Another "Holy Grail" find this week.  But this is a cheat, I have been looking for this on eBay for a while.

Ral Partha's Witch's Caldron
Not to be confused with The Witch's Cauldron.

I didn't want the newer 2016 version so I have been looking for a complete 1980 version with minis. Well, my persistence finally paid off.



The box is full great stuff too.







The minis are what you expect from Ral Partha in the 1980s. Yes, that is a positive thing.




The Wizard and the Witch,




Lots of great minis in this.

Part of me wants them painted, another part of me doesn't.  Maybe I'll just find some pre-painted minis that I can use in place of these.

Going back to my "Traveller Envy" I would love to figure out a way to use this in my War of the Witch Queens campaign.  A battle that the wizard pulling the strings of the PCs makes them participate in against one of the Witch Queens.

In the same lands that gave us Grýla, The Christmas Witch we also get the Yule Cat, also known as Jólakötturinn or Jólaköttur in Iceland.
Described as a huge and vicious cat that preys on people that did not get new clothes for Yule/Christmas. 

The Yule Cat, and there is only one, can run across ice and snow with no difficulty.

The Yule Cat
(Labyrinth Lord)
No. Enc.: 1 (1) Unique
Alignment: Chaotic (evil)
Movement: 40' (120')
Armor Class: 4
Hit Dice: 5+5*** (28 hp)
Attacks: 3 (claw/claw/bite)
Damage: 1d6/1d6/1d8
Special: Can detect who did not get new clothes for Yule/Christmas
Save: Monster 5
Morale: 10
Hoard Class: None
XP: 500

The Yule Cat
(Blueholme Journeymanne Rules)
AC: 4
HD: 5d8+5
Move: 40
Attacks: 2 claw (1d6 x2), 1 bite (1d6+2)
Alignment: Chaotic
Treasure: None
XP: 500

The Yule Cat
(Old-School Essentials)
AC 4 [15], HD 5+5 (28hp), Att 2 claw (1d6x2), 1 bite (1d6+2), THAC0 17 [+2], MV 120’ (40’), SV D14 W15 P14 B76 S15 (5), ML 10, AL Chaotic, XP 1,700, NA 1 (1) Unique, TT None
▶ Fleet-footed: Can travel over and ice and snow with no difficulty.

Since the publication of Dungeons & Dragons, Third Edition in 2000, Goodman Games has published over one hundred adventure modules for its Dungeon Crawl Classics line and since 2012, these have been for its own Dungeon Crawl Classics Role Playing Game. Derived from the d20 System, the Dungeon Crawl Classics Roleplaying Game sits somewhere between Basic Dungeons & Dragons and Advanced Dungeons & Dragons in terms of its complexity. The most radical step in the Dungeon Crawl Classics Roleplaying Game is the starting point. Players begin by playing not one, but several Zero Level characters, each a serf or peasant looking beyond a life tied to the fields and the seasons or the forge and the hammer to prove themselves and perhaps progress enough to become a skilled adventurer and eventually make a name for themselves. In other words, to advance from Zero Level to First Level. Unfortunately, delving into tombs and the lairs of both men and beasts is a risky venture and death is all but a certainty for the lone delver… In numbers, there is the chance that one or more will survive long enough to go onto greater things! This is what the Dungeon Crawl Classics Role Playing Game terms a ‘Character Creation Funnel’.

And right from the outset, Goodman Games supported this feature with the very first scenario released for the Dungeon Crawl Classics Roleplaying Game. This is Dungeon Crawl Classics #67: Sailors on the Starless Sea and since 2012 it has gone through six printings. Even further, Goodman Games has marked that sixth printing with a Limited Foil Edition’, a lovely hardback edition with a foil cover which not only reprints the module, but also includes new artwork, a retrospective, sketches, a discussion of the art process, and even discussion of lead artist’s—not the author’s—variant of the module, ‘Reverse Sailors on the Starless Sea’!

The adventure in Dungeon Crawl Classics #67: Sailors on the Starless Sea is designed for Zero Level characters, roughly between ten and fifteen with three characters per player. Alternatively, it can be played using characters of First Level and Second Level, but either way, it is expected that roughly half of these characters will survive. That though, is quite possibly a generous assessment as this module has the potential to kill player characters, even cause a Total Party Kill. Nevertheless, it has some great set scenes and really has a grim and perilous feel that echoes Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay.

The setting for Dungeon Crawl Classics #67: Sailors on the Starless Sea takes place in and below a ruined keep that was once the lair of Molan and Felan, brothers who were great chaos lords at the head of great armies of beastial mutants before the forces of good led a campaign against them and sacked their foul castle. Ages have passed and its vile reputation is barely remembered, but now villagers have gone missing, beastmen howl in the night, and it is up to other villagers—the player characters—to go into the keep and hopefully find the missing villagers as well as put an end to the chaos that threatens to surge up and sweep over the land once again…

The adventure consists of two levels, each with just a few locations. The first of these is the courtyard of the keep itself, a bramble-filled ruin of tumble-down towers and walls. From the outset even getting into this area is dangerous, one route threatening a rock slide, another an encounter with vine-infested villagers, and a third with via sinkhole which appears to go straight to hell! Once inside there are tombs to discover, charnel chaos-infested ruins to explore, and dread Beastmen to face, and whilst these are single locations, they are big in terms of story and atmosphere. For example, in the charnel ruins, there are charred skeletons still hot to the touch, a frog fountain with red gemstone eyes and jewelled maw, and a black ichor which drips from the fountain and forms deadly pseudopods. But there is also a means to counter them in the ruins and clues to that too, waiting for the players to have their characters work out exactly how…

However fun these locations are, they cannot beat the big set piece on the shores of the starless shore. Here the player characters are faced with puzzle which looks like a combat encounter and asks them how they get past a leviathan which they have almost no chance of defeating. In some ways, the scenario’s end encounter with the Beastmen shaman and his acolytes atop the ziggurat which stands in the starless sea is almost an anticlimax, but it is nevertheless a thrilling end to the scenario.

With its fifth printing, Dungeon Crawl Classics #67: Sailors on the Starless Sea included a bonus dungeon, ‘The Summoning Pits’. This is an adjunct to the main dungeon, one that explore the origins of a particular monster which appears at the start of the scenario. It is a change of tone in comparison to the rest of the scenario, weird and creepy rather than obviously grim and perilous. 

This being a scenario for the Dungeon Crawl Classics Roleplaying Game, it should be no surprise that there is a pleasing degree of detail to Dungeon Crawl Classics #67: Sailors on the Starless Sea. This includes not only each and every location as you would expect, but also elements such as a table of mutations for the Beastmen—a table whose content foreshadows those for Manimals in the Mutant Crawl Classics Roleplaying Game, what to do if the player characters actually have five hundred feet of rope with which to lower themselves into the sinkhole, the list of curses which will befall the characters should one of their number take a certain magical item. One aspect of the scenario is the preponderance of magical items that the player characters can find and wield, but nearly all of them with some kind of cost—even when that magical item might actually help the player characters. Well, that should be no surprise given that the scenario takes place in the former lair of a pair of chaos lords!

Dungeon Crawl Classics #67: Sailors on the Starless Sea barely takes up twenty-four of the fifty-eight pages of the sixth printing and its ‘Limited Foil Edition’. The other thirty or so pages include ‘Sailors Retrospective’, an interview with Harley Stroh about the development and writing of the scenario along with his original map sketches. Doug Kovacs’ cover is accorded a similar treatment as well as a series of tribute covers by the stable of artists who illustrate for Goodman Games. The section highlights just how much of an influence his art and cartography has on the whole of the Dungeon Crawl Classics Roleplaying Game line. Rounding the book is a look at the artist’s ‘Reverse Sailors on the Starless Sea’ in which the players take the roles of not the villagers but the Beastmen fighting their out of the complex. It is simply bonkers… Lastly, there is a photo gallery of the early years of Dungeon Crawl Classics.

Now these extras are not as extensive as that in Metamorphosis Alpha: Fantastic Role-Playing Game of Science Fiction Adventures on a Lost Starship and Original Adventures Reincarnated #1: Into the Borderlands, but then Dungeon Crawl Classics #67: Sailors on the Starless Sea is just seven years old and does not have the same history, and obviously, it is much, much shorter than either. Nevertheless, this is lovely way in which to acknowledge the success and impact of Dungeon Crawl Classics #67: Sailors on the Starless Sea.

Physically, Dungeon Crawl Classics #67: Sailors on the Starless Sea is superbly presented, The artwork is excellent, the editing solid, and the cartography atmospheric with some lovely little details, such as the nod to the cutaway dungeon that appeared in Basic Dungeons & Dragons.

Dungeon Crawl Classics #67: Sailors on the Starless Sea is never less than deadly and dangerous, but always ready to reward good play. It feels like a big scenario, rich in grim and perilous flavour and detail, not a dungeon to be attacked, but to be explored, its secrets to winkled out and perhaps put to use in saving the villagers—and possibly the world. It set a standard for the Dungeon Crawl Classics scenarios which followed and the Dungeon Crawl Classics #67: Sailors on the Starless Sea – Limited Edition Foil Cover gives us the opportunity to go back to reexamine that standard.

The year 2019 seems quite the year for the Cyberpunk genre, as we reach the year in which the genre classic film, Blade Runner, is actually set, and the classics of the genre in roleplaying see the release of either a new Starter Set and edition, for example, Shadowrun, Sixth Edition or Start Set with a new edition to come, for example, Cyberpunk Red. It is joined by Carbon 2185: A Cyberpunk RPG, a roleplaying game notable for being from a British publisher, Dragon Turtle Games, Ltd. and for its mechanics being derived from those used for Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition. From the outset then, the designers of Carbon 2185: A Cyberpunk RPG were faced with the challenge of adapting a set of rules strongly identified with Dungeons & Dragons and the fantasy genre to model entirely different genre. The good news is that they have succeeded and appropriately enough in 2019, have done so with a Cyberpunk roleplaying game heavily influenced by Blade Runner.

Published following successful Kickstarter campaign, the setting for Carbon 2185: A Cyberpunk RPG is the Earth of 2185, specifically San Francisco—a possible nod to the setting of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, the novel on which Blade Runner is based. It is a future which begins literally tomorrow with climate collapse, resource depletion, and an ongoing refugee crisis as corporations begin expanding offworld, building orbital factories, searching for new resources, and supplying Earth with deuterium for the new coastal fusion plants. The discovery and manipulation of several wormholes which connected to other star systems resulted in ‘The Scramble for Stars’ in which the megacorporations raced to discover and exploit new worlds. Many were suitable for colonisation leading to a steady flow of those who could afford to pay or were prepared to work for corporations in return for their passage from Earth to “...[B]egin again in a golden land of opportunity and adventure.” On these new worlds, the megacorporations were able to conduct research and development free from Earth’s oversight, which would lead to the introduction of Neurolink technology, Synths or biological androids, and power cell technology.

San Francisco is surrounded by high walls to protect it against the rising sea levels  and has been long divided into five districts from the fortified and secure corporate zone of District 1 to the gang controlled, near slums of District 5. Debt and crime are rife and many prefer to spend their lives in Virtual Reality pods than the pollution drenched streets and tenements of the city. As ‘cyberpunks’, the player characters are rebels, wanting to live independently of the megacorporations, and in the given scenario in Carbon 2185: A Cyberpunk RPG, they are connected to gang which will give them a sense of family as well as employment.

At the core then of Carbon 2185: A Cyberpunk RPG are rules and mechanics of Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition. This means that it is a Class and Level roleplaying game, a twenty-sided die is rolled and bonuses added to determine success on an action, there are three Saving Throw types—Fortitude, Reflex, and Mind, and characters have Skill Proficiencies. There are changes, both minor and major, as you would expect. First off, instead of Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Intelligence, Wisdom, and Charisma, a character has the Abilities of Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Intelligence, Technology, and People. Technology represents a character’s ability to deal with technology and People his ability to deal with people. Carbon 2185: A Cyberpunk RPG is primarily a humanocentric setting, so instead of Race it offers Origins, reflecting a character’s background. These are Badlander, who grew up in the heavily polluted regions between the Megacities where radiation has given the ability to see in the dark; the Gutter Punk, who grew up as street rats and in gangs; the Korporate Kid, orphans raised in corporate orphanages and are highly educated; and the Regular Joe. The two exceptions, are the Synth and the Wormer. The former is a cyborg manufactured offworld and indistinguishable from ordinary humans, but tougher and trained as warriors, companions, or labourers, whilst the latter is a  human born in one of the low-gravity offworld colonies, forced to come to Earth as a refugee. Some of the Origins may have Suborigins, but not all.

Carbon 2185 has six Classes. These are Daimyo, Doc, Enforcer, Hacker, Investigator, and Scoundrel. The Daimyo specialises in heavy weapons and leading teams, the Doc is a healer whose hand implant can inject healing nanobots into the injured, and the Enforcer is trained to provide military, law enforcement, or combat support. The Hacker breaks into computer systems to steal information, but can also control botnets to access the local electronic infrastructure or even mechs; the Investigator is a private eye or a journalist; and the Scoundrel is a thief, a smuggler, or a street thug. Of the six it is possible to map some of them back onto the archetypal Classes of Dungeons & Dragons, so the Daimyo with its Fury is a little like the Barbarian Class, the Enforcer like the Fighter, and the Scoundrel like the Rogue, but there are differences enough between them so that the similarities are not intrusive. All have just the ten Levels versus the twenty of standard Dungeons & Dragons, although a player character needs more Experience Points per Level and it does mean that campaigns are likely to be shorter.

To create a character, a player rolls his Abilities—on 2d6+5 rather than four six-sided dice and drop the lowest, with the effect of giving a slightly smaller range, but less deviation or by assigning the given array. Besides selecting an Origin and a Class, a player generates two further aspects of his character. The first is Vice, for example, “I am addicted to Crush. If I go more than 24 hours without it, I suffer withdrawals” or “I like to keep and look after synthetic animals.” They include beliefs, additions, fears, obsessions, and so on, and represent both a roleplaying hook for the player and a story hook for the Game Master. Between adventures they can be indulged in to gain temporary Hit Points, but exactly how that works will be up to the Game Master and player to determine. The second aspect is the character’s Background, essentially what he did between leaving education and becoming a Cyberpunk. This consists of a number of five-contracts, the player deciding how many contracts he wants his character to go through before retiring to life as a Cyberpunk. Each contract is five years long and trains the character in various skill proficiencies and languages as well as providing him with several thousand Wonlongs (the currency in 2185) and a parting gift. A character is free to stay in the same career or switch, the latter typically to gain access to a wider variety of skills. The only downside to the process is that there is a chance of injury in each contract period which will end the contract without payment and should the character take too many contracts, he will suffer the effects of aging. The contracts include Corporate Drone, Criminal, Entertainer, Explorer, Laborer, Law Enforcement, Merchant, Military Technician, and Unskilled Worker.  Overall, the Background generator feels like a simplified version of the terms used in Traveller and perhaps the only thing it could have done with, is some events to add further colour to the character’s background.

Name: PRV-1967-47 (Pierce)
Origins: Korporate Kid
Suborigins: High Flyer
Age: 38
Vice: I am careful and meticulous with my bonsai trees. Nothing distracts me when I am dealing with them.
Background: Contract Drone (4)
Languages: English, Japanese, Mandarin

Armour Class: 16 (DR/2)
Hit Points: 9

Strength 08 (-1)
Dexterity 16 (+3)
Constitution 12 (+1)
Intelligence 18 (+4)
Technology 16 (+3)
People 13 (+1)

Fortitude: 14 Reflex: 18 Mind: 20

Proficiency: +2
Skill Proficiencies: Bureaucracy, Computing, Deception, Engineering, Hacking, Persuasion, Sense Motive 
Armour Proficiencies: Helmets, Light Armour
Weapon Proficiencies: Melee Weapons, Pistols, SMGs, Shotguns
Saving Throw Proficiency: Mind
Exploits: Computer Interface, Hack Mech
Abilities: Healing

Equipment: Advanced Comms, Concealable Ballistic Vest
Augmentation: ZA Korp Enhanced Aiming MK. II

Mechanically, Carbon 2185 is basically the same as Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition, but it includes a number of rules additions to make it emulate the Cyberpunk genre. For example, in combat, armour not only provides an Armour Class value, but a Damage Resistance value against ballistic damage. This protects against most firearms—there being no energy weapons in 2185—but not melee weapons like vibro knives and some ammunition types. The rules allow for major injuries to be suffered when a character is reduced to zero Hit Points by a critical hit and instead a player rolling to attack when his character fires a gun in automatic mode, the defendants in the target area make a Reflex saving throw to avoid being hit. This neatly places the emphasis on the defendants trying to not get hit and keeping their heads down rather than on the attacker having to roll for each person. 

Of course, the two signature aspects of Cyberpunk genre are Hacking and Cyberware. Both are very different to most other roleplaying games of the genre. In many of them, the Hacker character would have to play out sneaking into a network, overcoming the ICE, defeating the defending SysOp, and so on, all but a sub-game that none of the other players and their characters could participate. Further, all of that time spent in the computer network actually only took a few seconds in game time, but several minutes in real time. More contemporary approaches to the genre, as with Carbon 2185, simply have the Hacker be on the spot alongside his fellow Cyberpunks and his player making simple rolls to hack the local network, device, or mech. The one element of 2185 not discussed in Carbon 2185 is the nature of computer networks, but essentially the roleplaying game focuses on the local networks and leaves it up to the Game Master to decide that nature.

Cyberware is a bit more complex, but again different. In most other roleplaying games of the genre, installing cyberware detracts from your humanity or empathy—and in ShadowRun your capacity to cast magic—but that was never all that easy to roleplay. In Carbon 2185, cyberware, or augmentations, do not degrade your empathy; they poison you. Or rather, the power cells that power them do, leaking toxins and radioactivity into the blood. There are certain drugs which will counter both, but they are expensive and they have a limited effect, meaning that they need to be taken on a regular basis. Augmentations are arranged into tiers, the higher the tier, the greater its toxic effect, equal to its tier rating. Those on Tier 0, like Neurolink or an Enhanced HUD have no effect and the body can cope with them, but beyond that, from the Tier 1 Enhanced Aiming to the Tier 5 Supercharged Hidden Blade, and the augmentations begin poisoning the body. The base limitation or Blood Toxicity Limit is equal to twice a character’s Constitution modifier, so a character can have augmentations that add up to that before he considered to be poisoned. There are other limitations on augmentations. They can only be installed in seven locations—Neural, Eyes, Right Arm, Left Arm, Torso, Skin, and Legs—and only one augmentation can be installed per location. So they cannot be stacked in a location, but in general higher Tier augmentations are more powerful. There are also legal limitations, augmentations of Tier 3 requiring a licence, Tier 4 being reserved for the military and illegal for civilians to install, and Tier 5 being experimental. Of course, this does not mean that they are unavailable, but rather that they require certain Influence to acquire and they are expensive. The list of cyberware or augmentations is not extensive in Carbon 2185 as in other roleplaying games of the genre and some may be disappointed by the choice.

Influence represents a character’s standing and social cachet. It is measured on two tracks, Influence: Corporate and Influence: Street. Rated between one and twenty, at Influence: Corporate 1, a character gains access to the city’s auction houses or the black market for Influence: Street 1. At higher levels, a character can gain informants and access to higher augmentations. It will rise or fall depending upon the Cyberpunks’ actions, so kill an important member of a rival gang and Influence: Street will rise, but kill an important member of your own gang and it will probably fall. The Influence mechanic is fairly broad and open system with latitude for interpretation and nuance—and even expansion should the Game Master want to track the player characters’ Influence with multiple organisation.

As well as giving a timeline for its future of 2185 and describing the setting of San Francisco, Carbon 2185: A Cyberpunk RPG also includes tables of encounters district by district and a mission generator. It details the various corporations operating in the city, the many gangs—many organised along ethinic lines such as the Snakehead Tong, Aizutachi Yakuza, Diablos Eléctrico, and the Bratva, and groups of interest. The latter includes The Church of the Machine Bound God, fanatics obsessed with augmentations; The Enigma Collective, elusive hackers dedicated to toppling the corporations; The Synth Rebellion, which supports escaped Synths and protects them against the government’s ‘retirement agents’; and Villeneuve Robotics, a small, but ruthless synth design and manufacturing company. A number of NPCs are also detailed, ready for the Game Master to add to her game along with a wide range of enemies and villains, from Challenge 0 up to Challenge 11. They include civilians, gangsters, Wesleys—Crush addicts, spiderbot, mechs, synthdogs and canine mechs, retirement officers, cyberninja, liberated AI, spider tanks, and more. 

Rounding out Carbon 2185 is the scenario, ‘Chow’s Request: A Carbon 2185 Adventure for 1st Level Cyberpunks’. The cyberpunks are asked by a gang leader to retrieve some stolen property from a rival gang. Various hooks are given as to why the cyberpunks might want to get involved, including being indebted, wanting to join the gang, and being an undercover law enforcement officer. It is decent enough scenario, basically a snatch and grab and its consequences, primarily focused combat. It would have been nice to see some options for Hacker Class for example.

Physically, Carbon 2185: A Cyberpunk RPG is a stunning looking book with a great cover and plenty of full colour artwork inside—although only in the first two thirds of the book. The layout tidy and looks impressive on its stark white pages. Unfortunately, dig a little deeper and there are one or two issues with the book’s production values. It does another edit, but the main problem is one of organisation in that a lot of the rules for actually creating a cyberpunk are in the rules section in the middle of the book rather than at the beginning and then the rules section comes after the one on combat. So expect to be flipping back and forth with Carbon 2185, especially when creating cyberpunks. None of this is helped of course, by the lack of index, an absurd omission in 2019, let alone 2185.

As solid a design as Carbon 2185: A Cyberpunk RPG is, it does feel slightly lacking places. There is lack of commercialisation in its depiction of 2185, in that every item will have a brand and the brand you use matters in the Cyberpunk genre. The corporations are mentioned, but the make and model of the items they sell. The presence of the media in the San Francisco feels underdeveloped and for any Game Master wanting not to set his campaign in the Golden City, there is only limited information about the world beyond its walls. Unfortunately, there is no advice for the Game Master on running Carbon 2185: A Cyberpunk RPG or the genre, and sadly, there is no bibliography either (although it could be said that Carbon 2185 wears its influences like adverts on your neurolink display). Thus no advice on the types of games that the Game Master could run, whether that is gang warfare on the streets of San Francisco, hunting down Synths as retirement officers, attempting to bring down the corporations, and so on. Hopefully a supplement specifically aimed at the Game Master will address these issues. 

If you are looking for a Cyberpunk or Science Fiction roleplaying game after playing Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition, then absolutely, Carbon 2185: A Cyberpunk RPG is a good choice. Equally, it is a good choice if you are looking for a Cyberpunk or Science Fiction roleplaying game, the core mechanics of Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition likely to be familiar and easy to handle, with the new rules and changes nicely emulating aspects of the Cyberpunk genre without disrupting the core rules and mechanics. Overall, Carbon 2185: A Cyberpunk RPG does an impressive job of showcasing the adaptability of the mechanics of Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition whilst being solid take upon the Cyberpunk genre.

A special sort of Zatannurday here today.

This past week we saw the Crisis on Infinite Earths on TV.  Something I have been wanting to see for years.
I got to see a ton of my favorite DC characters in their TV incarnations but two of my favorites are John Constantine (Matt Ryan) and Lucifer Morningstar (Tom Ellis).



The scene was pitch-perfect for the Lucifer show.


Lucifer does his mind trick on Mia and even subtly flirts with John Diggle. It was great.
This small scene makes me want more Lucifer on Legends or John on Lucifer.
Plus I need to learn what the deal was between John and Mazikeen.

Not to be lost in all the devils, gods and Earths going boom we also got Jim Corrigan, aka the Spectre. My prediction: Oliver will become the new Spectre for the Arrow-verse.

Parts 4 and 5 will be out next year. 

Published by the Melsonian Arts Council, Troika! is a Science Fantasy roleplaying game of baroque weirdness that lies beyond eldritch portals that open into non-euclidean labyrinths which lie on the edge of creation under skies filled with innumerable crystal spheres and the golden-sailed barges that travel between them. It combines a simple set of mechanics with a world that is not so much described as implied in its thirty-six refulgent and empyrean character options. This is a world and roleplaying game inspired by Gene Wolfe’s The Book of the New Sun series and  M. John Harrison’ Viriconium series, with just a little feel of Jack Vance’s The Dying Earth. Further, and although the mechanics of Troika! are not compatible with the majority of roleplaying games and scenarios for the Old School Renaissance, in tone and feel, it is not dissimilar to scenarios like Slumbering Ursine Dunes and Misty Isles of the Eld from the Hydra Collective LLC, Crypts of Indormancy and The Monolith from beyond Space and Time, and roleplaying games such as Monte Cook Games’ Numenera, Pelgrane Press’ The Dying Earth, and Lost Pages’ Into the Odd.

Characters in Troika! are very simply defined with three attributes—Skill, Stamina, and Luck plus a Background. Skill represents a character’s capabilities and prowess in combat, Stamina his Hit Points—if reduced to zero, he is dead, and Luck for just about anything else. Every character also starts with the same set of possessions. It is the Background though, such as Ardent Giant of Corda, Journeyman of the Guild of Sharp Corners, and Temple Knight of Telak the Swordbringer which defines the character in terms of origins, role, and advanced skills and possessions. Some Backgrounds also provide a special rule to do with an ability specific to them. For example, the Monkeymonger has spent his life herding Edible Monkeys, but has left his former occupation after falling or stepping off The Wall. He owns a Monkey Club, a Butcher’s Knife, a pocket full of monkey treats, and a herd of small monkeys too scared to run away from him. His advanced skills are climbing, trapping, club fighting, and knife fighting. The special rule associated with this Background has the Game Master rolling on a table to determine the Mien of the monkeys.

To create a character, a player rolls several six-sided dice for his character’s Skill, Stamina, and Luck, and notes the results down along with his character’s baseline possessions. Then he rolls d66 to generate a number between one and thirty-six and his character’s Background. The values listed for the Advanced Skills and the Spells are simply added to the character’s base Skill value to determine their final value. The process is really simple and easy, and between a group of players should create some interesting characters (although lose a few characters and the choices available in terms of Backgrounds may be limited to avoid repetition). The process is also fast. A character in Troika! can be created in a couple of minutes! 

Our sample character is a Claviger, a Master of Keys, obsessed and trained with the opening of doors and locks, both mundane and mystical. Ixyll is an orphan raised by the Grand Order of the Master of Keys and is obsessed by opening the doors, locks, and portals to furthest reaches of creation.

Ixyll
Background: Claviger

Skill: 5
Stamina: 20
Luck: 9

Advanced Skills: Locks 4, Strength 3, Trapping 3, Maul Fighting 2
Spells: Open 2, See Through 1, Lock 1

Possessions: Knife, lantern & flask of oil, rucksack, six provisions, festooned with keys (counts as Modest armour), a Distinguished Sledgehammer (counts as Maul), lockpicking tools

Mechanically, Troika! is disarmingly simple, if somewhat inelegant. To undertake an action, a player rolls two six-sided dice, aiming for a result equal to, or under, the appropriate Skill value. In an opposed roll though, the Skill value is added to the result of the roll and compared with that of the opponent’s to see which result is higher. Where Skill or an Advanced Skill does not factor into a situation, but a roll is still needed, the player instead rolls against his character’s Luck. This though, comes at a cost, the character sacrificing a point of Luck to make this roll. So essentially, a character’s luck (and Luck) can run out over the course of an adventure. Thankfully, this is not a permanent loss, and both Luck and Stamina can be regained once a character has taken the time to rest.

Combat  primarily consists of opposed rolls of Skill plus Advanced Skill plus the result of two six-sided dice, the roll determining which combatant hits and inflicts damage, whether that is mêlée or missile combat. Rolls of double six are criticals and count as Mighty Blows which inflict double damage, whilst double ones are fumbles and enable an opponent to inflict an extra point of damage. Mighty Blows can inflict a lot of damage on defendants and that includes the player characters, so Troika! has the potential to be fairly deadly in play. Thankfully though, character creation is quick, so bringing replacement characters into play should not too much of an issue. Other rules cover grappling, use of multiple weapons, armour and shields—both reduce damage, and so on. So simple and fast enough, but initiative is very different.

Initiative in Troika! requires tokens—a lot of tokens. These can be dice, counters, and so on, as long as they are in a mix of colours. Each player character requires two tokens of the same colour. All of the enemies require tokens in the same colour equal to their combined total Initiative value. One last token is needed of an entirely different colour. This is the End of the Round token. This collection of tokens, known as the stack, goes into a bag or container and shaken up. Then over the course of a round, the Game Master draws tokens one by one. When a player character’s token is drawn, he can act and when an enemy’s token is drawn, one of their number can act. This continues until all of the tokens have been drawn, or the End of the Round is drawn.

These Initiative rules are very different (at least for roleplaying, something like them being used in the board game, German Railways) and have an unpredictable, organic feel and flow. One clever extension of them is the aiming rule, which by letting a player character place one less token in the stack, lets his player rolls twice and take the best result when his second is drawn. However, the unpredictable nature of the Initiative mechanism means that the enemies might act before the End of the Round token is drawn and so prevent the player characters from acting in a round; some player characters might get to act, but not others before the End of the Round token is drawn; and all of the enemies might get to act before the player characters. Now barring the last one, which could occur in a standard combat engagement anyway, some players may be dismayed by being denied the chance to act, something which flies in the face of just about every other roleplaying game. What it represents, though, is a stronger ebb and flow of combat, of combatants hesitating, seizing the initiative and losing it, and so on.

Troika! includes some seventy or so spells. Each is treated like an Advanced Skill which needs to be rolled against when cast and also has a cost to be paid from the caster’s Stamina statistic when cast. A result of double one means that the spell is successfully cast, but a roll of double six means that the spell has not only failed to be cast, but that the caster’s player must roll on the ‘OOPS!’ table, which is given on the inside back cover. This can radically change the caster, whether that is deducting twenty-five years from the caster’s life or not, such as turning everyone nearby turning into pig, except the caster. The ‘OOPS!’ table definitely has an obsession with pigs! 

Monsters or enemies are treated in as simple a fashion that is in keeping with the rest of Troika! There are some thirty or so given from Alzabo and Boggart to Ven and Zoanthrop. The first is a ghoul-bear, the second is a grumpy Pixie, the third time travellers from the End of All Things, and the fourth, fashionistas who followed a fashion too far to be in touch with the animal kingdom and gave themselves partial prefrontal lobotomies… Every enemy entry includes a Mien table to quickly determine their attitude when encountered. All have slightly lower Stamina ratings in comparison to the player characters in order to make combat quicker to run and to balance against spell casters having to expend their Stamina to fuel their spells. 

Lastly, Troika! includes ‘The Blancmange & Thistle’, an introductory adventure. It is intended to be dropped into an ongoing campaign with little rhyme or reason, and sees the player characters taking rooms at The Blancmange & Thistle hotel in the city of Troika. They are forced to share a room because there is a big party on the roof to which they are also invited, but anyone and everyone is also going to party too. All of them just as weird, if not more so, as the player characters. The adventure really consists of the player characters having a terrible time in the hotel’s lift as one weird guest gets on as another weird guest gets off at his floor. The problem with the scenario is that it will fall flat if the player characters refuse to engage with it, but should they actually engage with the weirdness around them—and they have no excuse given just how weird they all are—then this is a lively, silly trifle of an adventure which has a feel of The Dying Earth about it. Writing adventures to fit this tone or indeed the feel of the world of Troika! may be a challenge for some Game Masters and the roleplaying game does not include any advice to that end—or indeed any advice. Although to be fair, the roleplaying game is not aimed at the inexperienced roleplayer. 

Physically, Troiki! Is very nicely presented. A nice touch is that the various sections—character creation, rules, spells, and the bestiary and scenario—are each done on different coloured paper, making them stand out a little in the digest-sized hardback. The writing is good and the artwork is suitably and weird throughout.

Mechanically, Troika! is undeniably simple, looking and feeling a little like the Fighting Fantasy solo adventure novels of the nineteen eighties. The application of Backgrounds though, not only make them more competent, they also provide ways in which the player characters can each be cool. The Backgrounds also suggest aspects of the wider world—or edge of the world—whilst still leaving plenty of room for player input. Ultimately, if Troika! is missing anything, it is more of this fantastically weird and baroque world that the Backgrounds and the scenario hints at, which as ‘The Blancmange & Thistle’ demonstrates really comes out in play rather than presented as chunks of information. Thus Troika! would benefit from further weird adventures rather than sourcebooks.

Troika! is a fantastic little book, a roleplaying game, which with its simple rules and rich character Backgrounds, possesses a superb pick-up and play quality. It would be fantastic to see that supported with a book of easy to pick up and run short scenarios, but the scenario in this book, ‘The Blancmange & Thistle’, is a fine start.

Taverns are a cliché in fantasy roleplaying because that is always where adventures begin, as in, “You all meet in an inn.” They are places where the adventurers can buy a drink, pick up a few rumours, perhaps get hired for a job, and then go on their merry way to delve into some dungeon or some other adventuring site. Then when the adventure is over, they are places for such adventurers to retire to and spend their loot on wine, women, and song. The Pocket Companion: A Tavern Guide is designed to make such establishments more interesting than that and to give multiple examples of such places where food and drink, company and entertainment can all be found and enjoyed. Some seventy or so taverns detailed, spread across four types of terrain—cities and towns, on the road, villages, and wilderness—all designed for use with the fantasy roleplaying game of your choice, for the content of The Pocket Companion: A Tavern Guide is entirely systemless. Further, the supplement published by Wisdom Save Media is very simply presented in a black and buff booklet in order to make it friendly on the pocket.

Now despite saying that The Pocket Companion: A Tavern Guide is systemless—because it is—it has its own system of presenting and rating each of the taverns described within its pages. Every entry is rated in terms of casks, from one to five, taking into consideration its customer service, quality of produce, comfort, range of services offered, décor, and overall customer satisfaction. This is only a rough guide and is open to interpretation, so a one-cask tavern might give great customer service, but serve terrible beer and have cheap furniture, or the beer is great, but overpriced, served by rude staff, and patronised by aggressively surly customers. The particular services offered by each tavern are indicated by a number of icons, one each for food, stables rooms, merchant (services), blacksmith, entertainment, and bar staff and patrons. Again, these are are open to interpretation, but further information is provided in each tavern’s description and some of their customer comments.

In addition every entry includes a description, a bit o’ history, and one or two reviews. Some also give descriptions of the staff and patrons of the tavern, each of whom is accorded their likes, dislikes, wants, fears, and flaws, all of which are organised into a table of their own. There are typically three of these per entry that includes them, nicely providing a thumbnail portrait of the individuals. This increases the page count for the entries with NPCs from one page to two.

For example, The Yellow King is rated three casks and offers food, entertainment, and rooms. The sign over its door depicts a figure with its head bowed and covered in a cowl and dressed in yellow tattered robes, surrounded by shadows which suggest the figure might have wings. Inside, its many patrons sit in small clumps, staring into their greasy yankards amidst an air of desperation and menace… According to its ‘A Bit O’ History’, The Yellow King is place for its patrons to drink and forget, ignoring the city’s worst inhabitants in the tavern’s dark corners. The right connections will get an introduction to any one of them should you have need of their prowess at blackmailing and coercing others. The price though, is often more than simple coin… Surprisingly, Hildred Castaigne only gives the tavern a rating of two out of five.

Where The Yellow King is found in a city or town, The Lair is rated at four casks and is located somewhere in the wilderness, its exact location and appearance changing at the whim or need of the owner, Nox. Nox is an average bakeep, though he does have information to sell for a price. The tavern is described as being clean and well-maintained, but the decor may well be off-putting and there are shady corners where all sorts of business can be conducted. Nox is described under ‘A Bit O’ History’ as often being sarcastic or derisive towards his customers as he would rather be elsewhere, though he will help those new to the area. It is awarded five out of five in one reward, but three out of five in another, the latter pointing out that Nox is freaky, whilst his bouncer and waiter twins are always grinning….

Under ‘Staff and Patrons of The Lair’, Nox is revealed as an intelligence broker with blank, disinterested expression and a sarcastic manner. He is also a vampire! He likes decorating and colourful cocktails, dislikes cleaning and daytime, wants better servants, fears not being needed, and suffers from the flaws of being overly supportive, even to his own detriment. Both his bouncer and waiter twins are given a similar treatment as is a secretive patron known as The Alabaster Mask.

In addition to the numerous taverns, The Pocket Companion: A Tavern Guide also includes a few plot hooks, a set of tables for determining the details of cellars as well as their secrets, for creating the names of beers, wines, and liquors and how they taste, some twenty distractions to throw at the player characters, and games like Beggars Blackjack and Drinks and Daggers. All of which can be used to add colour and flavour to the player characters’ visit to any of the establishments described earlier. Then if the Game Master runs out of choices within the pages there is a quick and dirty means of generating more taverns with a set of further tables. The book itself is rounded out with space for the Game Master to record her own creations.

Physically, The Pocket Companion: A Tavern Guide is a plain and simple book. It is only lightly illustrated, but more problematically is that it does need another edit as the writing in places is not as succinct or clear as it could be. Much of this stems from the contents of the book being crowd-sourced, so the writing is variable in its quality. The fact that the contents of the book were crowd-sourced also means that there is another issue with The Pocket Companion: A Tavern Guide in the degree of repetition between its seventy or so entries. So this means that there are lots of taverns that are run by retired adventurers, taverns that are really busy despite being off the beaten track, taverns run by Dwarves, and so on. What this means is that the Game Master has to be careful when selecting the next tavern to add to her game lest it is too similar to the last one that the player characters visited.

Overall, although The Pocket Companion: A Tavern Guide is somewhat rough around the edges, it does give the Referee plenty of choice and plenty to work with. Which it does in an inexpensive and accessible fashion.

Exhibit / December 12, 2019

Object Name: Domebook 2 
Maker and Year: Pacific Domes, 1971 (Lloyd Kahn, editor)
Object Type: Building publication
Image Source: Archive.org
Description (Michael Grasso):

“The thing about zomes is,” Riggs with a desperate grin, “is they can act as doorways to other dimensions. The F-105s, the coyotes, the scorpions and snakes, the desert heat, none of that bothers me. I can leave whenever I want.” He motioned with his head. “All I have to do is step through that door over there, and I’m safe.”

“Can I look?” said Doc.

“Better not. It’s not for everybody, and if it’s not for you, it can be dangerous.”

—Inherent Vice, Thomas Pynchon

In the spring of 1971, it seemed everyone on the fringes of mainstream society in North America was trying to build geodesic domes: soaring gridwork domes made of plastic and steel, of wood, of concrete. Inspired by technocratic engineer-turned-counterculture guru and geodesic dome evangelist R. Buckminster Fuller, hundreds of back-to-the-land hippies sought to use his elementary architectural example of solid geometry as the basis for their homes and gathering places. One of the many venues that helped dome aficionados figure out how to build their own domed spaces was a guidebook assembled by a group of students and facilitators at a freeform California high school. Inspired by their own experimentation with building geodesic structures, and directly assisted by the runaway success of Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog, these dome-builders and educators released a pair of “Domebooks” in 1970 and 1971 for sale to the general public. While Domebook One was more of a straight-ahead how-to construction guide, Domebook 2 acted as a clearinghouse for correspondence from a panoply of counterculture builders, along with material specifics on dome-building, ruminations on the geometry behind geodesics, a lengthy interview with Fuller, and a plethora of intriguing diversions illuminating the state of the counterculture in the early 1970s.

Buckminster Fuller’s conception (and subsequent U.S. patenting) of the geodesic dome does owe quite a bit to German engineers and architects of the interwar period, but during Fuller’s tenure immediately following World War II at the renowned experimental Black Mountain College near Asheville, North California, he struck upon the idea of building domed structures around regularly repeating three-dimensional geodesic frameworks. They would be strong and cheap, ideal for quickly assembling structures with a minimum of materials. Postwar developments in lightweight construction materials, such as aluminum and petrochemically-derived plastics, would provide the ideal building blocks for geodesic structures, just as they were already being used everywhere from suburban homes to designer furnishings. The U.S. government, specifically the defense establishment, immediately saw the value of these domes for structures that needed to withstand difficult climactic conditions, including radomes on the U.S. Air Force’s Distant Early Warning Line built in the Canadian arctic. Fuller’s patented domes were therefore fully integrated into the U.S. military-industrial complex prior to their adoption by the counterculture. Fuller’s emergence as an unlikely countercultural guru culminated with the release of his seminal 1969 Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, but his eccentric futurist visions had intrigued independent thinkers throughout the 1960s. Fuller’s own life was full of such contradictions: a man born into old Yankee WASP privilege, his own lifelong nonconformist ethos and mystical epiphany in 1927 were always at the heart of his humanitarian inventiveness and intellectual creativity.

The Domebooks themselves emerge, just as the geodesic dome did at Black Mountain did a quarter-century earlier, from the lengthy tradition of American experimental schooling arguably begun with the work of John Dewey in the late 19th century. Domebook 2 tells the tale of Pacific High School, a “free school” founded in 1961 in Palo Alto and designed to center the students’ experiences over formal instruction, hierarchies, or explicit supervision from adults. Field work was common at Pacific, as well as trips abroad. By 1965, the school had received 40 acres in the Santa Cruz Mountains, which the students first commuted to and eventually decided to live on, sharing responsibilities for food, shelter, and maintenance. Inspired by the domes that were popping up in locations like Big Sur (the location of countercultural retreat Esalen) thanks to dome-builders like Lloyd Kahn, the students tried their hands at dome construction. Like many of the student-directed experiences at Pacific High School, the domes met with frequent failures, but by the time of the first Domebook‘s release, more than a half-dozen domes made from different kinds of building materials with differing levels of success were standing on the grounds of the school.

Domebook 2 differs from the marginally more staid Domebook One in its patchwork ‘zine-like appearance; while both Domebooks used Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog publishing facilities (and Domebook One definitely apes the Catalog in its sleeker modernist visual design in spots), Domebook 2 has a much more homemade feel to it, with whimsical cartoons, sometimes-baffling asides, imaginatively-designed photograph inserts, and hand-drawn subject headers all over the document. The purely mathematical and practical portions of Domebook 2—illustrations of geodesic shapes, listings of angle calculations for various dome structures, and the like—possess that very peculiar aesthetic combination of hard technocratic science and near-mystic wonder that some have called “hippie modernism.” In explaining the five Platonic solids, Domebook 2 offers images of microscopic plankton that adhere to the geometry of said solids, showing that Fuller’s designs adhere to the ancient esoteric maxim of “as above, so below.” Domebook 2 is definitely meant to inculcate a geodesic “state of mind” in the reader; before building a dome, Domebook 2 advises every prospective dome-builder to get their hands on modeling materials and physically build a model of their desired dome: “Don’t try to build a dome without first making and studying models.” One can easily imagine even a dilettante with no interest in building their own domed home simply buying the Domebook to stare at the endlessly repeating geometries within; Domebook 2 even outright states that making a geodesic sphere model will allow you to “trip out on the different patterns.”

That variety of building materials evident in the Pacific High School projects was multiplied greatly in the photos and written contributions by the far-flung correspondents to Domebook 2. Each of these small groups of dome-builders—some of them families, others communes, some eccentric wealthy individuals, professional conferences, and even a few universities—had their own unique challenges in building and maintaining geodesic dome structures. The Pacific High School “campus” located in the woodlands of Northern California was situated in a temperate, if wet, climate. But within the pages of Domebook 2, builders from all across North America, from the frozen plains of Alberta to the deserts of New Mexico to the high mountains of Colorado to the snowy backwoods of Vermont, explain their own unique local challenges to dome-building, from temperature variations to precipitation to the incursions of porcupines. Correspondents to Domebook 2 accentuate the wisdom to be found in native populations and traditions—“for practical as well as spiritual reasons,” as one correspondent from New Hampshire says in a letter—such as using hand-split cedar shake shingling in the Pacific Northwest. Disagreements among the contributors on whether to use organic renewable building materials like wood or non-renewables like metal, concrete, or products of the “petroleum sucked from the earth” like plastic and foam insulation occasionally get heated; recommendations for how many Douglas fir seedling plantings would pay Mother Earth back for one’s dome are included in one sidebar. Tales of recycling and outright scavenging materials abound in the letters: “Use as little ‘money’ as possible. Recycle waste as much as possible. Manufacture our own parts as much as possible. Keep it clean as much as possible.” A Digger-like group that recycles urban waste for building and living materials goes further, cannibalizing old condemned structures; as they say, “The only growing resource is trash.”

Which brings us to the social and political aspects of the various dome projects seen in Domebook 2. The majority of these experimental builders, like Pacific High, reject many of the traditions of conventional mid-century American society. Dropping out and living by their self-professed ethos, many of the builders not only calculate the costs to Earth for their building materials but try to ditch the “square” mentality entirely in the process of building: “The most important thing we learned building this dome is that women baking bread while ‘dudes’ build domes is sexist bullshit,” says one of the Red Rockers commune in Colorado. “We dig science and futuristic stuff,” say the Red Rockers about their 60-foot wide central dome. “We wanted our home to have a structural bias against individualism and for communism; we like doing big things together.” But the pages of Domebook 2 are full of references to authority figures among the “straight” world who seek to take away the autonomy of dome-builders, usually through the use of building inspectors. The Pacific team itself tells of difficulties with the local authorities as they attempt to be open with the building inspectors and thus manage to remain “half-way within the law”: “Through maneuvers over the months, some good human beings in Santa Cruz county department, we somehow become semi-legal.” Several of the commune groups also cite intense police interest in their communities and, given that many of these letters were written in the previous year (1970), the spectre of the state-sanctioned violence at Kent State hovers over the many submissions to Domebook editors. One particularly hair-raising account depicts county inspectors in Topanga, California siccing police helicopters on a dome-building community; comparisons to the war in Southeast Asia are naturally made. And occasionally, the geodesic dome’s established place in the military-industrial complex peeks through the overall handcrafted and hippie vibe of Domebook 2; many of the tables, calculations, and illustrations that help a dome-builder figure out the geometry of a geodesic dome are present in Domebook 2 thanks to the computer-aided calculations of a NASA researcher named Joseph Clinton.

Probably the most poignant thing about Domebook 2 is what’s made clear by so many of the stories from the field: that ultimately the domes aren’t really keeping their inhabitants all that warm and dry. “Probably the main reason there are not more dome homes,” says the “Sealing” section of Domebook 2, “is the problem of leakage.” The Domebook writers even admit that their next book will cease focusing on domes and their cousins, zomes, and instead fall under the more general banner of “Shelter.” The lack of a Domebook 3 would end up removing a major venue for dome-builders and inhabitants to socially network about repairing and maintaining their structures. But among all the letters and photos, and throughout all the narrative streams, what shines through is that the domes themselves are helping people imagine a different future, one that looks and feels radically different from the North American suburbia that most of these young builders grew up in, a world of people taking charge of their own housing and electing to form their own communities. Whatever mundane problems that rain and snow and cops and building inspectors might present to the dome-builders, that vision of “other dimensions” on the other side of the zome doorway, of a new path forward that “trips out on the different patterns,” of a possibility for living outside what seemed like an omnipresent and oppressive system, remains.

Work has been busy as hell and I had a couple of other unexpected projects dropped on my lap.
What's that mean to you?  Well a long story short, that means my next scheduled release is going to be late.

Granted. These were all self-imposed deadlines.  So the only one here who is upset about this is me.

My next two books will both be for Gavin Norman's Old School Essentials.

I am extending my Back to Basic celebration a little into 2020 where I hoped to also publish a few books for D&D5.  Ah well.  This gives me time to give these two projects the more attention they deserve.



So what can I tell you now?

The Craft of the Wise: The Pagan Witch Traditions


This book follows the same series as the Daughters of Darkness,  the Cult of Diana, Children of the Gods, and the Pumpkin Spice Witch.


This book covers the Pagan Witch Tradition and it is really about 75% done.  It has a bunch of new spells, a lot of new rituals, some new monsters.  I also talk about spell creation, magic item creation and running a Pagan campaign.  I talk about how the witch is a better fit with druids, barbarians and bards than magic-users do.  I am also working on a few more covens.  If you have any of those books then you have an idea what this one will look like.

This book is overtly compatible with OSE but it also harkens back a little more to the B/X sources.  You can probably see where it is going based on my posts since Halloween.  This book will also have more of an "Advanced Genre Rules" feel to it.

I wanted to post this on the Winter Solistice (ten days from now) but I am not going to make that. So instead look for an Imbolc (February 2) release.  It will be a "Letter-sized" or 8.5" x 11".  Aiming for 64 pages.

The Warlock for Old School Essentials



This book will present a new Warlock class for Old-School Essentials.  This book will fit more with the "Core Fantasy Rules" of OSE and I'll present some options for "Advanced Fantasy".  It will be largely compatible with my other Warlocks and the spells can be used by witches or warlocks.

The idea here is that both books will be complete unto themselves but also can be used to complement each other.  This one is not as far along.  I was aiming for an Imbolc release and I think I will stick to that.

This book will be "Digest sized" or roughly 6"x9" or 5.5"x8.5".  I need to check what DriveThru supports.

There will be lots of new spells (at least 60) and new invocations.  Not sure if there will be any monsters or not.  Likely it will not have any demons since they really don't fit the feel of OSE or B/X.

Right now this book is only about 45% done.  Aiming for 32 or 48 pages.

I am disappointed I am not going to make my dates, but I think it makes for better books.

Exhibit / December 11, 2019

Object Name: What To Do In An Emergency
Maker and Year: Reader’s Digest, 1986
Object Type: Book
Description: (Richard McKenna)

The world is a dangerous place, and nowhere is this more true—subjectively speaking—than in its safest, most fortunate corners. I’ve spoken before about how the postwar UK seemed sometimes to be living in a traumatized fugue state of danger and threat. Here, then, is the bible of that particular belief system: the Reader’s Digest‘s 1986 What to Do in an Emergency, a 400-page compendium of Anglo fears, running from the most mundane (“gravy stains, removal of…. p.180”) to the surprisingly obscure (“caves, lost in… p.310”), which allowed every Briton to writhe in pleasure at the thought of the many nightmarish injuries, deaths, and degradations that might await them should they step from the path of righteous behavior.

In 1986, Britain was still eleven years away from two events—the election victory of Tony Blair’s New Labour and the death of Lady Diana—which would spark a mutation in, or perhaps simply bring into sharp focus, its psychology, triggering the evaporation of the last remaining remnants of the country’s previous approach to existence. Contrary to any naive assumptions about British “good manners,” it ought to be stated for the record that much of what made postwar Britain function was facilitated not by any innate civility but by a series of behaviors that had been drilled into us since childhood, with origins in the regimented lives ingrained in our parents and grandparents back when we were a total war economy Airstrip One-ing our way through World War II. That and the real risk of physical violence for infractions such as jumping queues and insulting other drivers ensured a Pavlovian comportment that turned boarding a bus or joining a dual-carriageway into almost devotional rituals. Given what has taken the place of this conditioned, vaguely collectivist pseudo-altruism as it has decayed under the pressure of individualist right-wing ideology, I think we can perhaps be forgiven a brief twitch of nostalgia for said collectivist pseudo-altruism, for all its faults.

Reader’s Digest was an American general interest magazine containing condensed articles and devised by Dewitt Wallace while recovering from injuries obtained during the First World War. Despite its progressive attitude towards sex, the Digest was also fond of promoting reactionary values and anti-Communism, often printing smear stories leaked to it by the C.I.A. and F.B.I. The company was also famed for its series of “condensed novels”—each plastic-tooled volume of which contained abridged versions of four popular bestsellers of the moment (Wallace was fond of saying that his epitaph should read ”The final condensation”). The books Reader’s Digest published in the UK were available either from the “Reader’s Digest centres” dotted around the nation’s cities (where customers could “examine and buy” them) or directly through the post by mail order, and the company had a particular hold over people without easy access to bookshops and those who were perhaps not comfortable entering them—because they could be intimidating places—and felt they needed a guide. This guidance was trafficked through the pages of the magazine, amidst its strange mixture of real-life “I fell into a cement mixer” horror, advice on removing stains, and excruciating joke columns like “Laughter, the Best Medicine.”

As well as producing guides like the Reader’s Digest Family Medical Adviser and The Reader’s Digest Complete Do-It-Yourself Manual—a two-volume tome so enormous that it came in its own ICBM launch-codes-eque slipcase—part of the remit of Reader’s Digest‘s publishing arm was to address the output of whichever gland of the zeitgeist happened to be secreting in that particular moment, hence books like 1976’s dip into the paranormal Strange Stories, Amazing Facts. What, then, does it tell us that alongside more sedate products like Success with House Plants and Creative Cooking and Entertaining, the Reader’s Digest publication roster for 1986 also included What to Do in an Emergency? Remaining safe and avoiding harm for ourselves and our loved ones is obviously a priority for most people, but What to Do in an Emergency also feels very much like it is tapping into something else—an almost perverse need to feel proximate to risk, to feel that our lives aren’t quite as safe and dull as they appear. It’s a truism oft repeated that one of the wellsprings of the aggressive energy of British punk was the flat-out boredom of British life, especially in the provinces. Perhaps What to Do in an Emergency was responding to that same need, which, across the Atlantic, was being answered by the delusions of a generation of survivalists. Of course, British survivalism was never going to take the same form as its pumped, bullish and locked-n-loaded US cousin, with its pecs oiled and its buttocks tightly clenched: our buttocks were tightly clenched alright, but for very different reasons. Plus, we didn’t have guns; we had umbrellas—well, if we were soft Southerners we did.

Perhaps it was also a reaction to the cognitive friction between the narrative then being pushed by the right-wing Thatcher government—that the world was a dangerous place and that the Tories were the party to make it safer—and the knowledge that thanks to Tory policies it actually was becoming a more dangerous place (albeit gradually, for most) and that people were going to have to start looking out for themselves as the strings of the welfare state’s safety nets were gradually snipped away. In some way, What to Do in an Emergency feels as though it was responding to these multiple stimuli—a need to feel that life wasn’t as dull as it seemed and at the same time a genuine fear that life risked becoming far less dull than it seemed.

In case potential buyers were unsure of the book’s contents, or emergency-tackling owners were worried about being able to identify their copy in haste as they attempted to save someone struck in the head by the yardarm of a yacht or scalded by a hot drink, What to Do in an Emergency featured a cover in innovative hi-visibility yellow with EMERGENCY emblazoned upon it in a clashing magenta, an ensemble clearly meant to evoke the livery of the British emergency services and confer upon it a pseudo-institutional aura of gravitas. To emphasize the tome’s vocation as a vital piece of lifesaving equipment, the book begins with a “rapid action guide” called “When Seconds Count” that covers primary existential threats to Brits—including, natch, chip pan fires, as well as children eating poisonous plants—before the book proper begins. The nine chapters that follow, from first aid and medical emergencies to drink and drugs, contain a number of illustrations so mind-bogglingly vast that only a corporate behemoth like Reader’s Digest could possible have afforded to fund. These are the book’s true heart and raison d’être.

Counterintuitively, the interior illustrations don’t take up the cover’s dramatic tones, adopting instead a washed-out, vaguely surreal photorealist style presumably intended to be reassuring and undramatic but in fact conferring to their subjects an eerily dreamlike quality. The scene for each chapter is set with a full-page image whose hazy tones, slightly more vivid than those used for the bulk of the illustrations, only lend their nominally innocuous subject matter an unsettlingly elegiac quality: a child on a bike, an old lady being given a cup of tea, a group of friends enjoying a picnic—tranquil scenes of everyday life whose very inclusion in the book imbues them with a sense of foreboding about what form the implicit emergency is going to take: will the poor old lady be scalded by tea, or is it the kind young man who is at risk? Are the carefree holidaymakers about to be attacked by wasps, or will they be struck by lightning? The pictures illustrating the chapters themselves share the mannered and vaguely camp style common to many Reader’s Digest self-help books—an uncanny fetishistic quality that makes them feel almost like some obsessive work of religious mania. In fact, the whole of What to Do in an Emergency feels like a dimly understood metaphor for something troubled and profound, and the stiffness of the posed images only adds to the disconcerting yet compelling atmosphere of gloom. In fact, What to Do in an Emergency almost seems like a vast, metastasized airplane safety card.

The book’s index—where “blood stains, removal of” sits next to “blocked lavatories” and “vomit stains, removal of” sits beside “volcanic eruptions”—reads like some crazed Oulipolian metafiction. In fact, you could probably make a case for What to Do in an Emergency being one of the more successful modernist horror novels of the 1980s. As well as covering standard British fears like blocked toilets, our ubiquitous chip pan fires, and the quicksand that, to judge by the amount of attention it got throughout the ’70s and ’80s, you would have been forgiven for imagining covered much of the mainland instead of a corner of a small beach in Grange over Sands, What to Do in an Emergency trots out a mindbending litany of horrors: “Menaced by a hitchhiker,” “A sleeping bag can become a dangerous trap,” “poisoned by a crop sprayer,” “Trapped in a bog,” “If you are falsely accused of shoplifting,” “TV fires,” and “If you are swept along by a crowd,” to name but a few. The emphasis is firmly focused on the less spectacular emergencies—surviving a plane crash is given less space than propping up a collapsed tent, for example—and each entry is written in the same voice: superficially calm and in control, but with a terse undertone that hints the writer is struggling to repress a panic attack. It’s not just the entries that are incredible, though—everything about What to Do in an Emergency is incredible, including the names of the illustrators, most of whom sound like people writing local scene reports for late-’80s Maximum Rock’n’Roll: Andrew Aloof, Dick Bonson, Charles Chambers, Ivan Lapper, A.W.K.A. Popkiewicz. The contributing writers are no less remarkable, any random selection of them—say, Dr. Birdwood, Frank Eaglestone, Anthony Greenbank, Basil Booth, and Pippa Isbel—sounding like characters from some half-remembered sitcom.

It would be churlish not to admit that what What to Do in an Emergency does, it does excellently, and its advice is always clear and to the point. The book’s genesis is obscure, but the illustrations and list of contributors indicate that it was commissioned by the British arm of Reader’s Digest and only later published in other countries: was it perhaps a fix-up compendium of material cobbled together from other Reader’s Digest self-help books? I can’t be arsed to find out, to be honest. But even if it is, it still feels in some way symbolic of its time and of what was to come. As I said at the beginning, the world can look like a dangerous place when you live in the safest parts of it. People there have farther to fall, as well perhaps as a suppressed semi-awareness that their peace of mind is simply an unearned accident of birth that was at least in part paid for by the sufferings and hard work of other less fortunate people around the world whose countries we’d invaded and whose economies we’d put to our own use.

For a long time, us Brits were fucking lucky, let’s face it: unemployment benefits, free healthcare, free dental care, free and affordable housing, free schools. The quality might occasionally have been as uneven as the teeth British dentistry provided to most of us middle-aged Brits, but at least you didn’t have to worry that there wouldn’t be a system there to provide help if you encountered an emergency. The seeds of the demise of our good fortune, though, were sown right there in the same furrow: given the decades of privilege and social security, many of us had forgotten that a world without such things was not just possible but the way most of the world lived. We thought being safe was the birthright of humanity—just something everyone got. Familiarity with the welfare state bred complacency and indifference, and when the spivs started trying to privatize it, we didn’t even realize it needed defending.

In times of uncertainty, safety and security start to prey on people’s minds. We’ve been watching it happen for years now in the UK as the political party most responsible for actually making Britain a more dangerous place—the Tories, natch, though Tony Blair’s New Labour did a lot of the groundwork and UKIP continues to stoke the fires—has used the anxieties its own policies continually frack up from beneath the psychic shale to fuel the engines of its own self promotion, promising they’ll be the ones to restore the beige stasis of what many consider to be English (as opposed to British) life. We’ll see over the next few years what new emergencies that typically English (as opposed to British) bit of shallowness leads us to.

Ok, now this is a fun one. At least it made me smile.

Reimagined: Fanfic Role-Playing Game

Reimagined is a "fanfic RPG" in which you take some other world and run with it.
If you have ever read (or written) fanfic or have a personal "head-canon" (or even know what that is) then this might be the game for you.

The author, Katarzyna Kuczyńska, comes in with some solid street cred, just different than what I have seen in the past.  This is a good thing.

The game is for two players using the X-Card system (a system I was not very familiar with).
You decide on the fandom, what level of romance you want (Gen, Lime, Lemon and Smut), what sort of story you want (lots listed) and who the charaters are and what the themes are.

Now you and the other player work out your do's and don't (or yeses and noes) and move on the storyline.
You have some tables you can roll on with a d6 (which makes it a game and not a series of collaborative storytelling).  The tables will depend on the tone of your game and type of story.

The players go back and forth being the "actor" and the "director".   I think with some tweaking it could be modified to accommodate more people and thus more characters.  This is one of those games where people that really know each other is where it would work the best.

There is also an example of play given and some examples of the worksheets filled out.   I love the example card shown of "Captain Carol and the God of Thunder" a Superhero story with Lemon (aka steamy) levels of Romance and tension.  On the Noes are "Children being hurt", "torture" and "alcohol" ok, fine and on the "yeses" are Dragons!


Images for illustrative purposes only...
Among our themes are "Superheroes Showing off", "Passionate Foreplay" and "Space Battles" you know...I am enjoying this one more and more.
The main storyline, "Heroes team up to save an alien planet using their powers and spaceship."

Seriously, how does that not sound like fun?


Seriously off the top of my head, I came up with about 30 fandoms this would work with.  Even some I wish I hadn't (gives the Mallfoy-Granger shippers some side eye).

I'd have to try it out. You need the right group to do this game with, but I think it would be fun. This is a very different sort of game for me and I want to try it out.

The PDF is full-color at 39 pages.  There are also extra sheets included.

All for $3.00. That's pretty good really.

Plays Well With Others: BlackStar

Of course, this got me thinking.  If this works well like this, maybe I could use the Story generation functions of this game in my other games.  Sit down as a Session 0 to determine what we all want to do out of a series.  IF that series is media-tie in, say like Star Trek, Star Wars, Doctor Who, or anything, then it might be a good starting point.

So.  Let me try it with BlackStar.

BlackStar is part of the Star Trek Fandom, but it also has heavy doses of Cthulhu.
It's going to be Dark, but Gen.  Sorry, there won't be time for romance among the stars for this crew, I'll save all of that for the Captain and the Thunder God above.

It is an Alternate Universe and partial crossover. 
The only character I know right now is Captain Valerie Beaumont.  BUT she is not in charge of the ship.  She was supposed to be, but it has been taken over by NPC Commodore Taggart.  He is the project leader and a complete dick.  So that will make up some of the interpersonal dynamics.

I want to cover the themes of "Horror in/of Space", "We are not alone", "Science as a Candle in the Dark" and "Adventure! ...but don't go insane."

I am saying yes to Monsters, Insanity, Death, and Visions of Hell.
I am saying no to Vampires, Klingons (sorry!) and no to Deltan and Betazeds.  Not because I don't like them, I love them, but empaths will have a really bad time here.

These are the voyages...Yeah.  This sounds like fun.

Noah Berlatsky / December 10, 2019

The elite is an amorphous clotted blob of parasitic greed and hate. Its tendrils extend with slimy stealth into every orifice of society—which makes its precise outlines difficult to see. Are the elite contemptuous coastal liberals and academics? Are they hedge fund managers and tech billionaires? Are they infiltrating globalists or capitalist pigs? Are they your bosses? Or are they your neighbors sneering at your MCU films and your fast food diet? Or are they all of these people and more, gelatinously fusing into a suffocating, boundaryless mass, conspiring in the dank corners of the hierarchy to feed upon and absorb your labor and your soul?

Brian Yuzna’s 1989 schlock horror film Society slides its moist appendages around the concept of the elite, queasily exposing its power and its vile plasticity. Squeezing into the paranoid horror genre at the very end of the Cold War, Society contorts itself away from the communist menace to focus on the evil assimilating rituals of a boneless capitalism. In doing so, though, it inadvertently shows how difficult it is, with the tropes of terror we have, to tell communism and capitalism apart. The two dissolve into a single two-headed, or multi-headed, or faceless mass, impossible to pin down or define, and therefore impossible to escape.

Society‘s protagonist is Bill Whitney (Billy Warlock), a wealthy Beverly Hills teen and star basketball player running for student body president. Everything seems to be going well for him. And yet, “If I scratch the surface, there’ll be something terrible underneath,” he tells his therapist, Dr. Cleveland (Ben Slack), just before biting into an apple and seeing it squirming with (hallucinatory?) maggots. The worm in Bill’s Garden of Eden is his family. His parents Nan (Connie Danese) and Jim (Charles Lucia) are much closer to his sister Jenny (Patrice Jennings) than they are to him. He suspects they don’t love him; he worries he is adopted. Soon, though, he has cause for even more serious alarm. His sister’s ex-boyfriend David Blanchard (Tim Bartell) secretly bugs Bill’s parents and sister; on the tape the three of them reveal that Jenny’s debutante coming out party is a bizarre incestuous group sex ritual. When Bill tries to share the evidence, the tape disappears, and Blanchard is killed in a car crash. The wooden acting and incoherent plot tremble between B-movie incompetence and sweat-drenched fever dream as the conspiracy begins to engulf everyone from Bill’s rival, Ted Ferguson (Ben Meyerson), to his new girlfriend Clarissa Carlyn (Devin DeVasquez), to his doctor, his parents, and the police.

In the film’s infamous conclusion, we learn that Bill was in fact adopted, and his parents and their friends are part of a shape-shifting species that devours humans in a bizarre group feeding sex ritual called the “shunt.” The last twenty minutes of the runtime are an oozy apocalypse courtesy of special effects guru Screaming Mad George: flesh dissolves, mouths turn into clotted rubbery tendrils, and Bill literally reaches up through Ted Ferguson’s anus to pull him inside out in a climactic battle, ending Ted’s life and Bill’s hopes of a Washington internship. Clarissa is so in love with Bill that she betrays her own species, and she, Bill, and Bill’s buddy Milo (Evan Richards) escape the clutches of the elite, whose members have to satisfy themselves with eating Blanchard, saved from his apparent death by car crash for an even more awful fate.

Society is a decadent, absurdly sodden and febrile extension of the body horror genre of the ‘70s and ‘80s, taking The Thing (1982), 1985’s Re-Animator (which Yuzna produced), The Blob (1988), and The Fly (1986), and adding even more K-Y Jelly and quivering sexual innuendo. It can also be seen, though, as a reversal of those late Cold War-era films, reaching through the back end to grab hold of the eye sockets from the inside to pull out the wet, pulsing innards. Just as the Berlin Wall was falling, Society revealed that the fear of the Soviets was fear of the wealthy elite all along.

***

Anti-communist paranoia in Cold War horror often centers on deindividuation and dehumanization. Ronald Reagan was channeling films like 1954’s Them!, with its giant, mindless insect invaders, when he described Communism as an “ant heap of totalitarianism.” The 1958 The Blob features a figurative Red menace: a clump of gelatin fallen from space that absorbs all those in its path, dissolving discrete persons into a single jelly-like mass. 1956’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers imagines alien seed pods falling to earth, from which gestate repulsively fibrous duplicates. They drain human appearance and personality when, in a metaphorical excess of failed vigilance, their targets fall asleep. “Love, desire, ambition, faith—without them life’s so simple,” a pod person explains to the horrified protagonists, sketching a vision of a world enervated by a lack of human warmth and capitalist moxy. Significantly, one of the first signs of the pod invasion is a dual leeching away of business initiative and consumerist impulses. Dr. Miles Binnell (Kevin McCarthy) first notices something awry when he sees an abandoned roadside vegetable stand. Later, when he takes Becky Driscoll (Dana Wynter) out to dinner, the restaurant is almost abandoned. Pod people neither sell nor buy; the hive mind, possessed of invisible tendrils, does not require an invisible hand.

Becky Driscoll (Dana Wynter) and Elizabeth Driscoll (Brooke Adams) are “born again” in the 1956 and 1978 versions of Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

Communism doesn’t just eat through commercial relationships in these films; it eats through domestic ones. Removing consumer desire also removes traditional sexual and romantic impulses, leaving behind monstrous abomination. Science-fiction author Jack L. Chalker neatly summarizes the anti-communist logic in his 1978 novel Exiles at the Well of Souls, in which humans have created Comworlds where “The individual meant nothing; humanity was a collective concept.” To advance that group good, the Comworlds retool sexual biology itself: “Some bred all-females, some retained two sexes, and some, like New Harmony, bred everyone as a bisexual. A couple had dispensed with all sexual characteristics entirely, depending on cloning.” In one of the most quietly ugly moments in Invasion of the Body Snatchers, a working mother prepares a pod for her own baby, noting in a monotone that soon it won’t cry. Plants replace wombs just as outsourced childcare replaces homemaking, and maternal feelings dissolve into a grey, ichorous, proto-feminist puddle.

The 1970s remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers further teases out the bleakly kinky implications of mind-controlled interference in the reproductive process. Elizabeth Driscoll (Brooke Adams) falls asleep in a field, and, as her personality is sucked from her, her body cracks and crumbles like a rotten pumpkin. Nearby, she rises up in her new form, “born again into an untroubled world, free of anxiety, fear, hate”—and also free of clothes. Pod Elizabeth is completely nude, and the film’s stark gaze willfully conflates desire and terror. In fact, the terror is precisely that she is both fully available and completely unavailable, a desirable body in thrall to some inhuman mass will.

Society takes that body and molds it to different ends. The communist infiltration is replaced with a festering class divide. Good, upstanding businessmen, mothers, and citizens are not infected with an alien ideology. Instead, as the maniacal Dr. Cleveland explains, “No, we’re not from outer space or anything like that. We have been here as long as you have. It’s a matter of good breeding, really.” The parasitic infection is not foreign, but native. No one has been changed; rather, the paranoid revelation is that the evil ones were here all along, squatting wetly in those mansions, and sliding hideously into prestigious internships. No blob or pod or thing needs to take control of the judges, the police, the hospitals, and the student presidency. The blob/pod/thing is already here, salivating. “Didn’t you know, Billy boy, the rich have always sucked off low-class shit like you,” Ted Ferguson sneers, before rolling out an impossibly long tongue to sloppily lick his prey.

Ted’s tongue slides around various kinds of appetite; the rich are hungry not just for deviant power, but for deviant erotics. Just as communism in horror films disorders sexuality, so in Society the rich are marked as evil in large part because of their hypocritical flouting of family values. “We’re just one big happy family except for a little incest and psychosis,” Bill tells Dr. Cleveland nervously, and it’s truer than he knows. His parents and sister share improbably pliable group sex. In a polymorphously perverse primal scene, Bill walks in on them, discovering his mother lying back with her legs turned into arms, and sister Jenny’s head sprouting from her genitals. “If you have any Oedipal fantasies you’d like to indulge in, Billy, now’s the time,” Jenny shrieks gleefully—vapid ‘80s high-class party teen revealed as demonic sexual reprobate.

Billy does have uncomfortable fantasies. Earlier in the film, before he knows what he’s dealing with, he walks in on Jenny in the shower. What he sees is one of the strangest erotic images in film history: through the glazed glass, his sister is facing him from the waist up, her breasts clearly visible. But below the waist her butt is towards him. Bill is frozen in confusion and desire at the sexual grotesque, a literally twisted incestuous spectacle. This erotic narrative stasis is something of a motif in the film. The plot slows down to catch Bill’s wide-eyed reaction during the student president debate, when Clarissa in the audience opens her legs, foreshadowing Sharon Stone’s more explicit move in Basic Instinct (1992) a few years later. Bill similarly comes to a staring halt while watching his parents inspect a phallic, writhing slug in the garden—and then again on the beach, when he is crawling to try to recover some fallen suntan lotion stolen by a couple of mischievous kids. Clarissa, entering stage right, picks up the lotion, and, leaning over him, sprays his face, a move that mimes ejaculation in a phallic role reversal. Finally, when Bill actually has sex with Clarissa, the expression on his face is one of distress and horror as much as pleasure—perhaps because at the height of passion, her left hand slides down sensuously over her back and then down her right arm, as if it’s been cut loose from her body and has wandered off on its own.

The movie itself mirrors Bill’s conflicted gaze, simultaneously fascinated and sickened. The climax is a special effects money shot in multiple respects. The scene is exuberantly concupiscent, with group sex, incest, porn movie tongue kisses, and indeterminate bodily fluids all slickly fusing. The leader of the shunt, Judge Carter (David Wiley), mutters greedily about Blanchard’s beauty mark before devouring him with his mouth, and shoving his hand up his anus. Homosexuality is framed as the ultimate decadence—a terrifying embodiment of penetrative lust that makes you recoil, laugh, and feel things you don’t, or do, want to feel.

The shunt is the Communist blob, with joy added. Judge Carter, Ted, and Jenny all obviously love the shunt. “It’s so fun to see how far you can stretch,” one of Jenny’s fellow shunters tells her. “The hotter and wetter you get the more you can do. It’s great!” The wealthy elite should be opposed to the depersonalization of Communism, but instead they leap in, eager and willing. They’re the enthusiastic audience for all those Cold War films, cheering for the goopy appearance of the Blob.

If all those capitalist viewers loved consuming the Blob, was the Blob ever really a Red Menace in the first place? The problem with seeing Society as an inversion of Cold War anti-communist narratives is that those Cold War anti-communist narratives were often torso-twisted replicas of themselves anyway. The 1988 Blob, for example, replaces the invading goop from space with a biological weapon created by the U.S. government; the shapeless metaphor for communist invasion heaves and bulges and becomes a shapeless metaphor for capitalist invasion.

John Rieder, in 2017’s Science-Fiction and the Mass Culture Genre System, points out that the anti-communism of Invasion of the Body Snatchers can also be read as a terror of capitalism, alluding to the economic signifiers I mentioned earlier.

One of the first signs of the invasion is the closure of a small farmer’s produce stand. Later we see a restaurant losing its business. Finally a group of aliens conspires behind a Main Street-type storefront after one of them grimly turns the sign on the door from Open to Closed. What these emptying-out and closures signify is an economy bent entirely on the production and distribution of seed pods. The colonizing economy is not attuned to the local needs that a produce stand responds to, but rather focuses solely on the single-minded propagation and export of its one and only crop.

The machinations of the body-snatching elites hollow out the town of Santa Mira, just as the society feeds on Blanchard—or just as the vampire feeds in 1922’s Nosferatu. Bram Stoker’s decadent, parasitic aristocrat was robbing helpless victims of their will and individuality via debased, incestuous, homoerotic sexual rituals long before the Cold War seedpods split open. Anti-communism spawned anti-elitism, and anti-elitism spawned anti-communism. Rieder argues that the real danger of the pods is “monopolistic corporate capitalism,” not communism. But which take is the true reading is less important than the way anti-communism is an indistinguishably parasitic replication of anti-capitalism, and vice versa. The tropes of anti-elitism and of anti-communism are grown from one bloated pod. Both dissolve personality, virtue, ambition, love, and sex into a repulsive muck that lives only to eat and perversely reproduce.

Left: Nosferatu (1922); right: They Live (1988)

Perhaps the best example of how radical and reactionary horror tropes sprout from one another is John Carpenter’s 1988 classic They Live. In the movie, John Nada (Roddy Piper), a virtuous, optimistic, working-class protagonist, discovers that cadaverous aliens are living among us, controlling us with television messages that turn us into obedient, consuming drones. The movie is widely considered a critique of Reagan-era neoliberalism, and it is that. But it’s also a story about the virtues of genocide. A white guy discovers aliens who don’t look like him living in his town, and his first impulse is to murder them. Foreign shape-shifting immigrants, like vampires, are a standard anti-Semitic stand-in for Jews, and They Live can be read as a fascist conspiracy theory, in which brave working Americans finally recognize their racial oppressors, and respond with righteous cleansing violence.

Actual neo-Nazis have in fact read the film in exactly this way. Director John Carpenter insists that this was not his intention, and there’s no reason to disbelieve him. But tropes, like pod people, have minds of their own. When a creator assembles signs that signal “anti-elitism,” those same signs exude a duplicate, indistinguishable signal that is “anti-communism” or its frequent partner on the right, “fascism.” This is certainly the case in Society, a film in which Judaism is as slippery as sexuality. David Blanchard, we’re repeatedly told, is not the right kind of boy to date Jenny. That’s in part, we learn, because he’s Jewish. After his car accident, he has an open casket funeral in a synagogue. The problem is that Jewish people don’t have open casket funerals. Blanchard, whose corpse is faked by the society, is, it turns out (and unbeknownst to the film creators), a fake simulacra of a Jew.

If Blanchard isn’t really a Jew, it follows that the group that rejects him is made up of fake gentiles. And indeed, the vampiric, endogamous, shape-shifting vampires of the society are a not-very-buried anti-Semitic caricature. “You’re a different race from us, a different species, a different class. You’re not one of us. You have to be born into society,” the creatures tell him. This is a statement about the insularity, privilege, and snobbishness of the hereditary rich. But it’s also a racialization of class that is uncomfortably congruent with anti-Semitism. When the rich are horned devils feeding on the blood of your progeny, that could mean they’re not the rich at all, but the usual scapegoat.

Society expresses its disgust for the elite through the visceral, loathsome, oily imagery of homophobia, anti-Semitism, and anti-leftism. Class critique in the popular imagination draws parasitically on the stigmatization of marginalized people, and on tropes of deindividuation and sexual disorder sucked up from anticommunism. This is in part why it’s been so easy for the right over the last half century and more to position itself as the defender of working people. We have built the rhetoric of anti-elitism and the rhetoric of fascism from the same putrid, writhing flesh. If we don’t find a better way to imagine resistance, and soon, society will consume us too.

Noah Berlatsky is the author of Wonder Woman: Bondage and Feminism in the Marston/Peter Comics.

Grýla, by Þrándur ÞórarinssonBaby, it's cold outside, so wear a coat over your armor and grab a sword since for the next few Monstrous Mondays I am going to deal with Christmas monsters.   Let's start with a classic, Grýla the Christmas Witch.

Grýla, The Christmas Witch

Grýla, and her husband Leppalúði, haunt the dark, frozen mountains far to the North.  Grýla is a foul hag that is rumored to be descended from the ancient Frost Giants.  Every year on the shortest day of the year Grýla comes down to find the naughtiest children in the lands. She captures them, stuffs them into a large magical sack (treat as a bag of holding). 
She takes these children to her 3rd husband (who is too lazy to leave their cave) where she puts these children into a large cauldron to make her favorite dish, a stew of naughty children.

Grýla can move across ice and snow with no difficulty.  Her nose is infallible, she can dependently detect alignments.  She will avoid Lawful (Good) and Neutral characters if possible.  She will approach any Chaotic (Evil) characters to see if they have any children. She will also abduct children from their homes.

Much like the Callieach, Grýla is inactive in the warm summer months.  Her husband never takes action; he is simply too lazy.

Grýla can cast spells as 4th level witch of the Pagan or Winter Witch traditions.


Grýla, The Christmas Witch
(Labyrinth Lord)
No. Enc.: 1 (1) Unique
Alignment: Chaotic (evil)
Movement: 30' (90')
Armor Class: 2
Hit Dice: 8+8*** (44 hp)
Attacks: 3 (claw/claw/bite)
Damage: 1d6/1d6/1d8
Special: Enhanced sense of smell, acts as "Detect Alignment", witch spells
Save: Witch 9
Morale: 10
Hoard Class: None
XP: 1,700

Grýla, The Christmas Witch
(Blueholme Journeymanne Rules)
AC: 2
HD: 8d8+8
Move: 30
Attacks: 2 claw (1d6 x2), 1 bite (1d6+2), witch spells
Alignment: Chaotic
Treasure: None
XP: 1,700

Grýla, The Christmas Witch
(Old-School Essentials)
AC 2 [17], HD 8+8 (44hp), Att 2 claw (1d6x2), 1 bite (1d6+2) + detect alignment and witch spells, THAC0 17 [+2], MV 90’ (30’), SV D13 W14 P13 B16 S14 (8), ML 10, AL Chaotic, XP 1,700, NA 1 (1) Unique, TT None
▶ Detect Alignment: Grýla can "smell" evil. This enhanced sense works as a Detect Alignment spell.
▶ Vulnerability: Vulnerable to silver, magic weapons and holy items. 
▶ Witch spells: Grýla can cast spells as 4th level witch of the Pagan or Winter Witch traditions.

If ever there was a city ripe for subversion by the Mythos it is Jazz Age Berlin, the Berlin of the twenties, of roaring inflation, the Weimar Republic, of unfettered artistic expression, of outrageous entertainment, of political extremes and violence, of a flood of immigration from Russia and Eastern Europe, and more that led it to be called the ‘Wickedest City on Earth’. It is this period—between the end of the Great War and the Nazi party under Adolf Hitler taking power in 1933—and its subversion by the Mythos which is explored in Berlin: The Wicked City – Unveiling the Mythos in Weimar Berlin, the latest supplement for Call of Cthulhu, Seventh Edition. Published by Chaosium, Inc., the content and subject matter of Berlin: The Wicked City—sex, drugs, and prostitution—as well as the horror, make it one of the more mature titles published for the venerable roleplaying game of Lovecraftian investigative horror to date.

Berlin: The Wicked City begins by exploring why an investigator would be in a Berlin. Well despite its reputation for political violence and the rampant inflation in the earlier part of the decade, it is a welcoming city, not just for immigrants of all sorts, but also tourists, artists, and academics as well as homosexuals, lesbians, transgendered, and others. For Berliners and Germans come to Berlin, there is the matter of asking the question, ‘How did you spend the War?’ to be answered and whilst no new Occupations are given, several new Experience Packages are provided which focus on aspects of Berlin life. These are Street Fighter, Underclass, and Former Corpsstudent (ex-member of a student fraternity). Four Investigator Organisations are given as examples for the Investigators to join, all pleasingly suitable for the Berlin of the 1920s, including as they do Hilde-Film, a struggling film company—the city being the centre of European film production—which believes it has footage of ghosts and the Landsberger Tenants’ Association, whose members have uncovered something weird in the cellar and fear that others are taking an interest in it. Further on, it looks at the possible contacts that the investigators can cultivate in the city, including political, occult, and criminal.

Berlin itself is accorded a decent history and description of each of it zones and districts. Each is given a page of detail accompanied by a list of its sites of interest—both mundane and unusual, house of worship, chief contact, gang or organisation, nightlife, ongoing problem, and prominent form of prostitution. Also covered are the city’s weather, transport network, media and communication, and penal code. Equally as useful for any Investigator are the descriptions of Berlin’s museums and libraries, whilst those for Haus Vaterland—a department store of restaurants, Romanisches Forum—the square where the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Memorial-Church and the exploitative Heaven and Hell Club both stand, the Institute of Sexology, and more, are described in more detail. The discussion of food and drink and Berlin’s nightlife, including the possibility of investigators owning their own club, move Berlin: The Wicked City onto more contentious ground.

One aspect that marks Berlin: The Wicked City as a sourcebook for more mature gamers is that the fact that it includes sex, drugs, and prositution, all prevalent in the period. These are subjects which some roleplayers may find dealing with more uncomfortable than the cosmic horror of Call of Cthulhu with its death and madness, but given that Berlin: The Wicked City is a supplement about Berlin, they are unavoidable. So yes, it does give rules for the effects of taking a variety of recreational drugs—including alcohol, it does list the types of prostitutes working in the city, and it does discuss both LGBTQI investigators and LGBTQI politics in the city. Notably though, it treats all of these subject matters in a mature fashion and a tone that is always measured, never salacious. Further, the treatment of these subject matters barely scratches the surface—Berlin during the Jazz Age deserved its reputation as the ‘Wicked City in the World’.

Before Berlin: The Wicked City delves into the weird, it gives biographies of some twenty or so famous Berliners and other inhabitants of the city, including Marlene Dietrich, Albert Einstein, Christopher Isherwood, and Vladimir Nabokov. None are given stats, but they do not really need them. What is given is the period when they are resident in Berlin, highlighting the possibility that the investigators might just meet any one of them.

More than half of the supplement is dedicated to the Mythos in Berlin. This includes the presence of Nyarlathotep as the emcee of the city’s wildest parties and cabarets, wild youth who style themselves as the ‘Lost Boys’ from J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan and worship something caprine in the woods outside the city, and a dance troupe whose ‘cosmic ballets’ might just be summoning clear vision to the world, but might inadvertently be summoning something else. These short write-up are accompanied by ten scenario seeds awaiting the Keeper’s development.

Berlin: The Wicked City is rounded out with three scenarios which together form a loose campaign which takes place in 1922, 1926, 1928, and 1932. Each of the three explores a particular theme which the author discusses at the scenarios’ starts, so the theme for ‘The Devil Eats Flies’ is ‘lustmord’—‘lust death’, for ‘Dances of Vice, Horror, and Ecstacy’ it is ‘überschreitung’—‘transgression’, and for ‘Schreckfilm’ it is ‘algolagnia’—‘sexual pleasure derived from physical pain’. ‘The Devil Eats Flies’ is a noirish case of a missing person which descends into political unrest and violence on Berlin’s streets and one of the stranger tales of the twentieth century. There are some nice set pieces to this scenario, including a scene at night in the city’s zoo and at the antagonist’s home. Overall, this is a rich, meaty mystery for the investigators to get their teeth into. ‘Dances of Vice, Horror, and Ecstacy’ draws the investigators into the life of a dissolute artist when something strange happens at one of her performances and they are asked by an occultist to investigate. This is a louche and loose scenario with multiple plot strands which may not be that easy to follow and the Keeper will need to ensure that she has well prepared before running this scenario. Foreshadowing events years in the future, the scenario takes on a grandeur in its later scenes in a number of quite wicked set-pieces. Lastly, ‘Schreckfilm’ begins with a MacGuffin falling into the investigators’ possession and finds them trailed by trouble as the authorities and other organisations, both mundane and monstrous, take too much of an interest in them. Investigating the MacGuffin will furnish them with clues and an encounter with a surprisingly urbane Englishman before plunging them into the seamier side of Berlin society and an attempt to prevent the co-option of the mass media by the Mythos. Taking place before the election of the Nazi party, there is a strong sense of foreboding throughout ‘Schreckfilm’, one that stems our knowledge of events which followed. For the investigators though, this is one last chance to stop at least some of the madness. 

All three of these quite lengthy scenarios make excellent use of Berlin as a place, making them difficult to set elsewhere. They also parallel the events and moods of the decade the supplement covers. Starting with the terror and uncertainty of the political violence and economic instability of 1922 and ‘The Devil Eats Flies’, continuing with the transgressive decadence of  ‘Dances of Vice, Horror, and Ecstacy’ in 1926 and 1928, before coming face-to-face with moral decay and turpitude of ‘Schreckfilm’ in 1932. All three of these scenarios contain sexual elements, especially the second two, so any group of players roleplaying these adventures need to be aware that they contain adult content that is more obvious than in other Call of Cthulhu scenarios. 

So what is missing from Berlin: The Wicked City? There are perhaps two things which it could have included. It mentions that despite laws being enacted following the Great War which banned the private ownership of firearms, guns were easy to get hold of. What it does not do is tell the Keeper what weapons might have been readily available. It need not have given stats for them since there are plenty listed in the Call of Cthulhu Rulebook, but giving their names would have been useful at the very least. The other thing missing from Berlin: The Wicked City is a timeline for the decade or so that it covers. Obviously, much of that can be found online, but for a setting supplement for a roleplaying game of Lovecraftian investigative horror, a timeline of occult or weird happenings in Berlin would have been useful.

Physically, Berlin: The Wicked City adheres to Chaosium, Inc.’s now high standards in terms of layout and look. This is a clean and tidy hardback, illustrated with a good mix of period photographs and full-page, full colour pieces of artwork, the latter capturing the gaiety of the city as much as the horror. The cartography though, is excellent, whether it is the period maps that depict the cluttered layout of the city or the delightfully architectural floor plans. The cover is also well done, hinting at the reach that the Mythos has over the bright lights of Berlin.

Berlin: The Wicked City gets the balance between background content and playable content right. There is more than enough of the former that is both interesting and useful to help run the latter and help the Keeper develop her own material. Although the more mature, if not adult, elements of that background may put some roleplayers off, it is carefully handled and presented throughout, especially in the scenarios where the investigators are more than likely to encounter it. And should roleplayers decide to avoid the supplement on those grounds, then they will be missing out on what are three good scenarios. Although the Keeper is given several scenario seeds to develop, an anthology of scenarios set in Berlin between the three scenarios in Berlin: The Wicked City would be more than welcome. Certainly Berlin: The Wicked City sets the blueprint for what a good city or setting supplement should be like for Call of Cthulhu.

Berlin: The Wicked City – Unveiling the Mythos in Weimar Berlin is an impressive supplement. It more than does the setting of the ‘Wickedest City on Earth’ justice and it enables the investigators to explore that setting in three tales that cover the influence of the Mythos in a decade of danger, dissipation, and decay. 

Last weekend I was at my parent's home for Thanksgiving and my dad's 90th birthday (he is doing great and looking great!). My brother had a gift for me!

Avalon Hil's Wizard's Quest board game.



The box is a little beat up, but inside everything is pristine and like new.  In fact, it is all unpunched.






I have never played it myself but I am really looking forward to trying it out.



PArt of me though doesn't want to punch it because it is in such wonderful shape.


But games are meant to be played.

I due a admit to a little of what I call "Traveller Envy".  Traveller had such a cool RPG and board games that all belonged to the same universe.  I thought it was such a fun immersive idea.
I always wanted to run a D&D campaign that also featured board games in the mix.  Something other than just Dungeon! for the players to do.  I caught a glimpse of what might work back in the 4e days, but that one didn't manifest in the way I wanted.  Thought I think I could work Zanzer's Dungeon into it somehow.

One of the aspects of the Old School Renaissance is that with access to the Open Game License and System Reference Document, roleplayers, Dungeon Masters, Referees, and game designers can not only revisit particular versions of Dungeons & Dragons—whether that is the original Dungeons & Dragons, Basic Dungeons & Dragons, or Advanced Dungeons & Dragons—but specific editions of those games. So it is with Old School Essentials Classic Fantasy. Published by Necrotic Gnome—a publisher best known for the Wormskin fanzine and Dolmenwood setting—following a successful Kickstarter campaign, Old School Essentials Classic Fantasy is one such retroclone of a particular edition of Basic Dungeons & Dragons. That edition is the 1981 revision of Basic Dungeons & Dragons by Tom Moldvay and its accompanying Expert Set by Dave Cook and Steve Marsh. The core book for which is the Old-School Essentials Classic Fantasy: Rules Tome.

What this means is that Old School Essentials Classic Fantasy is a Basic Dungeons & Dragons retroclone. It is a Class and Level roleplaying game, the combination of the Moldvay Basic Dungeons & Dragons and its Expert Set, providing scope for characters to go from First Level to Fourteenth Level. It does ‘Race as Class’, so the Classes are Cleric, Fighter, Magic-User, and Thief—all Humans, plus Dwarf, Elf, and Halfling. The Dwarf is a Fighter able to detect underground construction tricks and room traps, with Infravision, and good hearing; the Elf is a Fighter able to cast arcane spells, has Infravision, good sight and hearing, and is immune to Ghoul Paralysis; and the Halfling is a Fighter good at hiding, has good hearing, and is good with missile weapons. The Cleric has the Turn Undead ability, but does not get a spell until he has reached Second Level, whilst the Magic-User gets just the one spell at First Level. The attributes are still on the three to eighteen scale, but the modifier ranges from -3 to +3. The Alignments are Law, Neutral, and Chaos, rather Lawful Good, Lawful Neutral, Lawful Evil, Neutral Good, Neutral, et cetera. In combat, weapons do a six-sided die’s worth of damage with Old School Essentials Classic Fantasy uses THAC0 or ‘To Hit Armour Class 0’. Notably though, the range of Armour Class values starts at 9 and ends at -3, rather than starting at 10 and ending at -10 as in other iterations of Dungeons & Dragons.

Old School Essentials Classic Fantasy also includes the option for High-Level play, taking the player characters above the Fourteenth Level maximum of the Moldvay Basic Dungeons & Dragons and its Expert Set, right up to Thirty-Sixth Level much in the vein of the Mentzer edition of Basic Dungeons & Dragons and it subsequent expansions. Another inclusion is a list of the Level titles—so Acolyte, Adept, Priest/Priestess, and so on for the Cleric Class and Veteran, Warrior, Sword-Master, and so on, for the Fighter Class—another feature of early versions of Dungeons & Dragons. Both the rules for High-Level play and the Level titles are taken from the Moldvay Basic Dungeons & Dragons and its Expert Set rather than being new additions.

Ixyll
First level Magic-User
Alignment: Law
Armour Class: 10
Hit Points: 3
THAC0: 19

Strength 05 (-1, 1-in-6 Open Doors)
Intelligence 13 (Elvish, Literate)
Wisdom 10 
Dexterity 12 
Constitution 12 
Charisma 08 (-1, Max. Retainers: 3, Loyalty: 6)

Spells: Sleep
Equipment: Backpack, lantern, oil flask (2), tinder box, wine, iron rations, crowbar, daggers (3), 63 GP

At its core, Old School Essentials Classic Fantasy is Basic Dungeons & Dragons writ large then. Except not—and in a number of ways. To begin with, it provides options that shift it away from the original Moldvay version of Basic Dungeons & Dragons and a step or two closer to modern sensibilities. Most obviously, providing rules for ascending Armour Class as first seen in Dungeons & Dragons, Third Edition rather than the descending Armour Class of THAC0, and to be fair, it is an easier, more intuitive option. Another modernism is actually not, that of ability checks, which in Old School Essentials Classic Fantasy has a player rolling equal to or under one of his character’s six abilities for the character to succeed at a challenging task. Rather its inclusion is intended to address an ambiguity, their being included as an option in the Expert Set rules for Basic Dungeons & Dragons, but not in the Basic Dungeons & Dragons rules themselves. Other ambiguities the designer has addressed from the Moldvay edition of Basic Dungeons & Dragons includes the Encumbrance rules; how much Experience Points should be awarded to retainers—half of the Experience Points earned by the player characters is due to them; clearly distinguishing between the room traps that characters of all Classes can attempt to find, and the small or treasure traps which the Thief Class specialises in finding and disarming; clearly stating that characters cannot run in combat; changing the Morale rules so that monsters definitely check Morale the first time when one of their number is killed; and balancing the values of the various treasure types. 

In addition, Old School Essentials Classic Fantasy expands the scope of Moldvay Basic Dungeons & Dragons. For the most part these are more changes in terminology rather than scope. Thus ‘Adventure’ is no longer used to refer to a single session of an ongoing game; the term ‘Hirelings’ is introduced to cover all non-adventuring retainers; and the term ‘THAC0’ is imported from Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, First Edition to help explain the combat mechanics. (Its inclusion also helps ground player and Referee in the retroclone.) It also opens up the use of the subdual rules for dragons to apply to other monsters too and applies the rules for handling watercraft to other vehicles.

So what else is in the Old-School Essentials Classic Fantasy: Rules Tome? Besides the seven Classes and method of creating characters, the Old-School Essentials Classic Fantasy: Rules Tome covers wealth and encumbrance; vehicles and mounts; extensive spell lists for both Arcane spellcasters—the Magic-User and the Elf, and Divine spellcasters—the Cleric; adventuring—dungeon and wilderness adventuring, encounters, pursuit and evasion, and combat; hired help—retainers, mercenaries, and specialists; strongholds and domains; a bestiary, from Acolyte, Ape (White), and Bandit to Wyvern, Yellow Mould, and Zombie; advice on Running Adventures for the Referee; and treasure lists including sentient swords. Undoubtedly, there is a lot of information here, but a very great deal of it will be familiar to the target audience for the Old-School Essentials Classic Fantasy: Rules Tome. Which means that a member of that audience could grab a copy of this roleplaying game and a fantasy scenario of their choice and run using these rules.

At the sharp end of the game, the Old-School Essentials Classic Fantasy: Rules Tome also covers adventuring in just a few pages, covering marching order and the ‘Caller’ and ‘Mapper’ roles, time, movement, adventuring in dungeons, the wilderness, and on the water, combat, and more. Notably here, the dungeoneering aspect of the game is played out in ten-minute turns, the Referee first rolling for wandering monsters, the party deciding its actions and the Referee describing their outcome, followed by his bookkeeping at the end of the turn. Wilderness Adventuring and Waterborne Adventuring follows a similar pattern, but adding weather and getting lost into the mix. What the Old-School Essentials Classic Fantasy: Rules Tome is doing here is highlighting the procedural nature of play within the rules of not just this retroclone, but also Dungeons & Dragons in its earlier incarnations. In fact, the graphical design of Old School Essentials Classic Fantasy draws the reader’s very attention to this by placing each sequence of play in a box at the start of their relevant sections.

The Old-School Essentials Classic Fantasy: Rules Tome comes as a thick digest-sized hardback, but it never feels stodgy or like it is trying to pack too much information into its smaller page size. What is obvious about Old School Essentials Classic Fantasy is that as much thought has gone into its physical design as its mechanical design. A great deal has effort is made to fit particular sections of rules onto double page spreads, so how to create a character and an explanation of the six abilities take up a double page spread as do the rules for hazards and challenges, dungeon adventuring, wilderness adventuring, and so on and so on. The designer does this again and again, but some rules need just a page, like those for Alignment, and other content needs more, such as the spell lists and the bestiary obviously. The designer really makes good use of the space in the Old-School Essentials Classic Fantasy: Rules Tome and none of it feels wasted.

The Old-School Essentials Classic Fantasy: Rules Tome is liberally illustrated using a lot of black and white pieces with full colour spreads between chapters of the book. Some of it is weird, some of it wonky, some of it wonderful, but a wide range of styles showcasing many of the artists drawing for the Old School Renaissance today. The writing and editing is also good, the former succinct in presenting and explaining the rules. A nice touch is that many of the most useful rules and tables have been reproduced inside the front and back covers of the book.

What is missing from the Old-School Essentials Classic Fantasy: Rules Tome is anything in the way of examples. So there is no example of character generation, of play, of combat, and so on. True, its target audience does not need such examples, but it would have been nice to have had them included, not just to see the designer’s mind at work, but perhaps add a degree of verisimilitude from the roleplaying game that Old School Essentials Classic Fantasy is based upon. Similarly, there is no adventure in the book, or sample locales, but again, the audience for whom Old School Essentials Classic Fantasy is intended will doubtless have content of their own to use. Equally as similar is that it would have been nice to see the types of adventure that the designer had intended to use these rules for, but that said, he has published several for use with the Old-School Essentials Classic Fantasy: Rules Tome. 

What the version of Basic Dungeons & Dragons that followed the Moldvay version—the Mentzer version from 1983—ultimately got, but the Moldvay version never did, was a compilation. This was the Dungeons & Dragons Rules Cyclopedia, which is now available via Print on Demand. That is no longer the case. Thanks to Necrotic Gnome, the Moldvay version of Basic Dungeons & Dragons now has its own answer to the Dungeons & Dragons Rules Cyclopedia in the form of the Old-School Essentials Classic Fantasy: Rules Tome. It is not only a lovely representation of those rules, Old School Essentials Classic Fantasy is a representation with a polish, an adjustment for inconsistencies, errors, and so on, all to make it more playable. The Old-School Essentials Classic Fantasy: Rules Tome is the update that the 1981 Moldvay version of Basic Dungeons & Dragons deserved.

Published by Lost Pages, Genial Jack Vol. I is the first issue of a serialised setting that is one-part the Book of Jonah, one-part Green Ronin Publishing’s Freeport, one-part Swift’s Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World. In Four Parts. By Lemuel Gulliver, First a Surgeon, and then a Captain of Several Ships or Gulliver’s Travels, one part Baron Munchausen's Narrative of his Marvellous Travels and Campaigns in Russia, but all weird nautical urban fantasy that can be best described as ‘whale-punk’. This is because Genial Jack Vol. I details a levianthine Blue Whale which for centuries has been home to the teeming town of Jackburg built across his thick skin and in his stomachs and deep into his intestines, much of it made up of the ships he has swallowed and those that have sailed into his maw and permanently moored inside of him. Jackburg is home to peoples and islands that the whale—the ‘Genial Jack’ of the title—has swallowed, from the Draugr to the Fomorians, and today it serves as a roaming free port, from which merchants sell the strange and exotic goods they have acquired in distant lands as well as the ambergris constantly formed deep in his gut.

Designed for use with Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition—but very easily adapted to the retroclone of your choice—Genial Jack Vol. I focuses very much on the peoples and places of Jackburg. The former includes over thirteen new player character Races. These start with the undead Draugar, drowned corpses from the north who dwell in longships and a reputation for fell curses and trading in people, and Finfolk, sly, shapeshifting merfolk who are known for their illusions and the indentured workers they mark with their bloodsucking maws; and Formorians, giants banished from Faerie by Queen Mab who can cast an evil eye about, but are skilled crafters of magical devices and weapons and armour, to Sirens, who have reputations as malicious seductresses, but are highly charismatic and help in Jackburg’s aerial defence; Undines, water elementals who can turn into water and back again and work in Jackburg powering waterwheels, serving as living air-suits, and moving vessels and cargo; and Urchins, Jackburg’s underclass, beggars—Urchin Beggars?—who will happily eat rubbish, but who are considered to be lucky. The others do include Humans, but also the hive-mind Jellyfolk, the Karkinoi crustacean warriors, tentacular mercantile Octopoids, the sentient and artistic coral Polypoids, the bankers and thieves who make up the Ratfolk, and the often vicious shark-men raiders known as the Selachians, who include an individual casino-owner and moneylender who is called, of course, the Loan Shark. All of these Races have adapted to an amphibious life aboard Genial Jack and inside Jackburg, including being able to see in dim or low lighting, many need to be submerged at least once per day.

Genial Jack Vol. I then examines each of Jackburg’s districts in both Outer Jackburg and Inner Jackburg, the former being on the exterior of Genial Jack, the latter inside him. Each is given a full page which includes a short description and a handful of encounters and locations. So along the great whale’s flanks can be found Barnaclebank, the series of barnacles which have been hollowed out and linked via tunnels of reinforced glass and iron, then carved and reshaped, many of them into gun emplacements, harpoon launchers, and torpedo bays manned by the Whaleguard, Jackburg’s guard and security forces—unsurprisingly, Genial Jack has a decent navy to protect both himself and Jackburg. The encounters include an emergency as a porthole has cracked and is letting in water with the player characters being the nearest ones who can fix it before the Whaleguard can get there and the discovery of an enormous crimson pearl brought ashore by Jackburg’s fisherfolk, which might be anything from a mermaid lich’s phylactery to a resurrection stone. The locations given thumbnail descriptions are the Barnaclebank Fish Market which operates on the extendable docks on Genial Jack’s starboard flank, and the Sea Star Saloon, a tavern inside a single, huge barnacle-shell which is run by a man with the lower body of a starfish and which caters to Whaleguard officers and fishermen alike.

At the other end is The Gutgardens at the bottom of the whale’s main stomach. Here fish and krill is received from Genial Jack’s maw via canals and tubes and cultivated into gut bacteria and symbiotic algae which soothes his innards. They are worked by Gutgardeners in signature green and black uniforms with gas masks and heavy-duty work boots and gloves. The encounters include coming across a pair of Bloodskulls gang members about to dunk a debtor in Acid Lake; an invasion of Feral Fungoids driven into frenzy after feeding on Genial Jack’s blood; and a poisonous miasma that will leave all who breathe it in with a lung infection. The locations include an abattoir where a Jellyfolk mentalist humanely stuns livestock before their slaughter; the aforementioned Acid Lake, where enclosed and perfumed domes provide popular picnic spots for those from Inner Town; and the Digestive Reserves, areas kept entirely free of buildings and people to aid in Genial Jack’s digestion.

Some twenty or so districts are described in this fashion, along with a centre spread illustration/map of Genial Jack and Jackburg, as well as a list of city slang. So far, so good, but so far this is forty pages into Genial Jack Vol. I and the reader is left wondering how all of this works, who is in charge, and so on. At this point, Genial Jack Vol. I does cover the authorities of Jackburg, including The Captains’ Conclave held at Mysterium Tremendum, a massive ship and alehouse, where every captain and depending on the size of their constituent populations they represent, ship’s mates too, express their opinions and suggest where the Whale journeys next. Such are directions are imparted by the Navigators, the divine intercessors between the peoples of Jackburg and the ‘Godwhale’ that is Genial Jack, who are descended from those first shipwrecked inside him. Lastly, the Whaleguard is Jackburg’s navy and police force. Rounding out Genial Jack Vol. I are some details of Jackburg’s laws and criminal organisations as well as a list of some twenty interesting Jackburgers, inhabitants of Jackburg.

Physically, Genial Jack Vol. I  is more of a magazine rather than a book. Down in black and white throughout, this first issue is richly illustrated with some fantastic cross sections of Jackburg’s twenty districts. Use of the art does veer into the repetitious, but it has to be said it is good art. On the downside, the twelve new Races are only given portrait illustrations rather than full body shots, so players and Referee alike will need to use a little imagination there. The cover though is absolutely fantastically fantastic, a piece of artwork which just grabs the reader. Elsewhere, the writing is decent, as is the editing.

Genial Jack Vol. I  still feels as if it is missing one or two things. Obviously a scenario, but then it has almost forty encounters across the various districts it describes, but more problematically there is no discussion of what Classes are suitable or found in Jackburg and there are no new Classes. Yet, the one thing that is really missing is a discussion of the technology found on and in the Godwhale. Gunpowder definitely, but also an overhead tram which runs from Genial Jack’s Maw down its oesophagus, and working of iron and glass into tunnels, all of which suggests advanced technology of a kind. Exactly what though, is another matter. Hopefully, it will be covered in a later issue.

Although written for use with Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition, the rules content in Genial Jack Vol. I is very light being confined to the various abilities possessed by each Race. This means that it is very easy to adapt to the retroclone of your choice and it is very much a case of Genial Jack Vol. I being imaginative enough to transcend any limitations a Referee or player should have with regards to their roleplaying game of choice. Not only could this be adapted to the retroclone of your choice, it could be adapted to the setting of your choice, whether that is Green Ronin Publishing’s Freeport: City of Adventure or the world of 50 Fathoms for use with Savage Worlds or the Referee’s own campaign world.

Although just the first issue, Genial Jack Vol. I is a satisfying appetiser for what promises to be an imaginatively weird and wonderful setting. It can absolutely be described as unique, the first ‘whalepunk’ setting. Genial Jack Vol. II is eagerly awaited.

Not music videos tonight but the trailers for The CW's Crisis on Infinite Earths five hour crossover that begins on Sunday.



It is no lie or exaggeration that Crisis. the comic. had a HUGE impact on me and my games.  We did our own Crisis of Infinite Oerths back in 1986-87 to bring all our various worlds into alignment.  I am doing something like it again with my Come Endless Darkness campaigns for 5e.

But this is a big one.

So what do we have?

Lots.








Even the fan-made videos look great!







I have been waiting for this since I was 16.

More Than Meets The Eye: A Short Adventure with Lots of Tentacles is one of four short scenarios for use with Lamentations of the Flame Princess Weird Fantasy Roleplay released by Lamentations of the Flame Princess at Gen Con 2019, the others being Barbarians of Orange Boiling Seas, Menagerie of Exiles, and Zak Has Nothing To Do With This Book. Written by Kelvin Green, the author of Forgive Us and Fish Fuckers – Or, a Record, Compil’d in Truth, of the Sordid Activities of the People of Innsmouth, it is like several other scenarios from the publisher, set in the early modern period of the opening decades of the seventeenth century. It is also a sequel of sorts to the author’s scenario for adult Referees and players, the aforementioned Fish Fuckers.

From the start, including the title and its vibrant cover, it is obvious that More Than Meets The Eye is a weird, fantasy homage to a certain franchise of films involving giant robots capable of transforming into everyday objects. Not only is its location called St. Michael’s Bay, but the antagonists of the bay are transforming aliens, though not robots. Instead they are squidy, squidgy, tentacled aliens—shoggoths?—capable of transforming into everyday objects. This is depicted on the front cover and in a really good illustration inside the book. This transformation theme runs throughout the scenario, whether it is objects transforming into aliens (shoggoths), or the player characters into another race or Class, or simply into goop. There is a certain sexual element to the scenario, but it is not quite as prurient as that of Fish Fuckers.

Like the aforementioned scenario, More Than Meets The Eye is set in the West Country, but Cornwall rather than Devon, begging the question, “What exactly, does the author have against the people of the West Country?”. A light has been in the sky over the coastal village of St. Michael’s Bay or there has been violence in the coastal village of St. Michael’s Bay following a light has been in the sky or nothing has been heard from the leading men of the village, Ernest and Henry Hastings, and their business associates want to ensure that they are all right. These are the reasons to bring the player characters to the village of St. Michael’s Bay, which absolutely has to be the best use of the director’s name under any circumstances and well, it is set in Cornwall, home to Saint Michael's Mount (if there was a French version, there has to be a joke in there about Le Mont-Saint-Jean-Michel-Jarre).

What is going is this. St. Michael’s Bay has been invaded—twice. First by a group of shape-changing aliens in the past, fleeing a civil war amongst their kind. This group has recently been awoken after millennia of hibernation and in the process, the second group, come to Earth to capture the first. Which leads to a confrontation and a stand-off, one which the player characters are likely to break. Depending upon the outcome, there is a chance that the player characters might end up with a—unsurprisingly, given that this scenario is for Lamentations of the Flame Princess Weird Fantasy Roleplay—weird spaceship, which is not actually as bad as it might seem. After all, there are any number of scenarios published for the roleplaying game and other Old School Renaissance roleplaying games which are set in weird locations, for example, Barbarians of the Orange Boiling Sea, which could be reached by a spaceship.

Physically, More Than Meets The Eye: A Short Adventure with Lots of Tentacles is well presented, with some really quite entertaining artwork. The book could be better edited though.

More Than Meets The Eye: A Short Adventure with Lots of Tentacles lives up to its title. It is short, probably providing no more than a session or two of play—though if the player characters get hold of the spaceship, it opens up all sorts of possibilities. It also has a lot of tentacles and no, you do not want to get close and personal with any of them! More Than Meets The Eye: A Short Adventure with Lots of Tentacles is also bonkers, but it is the best version of Michael Bay throughout all of time and space.

I have updated my Witch Links Page.   Every so often I search the blog archives and find links to articles, posts or what have you on what others are saying or doing with witches.  Yeah, I am a tad obsessed, but anything worth doing is worth doing to excess.


So here are some of the ones I found that I thought were fun or interesting from the last six or so months.

If you visit, let them know I sent ya!
If you have a link you would like to share, post it in the comments below.

Boccob's Blessed Blog
20 Pathfinder Witch Quest Ideas
https://boccobsblog.com/2019/05/17/20-pathfinder-witch-quest-ideas/

Daemons & Deathrays
Eastern Gothic – Creatures of Slavic Folklore (Part 1)
https://daemonsanddeathrays.wordpress.com/2019/11/22/eastern-gothic-creatures-of-slavic-folklore/

Eastern Gothic – Creatures of Slavic Folklore (Part 2)
https://daemonsanddeathrays.wordpress.com/2019/11/29/eastern-gothic-part-2/

Greyhawk Stories
Iggwilv: Mother of Witches
https://greyhawkstories.com/tales-from-the-flanaess/iggwilv-mother-of-witches/

Greyhawkery
Witch Queen Iggwilv Discussion Tonight
http://greyhawkery.blogspot.com/2019/09/witch-queen-iggwilv-discussion-tonight.html

Hall of the Mountain King
Project - Blackmoor Land of a Thousand Witches - the Sisterhood
http://jasonzavoda-hallofthemountainking.blogspot.com/2019/05/project-blackmoor-land-of-thousand_16.html

Project - Blackmoor Land of a Thousand Witches - NPC Tuure
http://jasonzavoda-hallofthemountainking.blogspot.com/2019/05/project-blackmoor-land-of-thousand_17.html

Project - Blackmoor Land of a Thousand Witches - The Moon Hall
http://jasonzavoda-hallofthemountainking.blogspot.com/2019/05/project-blackmoor-land-of-thousand_22.html

NPC - Linnea Schnai Witch
http://jasonzavoda-hallofthemountainking.blogspot.com/2019/12/npc-linnea-schnai-witch.html

Hero Press
Which Witch Are You?
http://heropresstwo.blogspot.com/2019/10/which-witch-are-you.html

I Don't Remember That Move
a peeper deeper, Ready to Harvest the Witch's Garden
http://rememberdismove.blogspot.com/2019/10/a-peeper-deeper.html

Tales of the Grotesque and Dungeonesque
Conjure Wife
http://talesofthegrotesqueanddungeonesque.blogspot.com/2019/10/conjure-wife.html

Satanic Temple, Witch Board Museum, Count Orlok, Lighthouse, Parasite
https://talesofthegrotesqueanddungeonesque.blogspot.com/2019/12/satanic-temple-witch-board-museum-count.html

Writeups.org
All of these are for DC Heroes Role-Playing Game

Tara Maclay (!) but sadly no Willow
https://www.writeups.org/tara-maclay-amber-benson-buffy-vampire-slayer/

Evil-Lyn (Masters of the Universe cartoons) 
https://www.writeups.org/evil-lyn-masters-universe-cartoon/