As the Duchess leapt toward me, I wondered how I could defend myself. I was empty-handed, but this wasn't really happening. I was dreaming... Stepping back, I yelled Sword!. Runes shimmered in the air, snaking down to twist into a marble rapier in my hand. It pierced her breast, and she shattered into a flock of crows, which flew off in the four directions.
- From the dream diary of Ethan Haythornethwaite.

The Calligrapher's Sword is set in the dream-world Elsewhere. Elsewhere is a magical world, governed by magical rules. Elsewhere is the land beyond dreams, the spring from which our nightly adventures flow. In Elsewhere, everything is like water: always the same, yet ever-changing. Elsewhere is not mapped; the fabric of dreams is not bound by laws of physics, or the febrile powers of any one mind. It lives within us all, and so there can be as many interesting and different paths between two places as there are people who have ever dreamed. But there are some things that are true about the world of Elsewhere, special things that are true in that whole land of madness and glory. These are the Three Noble Truths.

We call the first Noble Truth the Truth of Words. For all the tongues, there is but one ear. This is to say that all languages are the same in Elsewhere. No one will fail to understand you because you are Thai and he is Tunisian, unless one of you wanted it to be that way. Though the words coming out of your mouth may be different if you are French or Japanese, it makes no difference to the Dream.

The second Noble Truth is the Truth of Writing. For all the hands, there is but one pen. This means that anyone who writes in Elsewhere will write in The Script, the magical language of dreamers that we forget when we awaken. Both Script and spoken Word are powerful in the Dream, and one who speaks with conviction or writes with beauty and grace can cause and create mighty things by those means.

The third Noble Truth is what we call the Truth of Nine Nights. Every road is nine nights long. This is the secret of travelling in Elsewhere. From any place in the dreamlands, it is possible to reach a particular place in nine nights of travel, though travelling by day will do nothing to quicken the journey. This place is called the City of Sorrows. Likewise, from the City it is nine nights of travel from that place to any other. If you don't want to go through the City, the best way to get somewhere is to get lost and find your way out. It's much easier to go places if you don't know you're walking in the wrong direction.

The City of Sorrows is different to every person who enters it. One man's Crazy Haroun's Story Soda Fountain might be another's City of Sorrows chapter of the International Library of Alexandria. Even the roads weave together and turn differently, depending on who walks them. When travelling in a group through the city, it is best that one person guide, and the rest follow with their eyes shut, lest they see something upsetting.

One thing about the City is always the same: the moonstone tower in its very center, whose top looks down on the clouds. Legend has it that in the top, there lives a mysterious ruler, that the city-dwellers call the Queen-in-Crystal. At the foot of the tower are many moonstone statues of strange ancient things. If someone steps too close, they come to life: jawless armoured fish, creatures with fins and feelers, jointed pincered horrors, all swimming through the air as if it were water. These are the Moonstone Guardians, making sure the Queen-in-Crystal is undisturbed. No one knows, though, if they are protectors or jailers, and the sages argue, while those powerful in the City's strange politics mill about the Tower's Courtyard, talking of affairs and carefully dodging the Guardians.

Legend has it that the City is a great Calligraphy created by the Queen-in-Crystal. Sometimes, when the sun is rising or setting, you can see the words beneath the city streets, writhing like glowing serpents. Everywhere, there are suggestions of calligraphy and the writer-painter's art - tangled columns like letters in ecstatic embrace, roads that widen and thin like brushstrokes, gold leaf and slashes of ink on the walls.

The Game

The Characters

Dreamers know that they are dreaming. They can do things that normal people couldn't, like fly or break down doors or sing in three voices, by reminding themselves of this. They have a Quality, Awake, that describes their lucidity. Dreamers can be identified by their shifting appearance: they tend to look like their waking selves, dressed appropriately for the occasion at hand. With concentration, they can change the way they look. Dreamers are not native to Elsewhere, remember, and so they can be woken up. They have a pool of Somnolence, sleepiness. When a Dreamer runs out of Somnolence, he wakes up.

Dreams aren't precisely dreams; they're creatures of the collective unconscious. The dreams of ordinary people are reflections of the Dreams that roam Elsewhere. Sometimes, the imaginings of one person, if they are particularly strong, will create a Dream. Then, this Dream can find its way into the minds of other people. Dreams, in the place of Awake, have Asleep, a measurement of their influence in the dream-world, and the readiness with which it responds to them. Instead of Somnolence, Dreams have Distinction. When a Dream runs out of Distinction he isn't interesting enough to have any power - the people dreaming him have forgotten him, for the moment at least. Characters also a second pool of points to spend, Syllables, which are used to create Words or Calligraphy.

Characters also have Illuminations. An Illumination is something a character will usually have particularly good experiences with. A little girl might have Illuminations like "I love ponies" and "Tea ceremony mastery", while a Dream warrior might have Illuminations like "Sword of beautiful fire" and "My shadow fights as well as I do." Like Qualities, Illuminations are reasons things happen; they need not be internal to the character. You could very easily have an Illumination like "Friends in the Moonstone Courtyard", which helps you in lots of City interactions, but really has to do with the actions of others. Closely related to Illuminations are Triumphs; a Triumph is something a character has had good experiences with in the past. It's something of an Illumination larva.

Finally, characters have three lists of things they care about, Passions: Riddles, Laments, and Desires. A Riddle is a question that the character needs an answer to. A Lament is an event or state of affairs that deeply upsets him. A Desire is something he wants, desperately. For an example, suppose that a Taoist sage, Chuang-tse, dreams that he is a butterfly. You could model this as any one of these things: "I dreamed I was a butterfly, but now I do not know. Was I a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or am I a butterfly, dreaming I am a man?", "I have no mouth and I must scream", "I must find the Ivory Lily and drink its nectar to regain my true form".

Starting the Game

A game of The Calligrapher's Sword is called a Dream-Quest. Each Dream-quest is like a trip to or from the City of Sorrows; it takes no less than nine Nights to complete. To start a Dream-Quest, first decide on the Quest or Quests the characters will be trying to complete. This Quest should be summarized in a paragraph or less. Don't do anything else with the Quest for a while. Then think up the characters that each Quest will involve. This includes not only the people Questing, but those that they are likely to encounter and deal with. At this point the characters need not be detailed; they're just little one-liner descriptions. As you come up with these, other conflicts and roles will suggest themselves. For roles that are Dreams, make a note if they are Dreams of a specific person, or independent Dreams, who are dreamed of by many at once and tend to be less specific in nature. For Dreams of a specific person, that person should have a role in the Quest as well. You might want to make a sort of Dramatis Personae of all the roles in the Quest.

Finally, the players should choose one or more characters to play. You don't necessarily have to choose the characters that are questing; if you were to be running a game along the lines of Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, it would be completely appropriate for one of the characters to play Saruman or one of his Orc generals. After everyone's staked out a role, have them create game statistics for them, and note down on their characters who else in the story they have relationships with, and what they are. Finally, come up with between three and nine Passions for the Quest. These Passions aren't owned by anyone; any character can solve them. There should be at least one Passion of each type. Nine Passions have to be solved for a Dream-Quest to end, but you don't need to define them all in the beginning. If you're playing a game with multiple Quests, then repeat this process with the next Quest. You might want to consider involving some of the previous Quest's roles in the next one, or you might not. Whatever. An example of a really epic Dream-Quest might be, "Find the Queen-in-Crystal", which could involve a great many things, including weird Calligraphy-magic and altercations with the Moonstone Guardians.

So, you ask, why does a Dream-Quest take at least nine nights to complete? Well, this is because of the Truth of Nine Nights. Basically, a Dream-Quest is a way that characters move from one psychological place to another; like travel across dreamspace, this takes time. Each time one of the Quest's Passions is solved, all the Dreamers of the Quest wake up almost immediately, and all the Dreams are forgotten for a night, even though nobody lost any Somnolence or Distinction, because of the emotional force released by the solved Passion. The next evening, they reappear wherever they vanished, to continue their Dream-Quest. Characters involved in more than one Quest can sometimes resist this effect, called the Chrysalis. When they do so, it deeply weakens their power in the Dream, until the next evening. Most that try to resist the Chrysalis find themselves in nightmares of their own devising. Some nights can be very long; time in Elsewhere, like taffy, can be pulled and bent into many fantastic shapes. If the characters stop to rest, they will probably awaken or dissipate for the day.

Making Characters

Each character starts as a concept, a part of a Dream-Quest. After this, you want to name the character, write up a little description of how he looks and acts, and decide how strong his Qualities are. Assign Quite to one, Rather to another, and Slightly to the third. Quite is the strongest, while Slightly is the weakest. When you're describing, remember to mention whatever relationships he has with other characters.

Starting characters have no Triumphs and up to three Illuminations. You may give them as many Passions as you want. They also have five points of Somnolence or Distinction.

The Mechanics

Choose four colours. Assign one of these to Awake/Asleep, one to Aware, and a third to Intense. You will need 3d6 of the fourth color, and a set of d4, d6, and d8 for each of the three Quality colors. Whenever a character is having a hard time trying to achieve some goal, you can do one of several things:

• Make an unopposed roll. This is for the least important, complex sort of conflicts; it solves issues with a single roll of the dice.
• Make a contested roll. In this type of roll, a second agent has an influence, but not necessarily an overpowering one.
• Make an opposed roll. In this type of roll, both of the agents involved are equally important. This is pretty complex; it should be reserved for really important occasions.
• Start Word combat. This is where characters use the names of The Script's glyphs to create effects; it is time-consuming, but the effects will only last a night, assuming there is no collateral damage.
• Start Calligraphy combat. Here, the characters actually draw and undraw The Script right into the fabric of Elsewhere; it is even more dangerous than Word combat, because Calligraphy is forever.

Never start a conflict when something is very easy, like opening an unlocked door or picking up a pebble, or when something is totally impossible, like ...this one's harder to provide examples of. It really depends on the Quest. At any rate, when one of these is the case, just say that it is and move on.

Rolling the Dice

This is the basic concept upon which the "long combats" are based. To make an unopposed roll, state your goal and roll the three "default dice" - the 3d6 - and if the player of the character desires, and appropriate Quality dice. Quite rolls a d8, while Slightly rolls d4 and Rather is d6. Then, assign three of the rolls to three categories - higher is better:

• Ennui: This category indicates the dissipation of your sense of purpose.
• Mystery: This category tells you how incomprehensible the ensuing events are.
• Sorrow: This category describes your emotional wounds.

When you're describing what happens, if you used a Quality die you must describe how the appropriate factor affected the outcome. If you're in a conflict to which one of your Illuminations applies, like if our Dream warrior were in a fencing duel, you can add a single Quality die to a default die and treat them as one. That is to say, you can't add two dice to a single default die, but you can use even all three of your Qualities, if you want. If you use an Illumination, you should narrate how that applied as well.

Interpret the results of the die roll like this:

You'll notice that it seems like you can't achieve any kind of good results without using Illuminations. This is sort of true. It's where Somnolence and Distinction come in. Before you roll the dice, you can say that you want to gain S/D from one of the categories. Say how much you want, and what category you will take it from. Your result will be lowered by that many ranks, and you'll gain the appropriate amount of S/D points. If it's lowered to 1, it can't be lowered any farther, and you don't gain any extra from the ranks you couldn't demote it. Conversely, before the dice are rolled you can say you're spending S/D to augment your roll. This raises your roll the appropriate amount of ranks. Again, you can't raise your roll past 12-14, and you don't get charged the excess points you might have spent trying.

Here's an example, from little Ethan Haythornethwaite's dream diary:

When I woke up, there was a women sitting on the other side of the clearing. She was wearing a lot of gold and jade jewelry and not much else, and she was plucking the feathers out of a quetzal's tail. They were greener than the jungle, greener than a jaguar's eyes. She rose up on her scarlet serpent's tail - she had no legs - and came up to me.

Ethan's player says that he wants to take the quetzal from the woman, and drive her away. The serpent-woman wants to seduce Ethan and eat him. Everyone decides that the serpent-women's just sort of incidental, and not very important to anything, so they have Ethan make an unopposed roll. Ethan's player says that he's going to use his Illumination "Stubborn Little Boy" to resist her seduction. Ethan's Quite Quality is Intense, and his Slightly Quality is Aware. He rolls the dice: 6 4 2 on his default dice, and 6 Intense, 2 Awake, 3 Aware. He assigns the 4 and his Intense 6 to Ennui, because he really wants to drive the woman away and doesn't really care how. The default 4 goes to Mystery and the 2 to Sorrow. He narrates:

Kissed me. I could taste her venom; it was sweet like honey and saffron. So sweet and so cold... I hated her. I kicked her so hard I heard bones cracking, hers and mine both. She collapsed, her beauty broken, and I took the bird away. As it left her fingers, she shuddered, as if I had taken something much more vital. Her skin paled; her scales lost their lacquered sheen. The wraith that crept away from there was not the loveliness that had greeted me moments ago... I had destroyed it.

Contested rolls aren't much more complicated: simply, anyone involved in the conflict can bet S/D on the results, but it is still only one person who's really rolling the dice; that character is the only one permitted to add Quality dice to the roll or use Illuminations.

In an opposed roll, both involved parties make a roll. They can use S/D against their opponents as well as on themselves. Then, the side who rolled the highest Mystery gets to narrate the results, consistent with the indications of the numbers.

Words and Calligraphy

Long Combats

For a long combat of Words or Calligraphy, first write down in secret what Word or Calligraphy creation you want to create. Then, each character rolls dice as if in an opposed roll and they compare Longing scores, while interpreting the other two categories as usual. For Longing, instead the person with the higher number takes the difference, and can draw up to that many Syllables or erase that many or his opponent's, or a combination of the two. He can also modify his plan - the thing he's aiming to create. When one character has completed his Word or Calligraphy, he must spend the appropriate amount of Syllables. If he can, the creation takes effect and the combat ends. Otherwise, he has to start over.

Optionally, for Word combats you can't cause something to be "unsaid." This simply doesn't make sense. Additionally, for Calligraphy a character always needs something he can "cut through the Dream" with - this could be a sword, a scalpel, even a sharpened pen nib or a brush with a razor hidden inside.

The Script

At the moment, I only have a small sample of The Script; here's a little bit of it:

So, what does this all mean? Well, when reading Script, you go largest-to-smallest. A smaller piece always tells us something about the larger sign it's attached to. So, what's there? A Tortoise. The Tortoise can mean "patience, wisdom, progress, slowness, tortoise". Hm. Well, that darker blue curly thing attached to its right side, that's a radical. Radicals are sort of interpretation clues; they give you a hint about a sign's meaning. As it happens, this is the Water radical. Water itself can mean water, communication, or travel, motion in general. Well, attached to the Tortoise glyph, this probably means either "sea turtle" or "slow progress travelling". Since this is the largest glyph, it must be a verb, so travelling looks like the better guess. Underneath the turtle, the lighter blue spiral thing is the Pearl, which, besides being a pearl can also mean the moon, mirrors, memory. By its position, we know it's telling us something grammatical about the Turtle, so it must be telling us that it's something remembered - the past.

Those colorful leafy things are peacock feathers. These hardly ever refer to a bird; there are simpler signs for that. The feathers suggest a woman, pride, or success. We know that it's the subject of the sentence because it's the highest noun attached to the verb, which leads me to think it's a woman, not pride or success, that's walking around like a turtle. The coins and lotus blossom mean "wealthy" and "young or wise"; these are their only adjectival meanings.

Finally, the easiest part. The last symbol, the direct object of the verb (by its position again), is a door, representing Home.