by Nate Crowley
History
Grondorra’s history is a nightmare to unpick, as its thin soils conceal an ocean of ruin: the bones of once-mighty civilisations lying atop one another in a planetary mass grave. There are even gods down there – or at least monsters horrible enough to mistake for them.[6] Answering the question of who was here first, however, is akin to trying to work out who started a drunken argument. However, several discoveries of ancient rock paintings suggest that before everything got complicated, the first Barbarians shared the world with the Deer Folk, a people they represented as deer-headed humans with slit-pupilled eyes.[7]
Meet the Barbarians
Only one culture has remained a constant through all of Grondorra’s wild history: the iconic Barbarians, as raw and ruthless as the moon itself. They are … big. Thanks to the low gravity, the Barbarians grow large enough to consider seven feet dumpy, and are stacked with rippling pecs, thighs like overfed pythons and abdominal muscles like a child’s drawing of a window. They are extremely erotic, if you’re into that sort of thing.
But despite their sheer physical presence, these Nietzschean beefcakes believe the mind is the greatest muscle of them all.[8] Indeed, the Barbarians spend much of their time deliberating over the question of what is ‘good in life’ – usually by oiling up, swaggering into cities and taking whatever they want. It’s a strange means of contemplation, but it never leaves them short of an answer. They are hedonists, unconcerned with anything except the pursuit of experience and its seizure through individual prowess.[9]
DON’T FORGET TO PACK: OIL
Even if you’re not a particularly beefy sort, you’ll draw a lot of funny looks in Barbarian company if you don’t grease any exposed flesh until it glistens. This will confer the additional benefit of making you slip from the hands of any potential strangle-happy assailants.
PRAISE GRUM
Almost universally, the Barbarians worship the gas giant Grum, loving it just as much as they despise Gak, the ant-faced god. They understand Grum is just a ball of gas with no feelings or agency – but they love it anyway, because it’s so big and impressive. When Barbarians find themselves looking down the barrel of old age, they may choose to muster their strength for a final feat. Taking advantage of the moon’s low gravity, they will sprint right up one of Grondorra’s tallest mountains, before taking a mighty leap from its miles-high peak. While nine out of ten warriors will simply soar away in a long parabola before becoming a smear of red somewhere in the desert, some are strong enough to achieve escape velocity, and will literally jump into SPACE. It’s a hell of a way to go.
Occasionally, Barbarians will congregate in huge nomadic groups in order to storm larger settlements and socialise. During these swarming periods, Barbarians of all genders will mate enthusiastically, and when this results in pregnancy, newborns will be left gently in the wake of the horde’s passing to be raised by wolves.[10] The hordes never last, however – the Barbarians know they are a sort of natural regulator to the development of civilisation,[11] and so always make sure to demolish their factions before long, in glorious infighting over loot.[12]
Animalmen
Grondorra is famous for its proliferation of Animalmen – a species in which the heads and other components of animals are magically fused with extremely buff human bodies.[13] While some types of Animalmen don’t do so well,[14] others (most notably the prolific Lizardmen) can be found in abundance. All the Animalmen love capturing people and are masters of stealth and ambush. Fear not, though: once captured, it’s remarkably easy to astound them into thinking you’re a magician, which usually allows for a prompt escape.
Space Men
Grondorra has its own moon,[15] the grey, barren ball of rock known as Clax. It’s home to a miserable colony of Space Men from Outpost Bravo, determined to survey the savage moon as part of their inscrutable Mission. You’d think their technology would give them a considerable advantage on this primitive world, but any head start is mitigated entirely by their dismal luck and frequent blunders. Their faulty rocketships are constantly crashing, leading to the Space Men getting captured by Animalmen, or ending up bare-chested and fighting off swarms of eels or other vicious creatures. The Space Men pity the Barbarians for their savagery and simplicity, while the Barbarians piss themselves laughing at the fastidious, fragile masculinity of the Space Men and their complete refusal to admit they’re struggling.
PULP FRICTION:
ANIMALMAN IDENTITY POLITICS
Whenever discussing Grondorra’s smorgasbord of Animalman species, the question of whether it’s right to call them ‘men’ comes up. The answer, as I discovered in the battle arena of the Crayfishmen, is complex.[16] While I thought I was being open-minded in calling them Crayfishpeople, in recognition of the range of genitals the flimsiness of their loincloths did little to conceal, the snippies insisted on my calling them men.[17] Oh, and go easy on animal jokes. It’s all too easy to let loose what you think are a series of real thigh-slappers after a jar or two of the local rotgut. But before you ask an Anteaterman ‘why the long face?’ or jokily refuse to play cards with a Cheetahman, think long and hard about whether you are the first person to do so.[18]
The Urrizanians
At any given time on Grondorra, you’ll find a couple of ancient civilisations in a state of advanced senescence, staggering through civilisational twilight in a forlorn wait for the Barbarians to put them out of their misery. For tourists, the dying civilisation du jour is the city state of Urrizan. This crumbling metropolis, groaning under the work of a million sculptors, was once populous and powerful – but glory is long behind it. The city is choked with bureaucracy and tradition to a point where you don’t so much immerse yourself in culture as slowly suffocate in it, and its citizens are stuck in a rut of joyless decadence, consumed with the observance of a million clapped-out rituals. These rituals involve an amount of human sacrifice that would be horrifying if it wasn’t for the sheer incompetence of the priestly caste.[19] Urrizan’s altars are heaped with virgins just one minor intervention away from salvation, and infiltrating the city to free them has become a beloved pastime for young Barbarians and tourists alike.
Sorcerers
In the depths of Grondorra’s Vathek Desert, the notorious Sorcerers build their towers. Genius magicians who’ve wandered away from ancient empires after discovering immortality, these undying tinkerers love the peace and quiet of the desert, as well as the access to loads of skeletons.[20] Whether they’re content to ponder the mastery of the dead or they branch out to try their hand at making legions of Animalmen or other weird monsters,[21] their lifestyle generally boils down to using their minions to acquire treasure, then having it all robbed by Barbarians.
Skeletons
It’s hard to get taken seriously as a Sorcerer without at least a small cohort of Skeleton warriors. Still, they’re a bit shit: Grondorran Skeletons are weirdly jerky, moving in fits and starts as if animated in stop-motion, and tend to be limited to following basic commands and rattling in a menacing fashion. Even so, there are rumours of stray Skeletons congregating in deep-desert ruins and developing impressive communal intelligence over centuries. It’s hard to know the truth, however, as it’s said that when the living intrude on their domain, they just slump into the dust and pretend to be archaeology.
Wildlife
As a world celebrated for its primal character, Grondorra is chock-a-block with monsters of all descriptions[22] and is an unmissable destination for wildlife fanatics.[23]
Grondorra’s volcanic jungles are ruled over by the Dinosaurs, ignoble brutes as emblematic of Grondorra as the Barbarians themselves.[24] They’re not like the dinosaurs of our own past, however. These lizards are terrible in every sense of the word: turd-drab, unreasoning hulks that live for nothing except ripping lumps out of each other in fetid swamps, and will go to outrageous lengths to snap a morsel of human meat between their house-sized jaws. None of them are nice: even the nominal herbivores won’t think tw
ice before dipping their heads from the treetops to guzzle a passing human.[25] Luckily, it’s easy to keep a safe distance from these trudging, nut-brained dunces, since they move at the speed of local government and announce their presence with constant, needless roaring.[26]
Travellers passing through the Badlands east of Urrizan are often advised to stick to established paths, lest they fall prey to Medusae (Homo Craniophidia): gaunt, cannibalistic humans with deep azure eyes and nests of writhing serpents rooted to their scalps. According to some textbook I got bored reading, the ‘snakes’ on their heads are in fact ‘the motile fruiting bodies of a parasitic, cordycepomorphic mycelial mass’ – whatever that means[27] – and feed off the brain tissue of their still-living hosts as they wander aimlessly through the labyrinth of rock. Definitely worth avoiding.
VICIOUS VEG
In focusing on Grondorra’s lethal animal life, it can be easy to forget that even the plants will murder you if they get half a chance. From the Nazahak Horsetrap to Battle Kelp, Biffwort and the notorious Shitkicker Lily, Grondorra’s biomes are carpeted with aggressive flora. Even the desolate plains are not to be trodden lightly: too many travellers have strolled into seemingly harmless veldt only to hear a telltale thrashing and realise they are in a deep thicket of Grondorra’s dreaded Punchgrass.
Eating and Drinking
It’s probably not a surprise to hear that Grondorran cuisine is … fairly meaty. Even within the jungles, only a handful of plants aren’t lethally poisonous, and the plains offer only a few desultory herbs and wild onions. As such, vegan travellers are essentially out of luck. Even drinks here tend to be a fairly fleshy affair: Grondorra’s most popular soft drink is a brew called Greh-ve,[28] while most alcoholic drinks are made from either fermented beast-milk or some kind of blood.[29]
GRONDORRA’S
BEST BARS and RESTAURANTS
The Sword & Sorcery – Outside of getting rat-arsed in tents, there isn’t much of a bar culture on Grondorra. Still, a few years back, an offworld entrepreneur tried to start a town-sized megapub called the Sword & Sorcery, sticking it right in the middle of the Great Plain in the hope of drawing passing Barbarian traffic. Unfortunately, it has been so successful it tends to be burned to the ground on a weekly basis.
The Gilded Urn – Preposterously high-end fine-dining establishment in Urrizan. During the rare moments when the city isn’t in the grip of dysfunctional famine, this restaurant serves overpoweringly floral wines and impossibly labour-intensive delicacies such as hummingbird tongues and candied ape’s breath.
COMMUNAL EATING, BARBARIAN STYLE
When you enter a Barbarian feasting tent, you’ll usually be greeted with a cheery Garunka-gak! (death to the ant-faced god!) from the patrons. It’s best to respond rapidly with Ganoshgrum! (praise to Grum!), or you may be taken for an Antman in disguise and eviscerated on the spot.
To get a seat, you must wrestle one of the incumbent diners to the ground. Obviously, you should seek to persecute any other tourists present, but since the Barbarians respect courage almost as much as prowess, some good sports will feign injury in order to give you a ‘surprise’ victory, should you challenge them.[30]
The feast will usually start with a round of raucous toasts, plus maybe a fight and quick song about Grum. After that, the meal itself comprises three dishes: Rastacah-runn (‘red vegetables’) – the meat of a herbivore, such as a horse or a dire antelope, which counts as a vegetable to the Barbarian palate.
Lidhmugh (‘fightmeat’) – the centrepiece course, which must be an animal capable of killing an adult Barbarian.
Yolledd (‘sweetness’) – foods violently stolen from other people, garnished with looted jewels and precious metals. These foods are almost always meats, rather than desserts as you might expect; the sweetness comes from the satisfaction of taking them.[31]
Lug-glug-lugl[32] – Although the Lizardmen are largely insectivorous, you’ll be astonished by what these scaly culinary geniuses can do with the contents of a shaken bush. At this rustic establishment in the deep jungle, you can enjoy candied tarantulas, stir-fried weevil grubs and antcake, all while enjoying the sight of captured Space Men duking it out with swarms of small but angry creatures in the Combat Holes.
Getting Around
Clearly, given the technological state of Grondorra,[33] not to mention its general aesthetic, muscle power is the only way to get around. The low gravity favours travelling on foot, but if you’re planning on doing any looting, it’s worth springing for a pack beast. Fast travel necessitates booking transit aboard a Space Man rocketship, however, which will seem terribly exciting until you’re crashed in a swamp, choking on chemical smoke and desperately trying to thin a swarm of scorpions with a faulty ray gun.
Currency
Among the Barbarians, gold and valuables are hoarded only as markers of status, and the idea of using money as a token for the exchange for goods or services is laughable. As such, the only way to acquire anything is to take it by force or be given it as a gift,[34] and so what you can get largely depends on how massive and charismatic you are.
STATUSACCOMMODATION FOOD & DRINKENTERTAINMENTSOCIAL PRIVILEGES
You are physically fragile and entirely unlikeable Sleeping in the dust at the edge of a nomad’s encampment A quick slurp from a Wirrux’s udder Watching a fight from the back of a crowd Capture, followed by ten years chained to a millwheel
You are modestly strong, with a winning smile A night in a medium yurt, on a stack of used wolf pelts Several mouthfuls of raw goat meat Hire of a rusty sword and shield for a raid on a Sorcerer’s tower The right to punch a camel square in the jaw
You are a granite-jawed titan; people weep to behold you A night beneath a tent of golden silk, fanned by a legion of adoring eunuchs A diamond-encrusted bucket of dinosaur nuggets Travel on a palanquin, borne on the shoulders of forty less-fortunate tourists A crown, entitling you to seize your destiny by toppling an ancient civilisation
Suggested Outings
The botched sacrifice
Join up with a group of young Barbarians, infiltrate Urrizan’s Holy Quarter as dusk falls, and don priestly robes to attend the weekly sacrifice at the Temple of Krung the Foul. Wait for the very last moment, as the knife hovers above the victim’s chest,[35] then toss a banana skin beneath the executor’s feet and dive to the rescue. The virgin will be secured with manacles of such poor quality that they pop apart in your hands, and the temple guards will literally fall over each other in their scramble to catch you. After that, it’s simply a case of escaping the city via a thrilling raft ride through an underground river and a bit of catacomb-blundering before you emerge into the Eastern Badlands. You’re likely to face moderate quantities of Skeletons, but a good spray of Lazenby’s Skeleton Repellant will see them off.[36]
Lasers and lizards
Stay with the Space Men at Research Station Zeta, their sweaty outpost deep in the Fireheart Jungle. Zeta has poor air con and is plagued by tropical diseases and animal attacks – but you won’t be there long. Simply imply that you’ve seen a strikingly beautiful woman wearing animal skins somewhere in the trees, and the Space Men will scramble to assemble a search party. As a matter of certainty, this search party will be captured by Lizardmen during a thrilling duel of spears and ray guns, after which you’ll be carried to the scaly ones’ picturesque treehouse capital. There, on realising you’ve fallen in with a bad crowd, your hosts will free you, letting you enjoy their exotic home in comfort and peace as the Space Men are carted off to the Combat Holes.
WASTES OF SPACE
There is one exception to Barbarian fiscal policy – when dealing with Space Men, the tribes have agreed on an extended practical joke. Stifling cruel laughs, the bemuscled berserkers swear blind that they use teeth as currency, pointing to the tusks and fangs they wear as jewellery to evidence the fact. Unfortunately, there are no animals on barren Clax, where the Space Men make their home, so if they want to ‘buy’ anything from the Barbari
ans, they are forced to use their own teeth to pay up. There are few sights sadder than that of a Space Man ‘master trader’ sighing miserably through increasingly empty gums while a smirking Barbarian asks him to up his offer on a sackful of meat.[37]
The Temple of Gak
For this trip, you’ll travel with the warband of Brengann the Unstoppable, a relatively affable Barbarian lord. After a warm-up skirmish with a group of Lionmen, followed by a victory feast in which you’ll be faced with the dark question of whether it’s cannibalism to eat the meat of a Lionman,[38] it’ll be time to embark on a gruelling, 200 mile yomp to the Great Temple of Gak, the ant-faced god. There, you’ll fight your way through increasingly dingy sandstone chambers, against cultists who get more and more disconcertingly ant-like as you go. At the temple’s heart you’ll find, replete with blood and reclining on a giant pile of treasure, one of the avatars of Gak – a vast ant with human hands. When you see the avatar, don’t think twice: just jam your sword into its neck and prise its head off in a fountain of gore. If you’re quick enough to get there first, Brengann may allow you to keep it as a souvenir.