01 · The Hollow Country

Voice — a Cappadocian grandmother, recorded 1890

Before the book proper begins, a page to set the register. The following was taken down in shorthand by a Greek folklorist in a village near Ürgüp in 1890 — thirty-three years before the population exchange, when the chain of grandmothers was still unbroken — and is included here, lightly translated, because no advice from us can do what two minutes of her voice does. Read it aloud at session zero. Then put the book away and roll the first dice.

*You want to know what the village was like? It was like this. The swallows came back in March, every year, to the same eaves. You watched for them. If you did not watch for them they came anyway, but it was important to watch. My grandmother taught me that, and her grandmother taught her, and I taught my daughter, and now my daughter teaches her daughter, who is the little one over there with the goat.*

*The lambs came in April. The shearing was in June. The wheat was in by August, in a good year, in a bad year you went hungry but you did not starve, because there were always the cellars. The wine was in September. The salt came up in October on the white roads from the south, on long lines of mules with bells, and the smell of the road was the smell of dust and the bells, and we children ran out to see the muleteers.*

*Some years the men went away to fight, and some of them came back and some of them did not. The ones who came back did not always come back the same. There was an uncle of mine who went away in — oh, I do not remember the year, it does not matter — and when he came back he could not sit in a room with the door closed. He lived to be seventy-four and he never sat in a closed room again. We left the door open for him. Nobody minded.*

*In November we went down into the rock for the winter. You children do not do this any more, but we did. It was warm down there, with the lamps. My grandmother told stories. She told the one about the girl who married the rock, and the one about the clever shepherd and the stupid governor — you have heard them, yes, of course you have heard them, everyone has heard them — and the one about the swallows, why they come back. I have told you that one. I will tell it to the little one over there when she is old enough to sit still for it. She is not old enough yet. Next winter, perhaps.*

*That was the village. It was not a great place. There were no famous people from it. The emperor never came. The metropolitan came once, when I was a child, and gave us all blessings and ate two pieces of my mother's bread and went away. That was the great event of my childhood. The rest was the swallows, and the lambs, and the wheat, and the salt, and going down into the rock, and coming up again in March when the swallows came back. It is enough, I think. It was enough for me. I have been very happy.*

— *Anonyma, Ürgüp, 1890.* The folklorist did not record her name. She was about eighty.

A country you can ride through without drawing a sword

This is the design promise of the book, and it is worth making early and plainly. A full Cappadocia campaign — a year of sessions, twenty or thirty evenings at the table — can be played end-to-end without a single round of combat. Not because the country is safe (it is not) and not because the GM is pulling punches (they need not), but because the country is built to reward a different set of muscles. The hooks in this book are weddings the party cannot politely escape, tax inspections that turn on which cousin spoke last, a stylite and a hermit who quarrel without ever meeting, a pool at the back of a cave that may or may not be bottomless, a mixed marriage with no clergyman willing to bless it, and a hermit who has begun, after forty years, to speak. None of these is solved with a sword. Most of them are made worse by one.

We mean this as a promise to the GM, not a prohibition. If your table wants to fight bandits on the salt road, the salt road has bandits; if your table wants the akritai to ride out and meet a raiding column, the akritai will ride out. Combat is supported, the rules carry it, and the Year 838 chapter contains the only set-piece battle the campaign needs. But the default register of Cappadocia is conversation, hospitality, weather, work, and the slow recognition that the people you are travelling among have customs older than the empire. A GM who runs Cappadocia for a year without resolving anything with violence has not failed to use the book. They have used the book as it is intended.

The calendar is the dungeon

If a veteran player, reading the promise above, is about to ask the perfectly reasonable question — *then what do we actually do?* — here is the answer, as plainly as we can put it. The calendar is the dungeon. The rooms are the months. The campaign in Cappadocia is not a sequence of quests but a sequence of seasons, and a session set in March is a different room from a session set in October because the country itself is doing different work. In March the swallows are coming back and the lambing is on; in May the beacons may or may not light; in August the cave-chapel opens its door for one day; in October the salt caravans fill the white roads and the village settles its accounts; in November the country goes down into the rock for the winter. The party moves through the year the way a party in another book would move through a megastructure, and what they do in each room is the same thing they would do in any good dungeon — look around, talk to the people they meet, take a position on the local quarrel, and leave the place changed by their passing, or changed by it themselves.

The full calendar is Chapter 2; this is the headline. A party that understands that the next session is the next month, and that the country has been turning this wheel for centuries with or without them, has understood the book.

The tone — gentle honesty, and the occasional proper guffaw

A note to the GM about register, because it is the thing that holds the book together and the thing that is easiest to drop. The tone of Cappadocia is not dry wit and it is not whimsy. It is closer to what an honest grandparent sounds like telling you about their village — *sweet, gentle, honest*, with a long pause where the painful bit was, and then on to the next thing because the bread is rising and there is no time. The country is told straight. The headman's wife really has been carrying the lamb since she was nine. The hermit really has not spoken in forty years. The painter really did poison his brother. The book never winks at any of this. The wink would break it.

What sits inside that honesty, and what we strongly encourage at the table, is the occasional proper guffaw. Cappadocian humour is a country humour. It is the goat with its head in the fence. It is the metropolitan's secretary correcting him in front of the Patriarch's envoy and then trying to pretend he was clearing his throat. It is the bridegroom from a Greek family, drunk at his own Armenian wedding, attempting the Armenian dance he has been practising for six months in secret, and getting it almost right, and the room going still for a moment and then erupting. Land the joke; let the table laugh out loud; do not soften it into a smirk. Then return, without comment, to the sweet honest rhythm of the country. That contrast — the long honest line, then the sudden warm laugh, then the long honest line again — is the heartbeat of the book. A table that has guffawed together at the goat will sit, an hour later, in respectful silence at the hermit's first word, and will remember both for years.

An introduction to the game, for new players and for children

Because of the above, Cappadocia is the right book at which to start, if you are starting. A new player at an Amorium table is dropped into a city with four months to live and a siege coming, and the system is asked to do a great deal in the first session. A new player at a Cappadocian table is dropped into a village in May, where the swallows have come back and a sheep needs to be carried down from a fold, and the system is asked to do almost nothing in the first session except let the player look around. The country teaches the rules by using them gently. A Wits roll to remember what village this is. A Body roll to keep up on the climb. A Spirit roll, perhaps, when the icon in the chapel makes the new player's character cry without quite knowing why. By the time anything in the campaign needs a sword, the player has been playing the game for three months and has forgotten they were ever new.

This book is built to be played with children at the table — we would suggest from about nine upwards, depending on the child. The country is built for it. The set-pieces are funny in a way children find funny — a parent dancing badly at a wedding, a goat that follows the party home, a boy of about their own age refusing to let them step into a pool — and the stakes, in almost every session, are recoverable. Nobody need die because a young player missed a roll. The village still feeds them breakfast. The dance is told as a story for forty years. A child who plays through a Cappadocian autumn will, we hope, come away with the thing the older players are also there for: the feeling of having been somewhere real, and of being a little sad to leave, and of wanting, very much, to come back next spring when the swallows do.

Practical notes for tables with children at them are in Appendix C.

The shape of it

The theme of Cappadocia is roughly the size of Wales, and shaped, if you squint, like a kidney lying on its side. The Halys — the Kızılırmak, the Red River — loops around its northern edge in a long lazy bow. The Anti-Taurus heaves up along the south and east. The Taurus proper closes the south, with a single pinched seam through it: the Cilician Gates, the Pylai Kilikias, the door to and from the Caliphate. To the northeast, the theme's frontier with Charsianon runs along low ridges nobody much defends, because the country there is mostly empty and the next real garrison is days away.

Inside this frame the land does three things. It rises — to a plateau averaging a thousand metres, dry, brown for nine months of the year, lit by a sky so wide it makes strangers tired. It cracks — into the river valleys of the Melas, the Karmalas, the Halys's southern tributaries, where the famous tuff has been carved by water and wind into the chimneys and pinnacles that every traveller for two thousand years has commented on. And it erupts — twice, into the cones of Hasan Dağı in the west and Argaios (Erciyes) in the east, both extinct in living memory, both still credited locally with the occasional bad-tempered tremor.

The soil is thin. The water is scarce and precious. The wheat is reliable but never abundant. The horses are excellent. The sheep are everywhere. The vines do well in the sheltered valleys and produce a wine the rest of the empire considers rustic and the Cappadocians consider correct.

Who runs it

The strategos of the Cappadocia theme has his seat at Koron — not at Caesarea, which is the bishop's town and the merchants' town and a place generals find politically tiring. Koron is a fortress on a hill above the road, and the strategos in 838 is a competent middle-aged Armenian called Aetios — no relation to the Amorium tourmarchēs of the same name, though they get each other's mail twice a year and have stopped finding it funny. He has perhaps four thousand thematic soldiers on the rolls and perhaps three thousand he can actually muster; the rest are in their villages, ploughing, and will come when the beacons light.

The metropolitan of Caesarea is the senior churchman of the region by a long way — the see of Basil, no less — and in 838 he is an old man named Theodosios who has outlived three emperors, two iconoclast persecutions, and at least one assassination attempt he is too polite to discuss. He is officially iconoclast, in line with Theophilus's policy. He is privately tired of the whole quarrel. His clergy know this and act accordingly.

The kleisourarch of the Cilician Gates is a separate command, reporting straight to Constantinople, not to the strategos at Koron. This produces exactly the friction you would expect. In 838 the post is held by a man called Petronas — again, no relation to the imperial one — who is good at his job and hates Aetios on principle.

Below all of this: a thousand villages, several thousand cave-dwelling monks, perhaps a dozen serious landowning families, and the Paulician communities along the eastern fringe whom the imperial church regards as heretics and the imperial army regards as useful in a fight.

What you hear

Greek, in three or four registers — the cultured Greek of Caesarea's cathedral school; the working Greek of the market towns, which has absorbed a noticeable amount of Armenian vocabulary in the last century; the Greek of the high pastures, which the cathedral school finds embarrassing.

Armenian, openly, in perhaps a third of the villages east of Caesarea, and as a household language in many more. Cappadocia has been Armenian-flavoured since the resettlements of the seventh century, and is becoming more so each generation.

Syriac, in two monasteries near Tyana whose abbots came up from Mesopotamia a generation back and have not changed their liturgy.

Arabic, occasionally, in the market at Podandos, where the smugglers and the freed prisoners and the occasional ransomed monk all rub along.

And, at all hours, the wind — which in this country is a presence, not a weather, and which old shepherds will tell you has a different voice for each of the twelve months.

What you smell

Wood smoke and dung smoke from the village hearths. Sheep, always sheep. Wet stone, in the underground refuges where the air is cool even in August. Lamp oil and beeswax in the rock-cut chapels. The mineral, slightly metallic smell of the tuff itself when freshly cut — a smell every Cappadocian child knows and no outsider can describe. And, in late summer, the dust: a fine ochre dust that gets into the bread, the wine, the lungs, and the corners of the eye, and that the locals brush off without noticing.

What it costs to live here

Less than in Amorium. Considerably less than in Constantinople. A loaf of bread half a follis. A jug of the local wine one follis. A night in a village's guest cell — and most villages have one, attached to the local chapel — costs whatever you can put in the alms box and a willingness to fetch water in the morning. A horse fit for the mountains, sold honestly: thirty nomismata. A mule, which is what you actually want here: twelve.

A guide through the painted valleys, if you do not know them and you must: one nomisma a day and his food, and the guide will be a monk, and the monk will spend the evenings trying to convert you to whichever shade of theology he happens to hold. A guide through the underground cities: free, but you will not be told where the second exit is, and you should not ask.

What is happening here in 838

The short version: the Caliph al-Mu'tasim is coming. His general Afshin has crossed the Taurus in the late spring with a division of the army and is moving up through the eastern part of the theme; the main caliphal force is following behind, aiming for Ankara and then Amorium. In June, the emperor Theophilus will try to stop Afshin in open battle at Anzen, just north of the theme border in Charsianon. He will fail badly. He will escape with his life and most of his guard, and the army that should have defended Amorium will be scattered across the eastern hills for the rest of the summer, walking home in groups of two and three.

The longer version is what the rest of this book is for. But here is the texture of the year for a Cappadocian villager: the beacons go up in May. The men of military age are called out in June and march east. In July, they begin to come back, in worse condition than they left. Refugees from the Charsianon villages start to arrive in August. The underground cities fill up. Some villages are raided; many more are not. By October the Arab armies have gone west, the news from Amorium is bad and getting worse, and the country is left to count its dead, take in its harvest a month late, and discover that the world has not, in fact, ended. The country has been here before. It will be here again.

On the strangeness of the country

Cappadocia is the most uncanny country in the empire and we have, so far, been quiet about it. The reserve is on purpose — most of the book is about the patient, ordinary lives the country contains, and that ordinariness is the point — but the strangeness is the other half of the truth and needs naming once, plainly, in this opening chapter, so that the GM can let it leak under the door of every later session without ever having to introduce it.

**What is strange about the country.** The rock is not what rock should be: a horse's hoof rings on it in one valley and is silent in the next, the same horse, the same shoe. A village is built into a cliff that, from the road below, has no village in it — the doors are there only when you are above them. The wind on certain afternoons has a voice the locals do not, when asked, deny, though they will not describe it either. The light at dusk does to the tuff something that the light at dusk does not, anywhere else, do to stone: it goes through it for a half-second, as if the rock had been briefly persuaded to remember when it was warmer. Travellers have written this down for thirteen centuries. The villagers do not write it down. They simply walk through it.

**The felt presence of the saints.** There is a chapel above every third village in this country, and in most of them an old man or an old woman is praying when the party walks in. The party will feel, as visitors to this country reliably do, that the saint named on the lintel is somewhere in the room with them. Not as a metaphor. Not as a poetic figure of speech. The Cappadocian peasant believes — and the priest in Constantinople would not, on a careful day, disagree — that a saint who is venerated steadily in a particular chapel for a hundred years comes, in a manner the theology of icons exists to discuss politely, to *attend* the chapel. He is the chapel's guest. He sits in the apse the way a grandmother sits in her own kitchen. The cross on the wall is the chair he is using until his image returns. A PC who feels watched in a Cappadocian chapel is being watched. The watcher is kind. The kindness is what frightens the outsider; it does not frighten the village.

**The dream-life of the monks.** A community that has not spoken at meals for two generations begins, after a while, to share its dreams. The brothers at certain houses will be found at lauds knowing what the other brothers dreamt, without having spoken of it. They do not boast about this. They consider it a normal consequence of long silence, the way muscle is a normal consequence of long walking. A party that sleeps a night in a guest cell at such a house may, in the morning, find that one of the brothers asks them, courteously, whether the man with the limp in their dream was the brother of the woman who was selling figs in the courtyard. He was. The brother nods. *I thought so. He has been around the kitchen the last three mornings. Pass the bread.*

**The hesychia.** The interior silence that the older brothers cultivate has a name — *hesychia* — and a doctrine, but neither will help a player understand it. The doctrine says it is the stilling of the soul under the operation of grace. The practice, observed from the outside, is this: a brother who has been at it for thirty years has a quality of attention that, when turned on the visitor, feels like being weighed without judgement on a very old set of scales. The visitor leaves the encounter unable to lie for the rest of the day. This is reported by every outsider who has ever met such a brother, including outsiders who do not believe in any of it. Run it as a real thing. The country runs it as a real thing.

**Two things that are simply odd.** The villages that eat their men (Chapter 6) are uncanny because the country cannot account for them, and the country is normally very good at accounting. The pool at the back of certain caves (Chapter 7) takes a thrown stone and gives no sound back. Nobody has measured its depth. The grandmothers say it is the depth of a grown man's life and that the man who learns its depth has learned the wrong thing. Both of these are true. The GM should run them as true.

**A note on tone.** None of this is horror. The country is not haunted in the gothic register; it is *inhabited*, which is the older and stranger word. The saints are at home here. The brothers are at home here. The wind is at home here. The party is the visitor. A campaign that lets the strangeness in by degrees — a chapel that feels watched in March, a dream shared in May, a hermit who answers the question before it is asked in October — finishes its year with a party that understands, without ever having had to be told, why the villagers do not leave. The strangeness *is* the reason. Wonder, not dread. But wonder of the kind that does not blink.

What the players should feel, riding in for the first time

That this is a country of small wonders. That there is a rock-cut chapel around every third bend in the road, and that someone is praying in most of them. That the people are courteous and reserved and very, very used to strangers passing through. That the horizon is enormous and the sky is, somehow, larger than the horizon. That nothing here is going to kill them quickly.

The dread of Amorium is not the register of this book. The register of this book is wonder, with a thin cold edge of frontier under it — the edge a shepherd feels at dusk when he counts his sheep twice and looks south. The GM should let the players ride for half a session through this country before anything in particular happens. Half a session of weather and rock and the wrong kind of bird overhead. Then, and only then, the first hoofprints in the dust that are not the players' own.