Veiled Alliance

by Allen Varney

Veiled Alliance presents the DM with all the information required to create Alliance-centered campaigns on Athas--detailed information about the five aims, adventure hooks for each Alliance, recognition signals, and maps of various headquarters. All the features you need to create thrilling, fundamental challenges to the Alliance on the ruthless world of Athas are now revealed.

Genres: Role Playing Games, Dungeons and Dragons, Fantasy

96 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 1992

About the author

Writer and game designer based for many years in Austin, Texas, USA; currently in Ithaca, upstate New York. Designer of the 2004 edition of the classic science fiction roleplaying game PARANOIA. I operate the Bundle of Holding ( bundleofholding.com ), which presents time-limited offers of tabletop roleplaying game ebooks.

Reviews

[Brian · Rating 4 out of 5]

In a classic sign of a game from the 90s, the intro to the book specifically says that Veiled Alliance is for the Dungeon Master's eyes only. And then later on, it still has DM-specific notes. Oh TSR.

The beginning part of the book is basically terroristrevolutionaryfreedom fighterconspiracy member 101. How to set up a cell structure, how the Alliance minimizes contact between members, how often meetings must be held and how they are secured, the testing done on prospective members, how to quit the Alliance (hint: a body bag) and so on. A lot of it just generic information that could be useful for any clandestine group and I frankly wasn't that interested in it. Sure, cell names like "Mekillot Fire" or "Inix Silt" are kind of neat, but it's hard to get interested in a dozen pages about the way terrorist cells work when it's easy to look it up on the Internet. Just an artifact of its pre-Internet publication.

The beginning section is more interesting when it's dealing with subjects specific to the organization, like the cat-and-mouse war between the Sorcerer Kings' psionic and magical agents trying to sniff them out and the Alliance's psionic and magical agents trying to maintain their secrecy; or Cathexis, the giant psionic communion that puts all members in one mental room if they need to meet as an entire organization; or how the Alliance doesn't care at all about social causes or justice or anything other than protecting its own existance; or the "Green Test" that leaders do of prospective candidates, involving a large area of vegetation, the candidate casting spells, and multiple people training all of their psionic and magical might on them to search for deception; or whether the Alliance should divulge the existance of a secret order of wizards to the general population, almost all of which can't tell the difference between defilers and preservers and react to the mere mention of wizardry by digging out their torches and pitchforks.

There are some weird parts, though. For example, apparently renegade members suffer an attack from a loyal members within 24 hours of their treachery being discovered, then 1d6 attacks the day after that, and then one assassination party with a member of each class, minimum of 8th level, and then if all that fails, 1d6 attacks per day until the target dies or escapes. Does the whole organization just drop everything and throw themselves like lemmings at a defector? Apparently so! Also, only neutral or good members are allowed to join, which is odd in light of the Veiled Alliance's explicitly amoral stance

Things get a bit more interesting once it starts talking about the actual Veiled Alliances that exist in each city--all of which are separate organizations that share only a name and the basic cell structure. I'll do a blow-by-blow for each one, since that's the way the book does it.

Tyr: Tyr isn't really detailed because the book assumes that most campaigns begins in Tyr and suggests that GMs look at the Veiled Alliances of the other cities and then take inspiration to build the Tyrian Alliance. The framework given is a conflict between two members of the Alliance, which splits ub two respective camps based on whether they should reveal the existance of wizards among the populace in the wake of Kalak's death (metaplot!), or whether they should keep to their policy of propaganda and remain hidden.

The main leader of the Tyrian Alliance thinks Divulgence is a terrible idea, and the young Turk leader thinks it's a great idea. Also, she's being egged on by a double-agent sent by Kalak who isn't really sure how to proceed now that Kalak is dead (is Kalak not dead in your game? Oops! Yay, metaplot!), but thinks that forcing the Veiled Alliance to go public would probably lead to all of them dying, so he's pushing for that, setting up the central conflict that the PCs are supposed to stumble into.

It ends with some advice about which way to take the Divulgence debate, suggestions on how to lay the proper tracks for your railroadhow to lay hints as to how the populace would react so the players know what course to take, and a stern warning not to lay any false trails so that, say, the players think that the populace would be okay with wizards going public, so they do go public and then surprise witchburnings! On the one hand, this is kind of a dick move, but on the other hand, there's nothing wrong with players getting the wrong information if the PCs go about it the wrong way or ask the wrong people. The whole section has a very heavy-handed, "Here's how to lead the players through your glorious plot" tone that leaves a sour taste in my mouth.

Balic: Balic's Alliance is doing probably the best out of any of the cities' Alliances, because Dictator Andropinis is such a giant dick that non-wizards and nobles are signing up in droves with the Alliance just to be able to fight back. The organization is even led by a non-wizard, because in Balic, leadership is determined by election. This does lead to the major problem with the Balicite Veiled Alliance, which is that a lot of the higher-ranking counselors will let new members in with a minimum of scrutiny in order to get better votes in the election for leader. They also put on subversive theatre performances in order to reach out to prospective members and to propagandize among the general population.

While the Alliance thrives under noble patronage, their election policy is going to hurt them, because a mole from Andropinis managed to get in with the aid of magical items to act like preserver spells--this seems like the kind of thing they'd look for the Green Test, but apparently it's not foolproof--and learn enough that he could destroy the city's Veiled Alliance if he wanted to. But he doesn't want to, because he wants to blackmail people and get elected leader, so he can lead the Veiled Alliance members to the Forest Ridge, enslave the halflings, found his own city, and rule as Sorcerer King among verdant splendor and beauty!

If you're going to have delusions, might as well have the really satisfying ones, I guess.

Also, they pile on the Hellenism. Nobles wear the chiton and the chlamys, much business takes place in the agora, all the names are Hellenized, and so on. This continues to be a theme as the book moves through its description of the cities. I wrote in my review of Dark Sun that I liked how a lot of the cities took inspiration from cultures that are typically less used in TTRPGs, but this goes a bit far for me. Dark Sun is interesting precisely because it has so many differences from mainstream fantasy and because everything is "similar, but not." Making things the same takes away from that to its detriment, to my mind.

Draj: Most of this chapter is the history and culture of Draj, which is pretty cool and I certainly won't complain too much, but it does seem like the wrong book to have put them in. I probably would have read Veiled Alliance earlier if I had known it doubled as a guide to the seven cities. Like Balic, it's essentially ripped straight off from an existing culture. In this case, Aztec.

Anyway, in Draj the Alliance is headquartered right under Tectuktitlay's nose. Literally--they're holed up in an old ruined pyramid underneath the modern pyramid that he currently lives it. The Alliance isn't active, and it's odd how it's described as "aggressive," because it specifically says that the leader of the Alliance is passive because she's not actually a very good mage. She pretends to be a 14th level mage, but is actually only fourth level and gets by with the help of her lieutenant's psionic powers. Speaking of which, this chapter has an entry for the listed characters' spell appearance, which:

create a shimmering aura, like desert air on the horizon, around his hands and every object in the affected area. His spells also create the sound of desert wind and the smell of dust.

Evocative!

Two more things. To contact the Draj Alliance, the best way is to go try and buy spell components from the market. Oh, and don't pick the wrong merchant, or they'll turn you in to the templars. Or they might just try to swindle you out of your money and pass off shoddy goods. But if you're lucky, you can get in.

Also, there's a brief description of Tectuktitlay's Crystal Garden: "For 14,000 years the finest jewelers of the Seven Cities filled this room with perfect quartz replicas of plants." That's the first real listing of time given in any of the books, and as you might expect, it makes no sense compared to what comes later and kind of damages the timeless background given for the Sorcerer Kings in Dark Sun.

Honestly, I get the impression that they gave each of the seven cities to a different author and told them to write it up without talking to each other.

Gulg: First off, the now-traditional gazetteer of the city. Lalali-Puy occasionally flies into rages and imprisons people, and those people then become The Most Dangerous Game, though it is sure to specify that she does actually want to rule her city well and looks out for her people as a whole. Also, the nobles speak in a deliberately archaic dialect, at least when Lalali-Puy or her templars are present. When they come of age, children are sent into the forest on a vision quest and return with a vision of a totem animal, which determines their later place in life. wizards who have done so can enchant it into a kind of temporary golem, though the preparation takes years and the fetish-doll has a chance to run amok every time it's summoned, so it's not all that useful. The most annoying part of this section is that all the listed totem animals are stuff like hawks, bears, panthers, lynxes, and other animals native to Earth. Where's all the weird, magic-blasted Athasian animals? I didn't even know Athas had bears, and I don't think it should.

When it finally gets to the part about the Gulg Alliance, it gets more interesting. The Alliance doesn't do that much to oppose Lalali-Puy because she's not as bad as most of the others. Instead, it works to restore Athas' greenery. The reason for that is that Lalali-Puy almost eliminated the Alliance and did kill the Council, but one member escaped. He fled into one of her secret groves, where an ancient ghost of a defiler sent him visions about a green Athas. He went totally insane, started recruiting new cells and putting them all under him, and giving orders as though they came from the Council that no longer existed. He also instituted a new initation, where initiates ritually hunt their sponsor and capture them. Needless to say, this isn't popular, and is part of the reason why almost all the cells report to him.

Nibenay: Nibenay rips off of Cambodia and Thailand, like chewing betel nuts, extravagant politeness even when merchants are trying to cheat you, atheist monks seeking enlightenment with everything (it even uses the word Nirvana), and ceremonial dances with brightly-colored dancers.

The mud flats outside the city are the haunting place of the Zwuun, a ghost made up of the spirits of dozens of old preservers. It acts as the patron of the Veiled Alliance in Nibenay, but patron might be a strong word. For one, it cannot be summoned at all. It occasionally responds to need, but no ritual is sure. For another, it's usually benevolent and helpful, giving useful answers to questions asked of it, but about ~20% of the time, it gives intentionally bad advice. Telling people that the spell components they want are in a cave that actually just has a family of deadly monsters.

The Nibenay Alliance really hates defilers and has made their primary mission to oppose them, apparently because the Shadow King is too powerful and secretive to effectively fight, though they really don't give a reason why this is any more true than it would be for any other city. And when you read further, it turns out the real reason they're such fanatical defiler-haters is because the leader's wife left him for a defiler, willingly becoming his apprentice and his lover. The leader says that his wife was killed by a defiler and so it's vengeance, and currently no one suspects the truth, but his leadership might come crashing down if it's revealed. Enter the PCs.

The leader is also trying to make balloons out of the silk made by the moths in the Alliance's headquarters, which is just too awesome not to use.

Raam: Raam is listed as the most diverse city in the Tyr Region and is the only city where humans aren't the majority of the population, though they do form a plurality. The city used to mine gems and alabaster and other precious stones and building substances, but a lot of the mines are played out, and that poverty is part of what creates Raam's current instability. Alabach-Re has created a fake god named "Badna" and tries to use it as a source of external authority, but the citizens are too disgusted with her rule and too smart to fall for such an obvious ploy. Also, she doesn't do much to keep the city in proper order: rats and trash infest the streets, the poor suffer from a lack of medical care, disease is rampant, and crime is constantly on the rise. As befits the Indian source of Raam, citizens are organized in a caste system, from priests all the way down to laborers. Those born into a caste can never leave it, and even associating with members of another caste renders them unclean.

Despite this, much of the city is decorated in fine art. The Sorcerer Queen's palace is covered in reliefs, for obvious reasons, but even ordinary citizens use art as a way to escape the terrible conditions they live in. Even slaves will take the time to decorate a bracelet, or paint a mural on the wall of their mud hut.

As might be expected in a city where the Sorcerer Queen has basically no authority, the Alliance has heavily infiltrated city guard and can basically do whatever they want. That's only a recent development, however. For most of its history, the Raam Alliance barely managed to stay one step ahead of Alabach-Re's templars, until Shatri, one of her daughters, took control of the organization. She organized the chapter into a rigid chain of command, and she was the one who managed to insert agents at all levels of the Sorcerer Queen's government. Joining is mostly a matter of Shatri finding and choosing you, and initiation is searching out new spell components or exposing a member of the kuotagha, Raam's secret police.

Shatri is also trying to find out how to become an avangion, though she doesn't really know it exists, only that there's something out there that's powerful beyond what she knows. She only knows that she's on a race against time before Raam erupts into a full-scale civil war. Enter the PCs?

One really neat part is that Shatri has taken advantage of the city's caste system and put the headquarters of the Veiled Alliance in a crematorium. Only Alliance members or truly fanatical servants of Alabach-Re--what few she has left--would risk ritual pollution to enter such a place to search for enemies, and most of them wouldn't imagine that anyone else would willingly enter such a place either.

Urik: As you might expect from a city modeled on Babylon, Urik is famous for its code of laws, which are simple, comprehensive, and of exceeding clarity. Of course, Hamanu also changes them whenever he feels like it, which kind of undercuts the whole justice thing, but it's otherwise sound. It relies on the principle of talion--cf. lex talionis--if someone steals from you, they must pay you the value of the goods or work an equivalent amount. If they kill someone, the penalty is death, and so on. Hamanu has a whole philosophy of order vs. chaos, where he is an agent of change destined to upturn the order that is strangling Athas, but it doesn't really apply to the laws of his city. Unless he decides that it does, in which case hopefully you aren't relying on having memorized the law.

Most of the city is Hamanu's temple complex, though that is mostly just empty desert. A lot of the city's economy is dedicated either to the army or to building monuments to the glory of the god Hamanu, but the citizens find time to visit the temple priests and priestesses for their "favors" or throwing pots, which are the main art form of the city.

Urik's Alliance was a shattered wreck for years after Hamanu made it his mission to destroy it. It came to prominence against under a new leader, who forged it into a potent force and dedicated himself to overthrowing the Sorcerer King, but he has recently vanished without a trace, leaving the Alliance struggling once more. It has splintered into two rival factions, each with their own structure and command. The factions hate each other, and give no indication to visitors or prospective members that the other faction exists except for possible covert attempts to entice them if they notice the other faction's interest, so any initiate automatically makes deadly enemies of a bunch of wizards. Adventure!

The factions split over the old leader's disappearance. One leader is the old leader's bodyguard, who says (truthfully) that he doesn't know what happened to him, and the other faction is composed of the people who think he's lying. The first advocates the violence overthrow of Hamanu, and the second thinks that it's better to hide and gather strength. Hence the bitter rivalry.

One interesting practice is making pots with mouth motifs and enchanting them with magic mouth spells. That's a nice bit of color.

A final note on the chapter: this is the first book I've read that has demographic information for the seven cities. The cities, at least, are apparently majority human-dominated (at least 60%), and each entry except Tyr has a demonym for the residents of that city. This is the kind of detail that's probably a waste of space in this specific book, but I love it anyway because the proportion of freedmen to slaves and the background of the inhabitants tells a lot about what each city is probably like. Balic is 5% Patricians, 15% freedmen, and 80% slaves, and with the Hellenic influence, I can immediately jump to Sparta as the obvious parallel. Or just ripoff Sparta completely, since it's basically exactly the same...

Also, all the culture-specific terms from real-world history, like Draj's tlacochcalco (armories) or Nibenay's apsaras (female dancers) provide further evidence for my instinct to make each city have its own language. As does this line:

Also, travellers face greater language problems in Raam than in other city-states. Every narrow street buzzes with conversations in half a dozen languages.

Vindication!

The book ends with a description of the Veiled Alliance in smaller towns and villages, and ways to integrate the Veiled Alliance into the campaign. It does stress that the Alliance is an excellent source of adventure ideas, and this is true--there have been plenty small tidbits sprinkled throughout the book, even if some of them are a bit more railroady than I might like. And, more fitting with what I said about this book being a good survey of the city states, it also has a breakdown of how many wizards there are--less than 0.5% of the population are preservers, apparently, and less than 10% of those are 8th level or higher, while defilers are three to five times more common.

Veiled Alliance is a good depiction of the Veiled Alliance, but it's a much better introduction to the various city states, and it's worth getting for that alone.

[Benjamin]

Dark Sun 9/32

(Also, I did some math and I think I own about 75% of the Dark Sun line in physical form.)

(Also, to make sure that I am reviewing these in publication order, I went through and organized every year by month, so I can tell you this book is from October.)

Much like Slave Tribes and Dune Trader, this book takes one aspect of Dark Sun and dives into it, especially giving a view of the topic in all seven cities. So here we look at the Veiled Alliance, the secret group of preservers--wait, let me go back for a second.

So I mentioned that one of Dark Sun's core premise is that over-use of magic killed the world; and I mentioned at some point that there's two types of magic: defiling magic (which sucks life from the world) and preserving magic (that doesn't). But your average person in Athas doesn't really make that distinction; and in most of the cities, anyone who does magic in the open will be killed by a mob, if they aren't arrested by the sorcerer-king's agents.

(Now the sorcerer-kings are all defilers too and sometimes they train or recruit defilers, but everyone hates preservers.)

Enter the Veiled Alliance, an organization in each city (each alliance is separate, there's no real connection between them) dedicated to helping preservers escape and survive. And as this book points out, that is what they are dedicated to -- not necessarily the salvation of the world or the overthrow of tyranny or anything noble like that. There's a chance that, if your PCs rumble the Veiled Alliance, they won't be friends.

In fact, this book points out that the Veiled Alliance is good as a story device or patron to give missions, but not necessarily people who will always align with the PCs; that said, they do say that making them enemies won't be a good story engine because it will put the PCs in a less-than-heroic position. Which is funny, in some ways, because wasn't that the point of Dark Sun? Ah well, it's hard to shake a habit, and D&D is a power fantasy, sure, but it's also a fantasy about being epic heroes.

The bulk of this book is focused on the Veiled Alliance in the seven cities, and it says that each city should have a different feel: in one city, the Veiled Alliance might have a lot of friends, whereas in another, they have nowhere to turn. I'll come back to that claim in a moment, but first I want to note the slight oddness here: though the book is ostensibly about the Veiled Alliance, this is the book that has the most information on each of the seven cities, from their notable people to locations to culture. Like, it's in this book that we really see that Nibenay loves dance, while Balic has a whole class of people who declaim poetry. Now, I love to get this information (even if, yes, it kind of boils down to "Balic is Ancient Greece/Rome, etc."), but it seems funny to me that it is in this book.

Now, back to the claim that each city's Veiled Alliance is different: well, there's certainly some nuance that separates them--the Veiled Alliance where the leader is insane and in thrall to a ghost in a tree is different from the city where the Veiled Alliance is split into two factions or the one where a defiler has worked his way up through the ranks. And yet, almost each city has the same general structure and idea behind it: there's a problem in the Veiled Alliance and it's up to the PCs to solve that problem--and most of the problems are "someone in the high council has a secret." So maybe it's just that I'm reading this book while watching the latest Batman movie--you know, the one that's supposed to focus on his detective skills but where he apparently doesn't speak Spanish?--but I feel like the big adventure in each of these chapters is "find out the secret to save the Alliance."

This book does give a bunch of adventure hooks for each city's Veiled Alliance, but I wasn't set aflame with excitement by them, and they don't always seem to be in line with the style of play that the book sets out. For the worst instance of that, the city of Nibenay is supposed to be a nightmarish, shadowy campaign, where the Veiled Alliance doesn't know who to trust and betrayal is common; and the adventure hooks in that city are--the leader of the Veiled Alliance finishes his hot air balloon and invites the PCs to try it out?

So, as much as I like the city information here, I like the idea behind this book a little more than the execution.

[Arthur B · Rating 4 out of 5]

Will be useful to most Dark Sun campaigns, whether the PCs are members of the Alliance or simply run across them. Full review: https://refereeingandreflection.wordp...