The Battling Sailor

(Substack incorrectly flagged my blog as spam and suspended me for like a week. Bad manners in my view.)

Sailor Steve Costigan is like Conan the Barbarian’s idiot little brother.

Robert E. Howard was a strange and very racist man. He grew up in Texas cowtowns, spent his twenties inventing sword and sorcery, then shot himself in the head at age thirty when his mother died. It’s not likely that this odd man would have invented one of the iconic figures of twentieth-century popular fiction, but there you go.

Howard absolutely pumped out stories. He wrote them automatically, without thinking. Would he have thrived in a world of blogs? The issue is that publication in a magazine obliges you to put your ideas in a “story” format. It’s almost impossible to make pure short stories work on a blog, for some reason.

The world of RPG blogs now has a lot of the same eccentric oddballs (such as myself) who would have been writing for Weird Tales, back in the day. All those guys knew each other and were part of Lovecraft’s letter-writing circles. Which interests me because they invented a huge chunk of modern pop culture.

Most of Howard’s stories are historical fiction. But on the Conan model. He writes about Vikings in Tigers Of The Sea, Crusaders in Hawks Of Outremer, Puritans for some reason in Solomon Kane.

What I like about this is the idea of treating the real world as a fantasy setting. Most of the ideas we get in a game like Dungeons & Dragons are derived from historical sources. You get a setting “based on” medieval France or whatever. But the real world is far more interesting and varied than any invented one could be.

So why not set your story in the real world?

One answer is that the real world has no magic. Howard’s response to this is “yes it does.” The Lovecraft mythos, and the underlying idea of a world haunted by ancient aliens and prehistoric gods, provided him with a reasonable excuse to bring his Vikings up against sorcerers and have it make sense.

The modern day pulp setting is “in continuity” with the fantasy setting of the past. You could run a game set in Viking times that was essentially D&D, and have it be the backstory of another game set now.

Sailor Steve is just Howard’s answer to the question of “how do you have Conan the Barbarian in the modern day.”

He is a guy on a ship, he sails around and gets into fights for no reason. “The sailor” seems like a great player character to me. You have no home, you move between interesting settings, you’re risk-tolerant and it doesn’t really matter if you die.

He spends most of his time in Asia. Howard is racist, there’s a story called “Blow Down The Chinks,” this to me is very racist. I would not do the racist bits. The ports of Shanghai and Singapore, the islands of the South Seas, are natural adventure locations even to a non-racist individual, which I assume we all aspire to be.

Steve’s assets are his physical strength and his stupidity. Plus I think he has a dog. It is pleasantly easy to come up with things Sailor Steve could do. “Gets half of a treasure map”. “Accidentally made King”. “Friend kidnapped by Communists”. “Sleeps with mobster’s wife”. It is a shenanigan heavy premise. There’s one where he gets mixed up in the Chinese Civil War.

It’s funniest to think of him as a fish-out-of-water Yank. Perfect foil for Fu Manchu. Steve would defeat the schemes of any 1000IQ villain by simply punching him until he stops. If you put a poison spider in his bed he would jump out the window in his nightgown going “Gee willikers” but 0% chance he would die.

(I would simply develop a non-racist version of Fu Manchu. The research is ongoing.) 

Difference between a pulp game and a horror game. The horror game wants you to be a reclusive intellectual who quietly goes mad. It does not want you to play as a comedy sailor who bonks his head and gets seduced by dames.

At the end of The Call of Cthulhu the crusty old sailor beats Cthulhu by piloting a boat into his head. This crusty old sailor is a character archetype we don’t seem to have any more. The modern equivalent is probably the Filipino guys that work on cargo ships who you never hear about and who keep the entire world system up and running.

Play down the cosmic horror angle and let the monsters be defeated with sufficiently large boats. Using ordinary physical laws.

This doesn’t work in a short story, it’s not a satisfying ending to The Call of Cthulhu. Sailor Steve vs. Fu Manchu would seem like dull pastiche if I wrote it for you in a thousand words. It would be fun if you actually played it out for yourself.

Howard’s Conan stories have been extensively mined for roleplaying games. Is there a temple with mad priests and a jewel in an idol’s eye? Is there a giant snake? What about a creepy abandoned city in the desert where the statues come to life at night?

His other stories aren’t as good. It’s strange to me to think that he probably wrote this stuff in a day or two, at white heat, likely while cranking himself off, and we’ve been dining out on it ever since. Why Howard, specifically? Could anyone else have done it? What made this one guy’s imagination unusually fertile?

He did pretty well financially, I think. He was probably the richest man in Cross Plains, Texas. How did he know Conan would sell? We’re indebted to him for a deep vein of lurid imagery. Bulging thews, odalisques, sorcerers, white apes. The whole universe of Frank Frazetta. If Howard had shot himself ten years earlier, would this just like, not exist?

It seems inevitable. Like the world of Conan was lying there, waiting for someone to pick it up. Yet that can’t be true.

You can steal from Sailor Steve. I will make it possible for you to do so. Hopping through a world of interconnected tropical ports. Jungle assassins, casino boats, giant snakes, hiding from the Mob. Okay so you got the other half of the amulet, but you smashed up Benny Wong’s opium lounge and now he wants you dead.

Seems like low-hanging fruit. Particularly for a sandbox game.

It’s a D&D style game, you’re rogue adventurers, but you’re still in the world you know. The ‘20s is perhaps the last possible date at which you could do this. Pulp gives way to horror. Do the Filipino guys on cargo ships get into bar fights and have adventures? How would we know? Maybe they do.