Cabin Risotto Fever is an investigative horror scenario set in the depths of winter in Canada, involving a missing academic or two, an Italian antiquary, and a bone warming dinner. If the scenario is run as written, then the Game Master will have prepared said dinner and actually dish up during play! As with other scenarios from Games Omnivorous, Cabin Risotto Fever is a system agnostic scenario, but unlike previous scenarios—The Feast on Titanhead and The Seed before it, it takes place in the modern world rather than a fantasy one. Specifically, northern Canada in 1949. However, just like The Feast on Titanhead and The Seed before it, Cabin Risotto Fever adheres to the Manifestus Omnivorous, the ten points of which are:

1. All books are adventures.
2. The adventures must be system agnostic.
3. The adventures must take place on Earth.
4. The adventures can only have one location.
5. The adventures can only have one monster.
6. The adventures must include saprophagy or osteophagy.
7. The adventures must include a voracious eater.
8. The adventures must have less than 6,666 words.
9. The adventures can only be in two colours.
10. The adventures cannot have good taste. (This is the lost rule.)

As we have come to expect for scenarios from Games Omnivorous, Cabin Risotto Fever adheres to all ten rules. It is an adventure, it is system agnostic, it takes place on Earth, it has one location, it has the one monster (though like the older scenarios, those others that appear are extensions of it), it includes Osteophagy—the practice of animals, usually herbivores, consuming bones, it involves a voracious eater, the word count is not high—the scenario only runs to twenty-eight pages, and it is presented in two colours—in this case, tangerine and black. Lastly, Cabin Risotto Fever does lack good taste—though that will either be ameliorated or exaggerated by the quality of the scenario’s singular handout and how the players and their characters react to it.

It is 1949, and Professor Martin D. Ernst from the Department of Anthropology at Schuylkill University has led an expedition into the wilds of northern Labrador in order to locate and explore an ancient Algonquian ritual site. The expedition is funded by Italian antiquarian, Rubicondo Bronzetti, who also accompanies the expedition, as does Professor Ernst’s researcher, Solomon Silverberg. It is three weeks since the expedition has been heard from, and a team of rescuers is being sent to check on them. The scenario suggests a Forest Ranger and his apprentice, another professor of anthropology, and a native shaman. It outlines the basics of the four Player Characters, all of whom should be easy to create using the roleplaying game of the Game Master’s choice. In fact, Cabin Risotto Fever could be run straight from these descriptions should a playing group want a very light game in terms of its mechanics.

What Cabin Risotto Fever does include mechanically, is rules for handling Sanity. These require four tokens per Player Character. When a Player Character sees, hears, or experiences something weird or unsettling, the Player Character’s player rolls a six-sided die. If the result is less than the number of tokens the Player Character has, the Player Character suffers a minor panic attack and looses a token. The Player Character may also learn a piece of random information pertinent to the situation in Cabin Risotto Fever. At two tokens, and then at one token, the Player Character suffers a worse panic attack and another effect, determined by the roll of an eight-sided die on the included table. These effects range from attacking a fellow Player Character to a case of unfortunate micturition. Of course, should a Player Character lose all of his tokens, then he becomes an NPC.

Cabin Risotto Fever requires some set-up, some of it traditional, some of it less so. It is suggested that the playing space be lit with candles for atmosphere and that a fast and light roleplaying game be used to prevent any impediment to roleplaying. That is the traditional. The non-traditional is the preparation of the risotto that is the scenario’s singular handout—or is that dishout?—or prop, that should be served during the play of the scenario. The recipe for the risotto al midollo in full is included in the scenario.

The focus for Cabin Risotto Fever is the cabin—as much as it is the risotto. Here the Player Characters will encounter the expedition, its members surprised to see them, but welcoming all the same and happy to invite them to dinner. Events will play out as the Player Characters poke around the cabin and interact with their hosts, some of them random, and of course, the horror of the situation slowly dawning upon them. The likelihood of course, is that the players will realise what has happened, but not their characters—and it is their realisation the players are roleplaying and reacting in horror to.

Physically, like The Feast on Titanhead and The Seed before it, Cabin Risotto Fever is well presented. It is darker and gloomier in tone given its choice of colours. The single location of the cabin is mapped out inside the separate cover. The map is detailed, but suffers a little from forced perspective. Some of the chosen fonts are a little difficult to read, but overall, Cabin Risotto Fever is easy to read. The illustrations have a heavy oppressive feel and many can easily be shown to the players during play. It needs a slight edit in places, but is overall quite a sturdy product, being done on heavy paper and card stock.

As with other scenarios which adhere to the Manifestus Omnivorous manifesto, Cabin Risotto Fever is nasty, brutal, and short, it being possible to play through the scenario and even survive in a single session. It is also easy to run using a wide variety of roleplaying games. The most obvious one is Lamentations of the Flame Weird Fantasy Roleplay, another is the publisher’s own 17th Century Minimalist: A Historical Low-Fantasy OSR Rulebook, but with some adjustment it would work with Cthulhu by Gaslight or a darker toned version of Leagues of Gothic Horror for use with Leagues of Adventure: A Rip-Roaring Setting of Exploration and Derring Do in the Late Victorian Age!. Take it away from its European setting and Cabin Risotto Fever would work well with Mörk Borg as they share a similar tone and sensibility.

Whether used as a one-shot, or added to a campaign, Cabin Risotto Fever is easy to prepare and set-up for a night’s single session of juicy, meaty horror. Indeed, the only thing difficult to set up is the risotto itself. 

Demon Witch Child (1975)

Another one that has been on my list for a while now.  I had it on tap for 2018, but for some reason, I never got around to it.  I think I just forgot about it. Actually, it is perfect for this year and right now.

Before I get into the plot, such that it is, I want to talk about what this movie represents.  All month long I have been focused on the time period in Europe, and mostly Italian and Spanish cinema, just right before the Exorcist hit.  The sweet spot for me has been 1971 to 1973.  Now maybe someday I'll do a post Exorcist run of movies, but until then this is the film that I will hold up as Exhibit A as to the effect the Exorcist had on filmmaking. 

Demon Witch Child, aka The Possessed and La Endemoniada, has a pedigree of sorts.  Marián Salgado who plays Susan, the titular "Demon Witch Child," was the Spanish voice actress for Linda Blair's Regan in the Exorcist.  So she was handpicked by director Amando de Ossorio for his Exorcist rip-off, er, homage.   The fact that she also bears some similar facial features to the old witch played by Tota Alba helps.

The Exorcist influences are all over this movie.  Susan crawls around, her body (not just head) spins around 180 degrees. She swears, she makes rude sexual comments all the time, she speaks in different languages (though we never hear them).  And it is all a little weird. I honestly got the feeling that the movie was written one way, but when the Exorcist hit more was added. 

An old witch desecrates a church and is arrested.  She is suspected of kidnapping a baby, but instead of talking she throws herself out of a window.  Her daughter (played by Kali Hansa who also spent some of time working with Jess Franco, including one of his hardcore outings, Weiße Haut und schwarze Schenkel, 1976) witnesses this and decides to curse the daughter of a local politician, Susan. 

Susan it seems is now possessed by the spirit of the dead old witch. The make-up effects are pretty good and do a good job of making Marián Salgado look like Tota Alba.  

Sadly the movie goes nowhere really.  Susan sacrifices babies, eats them,  gets people killed, murders a reporter, and comments on how well hung he is before castrating him. But there is also a surprising lack of gore or nudity for the time.  There is a subplot with a priest, our would-be exorcist, how before he became a priest he was engaged.  It is all very random in places. 

This is not the only movie I have seen from the time that suffers a lot from comparisons to The Exorcist, but this one of the most glaring ones. 

Watched: 52
New: 36

NIGHT SHIFT and Old-School ContentPossession is always fun in a game. Unless you happen to be the one possessed.  While this movie was obviously about demonic possession they can be other types.  Based on similar tales, I posted about the Eretica Vampire a few years back.  I even used a still from this movie.
Eretica (Vampire)No. Appearing: 1AC: 6Move: 40ft.Hit Dice: 7Special: 2 attacks (claws, bite), Mind control, Strong and Fast, Witch spells, blood drain.XP VALUE: 750 
Eretica are the spirits of dead witches who possess the living, turning them into a sort of living vampire.
Unlike the typical Vampire, these creatures cannot Polymorph and cannot create new vampires.  In their host form, they can also move about during the day and are immune to holy items.  In their "possessed" form they have all the standard weaknesses of vampires. They can witch spells at the 4th level of experience.

Ok, this is not a witch RPG per se, but that is not going to stop me.  

Also, this one appeared on my doorstep and I have no idea if I ordered it, if it was sent to me, or what. I looked back and I have no interaction with the author or the company Strange Machine Games (SMG).  

So let's get into it.

Charm RPG
by Jeff Mechlinski, illustrations bt Yimi Jian "Meammy"

Charm is a "universal" RPG designed to be quick and usable across any genre or playstyle.  It advertises itself as being portable enough to keep your character sheet in your pocket and use a dice roller app to play.

For this review, I am considering both the softcover physical book and the PDF.  The book is 158 pages, 8" x 8" format. The covers are color, the interior art is black & white.

A quick note about the art. I like it, it does have a comic-book, almost anime style to it, but it also fits the game well. 

The first 40 pages cover the basic rules and the remaining 100 or so cover the seven different sample "worlds" you can play in.  

The rules are pretty simple, roll a d20 (sometimes with a d6) to get over a particular Target Number set by the GM.  Greater levels of success or failure result in added effects.  Rolls can be modified.  You add the d6 when your character is particularly good at something. 

Characters regardless of the Power Level of the game are assumed to be good at what they do.  So out of the gate this game is going to have a more "Cinematic" feel to it.  A thief will almost always be able to break into a place or steal something for example.  Rolling occurs only when there is a chance of failure, combat (or other opposed rolls) or the GM needs it.  

The Challenge Threshold, or target numbers, are pretty easy to use and memorize, so players and GMS will catch on very quickly.  The levels are all multiples of 3, so abstraction of the rules is easy.

Characters are built using some basic abilities in a way that reminds me of Fate, but a little crunchier.  To me this is a GOOD thing. I find Fate a little too fluffy for my needs. This includes the use of a similar term, Aspects. At first level you have three aspects rated at 4, 3 and 2 points.  As you level up you can add points to these or gain new aspects. A list of sample aspects is given with guidelines on what else can work.

And that is it.  Not difficult to learn and certainly very easy to play the first time.  Get together with some friends, decide on a world and then make characters with various aspects. You are ready to go.

While not as crunchy as say GURPS it is crunchier than Fate or FUDGE.  I'd put it just south of True 20 and Unisystem in that regard.

The seven sample scenarios are:

•  Action 5 News: You are the city's most elite local news team! It isn't easy staying on top. You'll need to pull together all your guile and charisma to keep the number 1 spot.
•  Temporal Raiders: Travel time, seeking the ultimate heist. Ally with powerful historical figures, change history, be your own grandfather. What could go wrong?
•  Dustbound: Take on the role of a god-touched gunslinger in a bleak world of dust and decay. Fight Oni, rival gunslingers, and vengeful townsfolk.
•  Mystery Incorporated: Jeepers, guys.  Play as a gang of kids, or possibly a lovable pet, who solve mysteries using their astonishing meddling abilities.
•  Pact of Night: Small town woes meet big monster drama. Play a Vampire or Werewolf as you balance your life with the humans during the day and beasts at night.
•  Onitech: You exist in a high-tech world ruled by demon masters. Civility has superseded morality, leading to a perverted and deadly state of affairs.
•  Asylum Reflections: In Victorian London, people are being replaced with mirrored doubles. Uncover the duplicitous mystery in this dark world.  

Actually, these all sound like a lot of fun.  I have to admit it was the Action 5 News that really grabbed me at first.  In this one, you are not likely to get into deadly combat, but your social "hit points" could take some damage.  No they don't call them "hit points" but that is my translation to my readers.  I will admit, years ago I tinkered with a True 20 idea of newspaper reporters, tabloid writers and news bloggers as a game. When Fate came around I tried it in that too.  Never really got it to jell the way I wanted.  Action 5 News though does this now for me.  A few EASY tweaks, and to be fair all tweaks in this game are easy, and I can run it like I was planning some 20 years ago.
Mystery Incorporated practically jumps off the page and begs me to run something with it. 
If I had a complaint at all it is that book makes me jump all over the place to get the information I need.  For example there are lot of "see page XX" (no actual xx though, they do have page numbers.)So reading about Power Level on page 11 I need to jump to page 25 to get information on aspects. There are a few of these. Now to be fair you quickly figure out where things are and how to get to them fast.  But maybe a character creation flowchart might be nice for first time players.
Still, there is a lot to like about this game.

It's Supernatural Thursday of Witch Week and that can only mean one thing; let's do some NIGHT SHIFT stats for Rowena MacLeod.

Spoilers up to Season 15 follow.


What is there not to love about Rowen? She is a badass redhead witch who gave the Winchesters a run for their money for seven seasons. She was the big bad for Season 10. She was born in the 17th Century Scotland, she is a pagan and is the mother of the former King of Hell, Crowley.  Now she is the Queen of Hell.  She only "died" because she needed to turn herself into a giant ghost bomb.
There were a lot of magic-using characters in Supernatural as well as a lot of them that were witches, but Rowena was the most powerful. 
Rowena MacLeod
15th level Witch, Human

Strength: 12 (0)
Dexterity: 13 (+1) 
Constitution: 15 (+1)
Intelligence: 18 (+3) P
Wisdom: 17 (+3) s
Charisma: 20 (+4) s

HP: 52 (11d4+8)
AC: 8
Fate Points: 1d10

Check Bonus (P/S/T): +7/+5/+3
Melee bonus: +3  Ranged bonus: +3
Saves: +6 to spells and magical effects

Special Abilities: Arcana, Casting 125%, Charm Person, Enhanced Senses, Pre-cognition, Innate Magic (Raise Dead, self only), Suggestion

Skills: Sleight of Hand (Dex), Body Control (Con), History (Int), Research (Int), Theology/Myth (Int), Convince/Deceive (Cha)

Languages: English, Latin, Greek, Gaelic, 

Spells

1: Bane, Command, Disrupt Undead, Inflict Light Wounds, Sleep  
2: Cause Fear, ESP, Hold Person, Locate Object, Suggestion
3: Cause Blindness/Deafness, Curse, Fly, Remove Curse
4: Arcane Eye, Cure Serious Wounds, Inflict Serious Wounds, Produce Fire
5: Dismissal, Finger of Death, Harm, Raise Dead*
6: Disintegrate, Enchant Item, Projected Image
7: Death Aura, Draw forth the Soul
8: Wail of the Banshee

I will admit. I adore Rowena.  She was a fantastic enemy AND ally of the Winchesters, and I would have loved to see a little of Rowena's and Charlie's road trip. That would have been a lot of fun.   

If I am serious about running a Wayward Sisters game, Rowena will have to show up. Dead? That never stopped her before!  And we know that Rowena/Ruth supports the Wayward cause!

 

Ruthie Connell is an absolute delight.  I can't wait to see what she does next.

Links

• Wikipedia
• Supernatural Wiki
• Supernatural Fandom Wiki
• Villains Wiki

Reviews / October 29, 2020

Invitation to Hell
Directed by Wes Craven
ABC (1984)

Last year, my esteemed editor-in-chief delivered me a Halloween treat for our Tubular Terrors series in the form of The Night Stalker. My overall lack of familiarity with the made-for-TV horrors of yesteryear led to another recommendation this year, and it was just as enjoyable as skulking around 1970s Las Vegas with Carl Kolchak. But the sunlit suburbs of Wes Craven’s 1984 Invitation to Hell hide just as many demonic horrors—and conspiracies among the ruling class—as the shadowy, vampire-stalked alleyways of Las Vegas’s sleazy eternal night.

Invitation to Hell (Wes Craven’s previous made-for-TV horror was the 1978 Linda Blair vehicle Stranger in Our House) definitely follows on well-trod thematic ground, examining the American nuclear family’s impulse to conform and keep up with the Joneses in suburbia. But it’s on the execution, in the casting, and in a few of the left-field plot developments that the film really shines. Robert Urich and Joanna Cassidy play Matt and Pat Winslow, a married couple with the requisite pair of kids, Robbie and Chrissy (Barret Oliver of D.A.R.Y.L., Cocoon, and The NeverEnding Story and Soleil Moon Frye of Punky Brewster), and the obligatory dog moving into a brand new planned community as Matt takes a new job at the believably-ludicrously-named firm Micro-DigiTech. Matt is working on a new spacesuit for NASA’s exploration of Venus (not only is it temperature resistant to the thousands of degrees, but it can also identify non-human life; unsurprisingly, these details will become very important later in a unique case of Chekhov’s Spacesuit).

The Winslows’ beat-up station wagon literally runs into the town car of the woman who seems to really run this community: head of the local Steaming Springs Country Club, Jessica Jones (played by All My Children star Susan Lucci). The Winslows are soon drawn into the inevitable peer pressure to “join the club,” which, yes, ends up being a Satanic coven where the wealthy members of the club are replaced by doppelgängers from Hell. Matt ends up becoming the de facto resistance to this infernal conspiracy as his work colleagues get “promotions,” loyal secretaries are killed in mysterious accidents, and eventually the members of his own family are replaced by their evil demonic duplicates.

Again, this is all pretty bog-standard stuff that’s been explored since the very beginnings of American postwar suburbia: we’ve seen it from Invasion of the Body Snatchers to The Twilight Zone and back again by this point. If the Reagan 1980s jostle alongside Eisenhower’s 1950s as the collective psychological emblems of our Cold War material bounty (and the neuroses that come along with it), then it’s no surprise that we’d see a reflection of the same social-parable B movies just as “morning in America” is dawning. But this is the ’80s, and times have changed. From the very outset of Invitation to Hell, the creeping presence of technology is as much a sinister undertone as the impulses towards conformity and upward mobility. From the very first minutes, we see Robbie staying up late playing a hand-held video game (later smashed up by one of the neighborhood’s bratty demonic kids) and Matt’s habit of bringing his work home, impelling Pat to complain, “I want this house to be a home. Not a lab.” Later on, as Matt’s paranoia ramps up, he finds a seemingly hypnotized neighbor kid over at the house for a sleepover smiling in front of the television—not in front of static as in 1982’s Poltergeist but in front of violent riot footage. Matt’s first secretary at work suspects something is wrong with all the people who’ve received promotions at Micro-DigiTech; she hands Matt the pertinent HR files on a giant computer tape. All around Invitation to Hell, the ways in which surveillance, automation, and computers are beginning to intrude upon family life in the 1980s abound.

The brand new home that the Winslows move into also becomes demonically-possessed in a way. Full of the family’s more old-fashioned furniture and decor at the beginning, Pat redecorates it in a severely dark and angular 1980s style, laden with all the modern amenities, once Pat and Robbie and Chrissy become “members of the club” without Matt’s knowledge. All around the country in the 1980s, the often homespun aesthetic embraced by Boomers in the 1970s as a post-hippie reaction to their plastic childhoods began to shift to something more aspirational, sophisticated, and urbane. This transformation is foreshadowed early in the film—before Pat’s demonic replacement!—with Pat stating that she wants to redecorate to make this house look like a home, not “a fraternity house.” “We’re grown up now,” she says. “You work for a big corporation.” Of course, Pat’s hope for a “pretty and bright” home is subverted when you see it looks like something out of an ’80s music video—or the films of David Lynch or Tim Burton.

Pat wants to keep up with the neighbors, which leads to her being seduced by Jessica into membership at Steaming Springs. The family (minus the suspicious Matt) undergoes a creepy “initiation” ceremony in the resort’s springs, which is actually a literal portal to Hell locked behind a giant steel door (with, of course, electronic keypad lock). The idea of locating the town’s demonic clique at a country club is a deeply resonant American trope by this time, but the prominent and conspicuous addition of a health club and spa to the country club’s social matrix shouldn’t be ignored. In the 1980s, physical fitness was peaking throughout America, and while jogging had been a fad since the 1970s, the next decade saw more and more Americans buying memberships to pricey private health clubs. Locating the sinister impulse to conformity within a palace of fitness and health might be one of Invitation to Hell‘s more subtle and successful horror metaphors, especially considering so many other ’80s horror films did so either exploitatively or gruesomely.

It’s really only in the final act that Invitation to Hell somewhat falls apart. As Matt discovers his family are seemingly forever replaced with their evil duplicates, he takes the fight right to Steaming Springs and Jessica. Filching his experimental space suit from the lab at work, Matt gate-crashes the club’s Halloween party (where the guests favor costumes as conspicuously evil as honest-to-God SS uniforms!) and makes his way down to the steel doorway leading to “the springs.” There he actually physically enters Hell. I was still under the impression that there might be a twist, and Jessica and her doubles might be aliens from Venus themselves, or robots—but the shadowy Gustave Doré-like caverns and the cries of the damned (including Matt’s coworkers and family) convey neatly that Matt is about to follow Orpheus, Aeneas, and Dante into the depths. And at the very bottom of this TV-movie Hell? Well, it turns out that it looks an awful lot like suburbia (the suburban street grid that Matt falls into, shot in negative film, actually looks a bit like a circuit board). In a mist-cloaked replica of the Winslow family home (empty of all furniture except a piano that Pat must play eternally), Pat, Robbie, and Chrissy are trapped in laser-lit circles, which Matt can only break through by reasserting his familial  love for (and patriarchal control of) his family. They escape, of course, and Jessica—who tries and fails to seduce Matt into abandoning his family—is defeated. The Winslows teleport home to find the country club in flames after the Halloween party.

Whatever mawkishness the ending might possess, and despite the overall simplicity of the film’s message, there’s a lot to love about Invitation to Hell. Susan Lucci manages to convey real menace without chewing the scenery, portraying a sort of 1980s glad-handing, professional-class noblesse oblige that hides an iron fist underneath. It’s only when she’s forced to become a run-of-the-mill succubus that her character becomes uninteresting. In a pre-credit sequence at the very beginning of the film, she mercilessly combusts a limo driver who accidentally runs her over; in the aftermath of the explosion, her perfectly-poised big hair, makeup, and wardrobe say more in a few seconds than any clumsy exposition: Jessica is a confident, powerful, shoulder-padded coven leader for the Eighties. After getting used to Robert Urich in hardboiled TV series like Vega$ and Spencer: For Hire (as well as his turn as a world-weary cop investigating cattle mutilations in Endangered Species), it’s hard to buy this tough guy as a middle-management, Lacoste-wearing tech nerd. His transition to third-act quasi-badass seems almost like a fait accompli. But the scene where Soleil Moon Frye portrays a possessed Chrissie sitting in the middle of the dark and severely redecorated Winslow living room disemboweling her beloved stuffed bunny with a crowbar (!!!) throbs with real eerie energy. The synth soundtrack also gives the film a potent underscore of the technological paranoia telegraphed but never quite delivered upon by the film’s final act. Unsurprisingly, it’s mostly swapped out for an orchestral score during the scenes in Hell.

Wes Craven, for the most part, delivers the goods in Invitation to Hell, a funny little parable from a year of paranoia that occasionally punches above its B-movie lineage to deliver some real thrills and thought-provoking themes.

—Michael Grasso

Here we are at the end of all my 5e Witch class reviews.  I was saving this one for last just because it is so complete and there is so much here.  

Again, I am following my own rules for reviewing these; I want to stay fair. 

Hidden Oddities, A Witch’s Primer
By Eva M. Brown

Hidden Oddities is a monster of a book.  At 154 pages for a single class it has my attention.  Also at 154 pages, no point in figuring out how much is content vs. title, ogl and the like.  It is a beast of a book.

This book rivals any other published book for the D&D 5 game or any other game.  The layout is great, with crisp easy to read text. The artwork is fantastic.  And the authors know their OGL.  I should really just say "Author".  While it looks like Eva M. Brown surrounded herself with a great team to work on this, it is obvious from the reading that this is a single voice and author vision. 

Up first is a Foreword and it becomes obvious that this book is just more than a witch class. There is a bit of world-building going on as well.  This can only be a good thing in my mind.   There are Seven Chapters in this book. 

Chapter 1 covers the Introduction, what this book is about and the list of Kickstarter backers.

Chapter 2 is the Witch Class.  There are little quotes and “magical text” all throughout the book that really gives it a nice feel.  Break the code of the magical text for more information!

And in a bit of “magic text” of my own, “yes Eva, I do think we will be great friends!”

We start off in a place I think it great.  Background.  There are also d6 tables of “I Became  A Witch Because…”, a d6 table of “We Whisper to Each Other By…”, “Our Relationship Is…” and “My Curios Are…”  This is great stuff and perfect not just for EVERY D&D5/DMsGuild Witch I have reviewed but nearly every witch I can think of (and that is a lot is I can be so bold).

An aside. Curios are a great idea. I love them. I wish I had come up with them first.

The witch is a full 20 levels spellcaster. She can’t use armor and has 1d6 HD.

Instead of getting spell slots the witch gets curios, which are tiny mundane object that can store spells.  The witch records her spells in her spell book but uses that knowledge to charge her curios.  The witch gains two spells per level (four at level 1) of any spell level she can cast, half her own level rounded up.  This means the witch can know up to 42 spells. She can only cast the number of spells as she has curios.

The witch also gains an otherworldly companion. These are roughly the same as Familiars, but can be more than just animals.  The witch’s other worldly companion teaches the witch, Witch Script. It is invisible to all non-witches save for when detect magic is cast on it.

The Witch Archetypes are known as Sacred Secrets. There are also some powers known as Arcane Wonders.  

Between these, the different types of otherworldly companions and the various types of Curios, there should be an unlimited variety of witches one can create with this book.

Chapter 3 covers the Sacred Secrets.  Each one has their own background, Arcane Wonders and other powers.  Again, these are treated like subclasses, Traditions, or Covens in other books.  There are 14 of these and are all quite details have a lot of great potential.

Chapter 4 (mis-labeled Chapter 3 in text) are Additional Options.  This is a great chapter and one often forgotten about by other authors of Witch classes (including myself on occasion) and that is other archetypes for other classes.  There is a new Druid Circle, a Fighter Archetype, A Paladin Oath, a Ranger Archetype, and a Wizard Tradition. There are also new backgrounds, complete with personality traits, ideals, bonds, and flaws, for any class.

This chapter also has a number of new feats and some new equipment.

Chapter 5 gives us Spells.  Here there are 111 new spells. Overtly for witches they can be used by other classes as well.  Some of these spells share the same or similar names with spells I have written, enough to make me do a double take.  But it is obvious from reading them that these are not used OGC, merely the result of both Eva Brown and myself reading a lot of the same source materials.  Which in a way is really cool.

Chapter 6 Lore is our world-building chapter. Here we get some organizations the could belong too, or are against the witches. Even if you only use them as ideas or seeds there is a lot here to add to any game.   Membership, leaders (some detailed), goals and headquarters are all detailed.   Nine such organizations are detailed here.

The Appendices cover how to choose a companion, what equipment you might need and the roles of the witch. 

Additionally, there is art information and a Witch’s Script translation guide.  OGL and a four-page Character sheet.

While this might not be my favorite 5e Witch class, it is my favorite 5e Witch book.  There is just so much here that is great and really grabs my imagination.

I mentioned before that the art is great, but it really needs to be re-said.  This is a great book.

You can also get the Character Sheet for PWYW.  It works nicely with other witch classes as well.

Baba Yaga (1975)
I started watching this one a couple of years ago, but for some reason, I never finished it.  I kept meaning to come back to it but never did.  Next thing I knew Amazon Prime no longer listed it.  So I picked up the Blue Underground BluRay of it.  I always enjoy Blue Underground's DVDs and BluRays, so when I saw they had this one I knew I better jump on it.  
So glad I did.  Blue Underground is now listing it as Out of Print.  If the years of doing this October Challenge has taught me anything it is to jump on the movie when you can, I have lost track of all the ones that have gone out of print or have become unavailable over the years. 
Carroll Baker plays a very haunting version of Baba Yaga, one is immediately reminded of Delphine Seyrig's Elizabeth Báthory from "Daughters of Darkness".  Isabelle De Funès plays Valentina, a photographer in Milan. They meet when Baba Yaga's car nearly hits Valentina while she is petting a stray dog.
After Baba Yaga takes a clip from Valentina's garter belt some strange things start to happen.   Valentina goes to Baba Yaga's home and it is wonderfully creepy. Full of strange antiques, seemingly bottomless wholes, and a doll wearing S&M gear. Though when photographed it is wearing a normal doll's dress.   There are times too when the doll seems to come to life (played by Ely Galleani).  
There is also a clear plastic phone that I am sure was the coolest thing ever in 1975.
When Valentina's models start to get hurt or die she begins to suspect that Baba Yaga might be a witch. 
The movie is slow. No doubt. And it tries to be experimental in places, various hallucinations or visions of fascism or even silent German horror films. But it does have a nice creepy vibe and you never really know what is real or not. 
The story is based on the Italian comic, or fumetti, Valentina by Guido Crepax.  The movie even features some of the art from the comics in the credits and the actors can be seen paging through some of the comics.  Isabelle De Funès certainly has the look of Valentina down.  She looks like she walked right off the page, to be honest. 
The movie is listed as 91 minutes on IMDB, but my BluRay is 83 minutes.  There are some cut scenes on the BluRay that add up to the missing time.  But I am not sure if they are the same missing minutes or not.   They don't really add anything to the movie really. 

Watched: 51
New: 35

NIGHT SHIFT and Old-School ContentMovies about Baba Yaga in English are so rare. This one was dubbed into English from Italian, so rarer still.  This is not your Russian Grandmother's Baba Yaga. This Baba Yaga drives Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud not a mortar and pestle.  The ancient myths of Baba Yaga were about an old witch that devoured or sometimes protected young girls.  The Swinging 70s Baba Yaga is an older woman that preys on younger women in a carnal way. What would a 21st Century Baba Yaga be like?  Maybe a powerful businesswoman, who employs a number of young beautiful women. Likely models or maybe webcam girls.  In the modern retelling, she is not a predator that eats or seduces the young women, but rather uses them up in other ways. Maybe something like I did with Willow & Tara: Web of Lies.

Let's go with one I have had since the Summer.  I love the concept and can't wait to see what I do with it.

Kids on Brooms

Before I get too far into this review I want to start off by saying how much I love the art by Heather Vaughan.  It just fits, or more importantly sets, the tone of this book.  This could have been a cheap "Harry Potter" knock off, but Vaughan's art makes it feel darker and more dangerous.  The kids in her art have power, but they also have fear, and even a little hope. So kudos to Vaughan for really setting this book up for success from the cover and into the book.

Again for this review, I am considering the PDF from DriveThruRPG and the physical copy I picked up at my FLGS.

The game is 96 pages, roughly digest-sized. The art is full color and used to great effect.  The layout is crisp and clean and very easy to read.

Kids on Brooms (KoB) is a new (newish) game from the same team that gave us Kids on Bikes. Authors Doug Levandowski and Jonathan Gilmour with artist Heather Vaughan. New to the team is author Spenser Starke.  If Kids on Bikes was "Stranger Things" inspired then the obvious inspiration here for Kids on Brooms is Harry Potter.  If it were only a Harry Potter pastiche then there would be nothing to offer us.  

The game follows in the footsteps of many newer games in that narrative control is shared. The players help decide what is going on.  So our Session 0 for this game is to have the players come up with their school.  This can be just about anything to be honest, Harry Potter's Hogwarts is the obvious model, but I also got some solid Night School from Chilling Adventures of Sabrina as well. Also, I could see a Breakbills Academy easily being created here, though the characters in Magicians were older.  These students are very much of the 12+, highschool age, variety. 

The players create their school and even provide some background history and some rumors. It all looks rather fun to be honest.  This section starts with the first of many questionnaires to do your world-building.  None are very long, but they are rather helpful to have. I should point out that prior to this school building you are tasked with setting the boundaries of the gameplay. What is and what is not involved.  A LOT of people think this is a means to stifle creativity. It is not. It is a means to keep everyone at the table comfortable and playing what they want.  I mean a drug-fueled sex party prior to a big magical battle is not something you would find in Harry Potter, but it is the exact sort of thing that happens in Magicians or Sabrina.  

Something else that is a nice added touch is talking about the systems of power in the game world. So figuring out things like "This form of bigotry exists (or doesn't) in the game world and is different/same/better/worse than the real world."  To quote Magicians, "magic comes from pain." Happy people in that world are not spell-casters. Quentin, the star, was depressive and suicidal. The other characters had their own issues, or as Quentin would say "we are fucked in our own ways, as usual."  To ignore this page is to rob your game of something that makes your world fuller.

Character creation is equally a group effort, though the mechanic's piece of it is largely up to the player. The player selects one of the Tropes from the end of the book, these are only starting points and are more flexible than say a D&D Class. You introduce your character (after all they are young and this is the first day of class) and then you answer some questions about your character to build up the relationships.

Mechanics wise your six abilities, Brains, Brawn, Fight, Flight, Charm, and Grit are all given a die type; d4 to d20, with d10 being average.  You roll on these dice for these abilities to get above a target number set by the Game Master. 

As expected there are ways to modify your rolls and even sometimes get a reroll (a "Lucky Break").  The "classes" (not D&D, but academic levels) also gain some benefits.  You also gain some strengths and flaws. So if it sounds like there are a lot of ways to describe your character then yes! There is. 

There is a chapter on Magic and this game follows a streamlined version of the Mage-like (as opposed to D&D-like, or WitchCraftRPG-like) magic system.  You describe the magic effect and the GM adjudicated how it might work.  Say my witch Taryn wants to move a heavy object. Well that would be a Brawn roll, but I say that since her Brawn is lower and instead I think her Grit should come into play.  So that is how it works. Rather nice really.

At this point, I should say that you are not limited to playing students. You can also play younger faculty members too.

 Filling out the details of your character involves answering some questions and getting creative with other ideas. You also fill out your class schedule, since there are mechanical benefits to taking some classes.

The mechanics as mentioned are simple.  Roll higher than the difficulty. Difficulty levels are given on page 45, but range from 1 to 2 all the way up to 20 or more. Rolls and difficulties can be modified by almost anything. The first game might involve the looking up of mods and numbers for a bit, but it gets very natural very quickly.  As expected there are benefits to success above and beyond the target difficulty numbers and consequences for falling short of the numbers. 

Some threats are covered and there is a GM section.  But since a lot of the heavy lifting on this game is in the laps of the players the GM section is not long.

There is also a Free Edition of Kids on Brooms if you want to see what the game is about.  It has enough to get you going right away.

This game is really quite fantastic and there is so much going on in it. Personally, I plan on using it as a supplement to my own Generation HEX game from NIGHT SHIFT.  

Plays Well With Others, Generation HEX, and my Traveller Envy

I am SO glad I read this after I had already submitted my own ms in for Generation HEX in NIGHT SHIFT.

Thankfully I can see a game where I would use both systems to help expand my universe more.  The questionnaires here for both the school and the characters would also work well for a Generation HEX game.  In this case though everyone knows about magic and the school is AMPA.  OR Use the background of the hidden school like in KoB and then add in some GenHEX ideas.

So let me take another character today, Taryn, Larina's daughter.  Taryn is my "Teen Witch" and a bit of a rebel.  She was my "embrace the stereotype" witch, but has grown a little more since then.  Compared to her mother her magic came late (Larina was 6, Taryn was 12) so she feels like she has a lot to make up for. Her father is a Mundane and her half-sister has no magic at all.

Taryn is cocky, self-confident, but also a little reckless. Now that she has magic she is convinced it can solve all her problems.  She feels she has a lot to prove and is afraid there is some dark secret in her past (spoiler there is).

She spends her nights in an underground, illegal broom racing circuit.  She is very fast and has already made a lot of cash and a few enemies.  She is worried that one of her secrets, her red/green colorblindness, will affect her races. 

Her other weakness is guys on fast motorcycles. She is particularly fond of the Kawaski Ninja Carbon. Yeah, she judges people based on their bikes.  

Speed is her addiction of choice. Not the drug, the velocity.  Though that might be an issue in the future.

I find I am able to depict her rather well in Kids on Brooms, NIGHT SHIFT and Dark Places & Demogorgons.  I even gave her a try in the Great American Witch (she is Craft of Lilith).

This game has a bunch of solid potential and I am looking forward to seeing what I can do with it.

Reviews / October 28, 2020

Cruise Into Terror
Directed by Bruce Kessler
ABC (1978)

World-weary Captain Andy Andrews (Hugh O’Brian) never smiles, but he is especially not smiling today. The company’s luxury liner was overbooked, you see, and he’s been ordered to take eight passengers 800 miles to Mexico on a busted up “battle wagon” (in fact a midsized pleasure boat decorated with ferns) with a broken port engine. Andrews refuses, and is hit with an ultimatum by the line’s director (Marshall Thompson): “Are you gonna take the Obeah to Mexico? Or are you gonna look for a job in the Bolivian Navy?” Andrews, as you’ve probably guessed, chooses poorly. Then again, Obeah refers to an alleged (by white people) type of evil Caribbean sorcery, so he kind of asked for it.

The director, from his office that is for some reason smack in the middle of a warehouse chock-full of giant cardboard boxes (spoiler alert), quickly places a call, telling the other line that the deed is done before hanging up and asking God to save his soul. Enter menacing tribal chanting over a Jaws-like theme (it will occur throughout the movie, and it is a joy) as a runaway forklift rams a stack of giant cardboard boxes (told you) that squash the director.

Briskly, our unlucky passengers are introduced: the ship’s black cat Carina (real name unknown), who is scooped off the dock by recently divorced and looking-to-party Ms. Marilyn Magnesun (Stella Stevens, well acquainted with cursed ships); deck hand Nathan (Magnum, P.I.’s Roger Mosley, here employing a very unfortunate Jamaican accent); archeologist Dr. Isiah Bakkun (Ray Milland, bless him); too-busy-for-love husband and fed up, horny wife Neal and Sandra Barry (played by real life husband and wife Christopher George and Lynda Day George); gal pals Judy “the looker” (Jo Ann Harris) and Debbie “the great personality” (Hilarie Thompson), the former immediately inviting First Officer Simon McLane (pre-Battlestar Galactica Dirk Benedict) to make a house call; too-holy-for-love Reverend Mather (John Forsythe) and fed up, horny wife Lil (Lee Meriwether); and the straggling, bumbling physicist Matt Lazarus (Frank Converse).

Mr. Lazarus is familiar with Dr. Bakkun’s work on “Mayan-Egyptian cross-culturization,” obviously, as we find out during happy hour on the first night. “Ancient Egyptians sailed to Mexico 2000 years ago and founded the Mayan civilization,” the good doctor explains to the skeptical passengers. His evidence? A piece of papyrus revealing that Cleopatra ordered a tomb built “where the sun hits the sea.” I’m not sure how that narrows anything down, but apparently his “calculations” prove that the tomb is on the island of Cozumel, directly off the Eastern coast of the Yucatán Peninsula—the destination of the Obeah. 

Strange occurrences begin: Debbie nearly falls overboard when malevolent red eyes encroach in the darkness. But Debbie, because she’s somewhat intellectual (i.e. she wears glasses and reads books), is just “high-strung” and “hysterical.” What she saw were the lights of the channel police, says the Captain. Meanwhile, looker Judy is getting it on with Simon, who is only fulfilling his obligations as the “entertainment director.” Mrs. Barry and Mrs. Mather are not so lucky: their husbands both spurn their sexual advances, Mr. Barry because he’s a bigshot finance director and a giant asshole, Reverend Mather because he’s trying to impress God by doing “penance for the years I spent worshiping the bottle.”

The physicist “whiz kid” has done some independent research and concluded that Dr. Bakkun’s “calculations” are for shit: the tomb is actually 41 miles north of Cozumel. And sure enough, that’s exactly where something called the the injector pump breaks. Everyone wants to raid the tomb except for the good Reverend, who thinks “the dead should be allowed to rest in peace,” but Bakkun has “waited for this moment my whole life” and will not be swayed by “Biblical fantasies.”

Ms. Magnesun uses this opportunity to hit on the Captain, sensing he’s “spooked”: “Oh, I pick up on things,” she coyly brags. “Sometimes I know what people are thinking before they know.” Is she “some kind of a witch,” the Captain wants to know. “Well, some people might pronounce it a bit differently,” she says, “but like I said, I do read minds, and yours looks like some pretty heavy reading.” Is that a smile lurching across the Captain’s stony face?

The passengers take a dive and dig up an Egyptian tomb plate, to the orgasmic delight of Bakkun. The Reverend, who can apparently read ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics, explains that the plate specifically warns against desecration. Also, according to Bakkun’s own papyrus, the tomb (despite all the big brains in the room, no one seems to understand that the tomb has already been desecrated) is to be opened every thousand years for inspection. The last time that happened, the entire Mayan civilization disappeared without a trace. “Something evil” resides inside, the buzzkill Reverend declares, “something waiting for the next millennium.”

The passengers haul up the sarcophagus in short order. It is… much smaller than we were led to believe, but big enough to make dollar signs dance in Neal’s head. Nathan, left in the water like so much chum, is soon “buried under a thousand pounds of rock.” But there’s no time to mourn! The passengers want to take the sarcophagus back to the States and cash in, but the Captain gives them a quick class on maritime law: the salvage belongs to the ship. The Reverend wants to destroy the cursed thing “before the seal is broken on the lid,” because “the son of the evil one is inside, the son of Satan.” Evidence? He reads from a book called the Key of Solomon (a real Renaissance grimoire that has nothing to do with the Bible): “where 12 souls gather, the child of Satan shall be lifted from his bindings,” and so on. One of the 12 is his “guardian”—“One by one, he’s going to take us all.”

Ms. Magnesun uses this opportunity to bed the Captain. During the post-coital cigarette, Cap reveals that it’s his last trip; he’s making all the wrong decisions (he sure is) and feels guilty about Nathan’s death (as he should). Ms. Magnesun tells him something her father used to tell her: “That there is a devil, there is no doubt. But is he trying to get in us, or trying to get out?” She wants the Captain to “let [his] devil out.” Now, unless this is her roundabout way of asking for seconds, I believe she has completely misunderstood the point of her dad’s creepy rhyme.

Thunder and lightning. Lustful Lil has had enough: she must have sex. After making eyes at the heaving sarcophagus, she visits Lazarus’s room unannounced, breathes heavily, and drops her nightgown. Minutes later, disheveled and stumbling down the hall, she meets the Reverend, starts speaking in tongues, and tries to choke him to death. Meanwhile, Neal has become increasingly obsessed with cashing in on the sarcophagus, even while Sandra reasons that it’s clearly evil and should be thrown overboard. “We came on this cruise to be happy again,” she pleads. His response is the best line of the movie:

Happy? And how do you plan to work that miracle? We’re a little old to find happiness on a beach in some sleeping bags like a couple of hippies. Happiness has a price tag, Sandra. It costs money.

Dr. Bakkun comes to his senses, grabs an axe, and tells the baby devil that he’s going to chop him up. Bad move: devil baby shakes the ship, toppling Bakkun, and the sarcophagus launches itself off the table into Bakkun’s face. Neal threatens the physicist into teaming up with him and removes the sarcophagus to his cabin for caressing and safekeeping. They need to get it to the launch before the Obeah docks in Mexico and the treasure is confiscated. But the Obeah is dead in the water, and Simon has to take the launch to get help. The guardian reveals himself, but the Captain still believes there’s a logical explanation. The Reverend strongly disagrees, chucking a couple of gas lanterns at the sarcophagus (and poor Carina, who has snuggled up to it)—“to the flames you shall return”—and wrestles with the guardian. Lil, her trance broken, sticks with her man to expire, along with the guardian and the devil baby, in the flames. The survivors escape in the launch before the ship explodes (an explosion lifted from a production with an actual budget and clumsily overlaid onto the Obeah), and the Captain concludes with a morose voiceover log entry. He will never smile again.

I have spent much too long describing the plot of a 1978 TV movie called Cruise Into Terror that is very obviously a rip of the greatest telefilm of all time, The Horror at 37,000 Feet, but I couldn’t help myself. There is magic here. Good magic. Hugh O’Brian utters every word with the gravitas of a Rod Serling-narrated Twilight Zone epilogue, and at one point the Captain, Bowie knife in hand, quite literally stares down a shark. Christopher George is spectacularly over-the-top, as was usual during this stage of his career. Milland is a treasure, and I won’t hear otherwise (he too would go on to star in Battlestar Galactica as the debauched Sire Uri). And the sarcophagus! It really breathes, with accompanying heartbeat sound effect! Ultimately, that’s what seals the deal for me. The ’70s were a golden age of paranormal media and pseudoscience and urban legend, and the idiotic and recycled occult theme feels like home. Also, I’ve got a thing for boats (see below).

An Aaron Spelling production, Cruise Into Terror was obviously banking on the success of Spelling’s The Love Boat, then in its first season. And yet it was probably an earlier Spelling TV movie, the murder-mystery Death Cruise (1974), that set the template (minus the foul play) for The Love Boat. Anyway, every single member of the Cruise Into Terror cast would go on to star one or more times on The Love Boat. Yes, I checked.

—K.E. Roberts

 

Getting back to more 5e Witch classes today I wanted to review one from Hope Punk Press that caught my eye.    Again, these are OGL based classes, but I am still following my own rules on reviewing them.

The Witch: A 5e Compatible Class
by Brandon Elliott, Hope Punk Press

This is a 26-page pdf (cover, 2 OGL pages, 23 pages of content) for the witch class.  The art is good and used well. The layout is good and very clean to read, but the background image makes printing a bit expensive. 

This witch is also a full 20 levels (as expected) with spellcasting to the 9th level.  This witch has 1d6 for HD and can’t wear armor.  These witches use Intelligence as their spellcasting ability.  This witch is a ritual caster.   

These witches choose a magical conduit; eight are presented here in two broad categories. Each one gains a list of bonus spells and new powers as expected of any archetype/subclass.   Other conduits could easily be added to these lists. 

The two broad categories, Dawn and Dusk witches have slightly different spell lists.  This is a nice touch and something I have done with my various Traditions for my own witches. 

There also 11 new spells for this witch so that is pretty nice.   

A discussion on magic items, feats, and spells from other books to add to the witch.  With the way the conduits are put together, there is infinite flexibility to this witch.  

This one has quite a lot going for it as well. It takes the witch in different directions and I like it.

Staying in the 70s tonight. In fact, I seem to be stuck in 1971-1973, but that is fine really.  I had seen this one before but I realized I had never reviewed it for my October Horror Movie marathon. 

Well, there is not a lot to recommend here. A very young Anthony Geary stars as a Vietnam Vet and a bunch of women run around completely naked.   How much of the movie is that? I have an edited for TV version that is only about an hour-long, so at least 20 mins were cut.  He meets up with a woman, Yyala, but he can't find her later. 

It does have Dyanne Thorne as Alotta, Queen of Witches.  So there is that I guess. The biggest issue is that the movie is so slow. 

I remember first wanting to see this for the overt association with hippie culture and witchcraft and it certainly has that.  Alotta makes for a good if somewhat stereotypical 70s-era witch. But that doesn't make her less fun.  Susan Damante as the water nymph/witch Yyala is less entertaining, but I think it is because her lines are so bad.  

So to love Yyala, David has to get rid of his soul. A bargain the Witch Queen is happy to oblige him with. Then of course the horror ensues. 

It is pretty typical of the Occult 70s right before the Exorcist hit the theatres. Lots of jumbled up occult ideas, lots of weird filming, and plenty of soft-core nudity.  It also pretty much typifies what I call the "leftover hippie shit" of the 60 going into the 70s.

There is a pretty good review of it (with plenty of screencaps) at the Grind House Database.

Watched: 50
New: 34

NIGHT SHIFT and Old-School ContentSo one idea I had based on this one and The Boy Who Cried Werewolf last night is the PCs find a group of hippies, yes in 2020, but these hippies seem a bit stranger than most. That is because they are all Fey or nymphs and satyrs. Maybe even Dionysis is still with them but instead of wine he the god of drugs. 
The characters run into problems when these fey want them to "Tune in, Turn on, and Drop Out" with them for the rest of eternity.

Let's start off the week with a game that is brand new.  How new? It was only two months ago that I was interviewing the author and designer, Christopher Grey, for the Kickstarter.

Last week or so I go my physical copy in the mail and codes for my DriveThruRPG downloads.  That was fast.  So such a speedy response deserves a review. 

The Great American Witch
by Christopher Grey

For this review, I am considering the hardcover, letter-sized book, and the PDF.  On DriveThruRPG you get two different layouts of the core book (1 and 2 page spreads), and several ancillary files for the covens and the crafts.  I was a Kickstart backer and got my products via that. Both the hardcover and the pdfs are available at DriveThruRPG.

The Great American Witch is 162 pages, all full color, with full color covers.  The art is by Minerva Fox and Tithi Luadthong. There are also some photos that I recognize from various stock art services, some I have even used myself.  This is not a criticism of the book; the art, all the art, is used effectively and sets the tone and mood of the book well.

The rule system is a Based on the Apocalypse World Engine variant.  Over the last couple of years I have had mixed, to mostly negative feelings about the Apocalypse World Engine.  Nothing to do with the system itself, but mainly due to how many designers have been using it.  I am happy to report that the version being used in TGAW is a stripped-down version that works better for me.

It is also published by Gallant Knight Games, who has a solid reputation.  So out of the gate and barely cracking open the book it has a lot of things going for it.

The Great American Witch is a cooperative, story-telling game of witches fighting against perceived injustices in the world.  I say "perceived" because of what injustices the witches fight against is going to largely depend on the witches (and the players) themselves. The framework of the game is built on Grey's earlier work, The Great American Novel.  TGAW is expanded from the earlier game.

Like many modern games, TGAW has a Session 0, for everyone to come together and talk about what the game should be about, what the social interaction rules are, and what the characters are.  The older I get the more of a fan of Session 0 I become. As a Game Master, I want to make sure everyone is invested in the game, I want to be sure everyone is going to have a good time. So yes. Session 0 all the way.  The first few pages detail what should be part of your Session 0.  It's actually pretty good material that can be adapted to other games. 

The game also wears its politics on its sleeve. Frankly, I rather like this. It helps that I also happen to agree with the author and game here. But besides that, there is something else here.  This game takes the idea, or even the realities and the mythologies of the witch persecutions and "Burning Times" and revisions them into the modern age.  It is not a bridge to far to see how the forces of the Patriarchy and anti-women legislation, politics, and religion of the 16th to 17th centuries can be recreated in the 21st century. After all, isn't "The Handmaids Tale" one of the most popular and awarded television programs right now? There is obviously something to this.

The main narrative of the game comes from the players themselves.  The Guide (GM) plays a lesser role here than in other games; often as one running the various injustices, NPCs, or other factions the players/characters/witches will run up against.  The system actually makes it easy for all players to have a character and rotate the guide duties as needed.

True to its roots games are broken down into"Stories" and  "Chapters" and who has the narrative control will depend on the type of chapter.  A "Story" is a game start to finish. Be that a one-shot or several different chapters over a long period of time.  A "Montage" chapter is controlled by the players. A "Menace" chapter is controlled by the Guide. A "Mundane" chapter is usually controlled by the player and the details of that chapter are for that character alone.  "Meeting" chapters involve the characters all together and are controlled by them. "Mission" chapters are the main plot focus that move the story forward. "Milestones" are what they sound like. This is where the witch would "level up."

The game uses three d6s for the rare dice resolution. Most times players use a 2d6 and try to roll a 7 or better. "Weal" and "Woe" conditions can augment this roll. The author makes it clear that you should roll only when the outcome is in doubt.  There are a lot of factors that can modify the rolls and the conflicts faced.  It is assumed that most conflicts will NOT be dealt with with a simple roll of 7 or better. The author has made it clear in the book and elsewhere that more times than average a conflict is not just going to go away like defeating a monster in D&D.  Conflicts are akin to running uphill, that can be accomplished, but they will take work and they will not be the only ones.

Once gameplay is covered we move into creating the player character witches. The book gives the player questions that should be answered or at least considered when creating a witch character. Character creation is a group effort, so the first thing you create is your group's Coven.  This also helps in determining the type of game this will be as different covens have different agendas.  There are nine different types of Covens; the Divine, Hearth, Inverted, Oracle, the Storm, Sleepers, the Town, the Veil, and Whispers. Each coven has different specialties and aspects. Also, each Coven has a worksheet to develop its own unique features, so one Coven of the Storm is not exactly the same as another Coven of the Storm from another city or even part of the city.  These are not the Traditions of Mage, the Covenants of the WitchCraftRPG, or even the Traditions of my witch books.  These are all very local and should be unique to themselves.  Once the coven is chosen then other details can be added. This includes things like how much resources does the coven have? Where does it get its money from? Legal status and so on. 

If Covens cover the group of witches, then each witch within the coven has their own Craft.  These are built of of archetypes of the Great Goddess.  They are Aje, the Hag (Calilleach), Hekate, Lilith, Mary (or Isis), Spider Grandmother, and Tara.  These are the Seven Crafts and they are the "sanctioned" and most widespread crafts, but there are others.  Each Craft, as you can imagine, gives certain bonuses and penalties to various aspects of the witch and her magic. Aje for example is not a good one if you want a high value in Mercy, but great if you want a high number in Severity and mixed on Wisdom.   All crafts are also subdivided into Maiden, Mother, and Crone aspects of the witch's life.   

Character creation is rather robust and by the end, you have a really good idea who your witch is and what they want.

The Game Master's, or Guide's, section covers how to run the game. Among other details, there is a section on threats. While there are a lot of potential threats the ones covered in the book are things like demons, vampires, other witches, the fey, the Illuminati, ghosts and other dead spirits, old gods and good old-fashioned mundane humans. 

The end of the book covers the worksheets for the various Covens and Crafts.  You use the appropriate Craft Sheets for a character.

The PDF version of the book makes printing these out very easy.  It would be good for every player to have the same Coven sheet, or a photocopy of the completed one, and then a Craft sheet for their witch.

While the game could be played with as little two players, a larger group is better, especially if means a variety of crafts can be represented.  Here the crafts can strengthen the coven, but also provide some inter-party conflict. Not in-fighting exactly, but differences on how to complete a Mission or deal with a threat.  After all, no one wants to watch a movie where the Avengers all agree on a course of action from the start and the plans go as though up and there are no complications.  That's not drama, that is a normal day at work.  These witches get together to change the world or their corner of it, but sometimes, oftentimes, the plans go sideways.  This game supports that type of play.

The Great American Witch works or fails based on the efforts of the players.  While the role of the GM/Guide may be reduced, the role and responsibilities of the players are increased.  It is also helpful to have players that are invested into their characters and have a bit of background knowledge on what they want their witch to be like.  To this end the questions at the start of the book are helpful.

That right group is the key. With it this is a fantastic game and one that would provide an endless amount of stories to tell.  I am very pleased I back this one.

Plays Well With Others, War of the Witch Queens and my Traveller Envy

I just can't leave well enough alone.  I have to take a perfectly good game and then figure out things to do with it above and beyond and outside of it's intended purposes.  SO from here on out any "shortcomings", I find are NOT of this game, but rather my obsessive desire to pound a square peg into a round hole.

Part 1: Plays Well With Others

The Great American Witch provides a fantastic framework to be not just a Session 0 to many of the games I already play, but also a means of providing more characterization to my characters of those games.

Whether my "base" game is WitchCraftRPG or Witch: Fated Souls, The Great American Witch could provide me with far more detail.  In particular, the character creation questions from The Great American Witch and Witch: Fated Souls could be combined for a more robust description of the character. 

Taking the example from WitchCraft, my character could be a Gifted Wicce.  Even in the WitchCraft rules there is a TON of variety implicit and implied in the Wicce.  Adding on a "layer" of TGAW gives my Wicce a lot more variety and helps focus their purpose.  While reading TGAW I thought about my last big WitchCraft game "Vacation in Vancouver."  Members of the supernatural community were going missing, the Cast had to go find out why.  The game was heavy on adult themes (there was an underground sex trafficking ring that catered to the supernatural community) and required a LOT of participation and cooperation to by the player to make it work. It was intense. At one point my witch character was slapped in an S&M parlor and I swear I felt it! But this is also the same sort of game that could be played with TGAW. Granted, today I WAY tone down the adult elements, but that was the game everyone then agreed to play.  The same rules in TGAW that allow for "safe play" also allow for this.  The only difference is that those rules are spelled out ahead of time in TGAW. 

Jumping back and forth between the systems, with the same characters and players, and a lot of agreement on what constitutes advancement across the systems would be a great experience.  

I could see a situation where I could even add in some ideas from Basic Witches from Drowning Moon Studios.  

Part 2: Traveller Envy

This plays well into my Traveller Envy, though this time these are all RPGs.  Expanding on the ideas above I could take a character, let's say for argument sake my iconic witch Larina, and see how she manifests in each game.  Each game giving me something different and a part of the whole.

Larina "Nix" Nichols
CJ Carrella's WitchCraft RPG: Gifted Wicce
Mage: The Ascension: Verbena
Mage: The Awakening: Path Acanthus, Order Mysterium
Witch: Fated Souls: Heks
NIGHT SHIFT: Witch
The Great American Witch: The Craft of Lilith OR The Craft of Isis.*

There is no "one to one" correspondence, nor would I wish there to be. In fact, some aspects of one Path/Order/Tradition/Fate/Craft will contradict another.  "The Craft of Lilith" in GAW is a good analog to WitchCraft's "Twilight Order" and the "Lich" in Witchcraft: Fated Souls.  But for my view of my character, this is how to best describe her. 

* Here I am already trying to break the system by coming up with a "Craft of Astarte" which would be the intersection of Lilith and Isis.  Don't try this one at home kids, I am what you call a professional.  

Part 3: War of the Witch Queens

Every 13 years the witch queens gather at the Tredecim to discuss what will be done over the next thirteen years for all witches. Here they elect a new Witch High Queen.

One of the building blocks of my War of the Witch Queens is to take in as much detail as I can from all the games I can.  This is going to be a magnum opus, a multiverse spanning campaign.

What then can the Great American Witch do for me here?  That is easy.  Using the coven creation rules I am planning to create the "coven" of the five main witch queen NPCs.  While the coven creation rules are player-focused, these will be hidden from the players since the witches are all NPCs.  They are based on existing characters, so I do have some external insight into what is going on with each one, but the choices will be mine alone really. 

Looking at these witches and the covens in TGAW they fit the Coven of the Hearth the best.

Coven of the Hearth, also known as the Witches' Tea Circle (tea is very important to witches).  
Five members, representing the most powerful witches in each of the worlds the Witch Queens operate in.
Oath: To work within witchcraft to provide widespread (multiverse!) protection for witches
Holy Day: Autumnal Equinox. Day of Atonement: Sumer Solstice. Which was their day of formal formation as well.
Hearth: A secured build in an Urban setting.
Sanctuary: Lots of great stuff here, and all of it fits well.
Connections & Resources: Organization charged with finding those in need.

Going to the Coven Worksheet:

Resources: Wealthy coven (they are Queens)
Makes money? A shop.  Let's say that the "Home, Heart & Hearth" stores from my own Pumpkin Spice Witch book are the means to keep this operation funded.
Distribution: Distributed based on need.
Status: Mainstream.  They ARE the mainstream.
Importance? Witches need to come together.
Mundanes? Mundanes are important. but not for the reasons listed. Mundanes are the greatest threat.
Influence: Extraordinary.
Members: Five or six local, but millions in the multiverse.
Authority: Through legacy and reputation

Wow. That worked great, to be honest.

Here's hoping for something really big to come from this.

I am still reviewing 5e Witch classes, but now I am expanding my reviews to the OGL-based publications and not DMsGuild ones.  I am going to still follow the rules I have set up for this month of reviews, though I can also be a little more critical of these publications since I am also expecting a higher caliber of production value.

Up first is the Complete Witch from Mage Hand Press.  

Complete Witch
from Mage Hand Press

This book is 41 pages (cover, table of contents, credits, OGL, for 37 pages of content).  

This PDF sells for $5.99, but currently is $4.99 for the Halloween sales.  Given that the art is more expensive for an OGL book than a DMsGuild book I am not sure if my 10 cents per page rule of thumb is appropriate anymore.  In any case, this one is very close to that.

If my expectations were for better art, design and production then Mage Hand has met those expectations and surpassed them.  The layout is extremely clean and readable.  The art is fantastic and liberally used.  The cover in particular is very dynamic.  This is a product that grabs your attention.

The witch class itself is a full 20 level caster with spells to the 9th level.  The witch has a number of cantrips known and a maximum number of spells known.  This witch also gets something called “Hexes” at the first level and these progress.  The witch has 1d8 HD. She is a charisma based spell caster and can cast ritual spells.  Ok so far every box has been checked.  

Each witch also has a curse. Now this is a nice touch and I really like it.  I am not going to detail the curses here, you should really buy it to see, but I am very, very fond of the Burned, Hideous and Hallow.  But the coolest is Visions.  As a DM I’d use that one to my advantage.

As the witch progresses she gains other powers.  Most notably the Hexes. These are roughly equal to the Hexes of the Pathfinder Witch or even of the Occult Powers of my witches. There are a good number of them, including Grand Hexes.

The Archetypes of this Witch are the Witch’s Crafts.  I would call these Traditions and others call them Covens.  But regardless of the names, they work really well.   Each craft gains a list of additional spells and choices of Hexes unique to that craft. There are 14 different Crafts.  I would have gone for 13 myself, but hey I am not going to complain here.  Special shout out for the Tea Magic Witches. 

IF that was all that this publication gave us, then frankly I would call myself happy and been good.  But that is only half the book.

Up next we get a Chapter (yes a proper chapter) on Familiars. There are many new ones introduced here too. There are 17 here including the very inspired Pet Rock (I am nor joking! I love it!) 

Chapter 3 covers spells.  This is the witches' spell list AND new spells. There are 18 new spells here.  For a D&D 5 book that is a lot.   But again, that is not everything we also get some new Dark Rituals. There are 11 of these and they remind me a lot, in form and function, of the Ritual Spells I also give my witches.  They are very well done. 

We get a new god/monster/elder thing.

We end with an Appendix on Epic Boons! (This is a first!)

At 41 pages, this one packs a huge punch. 

I can’t find a single issue with this product save for a couple of nit-picky layout issues.  It is really, really good. 

I had very high expectations and this product met and surpassed them all. 

So this one has been on my list for some time now.  I have hesitated because of all the really negative reviews I have read about it.  But I figure I need to get to it sooner or later and today is that day.

Truth be told I loved the original Blair Witch Project. Such a fun film really. This one had some promise; well...at least promise in my mind.  Mix a goth girl and a Wiccan in the Blair Witch mix? That should have been a hit for me.  And there is the seed of a good movie here, but it got lost somewhere.

Many of the actors are not great, but thankfully many of them got better. Jeffrey Donovan for example moved on to much bigger and better things. 

The beginning starts promisingly enough and then the middle drags a bit.  Again, there are all the elements of a good movie here, just not put together well.  Like getting some furniture from Ikea, but not having the instructions. 

I kinda like the mystery, reminds me of the first movie in that respect, but none of the claustrophobia. 

While it didn't live up to its predecessor it was not as bad as I was lead to believe. Oh it was bad, just not awful. 

NIGHT SHIFT and Old-school Content:  So the Blair Witch Project, in any form, is great for a Modern Supernatural game. An ancient witch coming back to haunt people? That is great stuff.

The memory blackout is a good plot point and easy to do in a game, even if it can be a bit cliched. 

Watched: 49
New: 33

Reviews / October 27, 2020

 

The House That Bled to Death
Directed by Tom Clegg 
Hammer Films (1980)

Apologies in advance to any fellow child of the UK who might be reading this, because for a Brit of my generation, choosing The House That Bled to Death as exemplar of British TV horror is a bit like announcing that your favorite novel is Moby Dick or your favorite food is pizza: so totally obvious that it looks like either laziness or ignorance. But the rest of the world needs to know about semis. No, not those semis.

Semi-detached houses—the two-family domestic Rorschach tests that made up almost half of all properties built in the United Kingdom from the end of the war until the mid-1960s—occupy an important if strangely unacknowledged place in the country’s collective psyche. I say strangely unacknowledged because the place is rotten with them. Semis can be working-class, like the majority of British council housing, or very posh, generally tending towards a square, cozy middle class (British middle-class, mostly with much less disposable income than their US counterparts) averageness that’s very much of its time and place. In 2018, 60% of the UK’s population lived in one. The British haunted house is usually represented in popular culture by some crumbling mansion or middle-class pile with a turret, but from a statistical standpoint, the sheer number of semis makes them far more likely sites for supernatural manifestation, and a series of poltergeists and serial killers of the post-war period did eventually give the semi claim to the paranormal and unpleasant. There’s something implicitly strange about the structure’s floorplan, something that echoes the organic symmetries of lungs or lobes and evokes doubles and distorted mirror-image versions. Perhaps it’s because it hints at something deep in the British—or more properly in this case, English—psyche, some feeling of only half-inhabiting reality, of only being half of a life. Yet despite all this, it remains something of a marginal presence in British popular culture, so ubiquitous that it’s invisible. The House that Bled to Death is an exception, a fact that confers upon it an odd power.

The House that Bled to Death was the fifth of the 13 episodes that made up Hammer House of Horror, a television anthology series produced by Hammer Films in association with Cinema Arts International and ITC Entertainment in the hope of breaking into the TV market. Houses were very much on the country’s mind on Saturday the 11th of October 1980, when The House that Bled to Death was broadcast, because the previous week the Conservative government led by Margaret Thatcher had introduced the Housing Act. Around a third of the country’s population lived in public housing, and the Housing Act allowed five million of them to buy those houses at discounted prices, but at the same time eliminated vast swathes of the stock of (often poor quality) public housing. It was a hugely divisive move that, while undoubtedly giving a lot of families a financial leg-up, kicked off the Conservative Party’s dismantling of social cohesion and, by placing vast numbers of cheap homes in the hands of private landlords, also helped kindle the vicious housing market the UK enjoys today. In 1980, the average annual salary in the UK was probably somewhere between £5,000 and £7,000, and the average price of a house £20,000, meaning three or four years’ wages. As things stand today, the average price is almost £240,000 and the average salary around £30,000. Consequently, owning a home is nowadays at least twice as hard—and impossible for a lot of people. And in the meantime, private landlords have become ever more greedy and unscrupulous. But anyway.

Perhaps taking its lead from the previous year’s The Amityville Horror, The House that Bled to Death tells the story of young couple William and Emma Peters who, in their desperation to get onto the property ladder, move with their daughter Sophie into the semi-detached house where an awful crime was committed involving a pair of incongruous machetes (weirdly referred to repeatedly as “swords”) that the former tenant kept mounted over the fire, only to find themselves under paranormal attack. A pervasively ominous mood of doom envelops the proceedings, but The House That Bled to Death is mainly remembered for containing the shabby British suburbs’ riposte to the crew’s celebratory meal in Alien–-a scene where a pipe detaches itself from the ceiling and starts belching out blood, drenching a group of children assembled around the dining table to celebrate little Sophie’s birthday.

As is often the case with this kind of thing, it’s the echoes of childhood impressions that trigger unease as much as the “horror”: the perennially overcast weather, the pebbledash, “liver for supper,” nobody wearing seatbelts, the constant rumble of traffic, people carrying plastic bags, how empty rooms were back in the days before full materialism, the mercurial pervery of the great Brian Croucher (even more uncomfortable here than he was as Travis in Blake’s 7) as the Peters’ neighbor. And in this age of spectacularized everything, it’s incredible how much more strange and alien the unaffected voices of the child actors here sound compared to the supposedly unnerving music box melody that plays every time something nasty’s about to happen to poor little Sophie—one of The House That Bled to Death‘s more witless and hackneyed attempts at putting the frighteners on.

I’m not going to try and spin some revisionary interpretation that The House that Bled to Death‘s twist ending is actually a veiled comment on the effects of Thatcher’s housing policy, though to be honest, it would sort of fit. That writer David Lloyd was the same ex-tennis professional David Lloyd who founded that other symbol of those hedonistic times—a chain of private sports facilities—in the early ’80s seems unlikely, which is a shame, as it would provide a gratifyingly neat Hammer-esque twist in the tail. Watching it today, with the country in the final throes of pretending that it knew what it was doing when it took out a high-interest mortgage on the damp-ridden haunted semi that is Brexit Towers, it does seem oddly timely, what with the Peters’ refusal to look reality in the face and their hysterically taking against their neighbors for trying to point out that self-eviscerating cats and severed hands in the fridge might mean there are issues that need dealing with.

Brexit was never really about leaving the EU; it was about leaving behind concepts like equal opportunities and social care and moving the country to the right. And in fact, as we learn at the end of The House that Bled to Death, the terrifying events the Peters have been subjected to were never real—they were just a way of using other people’s credulity and fears to whip up a payday. The House that Bled to Death concludes with them living off their ill-gotten gains in a bungalow with swimming pool that’s nominally in California, despite being so clearly outside High Wycombe that all that’s missing is a sign for Bekonscot Model Village.

Who knows if Britain’s children will one day revenge themselves upon their self-obsessed parents for the trauma they’ve been put through the way little Sophia revenges herself on hers. 

Snowbeast
Directed by Herb Wallerstein 
NBC (1977)

The reason I was allowed to hurtle through the 9:00 bedtime threshold and watch The House that Bled to Death in the first place was because when it was shown I was staying in Wales with my mum’s auntie, who in broken English insisted on my parents letting me traumatize myself because I was “on holiday.” In fact, until I was able to access a VCR (we never got one), my exposure to horror was pretty much exclusively thanks to elderly relatives either nodding off in front of the telly or brushing away parental concerns. And the beautiful traumatizing of that long evening of Saturday the 11th of October 1980 hadn’t even started at 9:15, when The House that Bled to Death was broadcast—it had started an hour and three quarters earlier when another of the Caravaggios in the Uffizi of TV terror had begun. Yes, I’m talking about Snowbeast with Bo Svenson.

Snowbeast—which, predictably, is Jaws with Bigfoot as the shark—has it all. The perennially underused Yvette Mimieux, the reassuringly enormous and idiotic visages of Bo Svenson and Clint Walker, The Wilderness Family‘s Robert Logan (who can barely keep a straight face), the great Sylvia Sidney as the avaricious ski resort owner who refuses to close things down, and a monster design almost as alarming-looking as the sasquatch from the previous year’s Six Million Dollar Man story The Secret of Bigfoot, which was presumably at least partly the movie’s inspiration. No rationale is given for the Snowbeast’s frenzied hatred of humankind, though it does genuinely seem to detest skis and skiing—which makes at least some sense in the end, as the instrument of its death isn’t a rifle or a revolver but a Bo Svenson-wielded ski pole. 

Both The House that Bled to Death and Snowbeast are great, but I’m going to risk opprobrium in my homeland by admitting that though the first doesn’t frighten me anymore, for some reason, Snowbeast, which in many ways is far more ludicrous, still does. The sheer surreal irrationality of the whole thing, its risibly shoddy monster, its obsessive revisiting of the same locales, the terrifying snowbeast POV shots and freeze-frame fade-to-red snowbeast attacks (though as I approach 50, the most frightening scene in the film might be the one where a fleeing Sylvia Sidney is knocked to the ground and bangs her hip), the endless boring scenes of skiing: they all combine into something nightmarish, and watching it I’m immediately transported back to a little Welsh house with only wild countryside thrashing away in the wind outside the window and the awareness gradually sinking in that, as bedtime inevitably approaches, I’ve bitten off way more terror than I can realistically chew.

—Richard McKenna

I am going to do some reviews of some non-D&D witch books this week as well.  I am going to talk about what I plan to get out of each game and if they help contribute to more of my "Traveller Envy" (spoilers, they do).

For all these reviews I am going to review the PDFs and the physical books.

I'll spend some time reviewing the game on their own merits and then also looking at what I am planning to do with them.  Keep in mind that my plans might extend beyond the design goals of the various authors and designers and any short-comings they have at that point are not due to the design or the game itself, merely my implementation of them.

The games are:

Kids on Brooms: Core Rulebook

The Great American Witch

Charm Roleplaying Game

and one add on for D&D 5e, Witch+Craft, a 5e crafting supplemental

Looking forward to them all!

Michael Grasso / October 26, 2020

The English Heretic Collection: Ritual Histories, Magickal Geography
By Andy Sharp
Repeater Books, 2020

Disclosure: The editors of We Are the Mutants are currently writing a book for Repeater Books. Featured image courtesy Andy Sharp.

At this time two years ago I was in the thick of writing my capstone project for my Master’s degree in Museum Studies. As I researched how fragmentary memories of childhood museum visits could be used in their later promotion and preservation, I also delved deeply into the larger cultural uses (and misuses) of remembrance, commemoration, and “heritage” in the US and UK. In the schema of nostalgia theorist Svetlana Boym, top-down cultural commemoration often reaches for a “restorative” impulse of wanting to enshrine a golden era of the past, while personal memories and interpretations, playfully reassembled and remixed, offer a “reflective” method of accessing nostalgia.

I found myself thinking about my abortive career in museums when I read the foreword and preface to English author, musician, and artist Andy Sharp‘s catalog of the weird and lost in the English landscape, The English Heretic Collection: Ritual Histories, Magickal Geography. Using as its inspiration English Heritage, who preserve the very bones and sinews of English feudal hierarchy in the form of the nation’s stately homes and historical sites, Sharp’s English Heretic project seeks to détourne these edifices of authority, playfully bringing forth the dark and forgotten occult secrets in the English landscape. In his foreword, Dean Kenning cites Sharp’s mining of “mythology… generated not from on high, but from somewhere subterranean and demotic.” The connections that Sharp makes between places, persons, themes, and concepts in the mystical English imaginarium deliberately echo the “ludic” tendency of children’s constructivist play at historic sites: “Children,” Sharp says in his Preface, “see these locations as stages for some imaginary film—a natural tendency to play with the backdrops of history.” Sharp’s “black plaques” are a reminder that there is a moonstruck dark side to the English landscape, one that’s often ignored in favor of sunny evocations of the perceived doughtiness in the English character and the too-quaint yeoman ruralism of a romanticized countryside: “The comfort and nostalgia for rurality and animism is a weekend retreat from all the small shocks we endure in the maze,” Sharp says in his closing chapter. “But inevitably they become photo opportunities to report back our coordinates to the social laboratory.”

The English Heretic Collection consists of a series of essays that themselves meander across time and space, using individual people and places as launching points for apophenic explorations. Through the lenses of film directors, in the pages of novelists, and in the grimoires of ceremonial magicians, Sharp perceives and explains the occult patterns that echo down the ages in England’s green and pleasant land. Like his fellow seers Nigel Kneale and Alan Garner, he turns the leaves of the land to demonstrate that the past isn’t ever truly dead, and that its mysteries recur in attenuated, mutated forms throughout both English artists’ and occultists’ sense of the uncanny.

Speaking of those occultists, Aleister Crowley, that giant of early 20th century English occultism, haunts many of the chapters of the Collection, but so does somewhat lesser-known (at least on this side of the Atlantic) Thelemic magician Kenneth Grant, whose syncretic approach to magic integrates elements of the Lovecraft mythos, kabbalism, and Surrealism, among much else. Sharp reminds us that the three books in Grant’s first “Typhonian” trilogy were released between 1973 and 1975. At the same time, of course, mystics and magicians with similarly spiritually syncretic impulses were working those same fields in America. But Grant’s output continued to grow throughout the next three decades, absorbing new and further elements as it went. “Grant’s later works are grimoires,” Sharp notes. “By the time he reaches the final volume of his third ‘Typhonian’ trilogy, Grant’s universe is a self-replicating, self-referencing, semi-autonomous ouroboros.” Sharp takes Grant’s embrace of Salvador Dalí’s art—Grant calls Dalí the “foremost magician of the twentieth century”—seriously, and sees Grant’s obsession with the feral animal dreamscapes and visions of Dalí and Max Ernst as a link between Grant and J.G. Ballard’s surrealist visions of a late-20th century psychosphere scarred by war, suffering, and technology.

That mention of Dali evokes the next noteworthy theme in the Collection: for all the very English settings and personalities, Sharp is acutely aware that the gradual assemblage of a 20th-century English Weird aesthetic owes much to interlocutors in Europe and America. The archetypal English hamlet was not exempted from being swallowed up by McLuhan’s “global village” in the postwar era. What has come down to us in the 21st century as the aesthetic of “folk horror“—foundational films such as Witchfinder General (1968) and The Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971)— demonstrate how the motion picture camera lens fused the uniqueness of English myth, history, and landscape with the American hunger for on-screen sensation and blood. Every now and again the name of an American who seems to innately understand and plumb the Weird such as Lovecraft, Philip K. Dick, even Charles Manson, floats through the Collection. Furthermore, Sharp is especially astute when analyzing the intrusions of the American metaphysic on the land- and psycho-scape of Britain. Whether it is the ghost of Joe Kennedy Jr. enshrined with a black plaque commemorating his efforts (and death) as part of a top-secret early remote drone program during World War II, or the UFO sightings at Rendlesham Forest in 1980 (which, Sharp reminds us, are believed by many to be a test of psychotronic mind control technology and not a UFO landing), the incongruous sight of a McDonald’s opposite a centuries-old gibbet, the broadcast intrusions that parrot the ufological/New Age consensus on both sides of the Atlantic, and of course the very American cultural phantasms conjured by J.G. Ballard’s works in the 1970s—Elizabeth Taylor, Jackie Kennedy, Ronald Reagan—are all signs of the havoc wreaked by a Cold War American empire reaching out with its tendrils to wrap its “allies” in its black embrace.

Unsurprisingly, the spectre of war also hovers over the Collection. The psychic and physical scars of World War II and “phantom” invasions abound. Sharp’s linkage of a childhood fear of the closing credits to British sitcom institution Dad’s Army to the possibility that German soldiers actually did set foot on England at the “Battle of Shingle Street” is especially spooky. Even after the conclusion of WWII, the melding of black magick and the Cold War military-industrial complex cut England’s body and soul to the bone. In an exploration of the post-Cold War ruins of an abandoned defense installation, Bawdsey Missile Base, Sharp explores the psychogeographic ramifications of these colossal ruins:

These rockets were stored in what look like giant concrete squash courts, or more to the point, like the bloody ball courts of Mesoamerica. As one walks through these ominous precincts, devoid of their munitions, the vacated architecture appears to reveal its primal purpose, its ritual origin. This is a palace of solar worship, a site under a regime in the age of a thousand suns, embodying all the paranoid manipulations of protecting king and salvational psychopath.

Here, English Heretic most darkly echoes its daytime counterpart at English Heritage. The ancient castles gawked at by holidaymakers are centuries-old picturesque ruins now, but at the time of their building and use were no less potent displays of naked political and military prowess. (Sharp takes a smart detour in one of his essays to talk about “nuclear semiotics,” the practice of providing warnings for buried nuclear waste for human beings tens of thousands of years hence, and the idea of an eventual “atomic priesthood” that would warn people away from radioactive ruins.) The profane geometries left behind on the English landscape by both castle and missile base are a literal evocation of the kabbalistic concept of the qlippoth, the empty husks or shells left behind after the light of creation filled up the universe. “At last we have the ordnance map for [the qlippoth],” Sharp muses, “abandoned military bases, WWII bunkers, nuclear bunkers, melting power stations, the dead shells of all that technology ‘concentrated on the production of nothing,’ a black nirvana.” One of Sharp’s most intriguing essays concerns Winston Churchill’s outsized archetypal shadow which still haunts Britain; Sharp finds him a dark reflection of the mythic savior of the British Isles, Merlin, thanks to Churchill’s real-life membership in a druidical circle and his repeated mentions of the “black dog” of his depression, recalling English myths such as the Gabriel Hounds—let alone Churchill’s penchant for human sacrifice.

And that brings us to what I found the most interesting of all of Sharp’s explorations: his implicit location of blame for this landscape on the people who sold Cold War necromancy to the English (and Western public). Absolutely the makers and deployers of these bombs and jet fighter bases deserve to be counted among the poisonous cabal practicing black magick upon the physical landscape, but so does the late-modernist “expert class.” Sharp notes at the outset of his essay titled “Anti-Heroes” that he felt that an archetypal member of this class needed to be represented among his black plaques. Sharp sought to “commemorate a fictional psychopath. The perfect vehicle for such an exploration, I felt, would be Dr Robert Vaughan, the hoodlum scientist of J.G. Ballard’s visionary forensic Crash.” Vaughan is an avatar of modernism’s black underbelly, a fictional concatenation of the physical scars of World War II; the ancient blood in the leylines of England as exemplified by their modernist successor, the motorway cloverleaf; and the rise of a postwar expert class ineluctably linked to the military-industrial-entertainment complex: Ballard’s uber-technocrat, who is also a celebrity. Recall that before he was the leader of a de facto cult of car-crash fetishists, Vaughan from Crash was a “one-time computer specialist” as well as a television host: “one of the first of the new-style TV scientists,” Ballard tells us, “driving about from laboratory to television centre on a high-powered motorcycle.” Sharp notes that one of Ballard’s real-life inspirations for Vaughan, Dr. Christopher Evans, was the scientific consultant for thoroughly glam-hauntological 1970s children’s sci-fi series The Tomorrow People.

These echoes of science, media, and old hauntings reverberate throughout the varied weird television British series of the 1970s that married the countryside gothic with hypertechnology, from Doctor Who to Children of the Stones. Throughout Crash, “Ballard” the narrator’s obsession with Vaughan, his physical body and its scars and secretions, and Vaughan’s own hieratic dedication to the global spectacle of media, celebrity, and technology weaves its own black spell on narrator and reader both. That spell’s incantation is the technically-overspecific language of the automobile as machine, of car crash tests, and the mystery cults of celebrity that grow around the media spectacle of car crashes both anonymous and famed: Vaughan is Ballard’s “undead guardian angel,” in Sharp’s words, much like the American bombers and missiles perched on English soil.

The traumas that war, conspiracy, and black magick leave on the landscape tend to scab over and leave interesting scars. All the while, official history is told by organizations like English Heritage: sanitized tales from the parapets of the mighty redoubts of English castles, of derring-do during the World Wars, of Churchill’s fighting spirit. Sharp channels the dreaming subconscious of that much-invaded land, the rituals of the priest caste that controls the weapons of war, and the secret currents of folk magick that have always existed alongside. The folk horror aesthetic was never just about hobby horses, Morris dancers, and wicker men; nor was the hauntological aesthetic ever merely about library music-tracked public information films on warped, crackling celluloid, or high-tech radomes on hills overlooking ancient stone circles. They were more fundamentally about the very intrusion of modernism, of global industry and media, and of the waging of wars, both secret and overt, on a landscape itself cyclically scarred by conflict and a history of apocalyptic change. Despite this semiotic pollution and these alien temples to human sacrifice, England prevails, in all its horror and splendor.

Michael Grasso is a Senior Editor at We Are the Mutants. He is a Bostonian, a museum professional, and a podcaster. Follow him on Twitter at @MutantsMichael.

Another one I have been playing around with for a bit.  The final product was not what I was going for originally, but I like what I came up with.  Doing research on the demonic offspring of witches. I played around with Aludemons, Alrunes, even Agrat Bat Mahlat.  

My research will come up with something closer to what I was looking for, but until then here is a nice low-level monster for you to use.

Art by Karen Nadine
Alraune
Medium Humanoid (Demonic)
Frequency: Very Rare
Number Appearing: 1 (1)
Alignment: Chaotic [Chaotic Evil]
Movement: 120' (40') [12"]
Armor Class: 9 [10]
Hit Dice: 3d8+3* (64 hp)
Attacks: NA
Damage: NA, or by spell
Special: Charm x3, Witch spells (3rd level), damaged by holy weapons
Size: Medium
Save: Witch 3
Morale: 8 
Treasure Hoard Class: None
XP: 75

The Alraune is born of the unnatural union of a witch and a specially procured and enchanted mandrake root. 

The witch must find the place where a murderer was hung to death.  It is believed that the "final power" of the hanged man would fall to the ground below him.  The witch must come by night and there dig up up the mandrake root that has grown from this final power.  If she can do this by the new moon then all the better.

The witch then takes the mandrake and applying certain alchemical elements and demonic rituals, he will make a lover for herself in the shape of the dead man.  The man/mandrake will then impregnate her his demonic seed. The mandrake creature is mindless and serves only one purpose.  By the light of the morning sun, he will wither and die.

What is born then after the normal amount of time is the Alraune.  The child, who is always a girl, will grow quickly (three days) into young adulthood.  The witch will then set her new demonic daughter loose to wreck chaos.  

The Alraune is always beautiful and smells of sweet flowers. She has a natural charm ability that she can use 3 times per day as if she were a witch of the 3rd level. The creature has no soul, nor any sense of morality.  She will seduce faithful husbands to destroy their marriages, disrupt any village she is left in, inspire envy and jealousy in all that see her.  She will avoid anyone she perceives as stronger or more powerful than herself. If the tide of the village goes against her she will attempt to escape. Most often they end up sharing the fates of their mothers; on the stake and pyre.

The Alraune does not attack with physical attacks or weapons. She will instead rely on her natural charm ability. If pressed she can use witch spells as a 3rd level witch of the Mara or Demonic traditions. Alraunes take double damage from holy or blessed items. Holy water does 1d4 hp of damage to them and burns like acid on their skin.

Alraunes, by custom, are often named after flowers.

Special: Once in a great while a witch will birth two alraunes at once, twin girls.  When this occurs one will be exceptionally evil and the other, while not good exactly, is not dedicated to evil. The witch will not know which is which until they become older.  It is believed that if the evil twin is killed the "good" twin will be free and even gain a soul. 

This is the last week on my DMsGuuild Witch Project Reviews. I am going to focus on some of the larger PDFs now. Also, all of these are full witch classes.

I am going to still follow my own rules and guidelines to make sure I am giving these a fair review. 

Wonders of the Witch
by Ryan Van Natter & Matthew Emerson

This PDF is 50 pages (front and back covers, legal, 47 pages of content) and runs for $9.99. It is light on art (save for a great cover) but high on design.  It is a very attractive book to look at and super easy to read.
I have not talked about PDF bookmarks so far because there has never been a need; all the other pdfs have been small enough to not really need them.  This PDF is larger and uses them. So another plus in their favor.
We open with a fiction section with Baba Yaga instructing a young Igwilv (sic) on the nature of magic and witchcraft.  Seriously are you guys just flirting with me now?  As someone that has spent a lot of time with both characters in my games, this one feels right.  Canon accepted.  Hell that cover could double as the young Iggwilv/Tasha really. 
We start out with witch-related background details. There is the Dedicate, the Disciple, the Healer, the Hidden One, the Malefactor, and the Temptress (or Tempter). Each with associated Traits, Ideals, Bonds, and Flaws.   Eight pages of this and I want to figure out a witch for each one. 
Next is the Witch class proper. It is a full 20 levels with powers at many levels.  The archetypes/subtypes/subclasses for this are known as Covens and they are Hag, Grey, Elemental, and White.  Spellcasting ability is Charisma.   This witch has spell slots like all casters, and a max number of spells known.  Witches are Ritual casters and use arcane spell foci.  So yeah, everything I want to see in a witch really.
Witches gain a power at 2nd level (Beguile) and then a "Witch Craft" at levels 3, 10 and 17.  These function a bit like Hexes (Pathfinder) or Occult Powers (mine).  There is a list to choose from and these are independent of coven.
The covens are nicely detailed. They are all written in a manner that immediately makes you realize that the authors could add any number of extra covens as their imagination sees fit. This is yet another positive aspect of this class. The covens also feel different enough and cover a wide variety of witchy archetypes. 
Spell lists follow with the expected spells. There are also NEW SPELLS. This is the real gem of this book.   There are 27 new spells here. They are truly new spells. There are some that will feel familiar, but many that are new.
For clerics there is a new "Black Magic" Domain. 
We also get some new named covens.  There is the Daughters of Twilight, dedicated to Shar (and a new spell).  The Vistani get the Stravaneska Tasque, and a new spell. The Secret Shards dedicated to Selûne (and a new spell).  The Sun Sisters, dedicated to the Goddess of the Sun. The Blood of the Green, witches of the forests.  The Red Witches of Thay, a Lawful Good sect of witches in Thay!  So six more new spells.
There are some Tools fo the Trade which covers many new magic items. 50 plot hooks for witch adventures. 
A bit on the Mother Goddess in the Realms, or bringing the Witch Goddess to the Toril. 
Finally a bestiary of witch related creatures.  These are the: Brownie, Gallows Hag, Rune Hag, Weeping Hag, Gilt Hag, Severed Hag, Daughter of Darkness (!) Witch, and Witch High Priestess.  They are organized by CR.
This really is a quality product. One of the best of the DMsGuidl Witches to be honest. 

1974 is an important year for the gaming hobby. It is the year that Dungeons & Dragons was introduced, the original RPG from which all other RPGs would ultimately be derived and the original RPG from which so many computer games would draw for their inspiration. It is fitting that the current owner of the game, Wizards of the Coast, released the new version, Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition, in the year of the game’s fortieth anniversary. To celebrate this, Reviews from R’lyeh will be running a series of reviews from the hobby’s anniversary years, thus there will be reviews from 1974, from 1984, from 1994, and from 2004—the thirtieth, twentieth, and tenth anniversaries of the titles. These will be retrospectives, in each case an opportunity to re-appraise interesting titles and true classics decades on from the year of their original release.

—oOo—

Designed by the late Lenard Lakofka, as the first part of a trilogy, L1 The Secret of Bone Hill is a scenario for Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, First Edition. Published in 1981, it presented something a little bit different for the world’s preeminent roleplaying game at the time—a sandbox, a town in which the adventurers could base themselves and explore from, locations to explore not just outside of town, but within its confines too, and an absence of plot. Or least an absence of a plot which would ordinarily drive or pull the Player Characters to explore the locations of keyed adventure module, for example, U1 The Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh. In essence, L1 The Secret of Bone Hill is really a setting source book rather than a traditional roleplaying scenario, one that would lay the foundations for the two scenarios which would follow, L2 The Assassin’s Knot, and eventually, L3 Deep Dwarven Delve, and would together form the ‘L’ series or the Lendore Isle trilogy.

The full history of L1 The Secret of Bone Hill, as well as the option to purchase a reprint are available here, but of course, the original came in the classic format for TSR, Inc. scenarios for Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, First Edition and Basic Dungeons & Dragons, a simple black and white booklet inside a separate card cover, inside of which were printed the scenario’s maps. The scenario introduces the town of Restenford and Isle of Lendore, part of the Spindrift Chain, far to the south in the World of Greyhawk setting. It recommends that the module is designed for novice and intermediate players, preferably between two and eight, using Second Level to Fourth Level characters. Then it begins not with a description of the town of Restenford or the Isle of Lendore, but wilderness tables and rumour tables, before going on to describe various wilderness locations around Restenford. These are located on the various around and overlooking Restenford, and include a temple where worship to the God of Chance takes the form of gambling, a den thieves, various campsites for travellers—and potential hirelings, and more.

The key location described here is the eponymous Bone Hill, atop which stands a partially ruined castle, around which there are signs of it having been under siege some time in the past. There is an odd atmosphere to place, occupied as it is during the day by a small tribe of Bugbears, and a small horde of the Undead during the night. There are some odd monsters too, such as the Ghoulstirge, a type of Stirge which not only feeds on your blood as standard Stirges do, but also paralyses its victims. Encounters above ground are relatively safe, but below ground they get nasty—more Undead, including a Wraith, a tough fight for adventurers of any Level, and they get weird, and even a little wondrous. Above ground there is a potions workshop where the concoctions are combinations of standard potions, such as a Potion of Longevity with a Potion of Speed, thus actually making use of the Potion Miscibility Table from the Dungeon Master’s Guide (!), but below there is a mirror which pulls the viewer in and forces him to fight himself, some not-Beholders (!) with treasure to guard and treasure to share, and afternoon tea with a surprisingly pleasant skeleton!

More than half of L1 The Secret of Bone Hill is devoted to detailing the town of Restenford, its keep, and their inhabitants. Besides the keep and its inhabitants, this description includes the town’s inn and tavern, homes of individuals such as Pelltar the sorcerer, Felix the mercenary, and a bait shop—Restenford being a fishing port. Notably, it includes a Burnt Guard Station, the shell of a guard station which has fallen into ruin, an actual adventuring location within the town itself. Throughout, there is a wealth of information given all of these locations, both in town and out, so if the Dungeon Master needs to know about animals, encounter probabilities, and what an NPC is equipped with, then she is well served by the module. However, what L1 The Secret of Bone Hill does not do is give support in terms of NPC motivation. Few of their descriptions include suggestions as what they want, and certainly no reason why they might hire the Player Characters. For example, there is a spy in the town from a rival duchy, a mentally ill abbot with designs on the daughter of the Baron of Restenford—though the Dungeon Master is advised to keep this a secret until she runs L2 The Assassin’s Knot, and a merchant whose nephew is interested in learning magic.

Rounding out L1 The Secret of Bone Hill is a short bestiary of new creatures in addition to several monsters given earlier, like the Ghoulstirge. These include the Spectator, a Beholder-like creature which readily guards treasure hoards, and the Stone Guardian, a new type of golem. This is followed by ten sample Player Characters, ranging from Second Level to Fourth Level. Most of them have at least one magical item.

Physically, L1 The Secret of Bone Hill is what you would expect from a TSR, Inc. module for Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, First Edition. The layout is clean and tidy, it is easy to read, and the artwork varies in quality—the back cover seems particularly poorly handled. Some of it, is actually very good. Overall, the maps are very good, but perhaps could have been better organised. However, the organisation of the module—rumour and wilderness tables first, then the adventuring locations, including Bone Hill, and lastly the description of Restenford—feel almost backward, but are more higgledy-piggledy than helpful.

—oOo—

Initial reviews of L1 The Secret of Bone Hill were less than positive. For Anders Swenson, writing in Different Worlds Issue 16 (November 1981), the issue was one of scale and randomness, stating that, “There are problems with the material as a scenario - a lot of the encounters seem to be random in nature, not closely related at all to any of the other groups of NPCs and monsters on the map. Given that the Baron of Restenford has a handy military force, why are these nests of monsters within a day’s march of his castle? How can the farmers gather their crops if the random outdoor encounter table is as dangerous as it is? And so forth.” In Ares Nr. 12 (January 1982), Robert Kern said, “The good news is that TSR is publishing a new module for low level characters. The bad news is that it might require a more experienced DM to overcome it omissions and shotgun method of presenting information.” Although he praised the functionality and description of the Restenford given in the module, he was far from positive in considering the motives for the players and their characters in exploring the region around the town.

Conversely, Jim Bambra, reviewing L1 The Secret of Bone Hill in Open Box in White Dwarf No. 35 (November 1982), were more positive. He wrote that the descriptions of both town and wilderness were “particularly colourful.”, such that “A good feel of the area is given and the whole module provides an excellent background for a campaign.”, before lamenting that, “Unfortuately [sic], it provides little more than this on a long term basis. L1 primarily sets a scene, with adventures along the way. Parts of L1 are not needed until the arrival of L2 and so trying to run this module on its own could prove to be a frustrating experience as the designer has given little indication of what L2 will contain or how many more modules there are likely to be.” However, he suggested that with the publication of its sequel, L2 The Assassin’s Knot, the module would be enjoyable and awarded the module a score of eight out of ten.

—oOo—

L1 The Secret of Bone Hill is regarded as a classic, but as a classic, it is a problematic one and it would have been a problematic one at the time of its publication. Geographically, the compact and dangerous nature of the region around Restenford with its cluster of threats and busy encounter tables, does feel just a little too forced, but neither of these is insurmountable, and it is possible to suspend any sense of disbelief that this might give rise to. However, the real problems are that as a module, L1 The Secret of Bone Hill is not ready to play and it does not have a plot—or at least a hook to play and adventure there. Indeed, the nearest it gets to plot is the blurb on the cover: “Danger lurks in the Lendore Isles. Bands of evil creatures prowl the hills overlooking the town of Restenford, seeking unwary victims. Now you have come to this sleepy little village looking for adventure and excitement. You seek to fathom the unexplored reaches of Bone Hill and unlock the mysteries of Restenford.”

Obviously, L1 The Secret of Bone Hill is not designed as a plotted adventure, but as a sandbox, but as a consequence of the lack of plots and hooks, it needs to be taken apart and be prepared as a playing environment, rather than as a straightforward plotted adventure. Reasons need to be developed for the Player Characters to come to the Lendore Isle, let alone go exploring and adventuring there. After all, the minimum Level for the Player Characters is Second rather than First Level, so they will have had some previous adventures. The inclusion of the extensive rumour tables support this, but nevertheless, the Dungeon Master still has to pull them out and link them to locations described elsewhere in the scenario, to create hooks which will pull her Player Characters into the setting and the plots that the rumours hint at, but are left undeveloped and unexplored. This process is not really helped by the lack of motivations for the many NPCs to be found in the module—the villains in particular, and it is not helped by the scattershot organisation which presents the adventuring locations first rather than the starting point for the Player Characters that is the town of Restenford.

There is a lot of gaming potential in L1 The Secret of Bone Hill, but as one of the first sandbox adventures, its design—which is almost like a sandbox itself in its organisation—does not match its potential. It needs a lot of effort upon the part of Dungeon Master to even begin to work well, who will have to pull it apart and rebuild it around plots and hooks that she will have to develop. Fortunately, there is a wealth of detail in its pages for the Dungeon Master looking to develop L1 The Secret of Bone Hill into a more fully rounded adventuring environment. Far from being a plotted adventure, L1 The Secret of Bone Hill is more of a sourcebook and a toolkit awaiting the input of an experienced Dungeon Master.

—oOo—

For further information about L1 The Secret of Bone Hill and its author, Lenard Lakfoka, the Grognardia blog posted an interview with him in 2009. The first in three part series can be found here and is well worth taking the time to read.