Barbarian Snark Thread, Part the Third

[MinDonner]

Brak's naked backbone shuddered in the creeping chill of night. His tan skin reflected the dim emerald radiance of the walls. Shortly he rolled over again. The past made a shadow play of images in his mind.

Thus we are alerted to an impending backstory infodump, and sure enough, Brak now finds the time to reminisce on how he ended up in this predicament. Was he arrested for robbing a well-guarded temple or seducing a proud royal maiden? Nope, just trespassing. *facepalm* His trip down memory lane is interrupted by some "grisly barking" and "wild, forlorn moaning", then he falls asleep... to be rudely awakened at spearpoint!

Yep, good old Jath has betrayed him and told the guards about the weak link in Brak's chain, and they've come to fit him with some new ones - including an evil overseer whose bad eye (apparently) stands out in flicker and shadow, moist and horrible, disembodied, suspended in space. (??)

So, time for some fightin!

The power of Brak's leg thews turned his foot into a juggernaut that snapped the man's head violently to the right. The mercenary's neck snapped even as he shrieked and writhed to his feet. In the confines of the cell, the cries touched off pandemonium.

Is it just me or are these sentences making less and less sense as they go along?

Anyway, Brak grabs a sword off another guard and lops his head off with one mighty stroke, and gets covered in fierce red blood. At the rate of about one guard per paragraph, he finishes off the rest within a page, but then the overseer rings a bell and reinforcements start arriving. Brak has to flee and take his chances in mazy darkness!

However, he has the rare common sense to start unbolting cell doors as he runs, so the pursuing soldiers are soon overwhelmed by revolting slaves. He manages to gut the overseer with a spear somehow, and then runs into Jath! Brak has his barbarian honour to think of, and is reluctant to kill anyone who isn't directly attacking him, but the decision is conveniently taken out of his hands when the two men fall through a "stygian opening" and Jath is immediately killed by the fall. Then he sees a strange shimmer from the corner of his eye...

He bit down on his bottom lip until he tasted the salt of blood in his mouth. There lay his broadsword, its blade aglitter with the reflection of a face made of fire.

[Rakka]

Yay! The mighty thews are back!

[MinDonner]

<---- 6666 posts. Guess it's time for an extra beastly beast!

But first, let's return to this face made of fire. Surprisingly NOT a monster, it is in fact the tormented visage of an old man, chained up in the middle of a furnace... but his eyes are open and staring! All around are skeletons in various states of consumption-by-rats, and some laughter like delicate bells informs Brak that he is not alone down here.

It's the princess and a bunch of guards, having a feast! There follows the usual evil-princess-and-barbarian-banter...

"Well my wild man Brak from somewhere," the princess mocked, "you have surprised us on our outing. Our guest went into the furnace only a few moments ago. He was a former advisor to my uncle. Brought not from the mines this time, but directly from the palace by that more direct, secret route," indicating the staircase. "Before our guest died, we showed him the prized possession of our regency. There."

She flung out a bangled arm. Brak turned, awe-struck, for her face was etched in evil despite its youthful beauty as she pointed at the writhing apparition within the monster furnace.

"There, barbarian. There hangs my dear uncle Uzhiram. Neither alive nor dead. His body is not harmed by the hottest fires of his own mines. Yet he is never released from the unending torment that burns and burns and burns him."

Crikey! And does Mr Jakes provide any kind of reason for her uncle-tormenting ways? Er, no, it appears she enjoys evil evilness for the sake of evility, so much so that burning political prisoners to death at the bottom of a mine is basically her hobby. Nothing like a bit of multi-dimensional characterisation!

Anyway, she spends another page or so explaining her love of torturing people, then Brak hears two noises. One is the roar of all the rebelling prisoners, the other is a panting and scratching noise, that the astute reader will conclude is probably the Doomdog.

However, neither noise bothers the Princess so much as the need to have Brak spitted on spears and thrown in the furnace; she does take her hobby a little too seriously perhaps. The courtiers protest, as Brak is covered in blood so likely to attract the...

And then, even louder than the hideous moaning, came a new, grinding, panting horror of sound that turned Brak around still one more time. This time it was to face the beast-thing that snuffled and crept from blackness on its six long-clawed feet.

A vile-bulbous head sat on immense shoulders. The head itself was three times wider than a man was tall. Immense, slavering jaws click-clocked open and shut as the thing halted, swiveling its head. Obviously it was searching for the source of the blood-smell.

Ah, it's a "beast-thing", is it? Much like the bird-thing and the fish-things of the last Brak book, Jakes's vocabulary fails him again...

Brak's first action in this fight, of course, is to trip over a bone and nearly fall into the furnace. But! he catches himself in the nick of time, and then tries to fight the Doomdog by running underneath it and hacking at its belly, in the manner of the kind of special attacks you need to do to beat an end-level boss. Finally he manages to chop at its leg just as it is near the furnace, or something, and it falls in, taking Uzhiram's body with it. Yay!

At this, the courtiers run away! And the revolting slaves converge on the chamber! The princess begs Brak to kill her before they get her. But oh no, such chivalry is reserved for actual characters and not just cardboard ciphers of evilism. Instead, Brak picks her up and hands her over to the ravening mob!

Well, so much for the Doomdog. You'll be pleased to hear that the next chapter features a Fangfish. :lol:

[MinDonner]

double

[MinDonner]

III - In the Courts of the Conjurer

A slightly more confusing start to this tale; for some reason, at the bidding of a Lord Tazim, Brak is dressed up in silks and finery as part of some "scheme" which involves delivering a princess and a dowry to someone. Three stories and three princesses, so far; for a scruffy wild man from the north, he's getting to meet an awful lot of royalty. His savage braid is concealed beneath a gold headpiece! Good job too, it sounds pretty dangerous.

The princess is pretty enough (supple and lovely, in fact) but a bit too whiny and petulant for Brak's tastes; she spends a paragraph or two bitching about the boring prince she's being sent off to marry, which at least tells us that this particular castle is NOT their final destination, just a stop-off en route. Still no idea what we're doing here though - BUT, now we go past a sinister pool, from which the stench of death pours(?), so at least we know what kind of monster-battle we are in for.

Ah, now we find out the purpose of visiting Castle Evil, though it is an explanation that makes little sense: Lord Tazim has heard superstitious rumours of the castle's owner, and to "test them", he's taken the mountain shortcut with daughter and dowry instead of going the long way round. Cos obviously you always want your close family members and caskets of gold with you when checking out nasty neighbourhoods. Brak is involved in some kind of secret-bodyguard capacity, though he's had to leave his broadsword (a gift from the blood-maddened rebels of Toct!) in the treasure-chests, and only has a crappy fake sword with rubies on.

And now some backstory as to how Brak came to be working with Tazim - after establishing COMMUNISM back at Toct, he got a bit bored with all the carousing and fighting and headed on his way. Some caravan-guards warned him about the dodgy shortcut past Castle Evil, but he ignored them, and was subsequently set upon by four of Castle Evil's henchmen, had his stuff nicked, and then got hung up by his thumbs to die. Luckily Tazim was passing by and rescued him, and they hatched a Cunning Plan...

"I have come this way," the Lord continued, "and found you, amid a scene of hopeless, heartless butchery."

"The lord of the pass deserves to have an army hammer down his gates and gut him," Brak agreed.

"But I have no army. You will have to be my army if we cannot reason with the master of those riders."

"Me? I am only one man."

"A strong-looking man though."

...who couldn't even save himself from FOUR men, much less a whole castleful. I can see that this plan might contain a slight flaw...

Anyway, Tazim says that, if he decides that the lord of Castle Evil needs assassinating, and Brak carries out the deed, he'll give him half the dowry money. But according to the caravan guards, this lord has AWFUL POWERS at his command... :uhoh:

[theMountainGoat]

Just caught up on the last two pages, great stuff Min and you are right, this Brak adventure is making less sense as it goes along, which of course makes it better for us to snark at ;)

[Maithanet]

"The head itself was three times wider than a man was tall."

Wait a second. I have a dog (lab) and her head is approximately 5-6 inches wide. If the head is three times wider than a man is tall, then that would mean that a Doomdog is 12*3=36 times larger than a normal labrador retriever. Additionally, my dog is more than 3 ft long from snout to tail, but lets say 3 feet to be simple. This doomdog is over a hundred feet long, and his belly would be 30 feet off the ground at least.

How big is this chamber? Was it specifically constructed to be doomdog size? I don't remember any complete description of it, but I would think that Brak could easily find some portion of the room that would be totally inaccessible to such an oversized beast. In addition, Brak's attack on the monster's belly seems quite improbable, unless his sword was attached to some sort of polearm.

Then the doomdog just fell in the furnace? Once again, how big is this furnace? Did they construct it to have a 40 foot entrance, just in case any giant monsters might slip into the room? And how clumsy is this dog, not to notice this GIANT BURNING FURNACE RIGHT IN FRONT OF IT. Dogs can be pretty oblivious sometimes, but very few are careless enough to run straight into a fire. Maybe this doomdog still had a bit of puppyish clumsiness, and when under attack just lost its balance.

Poor doompuppy.

[Lummel]

I also wish to register my extreme discontent and disapointment over Doomdog. Neither doglike nor doomladen and they didn't even get to team up together in some kind of barbarian version of scobby doo, except in this version rather than run away from the ghost obviously Brak and Doomdog would respectively unmask and eat the irritable old man in a costume who would briefly get to say "pesky kids" before beginning chomped up.

[Voland]

I get the feeling that Brak is more the Inspector Clouseau of barbarians rather than a Conan-type :unsure:

[Antonius Pius]

As a personal tribute to these threads and Min's mighty efforts, I thought I'd try to read a Conan story. I came across a copy of Conan the Buccaneer for €2,-, and thought what the hell. For extra sword & sorcery pionts, the book contains a preface by Lin Carter which properly belongs to another book released about five years prior to Conan the Buccaneer. In this mighty preface (without thews of any kind) Carter makes clear that there is no point to his genre, only entertainment. Also, the book is dedicated to "the pioneer of the swordplay and sorcery genre, J.R.R. Tolkein." Neat praise, that.

Anyway, I've read about five pages. The intro (1,5 page) follows some princess, who is naked and decides to give an offering to some deity. Several descriptions of her nudity follow, and then we meet some evil king. Then a meeting between evil king and his henchmen (one with religious cheekiness) follows. Before I could read what their evil plan was, I passed out. I hadn't drunk any alcohol, nor did any drugs, so that's not it. It was Conan. Had to be. The sillyness was so mind-bumbing, I'm afraid I won't make it to page 10. Min, and everyone on these threads, has made clear that the cheese is terrible, but I didn't think it would be strong enough to knock me out.

Which leads me to once more pay my respects to Min for suffering through all this tripe. Not only that, she makes it look easy. :bowdown: :bowdown: :bowdown:

[MinDonner]

Awww :blushing: - I'm just glad to see my efforts are appreciated.

Anyway, I have the rest of the week off work, so should be able to crank through the rest of this Brak book a bit more quickly. And then we can get back to Rockson! :thumbsup:

Brak is pondering what he would do with "ass-loads" of pearls, when a gong sounds and the lord of Castle Evil finally turns up. He looks young, but also older than old, and demands that they call him Ankhma Ra, which is apparently his name. He also has a pile of suspicious shiny black rocks next to his throne, and a suspicious cask.

A bit of bickering with Tazim; Ankhma Ra wants the entire dowry if they are to pass through... however, Princess Jarmine starts flirting with him, so maybe they're delivering the dowry to the right place after all? But no, Tazim calls her an addle-pated strumpet, and the bickering resumes...

Ankhma Ra strode quickly to the cask upon the taboret. He laid a long-nailed hand upon it.

"Shall we come to the point? The dowry chests or no?"

Tazim glared. "I will not even deign to answer such a presumptuous-"

"I am not a man of infinite patience," the other interrupted again. "Don't imagine you can simply leave at your leisure, even though I did invite you as my guests so that you might ponder the alternatives. Should you think of swords, of your retainers, two of whom I see hulking back there, my men, though few in number, are loyal. They would like nothing better than feeding morsels to the amusing creature I keep in the pool. No-one knows how deep that pool runs, incidentally. Perhaps to hell itself. I have a certain adeptness with natural substances, among other things, and from the earlier generations of creatures in that pool, I have managed to breed - but no need to dwell on that. Suffice it to say the Fangfish is hungry."

The Fangfish.

Brak's palms turned clammy. Underneath the blue surface of the water, he had seen something loathsome, darting away. Tusk or fang, it had been as long as a man was tall.

Hm. This is looking suspiciously familiar to the plot of Kothar. Robber baron in hillside fortress containing ancient watery terror? Check.

But that's not the only trick Ankhma has up his sleeve. Nope, he also has a nasty-looking piece of red silk (in the casket), which he has to handle with iron gauntlets. The Silk of Shaitan! He chucks it at Tazim's other servant, whose flesh turns grey and dripping; when Ankhma picks it up again, it has the servant's heart in it!

Ankhma chants something and the heart turns into one of the shiny black rocks, then he chucks it on the pile with the rest. What a bad man! Then he tells Tazim he has until sunrise to deliver the dowry, and flounces off through some curtains.

So Brak has until sunrise to carry out the assassination.......

[Jon AS]

Long fingernails? A clear sign of villainy if there ever was one!

And you've just got love the mixture of ancient-Egyptian-sounding name of the villain and the Arabic devil-silk.

So Brak has until sunrise to carry out the assassination.......

What a fortunate coincidence that he wasn't picked for the demonstration of the evil piece of cloth!

[MinDonner]

In the small hours of the morning, Brak sneaks through the castle, getting a bit lost in the labyrinthine passages, so he has to mutter "Which way?" to himself, which echoes off the walls nicely. Stealth FAIL. Eventually he finds himself in place for the boss battle by the pool, where he hears a distant sound of woman's laughter... and then the henchmen arrive!

They drop down from a grate over his head and stab with spears, but Brak manages to cut one of them and shove him into the pool, uncharacteristically without falling over or concussing himself in any way. All that practice must be paying off! The pool roils as Something stirs in the deep...

The remaining two guards rush at Brak, who kills one, then trips over the body and tumbles into the pool, managing to grab a spear as he goes. He's like the Buster Keaton of barbarian warriors; forget our usual heroic soundtracks, in this case we need some kind of slapstick kazoo-theme with duck-whistle and raspberry noises.

Anyway, here comes the Monster of the Week!

Arrowing toward him came a thing of great slimness but immense length. It had a flat, milky-blind eye in either side of its head. The head looked malformed because it widened out twenty times the thickness of the creature's body and fanned, blicking tail. Gillslits as tall as Brak himself throbbed open and shut just above the water.

The immense round jaw of the gigantic fish opened, then opened wider still. From that maw gusted the stink of the wharf and charnel house.

Fangfish, Brak's brain screamed. He tried to swim away. But the weakness in his right arm and the weight of the spear dragged on him.

Despite being imminent fishfood, Brak has time to dimly realise that this fish has been crossbred from creatures older than time, as it has sort-of froggy legs as well as the usual fish appendages. And then he has a cunning plan to spit the other dead soldier on his spear and then shove both into the fish's mouth(?), which seems a little overly complicated in the circumstances, but at least buys him enough time to get to the edge of the pool. But then a black boot comes down upon his fingers!

It's Ankhma Ra, who now tries to get Brak with the silk, with a demonic laugh! But Brak manages to grab his broadsword from somewhere and snag a corner of silk and throw it back at Ankhma, stabbing him in the neck at the same time! This is extra impressive as Brak is still in the pool. Anyway, the silk gets stuck in the neck-wound and Ankhma's heart pops out, then he falls in the pool and gets eaten by the Fangfish.

Six more henchmen appear, but then run away when they realise that Ankhma is dead... but then Brak gets stabbed in the back!

It's Princess Jarmine. She is pissed off that Brak killed Ankhma, cos she contained a love of awful vileness that had lurked beneath her loveliness, and now is out for revenge - in fact, it was her who tipped off the guards that Brak would be trying an assassination that night; there is some gloating and the usual trappings of Evil Princess Dialogue. Brak just can't bring himself to kill her, and she's about to stab him again, when a spear hits her in the back and she falls in the pool!

It was Lord Tazim, who obviously prefers barbarian strangers to evil daughters, though he is quite upset about it. So they go their separate ways the next day, and Brak doesn't even get his reward. Booo!

Two more stories to go! I wonder what alliterative antagonist Jakes will have for us next time. Perhaps a Clawcat? A Hellhorse? A Devilduck?

[beniowa]

Two more stories to go! I wonder what alliterative antagonist Jakes will have for us next time. Perhaps a Clawcat? A Hellhorse? A Devilduck?

Whoever or whatever else is in it, it will undoubtedly have an evil princess!

The Buster Keaton of barbarian warriors, I love that! :lol:

[lacuna]

How do you smell "wharves and charnel houses", or indeed anything, underwater? Maybe he traded his equilibrium for that ability? Or is it all the knocks he's taken to the head?

Thank you, Min, for soldiering on! Love these threads. :thumbsup:

[MinDonner]

IV - Ghosts of Stone

When the big barbarian opened his eyes, he thought he had gone mad.

But no, it's not madness, just the "results of madness" - ie. Brak's dumb-arsed decision to take a shortcut to Khurdisan through a blasted desert along an abandoned caravan trail, where he was subsequently hit by a sandstorm and got completely lost. His prospects look pretty dire.

He was in utter isolation. He had no provender, no water, and no real knowledge of where he was, except that he was lost in the middle of a vast desert. The warnings of the hook-nosed loafers back at the oasis he recalled now with bitter clarity. Only men with the feel of sand in their bones, only nomads born to this part of the world, attempted to cross this desert. And even they crossed at a relatively safe corner of the waste.

Luckily, Brak seems to have somehow developed powers of echo-location, and wanders along shouting "Hallo!" until he finds an abandoned city. This fits well with the echoing emptiness inside his head, which we see a bit more of right now:

Then, like a thousand great gongs, the word came into his head before the word touched his tongue. Chambalor.

Chambalor, the city of golden chariots (apparently), is now nothing more than a long avenue of pillars. Pillars that twist and writhe in the manner of Septegundus's skin! However, in for a penny etc etc, Brak decides to take a closer look, kicking idly at a basalt rock as he goes. This is not the best of ideas.

He had taken two more steps when ghastly, stinging pain seared his left leg.

Looking down, he froze. A black, obscenely hairy feeler was twisting round and round his thick, tanned leg.

Even as his fist closed over the haft of his huge broadsword, Brak screwed his head around. No basalt slab lay there. Rather, a great lumpish black thing with transparent veins in intricate tracery over its body. The thing came rousing up out of the sand where it had lain asleep.

It's a giant spidery-centipede thing that Brak has inadvertently woken up; he cuts off the feeler and it scuttles away, but the damage has been done - obviously some poison is at work, and Brak collapses into unconsciousness...

[theMountainGoat]

Brak really is a useless cretinous prick isn't he.

Mighty barbarian hero he is not.

[lacuna]

Yeah, use the thews, Brak!

[MinDonner]

Brak awakens to the terribly fortunate sound of a convenient passing alchemist, who is mixing him up an antidote to the poison. Phew! But, there's a catch. Zama Khan is an EVIL alchemist, who will not give Brak the poultice unless he agrees to help him steal the treasures of Chambalor!

Zama Khan's daughter Dareet is less than impressed with dad's malevolent ways, though this seems more like an excuse for some backstory infodump as she chides him for a list of past misdeeds.

Brak reluctantly agrees - not really sure why the reluctance, given that a) he's off on a mission to plunder anyway and B) it's probably better than dying of centipede-spider poison (the creature turns out to be called T'muk,

- Jakes' usual skill with monster-naming shines out once again) - and so it's now time for a brief history lesson.

Turns out that the ruler of Chandalor was once a certain Septegundus (gasp!), until the local king got tired of all the evil and stabbed him - at which point all the city's treasure got magically locked up in an ivory chest, and all the people were imprisoned inside the pillars. Luckily, Septegundus passed on the secret of how to reverse his spell to a guy called Juhad, who wrote it all down on some tablets that Zama Khan has just recently stolen.

Brak is not convinced by this unlikely tale, but he made a bargain so has to stick to it. And so, even though it's the middle of the night, they head off into the haunted city...

Eventually, past the spooky writhing columns and the distant clacka-clacka-clacka sound of The Thing Which Crawls, they get to the underground chamber with the silver doors that Brak has to open using his mighty thews. But then, as soon as the doors are open, Zama Khan charges at him with a dagger and Brak has to chop off his head! He drops the tablets (being dead) and they break with a great white flash, as does the ivory treasure chest inside the room. And then the whole place starts to disintegrate! Sounds of a thousand wailing voices rise from the pillars! And that centipede-spider thing is back! And he can't hit it with his sword cos its blood is poisonous and no-one but ZK can mix the antidote!

The dilemma is quickly resolved as he throws his sword into the beast's eye. Then they have to climb over its body to escape, and he nearly falls over, but manages to keep his balance for once.

Dareet is pretty miserable that her evil father is dead, but Brak reassures her that at least he managed to free all the tormented souls (somehow, by breaking some old tablets that weren't even written by the original sorcerer), and they head off into the sunset...

[Jon AS]

That has to be the lamest resolution of one of Brak's misadventures yet. And no evil princess? Boo!