Genial Jack: Volume 1 – Preview

The first of several planned volumes of Genial Jack, a serialized setting about the whimsy, wonder, and weirdness of the sea and the strange things on and under it, is now available from Lost Pages Press in print and as a PDF.

Paolo Greco and I have been in cahoots for some time now with an eye to publish content for the Hex campaign world (including a guide for Hex itself, at which I am hard at work). Genial Jack and the city of Jackburg are a perfect entry point, since sweet, sublime Jack can easily be transplanted into other mileus, arriving to whisk characters away to hither and yon.

The first volume – with a magnificent cover illustration by Bronwyn McIvor, who plays in the campaign as Caulis the homuncular warlock – consists of a gazetteer of Jackburg, the symbiotic city within and upon Genial Jack, the Godwhale, who roams the strange seas of the world rescuing shipwrecked sailors and swallowing oceanic monsters menacing beleagured islands. The myriad peoples, government, laws, criminal organizations, and districts of Jackburg are detailed.

Like Hex itself, Genial Jack draws its influences from the fantasy of the 17th and 18th centuries – Gulliver’s Travels, the adventures of Baron Munchausen, The Blazing World, New Atlantis, salon-era fairy tales – and from New Weird urban fantasy like the Bas-Lag trilogy and K.J. Bishop’s The Etched City. Wheellocks, sailing ships, social satire, chimerical monsters, allegory, swordfights, manners, teeming cityscapes, metaphyics, oddball pirates, eccentric islanders, flotsam and jetsam.

It can be grotesque and often horrible – a future volume is going to take us into the parasite-ridden brachiations of Jack’s Entrails – but it’s not grimdark; there’s absuridity and humour layered in with the macabre and the loathsome. There may be moments of bleakness, even Lovecraftian dread of the deep, but at its heart this is a baroque yarn, a jaunty, maximalist smorgasbord of oddities. Indeed, Genial Jack originated as an attempt to make a kind of anti-Cthulhu – an impossibly ancient sea-monster who happens to be really lovely, actually. Not everyone who lives atop or within him is quite so savoury, of course…

As a brief preview, here’s a handful of NPCs from the random table in the Appendix:

Roll 1d6:

1. Yod Sprungly, a bone-thin human charm-peddler usually found in Borborygmus Bazaar hawking pickled gorgon eyes, hands of glory, coatl feathers, and many other magical objects, though a good handful may be non-magical curiosities he passes off as eldritch.
2. Jagged, a saw-nosed selachian lawyer and duelist-for-hire who fights with a pair of serrated blades similar to the organic jag on his face. Outside of his profession defending clients in the courtroom or on the piste, he’s a good-natured, jovial fellow, often found volunteering in the orphanage of Flotsamville.
3. Mercy Hectic, a criminal hiding in Finfolkaheem, guilty of sacrilege – a Jacksblood addict, she has been permanently warped by consuming the Godwhale’s holy ichor, and now towers a prodigious eight feet tall, with twisted, grotesquely muscular limbs. She brims with puissance and can spit spells as a 5^th level sorcerer.
4. Glumswell, one of the blobfolk, deep-sea merfolk from the Abyssal Realms of the ocean floor; an assassin of tremendous skill known for his talent with poisons who wandered the seas killing for hire, he has retired to Jackburg and now runs a darling little shop selling decorative sea anemones in Bellyborough.
5. Penelope Scrimp, a human witch from the arcane metropolis of Hex, exiled for magical crimes involving an alchemical experiment gone terribly wrong; evidence of this can be seen in the way that half of her body is a metamorphic plasm capable of assuming a plethora of bizarre shapes.
6. Guinevere du Ys, last scion of the nobility of Ys, which sank beneath the waves a thousand years past; some its descendants survived and were swallowed by Jack. Though human, she has some Faerie blood, discernable in her subtly green-hued hair and complexion. Though technically royalty, her family’s fortune is long gone, and she makes her living as a callused dockworker in Mawtown, drinking and brawling with common folk.