Tolkienizing the Gibbet King

[thegiffman]

I've been reading through Tales from Wilderland and am having some misgivings about the villain, the Gibbet King. Something doesn't feel adequately Tolkienesque about him. The zombie attack on the high pass, the animating of recently deceased corpses and severed heads, and having a corpse body for himself in general - all this feels more horror movie than Tolkien. The real test is this - two of my players are my sons, ages 8 and 10. While I've read the Hobbit and Lord of the Rings to them many times, and would love for them to read the Silmarillion, I'm not sure I'd be comfortable with them playing this adventure as written. It's just not the sort of thing I want as fuel for their imagination, and Tolkien, as a rule, IS exactly that.

As I try to deconstruct all this, in the service of suitably altering the adventure, I find myself wondering what exactly is off? I mean, Sauron was referred to as the Necromancer, and inappropriately messing with life and death is what that dark art is all about. So why does it feel utterly un-tolkien to have Sauron leading armies of zombies, or even having them for his lieutenants? I feel like even necromancy has different rules in Tolkien's world. The link between body and soul is pretty strong. When the Nazgul's mounts and forms are destroyed, they can't just fly off to the nearest graveyard and grab a fresh skeleton; they need to crawl back to Mordor and get some sort of genuine form that actually belongs to them (even if it's a sort of illicit necomancery sense of belonging).

Anyway, can anyone offer me some help here? There's a lot of Tolkien lore in the members of this forum - can some of you develop this idea further to get at the interplay between a malevolent spirit and physical form in Tolkien? And how that might guide me in altering the Gibbet King into something terrifying and wicked, but not like something out of the Exorcist?

[Michebugio]

I'm loremastering Tales from the Wilderland and I do agree that all the zombie stuff is a bit off from the classical Tolkien spirit - although the theme of death and undeath is widespread in his writings.

This said, the point is that the essence of the Gibbet King - and especially his ability to possess dead bodies - has an impact on the story itself, and changing that would require also some story editing. My advices are the following:

1) If you do not want armies of zombies around, just eliminate them from the story. They appear only in the dream in Those who tarry no longer, and they're not essential. You can keep the ghosts and spectres, though: they're dark, menacing but not so much horrifying as a rotting body. They're more like "abstract dead", instead of actual shambling corpses, and of course that's the kind of undeath that is widely present in Tolkien's works.

2) Change the manifestations of the Gibbet King. Make him speak through dark, ethereal manifestation, rather than possessing dead bodies. However, this shouldn't give to the players the impression that he can do it anytime and anywhere, so you have to narrow the circumstances when he can do that: at night, near graveyards, in blighted places or when hope is failing. Also, make evident that he needs some effort to do that. So he doesn't possess dead bodies, he's just an aura of malevolence that takes temporary physical forms.

3) Make the Gibbet King physical form different. You have a range of choices here: first, you can make him assume no more than an ethereal ghost form that still can be damaged by swords, only less effectively. Second, you can make his physical form a long-dead corpse: a skeleton or a mummy, something more light-hearted than a freshly decomposed body. These two first choices impact children's imagination less deeply, while still getting the idea of what the Gibbet King truly is. Finally, you can make the Gibbet King a disguised undead, with the appearance of a menacing and extremely elderly sorcerer, but certainly not "dead" judging from the exterior: just very, very old.

[Terisonen]

Nice post, Gibbet King is a kind of stranger in Middle Earth. You can also see him like a 'Would Be Witch King of Angmar".

[Otaku-sempai]

Is the Gibbet King all that different from the Barrow-wights? They are also evil, corrupt spirits (not ghosts) inhabiting long-dead corpses, fundamentally the same thing.

[zedturtle]

Yeah, I think the GK is a very tolkienesque villain already. But we did skip over Those Who Tarry. I do see the dream sequence as the GK reminding everyone what his boss is capable of, not as a show of personal power.

You know your kids best, my kids go for the scary stuff so I wouldn't bat an eye at running the GK pretty much as written.

[thegiffman]

Thanks, Michebugio for the tips.

Yeah, I planned on making it just Easterlings in the attack in "Those Who Tarry No Longer". That's an easy fix. The Gibbet King is a lot trickier, since this zombie theme runs through his whole story - from the head in "Kin Strife" to the chain trick in the last adventure. So I really am tasked with reinventing him from beginning to end. Not reinventing his evil scheming persona, but the mechanics of how it works.

So - starting off - he's an evil spirit. But what sort of evil spirit? A lesser Maiar? I guess that's fair enough that an evil Maia spirit could be serving under Sauron. This spirit might even deeply (though secretly) resent being outranked by the powerful Nazgul - who, by rights, should be mere mortals. He's supposed to be the torturer of Dul Guldor. So what sort of form would be appropriate? The idea of chains makes sense. Should he be, at least in full-bodied form, a humanoid wrapped in chains? Could touching a few links of that chain be enough for the Gibbet King to communicate with someone? Seems like it has promise.

The attack on the high pass does pose a problem, but then I'm liking my chain idea - that his power is invested in links to these chains, and some of them might be left up where the elf lady sits. Perhaps she picks it up, and that's when his spirit strikes.

Promising?

[zedturtle]

I think you might take a little bit from my attempt at rewrite of those who Tarry. Have the orcs chase the players into an abandoned city/town/watchtower etc. Then they can find the chain link and decide to investigate it in order to learn who would their enemy really is.

[thegiffman]

I think you might take a little bit from my attempt at rewrite of those who Tarry. Have the orcs chase the players into an abandoned city/town/watchtower etc. Then they can find the chain link and decide to investigate it in order to learn who would their enemy really is.

Can you provide a link?

[Bram Corolev]

Is the Gibbet King all that different from the Barrow-wights? They are also evil, corrupt spirits (not ghosts) inhabiting long-dead corpses, fundamentally the same thing.

These are my thoughts exactly. He was not a zombie at all. If I recall correctly the Gibbet King cannot even move the corpses he inhabits, hence why he is carried around in a cage. He just uses a corpse as a vessel so he can interact with the living world. I ran the Those Who Tarry adventure for my group almost as written and it was one of the most pivotol, well remembered moments in our campaign. Each group is different though.

[Terisonen]

To me, it's very strange that an Elf going West was to be put in hand of non-elves... Very dismal for me this kind of assumption. A feeble situation for this scenario.