Welcome to Modl-Urg
Rudy Balbach's Fantasy Roleplaying Cosmos
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"Elvish Motherf---er! Do You Speak It?"
Rudy's Dungeon Masters Guide was a first-edition copy he'd found at Wonderbook. A roleplaying purist, Rudy would have nothing to do with the glossy reprints, the cover with the green-robed Dungeon Master opening golden doors to a hoard of treasure nor the "2nd edition" cover depicting a stereotypical red dragon and a Gandalf-like magic-user mid mutual scorch. ("Why would you fight a red dragon with fire?" Rudy would scoff upon seeing the cover. "They only have complete immunity to it!") Even if the first edition was outdated, he preferred the artistically inept but decidedly more demonic painting on the front of the earlier edition, an image that had doubtless been the very reason parents in the early eighties had feared that gangs of pimply Satanists had taken over the basement to celebrate Black Mass. For what better to attract a boy's attention and incite his imagination than "an encounter between three adventurers and an efreet on the Elemental Plane of Fire" and a back cover depicting "the fabled City of Brass… floating over a flame-swept sea of oil"? Tucked into the back of the tome, which he used primarily as a backboard to write on rather than as a rulebook, were Rudy's notes on the campaign he was leading, set in a fantasy world of his own creation.
...
Rudy's homespun fantasy world was called Modl-Urg, a Tolkienesque realm mixing medieval Europe and Western myth with shades of Pern and Krynn. Though Modl-Urg was home to a complete pantheon of gods, Fate there was ultimately in the hands of the Demiurgos of the realm—that is, Rudy and his great big bag of dice. Despite Rudy's exasperated insistence, the players rarely used the title "Demiurgos," preferring the decidedly more facetious "God-Rudy." This gave them someone they knew personally to curse when they found their characters suffering Job-like on the Plains of Despair. When such imprecation occurred explicitly in the game-world of Modl-Urg, Rudy made a point of redirecting the complaint to the Demiurgos, thus filling both the role of interceding saint and that of supreme entity—a convoluted theology if ever there was one.
None of them was aware of the full intricacy of Modl-Urg, and Rudy never revealed the existence of the spiral notebook full of maps of the cosmogonic-theological order of his invented universe: the planes and demiplanes, the nether realms and their goetic hierarchies, the middle realms of the sub-divine (of which Modl-Urg was but one), and upper echelons of ethereality (the so-called Ten Heavens), or the one hundred and two elemental cities (not to mention the impure alloy worlds connecting some of them) and their catalogues of riches.
Blissfully ignorant of the details, the others were satisfied merely to play in the most mind-blowingly realistic fantasy world they had ever experienced, one that allowed them near infinite choice while presenting challenges sufficient to keep them entertained. And, of course, they were delighted that they got to explore, plunder, and kill some stuff.
...
(Re: A photo album in Rudy's basement bedroom)
The album was a record of Rudy's Hajj, not to the holy city of Islam, but to MECCA, the Milwaukee Exposition & Convention Center & Arena, where Gen Con '87 had been held. The trip—a seemingly interminable drive from the East Coast to the Midwest, about which Rachel had complained to no end and during which she had remained car sick for sixteen solid hours—had been Rudy's thirteenth birthday present. Along with about three rolls' worth of pictures, the album contained sundry memorabilia from the event, like Rudy's admission ticket stub and a schedule of events detailing the twelve time slots spread out over the four days of the convention with hand-written notes on which events Rudy had been most enthused to attend.
Despite his oft professed hatred for having his photograph taken (he was constantly diving out of a shot or ducking behind someone before the flash went off), the pictures were of Rudy with various other gamers: Rudy arm-in-arm with another thirteen year old wearing a wizard costume; Rudy between two overweight, graying men with beards, neither of whom were smiling though Rudy bore a grin that stretched from ear to ear; and a much prized, autographed picture of Rudy with Gary Gygax, the visionary mind behind Dungeons & Dragons and cofounder of Gen Con. Also in the mix were a few action shots of Rudy painting roleplaying miniatures at the conference's Miniature Open (where he had placed third), Rudy asleep on a hotel bench with a Piers Anthony paperback shading his face, and Rudy throwing dice while the other players at his gaming table clutched their heads in apparent anguish.
Who would have thought that Milwaukee, of all places, would have become the cynosure of his existence, the center of all his adolescent hopes and dreams, for four straight days? Certainly not Rudy's family, who had rued greatly his insistence that they all come with him. Rudy had arrived at the convention—the world's largest gaming event and, at that point, the most important thing Rudy had ever done—with the sort of lunatic enthusiasm and crazed determination more often associated with the busloads of blue-haired slot addicts that descend in droves upon Atlantic City and Las Vegas. But Rudy had not made his pilgrimage to MECCA merely for the joy of the game. Nor had he gone just for the rare opportunity to meet the roleplaying gurus who had dreamt up the multifarious worlds that populated Rudy's head as much as his characters populated them. Rudy had gone for one reason: to crush the competition and leave behind a smoking pile of paladins, rangers, magic-users, and sundry other warriors.
He'd brought with him a single battle-tested character—his best ever and the very same he had used to conquer the clandestine roleplaying ring in the stockroom at Brainstorm Comics: a seven-foot-tall, Chaotic-Evil half-orc armed with a five-chained flail, a helmet carved from the skull of a mystic ram, dragon-skin armor and a shield of basilisk hide, and a +5 bad attitude, called Augrak.
After playing eight sessions in which he mostly loosed his unholy violence upon the sundry netherworld creatures unfortunate enough to cross his party's path, on the third day of the convention Augrak turned his bloodlust upon his companions in a bid to kill them all for their magic items. This came as no surprise to the other players, since Rudy had been threatening to kill them from the start of the game, boasting (in the game world) about his unbeatable magic weapons, great strength, and evil genius, and (in the real world) about his incredibly lucky dice, flawless strategy, and evil genius. But the other players, many of them twice Rudy's age or older, had snickered at Rudy's threats and reminded him, in the eloquent words of one chubby black gentleman in an overly tight Revenge of the Jedi (sic) t-shirt, which a single glob of strawberry soft-serve had rendered significantly less valuable on the rare merchandise collector's market, "We been playin' this shit since before you was knee-high to a Jawa." But once the onslaught began, Augrak's enemies had been able to do little to contain him.
During the first three days of the convention, both in and out of the game, Rudy had secretly built up a coalition of other evil player-characters, and he had curried favor with some of the Game Masters, giving him access to the nastier NPCs during game play and allowing him to take his group of marauders from one table to the next in a cross-campaign, cross-RPG-system raid. The ad hoc alliance he had assembled for the last three gaming slots on Day Four made quick work of the Ravenloft pocket dimension Rudy had started in. They divvied up the booty then went on to become the scourge of the conference, rolling in an ever expanding army of darkness across seven worlds on four planes of existence and eventually storming the heavens, chopping down Yggdrasil, burning Asgard, and giving free reign to chaos over several formerly lawful dimensions. The Lawful Good were the first to die, and horribly, but not even the Neutral were spared. Chaotic characters were set off like so many strings of firecrackers, wreaking havoc in ways that even Rudy had not imagined. Rape and pillage were the order of the day. Once they had served their purpose, however, they too were slaughtered wholesale to make way for the dark reign of Rudolfine terror.
The players who sought to end the carnage and prevent this roleplaying Ragnarök were, in the final hours of gameplay, like desperate gamblers at the blackjack table. Hoping to regain their losses in life and property, the RPG addicts tossed their best characters on to the sacrificial pyre. They were consumed in the wildfire that Rudy had created. Their new Dark Lord destroyed them all mercilessly, using their magical items against the next batch of unfortunate souls to stand united against him. Lady Luck had kissed his dice. (Luck be a hundred-headed, 25th-level Sumerian serpent-goddess of chthonic chaos!) Those involved in unrelated games prayed for death when they heard the approach of the marauders from across the frenzied convention floor. Rudy laid waste to the Seven Kingdoms, multitudes of vanquished in his wake. And what had started as a small buzz at one of the back table of the convention center soon turned into a frantic scramble to escape. People were yelling for reinforcements. A group of Cymrilians organized a Neomorph alliance and magically transported a massive army into the męlée, only to be overrun by a hoard of bugbears, kobolds, fire giants, beholders, and mind flayers. When a group of marines recruited from the future of Gamma World were overtaken, Rudy's allies took command of their vehicles and strafed the enemy with nukes, leaving half of Middle-earth in a nuclear winter and nullifying the very future from which the enemy had come. In an hour, whole campaigns had been either rendered paradox worlds incapable of entering the fray or had been simply obliterated, depending on the GM's interpretation of the workings of space-time.
When Rudy's parents had shown up, they had been surprised by the arrival of the police, who had been called after an out-of-place Vulcan had started a fistfight with an errant Wookie, which had caused what would later be called "The Great Star Trek–Star Wars Schism." The Balbach's found their son standing on a chair in the back corner of the room, surveying the chaos and calmly calling out orders to his generals with a sneer of cold command befitting a fantasy/sci-fi Ozymandias.
Afterwards, Mrs Balbach had made Rudy apologize to Gary Gygax. But he'd managed to get the autographed picture with his hero.The trip had been a high point in Rudy's life. But once he had left, his interest in roleplaying, without quite waning, shifted. He had achieved about as much as one could as a player-character. He had made a name for himself at Gen Con, the legend of Augrak would live on in infamy, and now he could retire with his half-orc on top of the world. From then on, his only interest in playing was as a world builder, rather than a destroyer. Having played at being Siva, now he would be Vishnu. Or better, the blinking Indra behind each roll of the die.
He'd set Augrak on a burning boat and sent him floating out to sea. Literally. Fashioning the character sheet into a little boat, he'd lit it on fire and sent it down the Monocacy. Ever since then, he had been a Dungeon Master exclusively.