Barsoom Tales II: Romance, Revolution and BLOODY REVENGE!!! -- COMPLETE

[barsoomcore]

What A Woman's Got To Do: 21

Three angry women stood around the limp body of Etienne.

Arrafin glared at Elena. Elena glared at Yuek. Yuek yawned elaborately, one slender hand in front of her mouth.

"Do you have a better idea? Or are you just going to stare at me until your friend starts to decay?"

Elena's scowl took on an even angrier twist. Behind her, the remaining civilians waited silently, watching the bitter exchange with worried, uncertain eyes.

"Do you have to be such a bitch all the time? Our friends are dead, you evil c**t!"

Yuek smirked, but Arrafin spoke before Elena lost her temper entirely.

"Elena, she's going to help bring Etienne back. Please."

"It's okay, darling. She'd like to forget that I already helped bring her back."

"F**k you! I wish you'd left me dead! You think this erases the millions you've killed?"

"Pull your gun out again, Elena. I bet that makes you feel better."

"What is WRONG with you? Don't you have any--"

"Didn't you hear Isaac? I turned good. I'm all better now."

The three women went back to glaring at each other. Etienne's body lay on a hastily-assembled travois, wrapped in torn robes. His injuries appeared to have healed, but he lay lifeless and empty. The travois sat cross-wise in the ancient road, with Arrafin and Yuek standing on the side back towards Zuyang, the terrible whirlwind of souls still visible rising up behind them, while Elena stood on the opposite side, with the civilians behind her.

Arrafin's mouth twisted as she considered Yuek's words.

"Speaking of Isaac..."

Elena sighed.

"You mean, our friend who used to be Isaac until he turned into an enormous panther and ran away? Yeah, well, if I run into him -- and he's not a cat -- I'll tell him you're... what? Coming along a little later? With Etienne?"

"Yeah. We'll be along."

"Fine. Then I'll see you soon."

"Yeah."

"Great."

"Okay."

"See you."

"Yeah. See you."

Arrafin and Elena stared at each other. Elena thought back to how her friend had been at first, shy and lost in books and so unaware of the world around her. A girl, coltish and hesitant. They'd all felt so protective towards her. And now. Standing beside a former monster who'd lost all her supernatural powers, but who stood no less striking with her exotic beauty.

Still. A monster.

"How long were you lying to us, Arrafin? Did you laugh at us? Did you think you were better than us?"

"Elena. It doesn't matter now."

"It matters. It matters that you went behind our backs when we trusted you."

Arrafin shook her head.

"I love her."

Elena turned her glare on Yuek.

"I will always hate you for taking her away from us. You'll always be a monster in my eyes."

For just a moment, there was a sympathetic sadness in the Lohanese woman's slanted eyes.

"We have that much in common, then. Come on, Arrafin."

Yuek hoisted up the travois with an easy shrug of her shoulders and without looking back began dragging Etienne's body back down the pitted cobblestones. Arrafin brooded at Elena but just as the Saijadani woman turned away, the Naridic girl rushed at her and threw her thin arms around broad shoulders.

"Elena. I'm so sorry. About. About everything. I didn't mean. I just."

She pulled back, tears in her eyes.

"I do love her, Elena. I can't explain it. Maybe after we've got Etienne back we could. Maybe talk about it. If you."

Elena's scowl twisted even further.

"Yeah. Of course. After you get Etienne. You better go."

They stared at each other, neither quite able to find the words to express what they both feared. The ending of a friendship. Arrafin had a terrible premonition she would never see Elena again, but she couldn't follow her friend.

Not when her lover was headed in the other direction, grimly dragging Etienne's corpse behind her.

"Be safe."

The two women turned away from each other. Elena strode further up the inclined roadway and gathered the civilians around her.

"Alright, everyone. We're going to get out of this. The coast is a few days' journey from here, and from there we can find a port city if we just keep heading south. From there I'm sure we can find transport home."

They had a thousand questions, all of which were variations on "Are we going to survive?" Elena could only offer reassurances she didn't feel herself, but she got them moving and that was enough for now. The little band made its way up the switchback road leading over the ridge that overlooked the city.

At the top of the ridge Elena looked back.

Zuyang lay spread out across a broad valley beneath them, black ruins in a blasted landscape. It looked like some sort of angry god had punched the earth here, pounding the city flat and spraying death in all directions.

Far below, just where the road entered the crumbling remains of the city wall, she could make out two figures making their way into the heart of the metropolis.

Elena scowled and turned away. She concentrated, seeking for some sign of her friend Isaac. To her surprise, he was nearby and asleep. She crossed over to Hauthar, the burly Naridic soldier.

"One of my friends is down in that ravine. He's asleep, but we should be cautious. He--"

"Yeah. He turned into a cat."

"That's the one."

"Let me load my musket."

*****

Two women staggered into Shang's laboratory, both wide-eyed and panting. Arrafin leaned against a wall, trying to catch her breath.

"Did you? Did you see? Shang? And. Collette?"

Yuek let Etienne's body crash to the flagstones.

"Shang? No. I just heard. So much screaming. Ancestors."

Arrafin put her hands to her head. She concentrated hard, trying to drive out the visions and terrors that had filled her vision.

"Okay. We have to do this. Do this now."

Yuek was already unstrapping Etienne's corpse from the travois. With an unladylike grunt she heaved the half-Kishak onto the first table, and stabbed tubes into him. She reeled backwards but managed to pull herself up onto the second table. Her grunts of pain were more ladylike as she inserted unsavoury tubes into her own body.

"I hate this bastard. Arrafin. Tie me down. So I don't thrash."

"Right, right."

It seemed like their breathing was somehow amplified, echoing in this terrible gleaming chamber until it was even louder than the hurricane outside. Arrafin fumbled with straps and then found one of the remaining crystal spheres. She cast her mind upwards.

oh my god what's baby the baby she the whole wall i never fire god my arm how my arm where the noise fire what help me help me help help help help help

Arrafin collapsed to the floor, drooling as her mind continued to sort through a frantic mass of shrieking memories, seeking those ones that belonged to her young friend.

And at last. Brash and reckless and brave. Etienne.

She yanked, no cajoling this time no time she just pulled and pulled and slammed Etienne into the sphere. She had just enough strength to drop the sphere into the mechanism.

Yuek, as dazed as she was, lay crying in anticipation of the agony about to strike her. She heard the sphere drop into place and for a second thought that maybe it wouldn't work this time.

And then her body heaved, arcing up as she screamed, tearing out the back of her throat with her terror and her pain. She felt Shang's legacy reaching into her, torturing her one more time and an endless parade of the tortures she'd suffered and inflicted over centuries hammered through her now-mortal mind.

Yuek Man Chong screamed and screamed and screamed. Her soul was partially drawn out of her, bound into Etienne was a sort of stitching for his own soul. She was weakened and torn and the pain went on and on and on and she screamed and screamed and screamed.

Arrafin put her hands over her ears. She couldn't watch her lover suffering so she watched Etienne, watching his eyes and his chest, waiting for the sudden inhalation there it is and she leapt for the controls, shutting the infernal machine down immediately.

Yuek wept, moaning with sobs as Arrafin untied her. Her dark eyes rolled alarmingly but she managed to focus on Arrafin at last.

"Ara-chan. I don't feel so good."

Untied, she crashed to the floor in a tangle of long limbs. Her head flopped to one side and she lost track of Arrafin until the Naridic girl grabbed hold of her.

"Okay. It's okay. Etienne? Can you walk?"

"Eerg. Afl."

Arrafin took a deep breath and tried not to cry. She could feel her sanity slipping away, and memories of what Elena had done to herself here kept coming back to her. She had a pistol in her bag...

With a shudder, Arrafin drew the gun from her bag and hurled it off down the length of the lab. It clattered and slid under some mechanical apparatus.

"Okay. Man Chong? Can you stand? Come on, I'll help you to the Sanctuary. Come on, my love. I'll help you."

Leaning on the skinny Naridic girl, Yuek managed to get to her feet and they made their unsteady way out of the lab.

"Etienne? Just wait here. I'll be right back, okay? Don't move."

"Blbbgfm."

"Good. I'll be right back."

Gral fluttered over their heads as they climbed the stairs, but zipped down to tuck himself into Arrafin's shoulder as they emerged into the insane fury of Zuyang. Arrafin yelled over the shrieking winds.

"Come on. Come on, just a little more. Come on."

Slowly, staggering from one foot to the next, the two women made their way around splintered blocks of granite, past the mute foundations of what were once houses or business or something, across a dust-strewn street full of holes and irregular lumps where cobbles had come loose. Yuek fell to her knees, and Arrafin, unable to support the weight of the larger woman, collapsed with her.

"Ara-chan. I can't. Just leave me. Let me die, Arrafin. Please. I hurt so much. Please. I'm so tired, Ara-chan."

Arrafin burst into tears, but she turned her sadness into rage and heaved on her lover's arms.

"Come on, damn you! I have been through too much to give up on you now. Please, Man Chong, please. I need you. Please. Come on. Just a little further. You can see the gate, right there. Come on. Please."

She pulled and pulled, and at last, the bone-weary Lohanese woman struggled to her feet and they limped the last hundred yards to the Sanctuary gate.

Inside, the terrors subsided. The grass was green and thick and Yuek crashed down, fainting. Arrafin knelt beside her, still manic with fear and stress, stroking black hair from a still-perfect face.

"Safe now. Safe and perfect always now. Always love. Always."

Her head came up, lolled side to side, and focused on the gate.

"Etienne. Yes. You stay. I get. Him. Back soon. Love. Love. Always."

Arrafin pushed herself up and staggered back into the ruins. She had to get Etienne. The slight figure, bent sideways against the howling wind, reeled drunkenly along the devastated street.

In the wrong direction. Arrafin was lost.

She saw Matai Shang suddenly before her, laughing as he tore her father to pieces.

No. Vision. Not real. No.

Stones melted and ran, laughing at her, making faces. Her lover's face, laughing and sneering.

No.

Something shrieked, sobbed and a child ran in front of her, laughing and spurting blood from its mouth. Arrafin leapt back, tripped and fell.

Her head struck an upthrust stone. Bone cracked and splintered. Blood erupted from a terrible gaping hole in the back of her head. Her eyes stared upwards, empty, dust starting to gather on the still-wet corneas.

Gral shrieked inside. His tiny body clung to her as he keened a grief no creature so small had ever felt. All his world died before him and he had only suffering to replace it.

*****

In the relative calm of the Sanctuary, a beautiful if somewhat bedraggled Lohanese woman opened her eyes.

"Arrafin?"

Yuek Man Chong sat up, looking around her.

Looking around at all the dancing, capering, giggling figures around her. Looking up at the couple standing there. The woman smiled and made a gesture of introduction to the antlered man beside her.

"The King desires you. You shall be his slave now. And you shall please him, Beauteous One."

Overhead, thousands of dead souls, unaware of anything around them, unaware even of the new soul that had joined them, just kept screaming and screaming and screaming.

THE END

 

[frostrune]

AHHHHHHH!!!! They're all dying. I have a feeling Madam Yuek will sacrifice herself to bring Arafin back.

My man Isaac is still kickin though.

This is a rough end game for the heroes. Good story though.

Frostrune

 

[Desdichado]

I like this extended ending. Wrap-ups are always the most difficult part of a campaign for me; mine always seem to fizzle.

 

[barsoomcore]

Sorry, I forgot to type the last two words of that last update. Sorry about that.

Not so much of an extended ending, you see. That was the end of the last session.

So I know, I know, you want to know what happened to everyone.

Arrafin does NOT come back. She stays dead. Etienne, Elena and Isaac all receive boons from the Tarn -- there's actually a bit of story missing around them, as Nevid had forged a bit of a relationship with them.

And uh, Nevid didn't die here in the actual campaign. He survived this and JOINED the Tarn (that was the boon he asked for).

So Season Three started with Isaac, Etienne, Aubrey (remember Aubrey) and two strangers suddenly finding themselves in a bizarre jungle. The strangers included the Old Kook (who turned out to be a member of the Tarn who was sort of "riding" Nevid around) and a Kishak woman who turned out to be the Nevakada officer responsible for the party's case file. She'd been blamed for the disaster on board the party's ship (where the Nevakada totally failed to kill the party with a bunch of demons) and had been sent here.

"Here" turned out to be a wacky "dimension" called Kiriku, which had been created ages past by the goddess Ky'in when she needed somewhere to put a vast army of draconic sorcerer-soldiers that just wouldn't die. Kiriku wasn't as stable as Barsoom and it appeared that folks who hung around here started to change into awfully weird forms.

Like Spider Women. And Ghouls. And Yang Fei, the giant centipede with a cheerful fellow's head, who joined up with the group and followed them around.

Elena showed up as well, and it turned out the Nevakada had acquired all these "demons" that they could control but that they didn't really know very much about. What they did know was that if they commanded a demon to take someone away, that someone was never seen again. Because they brought the someones to Kiriku. And it was impossible to get from Kiriku back to Barsoom.

Of course, PCs being PCs, they found a way, but they inadvertently made it possible for Gedak Gan, the Tyrant's Shade and ruler of Kish, to return as well.

If you've been paying attention, that will surprise you, since the Tyrant's Shade was already ruling Kish. It turned out there'd been a switcheroo, and so our heroes found themselves having to fight not one but TWO mad undead emperors with legions at their disposal.

It also turned out that Barsoom wasn't TOTALLY stable itself, and that in fact it was beginning to unravel. Mechanisms had been put in place long ago, but the knowledge of how they worked had been lost and the mechanisms were starting to fail.

Season Three ended with the fights against the Shades (and this is where Nevid actually died, in exactly the manner described in this Story Hour).

With respect to the fate of Arrafin and Madame Yuek, the ex-vampire was returned to the mortal world after a year and day as the brutalized slave of the Tarn, and immediately set about trying to recover her beloved. By the time the PCs made it back to Barsoom, she had gathered an army and collected a bunch of sorcerers and was trying to get someone to retrieve Arrafin's soul.

Unfortunately, Matai Shang wasn't quite as dead as everyone had hoped.

Season Four started with the Blood Council coming to discuss some things with the party.

First off, the BC admitted that they'd been running a sort of breeding program a la the Bene Gesserit, to produce a sort of super-psion that could resist the goddess Ky'in who was making her big comeback play (this had actually started in Season One, but things were finally coming to a head). Thing is, the BC were basically decent folks and never "bred" people forcibly. They just tried to encourage the right strains to cross paths, and threw obstacles in the way of undesirable matches.

But once the Blood Mother had her mojo back, she realised WHY Shang had destroyed the BM's soul in the first place. He'd taken control of the BC for a century, and had "accelerated" their program with forced breeding of prisoners, and had produced their Kwisatz Haderach well ahead of schedule. The child was born the same year Matai Shang died. The child had been prepared with special rituals and so now, the one hope of humanity to resist the encroachments of an insane, all-powerful goddess, was a baby...

...with the soul of Matai Shang in its chubby little body.

Our heroes set about trying to assemble a "dream team" of powers to face up to Ky'in, but things went from bad to worse: the great warrior king of the draconic Keyadar managed to follow them from Kiriku and began laying waste, Barsoom was struck by dozens of bizarre asteroids that brought with them the intelligences of the ancient foul evils that originally created the entire world, which set about dominating religious practices across Barsoom so as to allow themselves to manifest fully in the world.

Things went very poorly indeed. But it turned out that the TARN were in fact one of these alien entities -- one that had been bound to Barsoom as a spirit and now manifested itself as this bizarre court of creatures -- and with its help they learned of the Ghostwalk -- a half-dimension leading to Omean, the Buried Sea (where human souls go when they die), and where Ky'in, in the midst of a desperate battle, had hidden the Seven Thrones, which were the control systems for Barsoom itself.

On the Ghostwalk they met the soul of Madame Yuek -- she had been killed when warlords directed by the infant Matai Shang defeated her army and she was impaled in front of the great palace that had been (unknown to her killers) her family's ancestral home. She never did manage to retrieve Arrafin's soul, which remained trapped in the whirlwind over Zuyang.

Isaac's curse was part of the Ghostwalk -- Ky'in had created three potent guardians for this place but a curse upon them made them into uncontrollable beasts. All Ky'in could do to limit their savagery was to bind them to mortal bloodlines. But that meant Isaac could traverse the Ghostwalk and restore the Thrones.

But the Thrones were damaged because the "maintenance system" for Barsoom required human souls. It turned out that humans had been CREATED by the ancient evils as "walking batteries" -- unlike the evils or the Keyadar, humans could carry within them BOTH Shadow and Dream, and as such they were very useful for managing and directing supernatural energy. So thousands of souls were needed to restore the systems of Barsoom and somehow reverse the damage being done by the returning ancient evil. Temperatures were dropping and the atmosphere was thinning all over the world. It was only a matter of time before everyone in the world died.

Shang got on board with the Save Barsoom program but Ky'in had to be destroyed first. That accomplished (and one of my great regrets as a DM is that the battle against Ky'in was TOTALLY ING LAME), our heroes settled into the Seven Thrones and did battle against the ancient evils, and triumphed. They found a way to release the souls over Zuyang and channel most of them into the maintenance systems so that Barsoom could survive -- in the process Arrafin's soul was released so she and Madame Yuek got to go into eternity together. I was glad they got a sort of happy ending, as Madame Yuek is easily my favourite character ever. I killed her off because I knew I was having way more fun telling her story than the PCs, and that's never good for a game. But I love her to pieces still.

Really, I wrote this Story Hour so I could tell HER story. Or at least part of it.

Etienne, Aubrey and Nevid all died along the way (well, technically, Aubrey was sold to some Spider Women as breeding stock...), but Elena and Isaac both survived the entire campaign run.

Whew.

There were pretty lengthy breaks between seasons -- nearly a year passed between Two and Three, and it was at least six months between Three and Four. By then I was hitting my limits as a 3rd edition DM and found creating and running high-level opponents more tedious than fun. The party finished the campaign at around fifteenth level, I think.

Good times all around. Season Four wasn't as good as I was pretty fatigued, and got a lot more busy with jobs and stuff, so I just couldn't put the prep time in to really nail the details right. I still feel bad about it to this day.

But my players were awesome all the way through, and making up that story with them was never anything less than inspiring. I had no idea what was going to happen when I started the campaign, and it far exceeded my expectations.

 

[Desdichado]

Oh. Well, that was still an extended ending. After the "bad guys" were all beat you still had characters die, even.

Anyway, pretty sweet setting. I've said it before and I'll say it again; it's amazing how many of the same kinds of themes and stuff that I really like this setting ended up hitting as well.

Coupla quick questions. The Goddess of the stewardesses game; was that Ky'in, then? Or someone else? How did that "mini-campaign" relate or fit in with the main Barsoom action?

I totally agree on the limitations of higher level third edition play, sadly. Although I really like d20---enough so that I struggle to seriously consider moving on, that's one of it's big bugaboos for me as well. I just can't run it effectively at high levels, and as a player, I find it somewhat unsatisfying as well. I greatly prefer single digit levels. Mostly I just find ways to end campaigns before it becomes an issue, but if I didn't want to do that for some reason, I'd seriously consider adopting E6 or something like that to prolong the sweet spot indefinitely.

What happened in the earlier sessions that you never wrote up? You've mentioned them a few times, but nothing substantial. I presume that's because it stands alone, apart from the main action, but I'm curious anyway.

And are you ready to get cracking on your next story hour now?

 

[barsoomcore]

Right, the Angels. Ha, ha.

That set of games took place in Tianguo during the terrible hellish regime of the Demon Goddess.

Yep, our brave and good-hearted heroines were, unbeknownst to them, serving the whims and savage appetites of an insane vampire who was torturing and slaughtering millions in her palace. They never knew, and I just figured that folks out on the fringes of the Empire wouldn't really have any idea what was going on in the center.

Would have been fun to get to that reveal with the flight attendants, but never quite got there.

 

[Desdichado]

So, who exactly was Ky'in then? And was she in some way related to Yuek and Shang by any kind of association?

 

[barsoomcore]

Actually, no, not at all.

The prehistory of Barsoom goes like this: first there's chaos, opposed by nothingness. Out of the boundary there, consciousness forms. Multiple consciousnesses form. Consciousness desires to sustain itself rather than be consumed by either chaos or nothingness, and so creates a "place" -- the first place that ever existed.

(all this is largely lifted from Brust's To Reign In Hell, actually)

These consciousnesses were not human in any way shape or especially form. They don't even have "form" as we would think of it. They are what on Barsoom are known as spirits -- random spontaneous generations of consciousness within the chaos.

So "place" exists, and quite possibly numerous "places". It probably takes a number of tries to figure out how to make "place" exist for a period of "time" -- which is pretty much the beginning of the idea of "time".

In some of these places consciousnesses experienced the desire to get done and created various forms of life. One form was a draconic humanoid known to humans as Keyadar -- very powerful in many ways (especially sorcery (also they're just really big bastards)) but limited. They can only draw on Shadow (nothingness), and have no way to connect to Dream (chaos). But they're useful, it appears.

Consciousness (whatever these things are) creates more life, and eventually comes up with the idea of humans -- creatures that can embody BOTH Shadow and Dream. Very exciting.

With these new toys, Barsoom becomes a feasible project, using human souls to keep the whole thing stable.

However, the Keyadar grow restive and with all the power they've been amassing, manage to drive most of the consciousnesses right out of Barsoom. Many are destroyed, and those that remained were forced to accept bizarre or limited forms. One such was the Tarn, which become a bound spirit that manifested as a whole host of individual creatures. Another (not seen in this telling) was Mullah, the spirit of the wind that served as the holy voice of the Naridic religion. Another was known as the Green Serpent, and sought sacrifices in dark jungles.

So then the Keyadar were in charge, and they liked that. But now it was the humans getting uppity. One great sorcerer-king named Kushan Kal Kabbar tried to fight them, and gathered together his best warriors, and made them in to undead monsters who could hunt and destroy Keyadar, and who would never truly die. But that was not enough to bring them down.

But in the end it was the sorceress Ky'in who overthrew the Keyadar regime, by suborning one of the key Keyadar generals, Essermane Varag, who she rewarded by trapping forever behind a faceless black slab. Much of the Keyadar population were tricked into an alternate dimension that they could not get out of, and then Ky'in was in charge. And she was, of course, completely insane. And things were bad.

So eventually folks got together to do something about her. About two thousand years before the campaign began, a Naridic king named Suelekar ben Azan and his Lohanese wife, Bai Xue (or something) cooked up a plan and trapped Ky'in in an alternate dimension (you're seeing the pattern now, aren't you?). At the same time, Bai Xue founded the Blood Council to A. make sure such powerful figures never arose again, and B. to create a human being who could truly stand against something like Ky'in without risking the destruction of the world.

Ky'in was still worshipped in Kish as a goddess, along with a few other legendary figures, but to no avail as she had no access to Barsoom.

Matai Shang comes much after that, although exactly when is unclear. But about two hundred years ago he sees the infamous beauty Yuek Man Chong and spirits her away to his little theme park of torture and terror, turns her into a vampire, then turns her into a goddess, and sets her on the Blood Council (after she's had a century of ruling Tianguo with real fun and games). To his surprise she breaks free of his control and runs away, tries a variety of means to put an end to first her condition and later her existence, and is really in a not very good place when our heroes come stumbling along into the mix.

Whew! Now most of this I didn't have in mind when I started. I knew there was a crazy goddess named Ky'in who had been kicked out and was trying to get back, I knew there was a bad sorcerer named Matai Shang, and I knew there were dragon-people called Keyadar that had been mostly wiped out long ago. None of the rest of this (including the ideas of "Shadow" and "Dream") existed when the campaign started. I just randomly gave Elena psionics in Season Two and had hinted at magic, especially of the necromantic variety, but it wasn't until Arrafin got that book that I even started to worry about metaphysics and magic and all that. And at first all I had was Shadow -- it wasn't until the first genie appeared that I started trying to fit psionics and spirits into the cosmology.

So the whole thing emerged organically out of the actual playing of the game -- I had no idea the Tarn weren't just a bunch of fey when they first appeared. It was only later I realised that they were actually one of the Old Ones that had been kind of messed up.

And yet it always seemed like I knew what was happening, and looking back, it all fit together so very well that it's hard to believe I made it up as I went along. I really regret not doing a better job running Season Four, because the connections that pulled everything together were really blowing my mind, but it became hard to share them with the players via the game.

 

[Desdichado]

That's always the way it works for me; I start with pretty darn vague ideas about big things like, say, cosmology and the whole secret history of the world. Which is kinda funny, because all my games end up being about the secret history of the world, but I end up making half of it up as I go.

I wonder if Chris Carter ever had that thought when he was making up his secret history of our world in The X-files. Somehow all my games gravitate towards fantasy X-files. Oh, well.

So, how does psionics fit into the grand scheme of things, then? A kind of Blood Council invention?

Also: Ky'in. I like that name.

 

[barsoomcore]

No, psionics is the ability to manipulate the Dream Worlds, in the same manner that sorcery is the ability to manipulate the Shadow Realm. Dream energy is chaotic and wild, and sorcerous energy is consuming and nullifying.

There were also characters who could summoun temporary entities out of the Dream Worlds to serve them in some fashion or other (Elena eventually acquired this ability).

The thing that Barsoom was most missing was any sense of religion. It's very tough to build what feels like a consistent society if there isn't some sort of religious practice and discussion going on. This Kishaks had some sort of worship, but other than that there wasn't much, and it started to feel artificial. There weren't any holidays, for example. Or temples or things like that. It's a problem.