Corum and the art of killing Gods

 

In Michael Moorcock's first Corum Series, the Swords trilogy, Corum must save his 15 planes from the powers of Chaos.

These powers are represented by the Kight, Queen, and King of the Swords.  For those who are more familiar with Michael Moorcock's Elric series, the Knight of the swords should be very familiar as it's Arioch, Elric's patron demon god.

Over the course of three novels, Corum dos manages to banish these gods.

Depending on the edition of Dungeons and Dragons you've run or played in, this might not seem that odd. Early editions of the god featured stats that, while powerful, were not so out of line that a group of players couldn't kill them.

Third party companies like Wizards of the Coast, when they were producing TRPG content, even made a series of books to augment gods with Primal forces which cut through mortal defenses. That was The Primal order series of books. Fun stuff. Find it if you can. Greatart.

But back to Corum.

Corum, at this point, has two artifacts, the Hand of Kwll and the Eye of Rhynn. They are described in detail. The hand is physically powerful and Kwll, unknown to Corum, controls the hand directly in several cases to save Corum's life.

So how does one go about killing the gods?

The Knight of Swords notes that Gods have to keep their heart separate from themselves so that the other rules know their whereabouts. Corum has to destroy it. Arioch leads him around, and Corum deduces where it is.

But it was a game because Arioch was unable to remove his own heart and Corum, taking it from it's chambers, has done Arioch a service.

Oh no!

So Corum's hand does the logical thing and crushes it. This banishes Arioch.

So no actual fight. No big battle. No clash of swords. 

The Queen of Swords is enraged at her brother's banishment. But she cannot go to Corum's five planes. There are rules of balance after all. The Eternal Balance must be maintained.

But Corum angers the Goddess so much she decides she is more powerful than the balance itself! She enters Corum's plane and... the Cosmic Balance Banishes her.

The King of Swords gets to meet the lost god Kwll directly. Corum, after finding Tanelorn, the city of refuge, the city of peace, a city with as many incarnations as there are champions, discovers that this Tanelorn is being used to imprison Kwll.

Kwll wants his hand back. Corum asks him to fight Chaos. Some back and forth and we get Kwll kind of agreeing but not really.

But then when it comes time to fight, Corum is shocked at the raw forces of chaos arrayed against them and tells Kwll to retreat and not honor the bargain.

Kwll gives a great line. "I made no bargain." And proceeds to destroy all the gods of chaos reamining.

Oh, and all the gods of law.

I don't point these out to indicate that it's lame or a cop-out. But to indicate that sometimes the way characters win, especially in older tales where the heroes have no direct manner of winning, no sword strength or sorcery powerful enough to win, there are often other ways to win.

Many of Corum's adventurers could be done with skill checks and investigation. Rare is it when Corum solely wins through strength of arms, and many times when he does, it is in a situation where he did not wish to do so, but Kwll controlled the hand and forced him to violence.

Think about how things can be accomplished in your own games that don't involve swinging a sword. Are there multiple paths that will get the players to the same place? Some are easier than others. Some provide a greater reward with risk than others.

Corum is an interesting read in that when Gods die, they don't die but are merely banished and have a host of early ideas that others have built upon. Go check them out.

Corum by Michael Moorcock

As a preteen, I read a lot. My father lived by Diversy and where Clark and Broadway merged. There were several bookstores and used bookstores in the area.  Mind you, this was before Barnes and Noble and even Borders. We had Crown, Waldenbooks, Barbarba's Books, and the bookstores that were used, among others.

So I was always buying books and back in those days at least, reading them.

The above picture is the one I picked up for Corum. I was a fan of Michael Moorcoc, via Elric like many before me.

Corum, though, is a bit different. 

I've reread the original a few times and read the First Comics adaptation, now available via Titan in the Michael Moorcock library. We readers didn't know how lucky we were to have Mike Mignola, famous for his creation Hellboy, on hand for those earlier volumes.

I'm lucky enough to have an hour lunch and I've been listening to audio books so I figured it was a good time to revisit Corum.

What's the old saying?

No man steps in the same river twice for the river has changed and so has he?

Some themes were far more obvious to me this time around, and I was just scratching my head at how dumb Corum appeared to be. 

The writing is evocative and I recommend anyone interested in the history of fantasy read it as it was written in 1971 so in and of itself stands as a historical artifact. It's also not by an American author and while we can argue a man of England isn't that far off, the author has always brought his own viewpoint to things.

As a youth, when I first started in TRPGs, when playing Advanced Dungeons and Dragons 1st ed, one of the things that was fascinating about Corum, was the hand and eye he bore in the first trilogy. In AD&D, we had the hand and eye of Vecna. Clearly Gary had been reading Moorcock as well eh?

Corum even had a one book TRPG products that was licensed from Chaosium who had the rights at the time. I do not recall it with any fondness as I remember reading it and it didn't have details on the  Eye of Rhynn and the six-fingered Hand of Kwll. It would be like buying the Stormbringer TRPG and it not having states on Stormbringer. 

Like some of the works of Robert E Howard, the author famous for Conan, but also the creator of Kull, Solomon Kane, and others, these books fall in and out of publications with some frequency.

The last hardcover I have is of the White Wolf edition when they were doing a 'library' collection, and they did Moorcock's worst as well as Fritz Leiber, known for his tales of 'the Twain'.

Corum has a new collection out, though, with a cover that's cropped from an older cover. I love the design on the original cover. It reminds me of the Ace versions of the Elric paperbacks I had, with the design and art style. Strangely enough, there's no e-version so if you read things in e-version like I do these days, to say on space mostly, you're out of luck.

I'll try to return to some actual gaming throughs on Corum. Having listened to all six of the novels recently and back to back, a lot of things really stand out in terms of how the author handles quests and whats expected of the hero. Some of it might be useful for gaming both in terms of what not to do and what to take inspiration from.