Thinking about my recent post mentioning Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser, I remembered that F&M were statted up in Deities and Demigods. I looked them up – yep, they are both fighter-thieves.
The entire Nehwon section of Deities and Demigods is pretty interesting. Last time I read it carefully was in high school, way before I read the Fritz Leiber stories, so it’s nice to see these stat blocks contextualized. I don’t even remember what I thought of Nehwon at the time – did I recognize that it was from modern fiction? or was I like “What kind of crazy, obscure world religion is this?”
A couple of stat block surprises: Death, for instance.
MOVE: Infinite
Well, that’s fun. I guess he has to move around pretty fast to travel from the dark underside of the world to collect all those souls.
CLERIC/DRUID: 30th Level Cleric
FIGHTER: 30th Level Fighter
MAGIC-USER/ILLUSIONIST: 30th level in each
Wow, Death really has a lot of merit badges. (By the way, 30th level seems to be the level cap for the gods: Odin, for comparison, has no class levels above 30th level, and Thor’s highest level is 20th as a fighter.)
THIEF/ASSASSIN 15th Level Assassin
BARD/MONK: 23rd Level Bard
OK, Death only has FIFTEEN levels of Assassin? He has more levels of BARD? You gotta figure, either Death has no assassin levels (your merciful 19th century solace-dispensing death) or he is the ULTIMATE ASSASSIN. As it is, though, if I had to choose one Nehwon god to inescapably kill a dude, and a different one to win a Battle of the Bands, right now it looks like I’m tapping Death for the battle of the bands, and I’ll take Rat God as my assassin.
The other peculiar entry in the Nehwon mythos is Pulgh:
Pulgh (hero)
Pulgh does not appear in any of the currently published works about Nehwon, although a cousin, Pulg, is mentioned in “Lean Times in Lankhmar”. Pulgh is the greatest warrior of Lankhmar (although when Fafhrd and Mouser are in the city, Pulgh would be hard pressed to claim he was the best in that place…)
What? He’s not in any “currently published works?” What does that even mean? Who is this guy? And what’s this about his cousin Pulg?
Tags: oldschool
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He has no more than 15 levels of Assassin or 23 levels of Bard because those are the maximum levels available in those classes. There aren’t rules for levels above them. You could make up rules on the fly based on the class tables, but apparently they didn’t want to make you do that.
Also: does a dude really need levels in Assassin when he has 30 in C/F/M/I?