not revenge?” as well.

There are two problems with Rosenbaum’s argument.

First, he doesn’t actually explain why we should ignore the speech. He seems to be relying on an unspoken premise that “revenge is evil”. But even if we accept the premise, Rosenbaum’s conclusion doesn’t follow.

Second, Rosenbaum is setting up a false dichotomy. He’s saying “if Shylock is a villain, then the play is anti-Semitic”. Then he concludes that Shylock is a villain, ergo the play is anti-Semitic. But in setting up this dichotomy, Rosenbaum may be missing the entire point of the play.

THE POINT

When we first see Shylock and Antonio on the stage together, Shylock says:

Signior Antonio, many a time and oft
In the Rialto you have rated me
About my monies and my usances:
Still have I borne it with a patient shrug,
(For sufferance is the badge of all our Tribe.)
You call me misbeliever, cut-throated dog,
And spat upon my Jewish gaberdine,
And all for use of that which is mine own.
Well then, it now appears you need my help:
Go to then, you come to me, and you say,
“Shylock, we would have monies.” You say so;
You that did void your rheum upon my beard,
And foot me as you spurn a stranger cur
Over your threshold. Monies is your suit.
What should I say to you? Should I not say,
“Hath a dog money? Is it possible
A cur should lend three thousand ducats? Or
shall I bend low, and in a bond-mans key
With bated breath, and whispering humbleness,
Say this: “Fair sir, you spat on me on Wednesday last;
You spurn’d me such a day; another time
You call’d me dog: and for these courtesies
I’ll lend you thus much monies.”

This speech, I think, sets up the core dynamic of the play: Hatred begets hatred.

It’s not that Shylock is pretending to be a nice guy while secretly being a Jewish monster. It’s that the Christians treating him like a monster is what turns him into a monster.

Elsewhere in his book, Rosenbaum quotes a speech from the “Hand D” of Sir Thomas More that many believe may be written by Shakespeare. In reading it, I was struck by a similar theme. Thomas More is confronting a riotous, anti-immigrant crowd. As Rosenbaum writes, “the sympathy is with the immigrant-bashing nativist poor”, but then Hand D takes over. Sir Thomas More stands up before the crowd and says:

Grant them removed and grant them this your noise
Hath chid down all the majesty of England,
Imagine that you see the wretched strangers,
Their babies at their backs, with their poor luggage
Plodding to th’ ports and coasts for transportation,
And that you sit as kings in your desires,
Authority quite silenc’d by your brawl,
And you in ruff of your opinions cloth’d,
What had you got? I’ll tell you: you had taught
How insolence and strong hand should prevail,
How order should be quell’d and by this pattern
Not one of you should live an aged man,
For other ruffians, as their fancies wrought,
With self-same hand, self reasons, and self right,
Would shark on you, and men like ravenous fishes
Would feed on one another.

Again, we see this theme of hatred creating hatred; intolerance breeding intolerance.

In the end I think this is not only a more legitimate interpretation of The Merchant of Venice, I think it’s also a more interesting one.

Rosenbaum presents his opinion of Shylock within the context of a larger thesis that Shakespeare’s villains don’t need any explanation or motivation — they’re just evil. I think this is, in general, an overly-simplistic, one-size-fits-all explication of the Bard. And I think it specifically causes Rosenbaum to overlook the complexity of The Merchant of Venice.

ROSENBAUM’S DEFENSE

But if Ron Rosenbaum were reading this essay, I know what his response would be, because he trots it out a half dozen times or more in The Shakespeare Wars:

Sorry, it’s just not a character you can make nice about, or rationalize as some do, by emphasizing the play’s critique of the cruel mockery of the money-hungry Christians as well. Christians weren’t slaughtered for their religious stereotypes in Europe; Jews were. None of the Christian characters played the ugly and vicious role Shylock did in Nazi propaganda. When one encounters this allegedly sophisticated Shakespeare-made-the-Christians-worse evasion, one has to ask why the Nazis put on fifty productions of Merchant. Because of its critique of the Christians?

Basically, this becomes Rosenbaum’s first and last line of defense: If you claim that there’s a sympathetic reading of Shylock to be had, then you’re a Nazi. (Or, at best, a Nazi-sympathizer.)

One could delve into the problems with Rosenbaum’s defense. (For example, just because Shylock can be played as a racist caricature, it doesn’t follow that he should be. Or perhaps the fact that the German productions would have been translated, offering plentiful opportunities to strip out Shakespeare’s theme and replace it with something uglier.) But it’s pointless, because there is no actual substance behind Rosenbaum’s repeated insistence that “if the Nazis performed it, it must be evil”. If he pulled this online, he would be rightfully called out for Godwinizing the discussion.

(And it was, in fact, this particular bit of intellectual dishonesty that prompted me to start writing this response.)

HEDGING MY BETS

With that being said, I have never performed a deep study of The Merchant of Venice. And even my casual readings and viewings have made it abundantly clear that there are no easy answers when it comes to the text. For example, before offering any other rationale, Shylock says, “I hate him for he is a Christian.” And there remains the open question of exactly how the behavior of the Christians in the play would have been interpreted by an Elizabethan audience: We see their behavior as abhorrent and are thus inclined to interpret them as negative portrayals. But if you don’t view their behavior as abhorrent, does that remain true? Is the play condemning them or are we condemning them?

But whatever complexities the text may offer, it remains absolutely true that it explicitly says both that, “Shylock does what he does because Antonio did what he did.” and “There is no difference between a Jew and a Christian.”

Any responsible reading of the text must take those elements of the text into account. It cannot, as Rosenbaum does, simply ignore them.