“What’re we going to listen to next, The Turner Diaries?” Giuli asked me. We had just finished listening to the LibriVox recording of ‘Red Shadows’ while we drove to Poughkeepsie. I readily grant that my dear wife thinks and acts like a total hippie, but she had a good point, Robert E. Howard can seem a little racist, at best (I plan a future OOC on the racist undertones of Solomon Kane, but more on that later). After listening to the story, we had a fairly heated argument, and she insisted that she would absolutely not play a game based on stories like that. Eventually, I prevailed upon her to trust me as a game master and storyteller, if not Robert E. Howard, but she still wanted to tackle that undertone head on, and I encouraged her to do so. As primitivists, we have to acknowledge the influence of the “Noble Savage” on our thinking and behavior. We can’t avoid it, we have to face it head on and own it, and Robert E. Howard did a great deal to create that image. More in Conan, yes, but also in Solomon Kane. But Giuli didn’t want to play a “noble savage,” not with anything that volatile. She wanted to play someone she could look up to, not someone she could appropriate. She wanted to play a white person who had rewilded, or “gone native.” So, she decided to play Virginia Dare.
Which naturally gave me the necessary first story for our campaign. In Robert E. Howard’s stories, Solomon Kane has few good friends; really just N’Longa, and Sir Richard Grenville. Grenville actually lived, and he played a major role in the history of the “Lost Colony” of Roanoke, where Virginia Dare lived. Virginia’s grandfather, John White, held the position of governor, and had joined the earlier expeditions to Roanoke, including Grenville’s, as a scientific illustrator (a very new field that White got into from its earliest days). Lee Miller makes a good case that John White may have involved himself with the Separatists, the most politically radical sect of the Puritans, and surely the side of the spectrum that freedom-loving, nigh anarchist Solomon Kane would have most empathized with. So, if Solomon Kane joined Grenville’s expedition (which seems likely enough), he probably would have made great friends with John White and Content Not Found: manteo. I can also see, in the aftermath, the deaths of people like Ralph Lane and Simon Fernandez coming from the hands of an obsessed, vengeful Puritan stalker. Speaking of which, does anyone know how Sir Francis Walsingham died in 1590, the same year that John White found that Roanoke had become the “Lost Colony”? Because I may have a thought on that now…
We don’t know when John White died, we just know when we hear from him last: a letter to his friend, Richard Hakluyt, describing what happened to Roanoke, written about 1605 or so. By 1609, rumors circulated around London about surviving Englishmen from Roanoke, including a “young maid,” held by an Indian chief named Gepanocan. Yes, news takes time to travel in Kane’s day, but I imagine a year to reach John White seems plausible, and that puts it in the same year as Robert E. Howard’s last mentions of Kane, in “Solomon Kane’s Homecoming.” Wouldn’t the heart-broken grandfather undertake one last journey to find his missing family? Wouldn’t he call on his old, sword-slinging friend to help him? And would Solomon Kane, of all people, turn down anyone in need, much less an old friend?
The rest rather wrote itself. Unfortunately, while Giuli had a clear idea of what she wanted to do, Mike didn’t. He didn’t make a character until that day, so I wrote the original story in just ten minutes, and it rather showed in the gameplay. I had to extensively retcon the “official” story, recorded here, and I have no pretensions about its quality. I can see I got far too drawn into the historical mystery of Roanoke (Lee Miller may sometimes reach a little far, but she certainly writes good anthropological history with a real dramatic flair), and the story suffered. Way too much exposition. Well, lessons learned. I’ll do better next time!
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