I am running By Endurance We Conquer, it’s a Carved from Brindlewood game from The Gauntlet, written by Harald Eckmüller. As preparation for this, I picked up Alfred Lansing’s book on Shackleton and settled down.

The book reads as a “Boy’s Own” adventure. An amazing feat of human achievement; many actions and events that have not been bested in over a hundred years. Ultimately, Shackleton’s objective, to make the first land crossing of the Antarctic and the South Pole, was met with failure. It must, though, be remembered that Shackleton and his men’s feats to survive are in many ways even more significant.

We start as the Endurance is caught in pack ice, slowly disintegrating as the men plan for its eventual evacuation and an uncertain future. Lansing uses some evocative prose and interleaves diary and interviews with the crew to add a real sense of how incredibly frightening and unpleasant this period was.

Here are snippets of the sounds that echoed across the ice from the wind and the ice, "...there was a sound like a gigantic train with squeaky axles being shunted about with a great deal of bumping and clattering. At the same time, a huge ship's whistle blew, mingling with the crowing of roosters, the roar of a distant surf, the soft throb of an engine far away, and the moaning cries of an old woman."

The book goes on to describe the destruction of Endurance and the struggles of the group as they move north, with sledges, dogs, equipment and supplies.

One of the men escapes from a sea leopard, a 13ft long creature that loped after him across the ice, then dived under the ice, following his shadow from beneath, before bursting out in front of him. Luckily, a colleague was a decent shot.

There is a constant fear of the ice they are on breaking up, plunging them into the icy water of the Weddell Sea, where survival is measured in minutes, not hours. Whilst the group pulled boats behind them, launching the boats into pack ice would result in them being crushed like balsa wood. So the aim was to reach open water, ideally open water near land, small islands dotted around the Weddell Sea. But the pack ice doesn’t move in simple directions; it whirls and shifts, as the currents and the winds do their worst.

Many struggles ensued before they reached open water, launched the boats and found themselves at Elephant Island.

Amazingly, no one had died, just one amputation, one heart attack and various unpleasant ailments. The group faced their most difficult period, survival on a remote, uninhabited lump of rock for the majority and a journey by boat across the open ocean, the wild Drake Passage, for the minority. A journey of 800 miles. Even then, the struggles were not over, finding somewhere to land on South Georgia, facing climbs, glacier crevasses and then attempting to return to rescue their comrades after the pack ice had moved further north.

This book is the perfect preparation for a game featuring this setting, as it focuses a lot on the sensory elements of the expedition, the deprivations, the joy of achieving small objectives and the relationships between the many and varied personalities.

A wonderful read.

Here are a few links that whiled away the hours as I read through the book;

• Paul Nicklen’s amazing talk on his face-to-face encounter with a leopard seal.

• Check out the wonderful resource that is Shackleton Online.

• A visit to the Scott Polar Research Institute is definitely on the cards.

• If you have a spare £200, you can pick up the Endurance in Lego form.

• I may even dig out my Steam account details to play The Pale Beyond.

• I very much enjoyed watching the BBC documentary on restoring Shackleton’s ship cabin from his final expedition.

I gave the book 9 out of 10.

TTRPG Thoughts:

I’ll come back to this after I’ve run the game in June, either updating this post or writing a new one.