Among the new releases from James Edward Raggi the Fourth’s dark fortress in Finland is The Music of Ericha Zann, Jimbo’s misanthropic take on the bard class. I quite like it, but I enjoy a certain amount of uncontrollable background mayhem in my games that not every ref goes for. Obviously, the primary influence here is H.P. Lovecraft’s short story The Music of Erich Zann. James says so in the intro.

But I think I can take a little credit here as well, thanks to my Dillhonker City campaign. It all started in the Halls of Tizun Thane, a classic adventure written by Albie Fiore and published in White Dwarf magazine #18 (1980). James was running a fighter named Graham and stole a necromancer’s wicked black plate armor. He wanted to impersonate one of the bosses in order to get by the guards.

This was a seminal moment in the development of Graham as a character, as he has spent the rest of his career trying to be a necromancer despite having no spellcasting abilities. And he’s been surprisingly successful in his attempts to invoke dark powers and bring doom upon the land. At least part of this success has been due to the Necromantic Tuba he found in a sewer dungeon underneath Dillhonker City.

An early experiment of one Zembrok the Music Magister. The tuba was intended to initiate the Resurrection of the Dead, thereby immanentizing the eschaton. It didn’t quite work as hoped, but it was still capable of animating nearby corpses as zombies and skeletons. A die roll is made each time it is used, with a roll of "1" indicating a malfunction and every number higher than that animating more and more dead. A roll of "6" zombifies every corpse in a 2.5 mile radius.

This last effect has happened twice in the campaign. The first time the party was still in the sewers and emerged into Dillhonker City in a full scale undead panic. Slorm the goblin cleric negotiated with city officials for his faith to be officially recognized in the city in exchange for clearing out all the rampaging deados. The second time was in the Lost City of the Dwarves, which used to be a nice place to visit. Now it stinks less of dwarves and more of death.

I’ve played with James for a couple of years, read much of his work, watched his videos, and collaborated with him on some projects. I think he’s on the same vector as some of the Romantic poets: he likes to follow an idea to the limits of reason or good judgement and then take that idea one step farther. Not out of malice, but out of curiosity. Sometimes the results are nonsense, but sometimes they are sublime.

So anyhoo I think I can take a little slice of the credit for James’s chaotic new approach to the bard. Buy *The Music of Ericha Zann *and maybe get yourself a Broodmother Skyfortress, too. I hear that one is pretty okay, too.

IMPORTANT: Becami of Systematica reminds me that it was her PC, not Jim’s Graham, who initially recovered the Necromantic Tuba from the sewers of Dillhonker. According to her notes the other treasures included a penny farthing bicycle as well as a wooden box containing a black lace hanky, quill, vial of ink, and a comb, and a chess queen (black). IIRC the rest of the chess set could be found in another room that went uninvestigated. None of these items were magical.