Much like the Miskatonic Repository for Call of Cthulhu, Seventh Edition, the Jonstown Compendium is a curated platform for user-made content, but for material set in Greg Stafford's mythic universe of Glorantha. It enables creators to sell their own original content for RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha and HeroQuest Glorantha (Questworlds). This can include original scenarios, background material, cults, mythology, details of NPCs and monsters, and so on, but none of this content should be considered to be ‘canon’, but rather fall under ‘Your Glorantha Will Vary’. This means that there is still scope for the authors to create interesting and useful content that others can bring to their Glorantha-set campaigns.


—oOo—

What is it?Rubble Runners - A collection of Pavis Characters is a collection of fifteen NPCs and almost eighty members of the supporting cast and scenario hooks.

It is a thirty-nine page, full colour, 5.97 MB PDF.

Rubble Runners - A collection of Pavis Characters is well presented and reasonably well written, but needs a thorough edit from start to finish. The illustrations are decent, being photographs reworked by the author.

Where is it set?
The content of Rubble Runners - A collection of Pavis Characters is set in Pavis and civilised Prax, specifically in the years 1625, 1626, and 1627 after Prince Argrath White Bull has defeated  Lunar forces at the Second Battle of Moonbroth and liberated the city and drove out it Lunar occupiers—mostly at the point of a sword.Who do you play?The supplement primarily consists of NPCs, though some NPCs can be used as player characters.

What do you need?
Rubble Runners - A collection of Pavis Characters requires RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha and a whole lot more. Being set in New Pavis and its environs, to get the full benefit of this supplement, the Game Master will require access to various supplements including Cults of Prax, Pavis, Big Rubble, and Borderlands for RuneQuest II or River of Cradles, Sun County, and Shadows on the Borderlands for RuneQuest III.

Note that this is at the time of publication of Rubble Runners - A collection of Pavis Characters and will change when a new supplement dedicated to Pavis and the Big Rubble is published. 

What do you get?
Rubble Runners - A collection of Pavis Characters is a collection of fifteen NPCs, each of which is accompanied by five or six associates and contacts—their supporting cast and five or six encounter and plot hooks. Every NPC includes a half to full page description and background, full stats for RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha, an illustration, and the aforementioned supporting cast, encounters, and hooks.

Many of the characters in Rubble Runners - A collection of Pavis Characters are connected to each other, either directly as friends or family, or through the members of the supporting cast they have in common. Yet what really connects this diverse range of characters in the supplement is that they have all been affected by the bloody expulsion of the Lunar occupation. In this the supplement draws its inspiration from the Wild West following the American Civil War, as well as the cinema that it inspired. That said, the nastiness and antipathy expressed by and towards some of the NPCs in this supplement echoes that of occupied Europe following its liberation at the end of World War II.

One further limiting factor to the supplement is not the setting itself, but the nature of that setting. Rubble Runners - A collection of Pavis Characters is predominately a city supplement and there few cities in Glorantha which are large enough and urbanised enough to support this range of characters and their elements. Nevertheless, if the Game Master has such access to such a setting or is using New Pavis, this supplement is a ready-made cast into which the Game Master can draw her player characters, involve them in each other’s plans and objectives, and so help build towards an ongoing campaign.

Is it worth your time?
Yes. Rubble Runners - A collection of Pavis Characters is a solid set of inventive NPCs, a good mix of contacts, friends, foes, employers, and more. Particularly useful for the Game Master running a campaign set in New Pavis.
No. If the Game Master is not running a campaign set in New Pavis—or planning to take her campaign to New Pavis, Rubble Runners - A collection of Pavis Characters is not a useful supplement.
Maybe. Even if the Game Master is not running a campaign in New Pavis, the content of Rubble Runners - A collection of Pavis Characters may still be of interest. Some of the characters contained in its pages can be used as player characters, pulled out and used in other settings, or simply used as inspiration for NPCs of the Game Master’s own design.

The kids had their games this weekend.

Friday Liam has his group, The Dungeoneers that have been playing together for over 10 years.  He ran a 5e game and had a blast.

Saturday was the game with Connor's group with Liam running.
They were supposed to go on a quest, given to them by a librarian in Waterdeep, they headed out to the forest area outside.

Instead, they spent three days looking for 62 mushrooms, 134 "magic" carrots, some catfish and berries.  The druid has decided that the forest needs to reclaim the land and has been casting Plant Growth and Commune with Nature to convince the forest to retake the lands.  The goblin warlock decided it would be fun to play a joke on a horse so they stabbed it, killing it and then they got in a fight with the owner.   They also crashed the funeral.

It was Gwen's (of the Goblin Warlock) birthday today and like everyone else in the group, they wanted to celebrate their birthday here, playing D&D.

We made the group ham & cheese sliders and turkey, bacon and provolone sliders.





We made these for both boy's respective New Year's Eve parties and they were a huge hit.

Since it was a birthday game we also made homemade cupcakes (yes from cake flour and everything) and brownies.


It was a blast.  The characters did not get very far and the Goblin is now wanted for murder and killing a horse.

Sunday was Liam's High School / College group. Kids he met in High School and continued into their college days.

This is his Curse of Strahd game.  So what is on the menu?  Bolognese sauce of course!

So three games this weekend. Not too bad really.

Originally published in 1987, Terror Australis, for use with Call of Cthulhu, Third Edition, the supplement was always, much like its source material, something of an outlier in comparison with the venerable roleplaying game’s focus on North America and Europe. Indeed, Terror Australis was perhaps best known for the inclusion of the scenario, ‘City Beneath the Sands’, the Australian chapter of the highly regarded Masks of Nyarlathotep campaign. Of course the removal of ‘City Beneath the Sands’ for its inclusion in The Complete Masks of Nyarlathotep left scope for Chaosium, Inc. to revisit Terror Australis, but that opportunity did not come until the publication of the Masks of Nyarlathotep: Dark Schemes Herald the End of the World and the revised edition of Terror Australis, both of which have been written for use with Call of Cthulhu, Seventh Edition and updated, revised, and expanded in scope to make their respective contents more accessible and playable.

Notably Terror Australis: Call of Cthulhu in the Land Down Under is double the size of the original Terror Australis. In fact, it includes half as much again in terms of background and source material in comparison to the original Terror Australis—and that is in addition the supplement’s two scenarios, both new and both lengthy. From the start, Terror Australis takes a mature and respectful attitude towards its subject matter. It identifies the continent’s  indigenous peoples throughout as the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, it acknowledges the racism prevalent against by those peoples by White Australia through much of its history, and it explores the presence of LGBTQI subculture to be found Australia’s big cities. Of course, not as prevalent as in Berlin as detailed in Berlin: The Wicked City – Unveiling the Mythos in Weimar Berlin in this period, but present nonetheless.

Terror Australis opens with an examination of Australian history, which of course begins with the arrival of the Europeans, there being no recorded history before that, looking at turn with the initial European exploration, the founding of the British penal colony—a period which has been looked at in greater detail in Convicts & Cthulhu: Call of Cthulhu Roleplaying in the Penal Colonies of 18th Century Australia, the Gold Rush of the 1850s, and so on, right up to the Commonwealth of Australia’s involvement in the Great War and its effects. It is followed by a guide to the continent’s geography which also touches a little upon its archaeology.

Where the history starts with the arrival of the Europeans, Terror Australis’ coverage of the Australians as a people starts with the indigenous peoples, identified throughout as the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. It covers their history, culture, art, spiritual beliefs, and world-view, information enough for the Keeper to create interesting NPCs and the players create interesting investigators. White Australians receive similar treatment, the supplement noting that most will be British and that the Mother Country dominates Australian life and society, whilst highlighting the dominant male culture with its love of the working man, drinking, and gambling. It includes a guide to Australian slang and pronunciation, plus new Occupations and skills. For the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples there are the Hunter/Gather and Clever Man/Woman, whilst the broader Occupations are all support the working class nature of Australian society. They include the Boundary Rider who tours and repairs the boundaries of cattle stations, the Bushranger  or Outback outlaw, the Camel Driver who acts as guides and escorts in the Outback, the Digger or former miner or soldier, the Jackaroo/Jillaroo who are working cattle or sheep stations for the first time, the Stockman/woman who have more experience than the Jackaroo/Jillaroo, and the Swagman/woman or itinerant labourer. Of course, the many other Occupations from Call of Cthulhu are suitable for inclusion in a scenario or campaign set in Terror Australis, although it does discuss the nature of the Private Eye in Australia during this period, highlighting how they are unregulated, distrusted, and sometimes guilty of criminal acts themselves in pursuit the evidence or proof their clients want. The Relativists—mostly physicists and astronomers—is given as an investigator organisation with an interest in the unexplained, whilst The Theosophical Society is given later on.

As well as giving thumbnail portraits of some twenty or so Australians of note, ranging from artists, scientists, and journalists to politicians, activists, and aviators, the supplement details Australia’s police and legal system, healthcare, transport networks, and communications. Given the nature of Call of Cthulhu, it is likely that the investigators will find themselves ‘going Bush’ or mounting an expedition into the Outback, so there is advice on handling expeditions and ensuring their survival in the harsh environment beyond Australia’s settled coasts. Similarly, for players and their investigators, there is most obviously a guide to law as it related to firearms and the institutions, all museums, where research can be conducted. Australia’s five main cities are described—the two largest, Sydney and Melbourne in some detail, as well as Perth, Adelaide, and Brisbane. Each starts with a pair of handy references, one a guide to portraying the city, the other a guide to the city at a glance, plus places of note, criminal underworld, and more.

As well as detailed city maps, it is here that Terror Australis begins to explore the weirder side of the Land Down Under. Initially, this is via the ‘Strange Australia’ sidebars such as the river monster said to inhabit the Hawkesbury River and the fate of the Alert, the ferry which was used to ram great Cthulhu himself as described in Lovecraft’s The Call of Cthulhu. The presence of various cults in each of the cities are also covered, the homegrown Cult of the Sandbat from Masks of Nyarlathotep being joined by the Cthulhu Cult and the acquisitive New World Incorporated from Day of the Beast. A good sixth of Terror Australis is specifically dedicated to the Mythos in Australia. Understandably, its initial focus is upon the Great Race of Yith, their place in Australia’s prehistory, their great city of Pnakotus, and their enemy, the Flying Polyps, exploring how both inhabit (or have inhabited) the very geography of Australia itself and this continues with the Great Hive of the Sand-dwellers. In addition various sites of Mythos interest, Terror Australis describes threats brought to the continent by Europeans. These include Ghouls, cultists from the darkest part of Gloucester, and a cult in the Barossa Valley sure to put off any oenophile. The Mythos bestiary adds a variety of different creatures and entities as well as discussing the presence of more traditional Mythos creatures and entities in Australia. So Ghouls and Hounds of Tindalos as well as Bunyips and Yowies, the latter akin to the North American Sasquatch or Himalayan Yeti, and Dark Spirits of Earth, which inhabit or haunt particular features of the land. No one Dark Spirit is the same as any other and the Keeper is given the means to create her own, for which she will need access to the Grand Grimoire of Cthulhu Mythos Magic.

The spiritual beliefs and existence of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples are explored in some depth in ‘Alcheringa’, also known as ‘Dreamtime’. A spiritual space which surrounds everything, this is where the world can be explained, not as a creation myth, but as the world is, has been, and always will be. It is also a space which can be entered via ‘song-lines’, not just to learn how the world is, but also for learning knowledge, for revealing the secret nature of the world, and for bringing about supernatural changes to the world. This is done via specific rituals and requires the participants to follow each song-line fairly tightly if they are to gain the desired rewards, otherwise there is a chance that they may get kicked out of Alcheringa rather roughly. Following a song-line and entering Alcheringa is not without its dangers, which is even worse should an investigator actually enter physically. There is even the possibility that participants can alter and even twist a song-line, although this is not easy and is not without its consequences. 

Song-lines are in some ways a Mythos tome which an investigator can experience spiritually rather simply read and which a player can roleplay that experience. Further, there is a social roleplaying aspect to Alcheringa in that the investigators will need to find someone who will teach them the ritual or allow them to participate in the ritual. The rules for Alcheringa are supported with sample rewards—either internal and personal or changes to the world and external, artefacts which help in the Dreaming, and sample stories which can be used as song-lines, including an expanded one which shows how they work in play. Four examples of megafauna, long extinct, but of course still alive in Alcheringa where the investigators might encounter them… The rules for Alcheringa and song-lines are an impressive addition to Call of Cthulhu, helping to bring an aspect of Aboringal culture and spirituality to life and mark investigations in Australia as being different to those in other countries. They literally add another dimension to Lovecraftian investigative horror and as a side note, there are parallels between the song-lines of Alcheringa and the heroquests of RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha—also published by Chaosium, Inc. 

The two scenarios in Terror Australis are both new. The first is ‘Long Way From Home’ is radically different to almost every scenario before it. Taking a leaf out of the Old School Renaissance, it is a ‘sandbox’ scenario in which the player characters—or investigators—are free to wander as they please and engage with the elements of the scenario as is their wont. Now Call of Cthulhu being a roleplaying game of Lovecraftian investigative horror, ‘Long Way From Home’ provides multiple lines of investigation into the scenario. Set in the Northern Flinders Range to the north of Adelaide, these lines include a strange shower of meteors, a growing pattern of earthquakes, a spa deep in the outback providing miraculous cures, and a job offer to look after a copper mine which has been put into mothballs. Each of these strands are standalone, but all have links to Australia’s deep past and H.P. Lovecraft’s ‘The Shadow Out of Time’. There is a certain benign quality to the nature of the Mythos and a scientific feel to it at the heart of this scenario. The multiple strands means that there is also a flexibility to it also, because the investigators are free to follow whichever strand they want in whatever order they want. The strands include some pleasingly creepy scenes—one of which is archetypically Australian—and the final series of encounters have a surprising grandeur.

The second scenario, ‘Black Water, White Death’, feels more traditional in terms of Call of Cthulhu, possessing an onion skin layering of its mystery. Even its beginning is traditional, the investigators being asked to attend an auction on behalf of a client. He is a professor of anthropology with an interest in cannibalism in tribal society who wants the diary of a convict who escaped prison on the island of Tasmania in the 1830s and is reputed to have involved. Not everyone wants the diary to end up in his hands, but should the investigators get it to their employer, he further wants their aid in following up the information and that means they get to visit wintery Tasmania. Essentially a scenario of two halves, ‘Black Water, White Death’ is more confrontational than ‘Long Way From Home’, with a potentially bloodier ending which comes out of nowhere after strong investigative, almost academic, focus.

These are both good scenarios and worthy replacements for those which appeared in the original Terror Australis. Hopefully the two scenarios from that supplement—‘Pride of Yirrimburra’ and ‘Old Fellow That Bunyip’, the third, ‘City Beneath the Sands’ appearing in Masks of Nyarlathotep—will be revised and revisited in an Antipodean-themed anthology of further scenarios. Of the two, ‘Black Water, White Death’ is the easier to run, being more direct and straightforward than ‘Long Way From Home’, which will require greater preparation upon the part of the Keeper because there are more plots and they are separate plots. If there is a weakness to the pair of scenarios in the revised Terror Australis, it is that neither involves Alcheringa, although there is an option to include it in ‘Long Way From Home’. In addition to the two scenarios, it should be noted that the supplement is strewn with scenario hooks ready for the Keeper to develop, which would provide multiple sessions of play. Rounding out Terror Australis is a set of four appendices, containing in turn a list of equipment prices, a bestiary of Australia’s mundane, but often deadly wildlife, timelines mundane and fortean, and a good bibliography. All useful content.

Terror Australis being from Chaosium, Inc., this means that this is a good looking supplement. The layout is clean and tidy, done in full colour, illustrated with a wide range of artwork and period photographs. The cartography is also good and the writing excellent.

In 1987, Terror Australis was a decent supplement and thirty years on, it could simply have been a case of Chaosium, Inc. publishing a straight reprint, probably with the addition of a new scenario to replace ‘City Beneath the Sands’, but doing so would have been a missed opportunity. Thankfully, Chaosium has not missed that opportunity and has taken it to publish more than just a reprint, allowing the original authors to revisit, update, and greatly expand upon the original. The result of that effort is undeniably impressive and it almost goes without saying that this is another great supplement from Chaosium, Inc. Terror Australis: Call of Cthulhu in the Land Down Under fully fleshes out the continent, not just in mundane and Mythos terms as you would expect, but in magical terms with the extra dimension of Alcheringa. 

Ok. Not *really* BlackStar related, but this is in the back of my mind the whole time I am thinking about BlackStar.  This is always worth forwarding.   Some of the comments are gold too.



The United Federation of "hold my beer, I got this"

It is impossible to ignore the influence of Dungeons & Dragons and the effect that its imprint has had on the gaming hobby. It remains the most popular roleplaying game some forty or more years since it was first published, and it is a design and a set-up which for many was their first experience of roleplaying—and one to which they return again and again. This explains the popularity of the Old School Renaissance and the many retroclones—roleplaying games which seek to emulate the mechanics and play style of previous editions Dungeons & Dragons—which that movement has spawned in the last fifteen years. Just as with the Indie Game movement before it began as an amateur endeavour, so did the Old School Renaissance, and just as with the Indie Game movement before it, many of the aspects of the Old School Renaissance are being adopted by mainstream roleplaying publishers who go on to publish retroclones of their own. Dungeon Crawl Classics Role Playing Game, published by Goodman Games is a perfect example of this. Other publishers have been around long enough for them to publish new editions of their games which originally appeared in the first few years of the hobby, whilst still others are taking their new, more contemporary games and mapping them onto the retroclone.

Yet there are other roleplaying games which draw upon the roleplaying games of the 1970s, part of the Old School Renaissance, but which may not necessarily draw directly upon Dungeons & Dragons. Some are new, like Forbidden Lands – Raiders & Rogues in a Cursed World and Classic Fantasy: Dungeoneering Adventures, d100 Style!, but others are almost as old as Dungeons & Dragons. One of these is The Fantasy Trip, published by Metagaming Concepts in 1980. Designed by Steve Jackson, this was a fantasy roleplaying game built around two earlier microgames, also designed by Steve Jackson, MicroGame #3: Melee in 1977 and  MicroGame #6: Wizard in 1978. With the closure of Metagaming Concepts in 1983, The Fantasy Trip and its various titles went out of print. Steve Jackson would go on to found Steve Jackson Games and design further titles like Car Wars and Munchkin as well as the detailed, universal roleplaying game, GURPS. Then in December, 2017, Steve Jackson announced that he had got the rights back to The Fantasy Trip and then in April, 2019, following a successful Kickstarter campaign, Steve Jackson Games republished The Fantasy Trip. The mascot version of The Fantasy Trip is of course, The Fantasy Trip: Legacy Edition. 

The Fantasy Trip: Legacy Edition is a big box of things, including the original two microgames. So instead of reviewing the deep box as a whole, it is worth examining the constituent parts of The Fantasy Trip: Legacy Edition one by one, delving ever deeper into its depths bit by bit. The first of these is Melee, quick to set up, quick to play game of man-to-man combat. It was followed by Wizard, a companion to Melee which sends wizards into the arena to duel against each other. It is designed to be played by two or more players, aged ten and over, with a game lasting roughly between thirty and sixty minutes. Inside the box can be found a twenty-four page rules booklet, a 19” by 23” game map, a set of sixty-two counters, and three six-sided dice. It also includes an eight page Wizard Reference Pages, which summarises all of the spells in the game as well as character actions and monster and beast stats.

The presentation of the game is rather plain and simple. So the layout of the black and white rulebook is clean and tidy, as the is the game map, which is marked in two inch Hexes, each with a centre spot, every seven Hexes forming a Megahex three standard Hexes in width. The standard Hexes are used for movement and facing in melee combat, whilst the Megahexes are used to determine range in missile combat. The various counters provide a range of opponents, including animals and monsters, plus condition counters and area effects. These are done in a range of monochrome colours, but all are different and include a pair of giants whose triangular counters take up three Hexes and dragons who take four and seven Hexes! All of the counters have a skull and crossbones on the other side to indicate when they have been killed. Lastly, the set of three eggshell-blue six-sided dice add a spot of colour to the game.


Play of Wizard begins with the creation of well, a wizard. In Melee, each fighter had just the two attributes—Strength and Dexterity, whereas Wizard adds a third, IQ. All three it turns out are important to spellcasting magic-users. Just as in Melee, Strength covers how many hit points a wizard has, what weapons he can use, and how effective he is in hand-to-hand combat. Dexterity covers how easily a wizard can hit an opponent, disengage from the enemy, and how quickly he can attack. For a wizard though, Strength represents how many spells he can cast, each spell having a cost that is paid in Strength points, not only to cast the spell, but also maintain it if necessary. Dexterity also represents a wizard's ability to hit a target with a spell. Intelligence or IQ, the new attribute, governs the number of spells a wizard knows, the maximum level of spells he knows—each spell has an IQ rating between eight and sixteen which the wizard’s IQ must match for him to know, and his resistance to illusions and Control spells. 

All three attributes begin at a base value of eight each, to which a player distributes another eight points. Once done, a wizard receives a staff, though it can be a staff, a wand, a rod, or the like, through which he casts spells. It is not a physical weapon though, but Wizard does cover physical combat should a wizard resort to using a dagger or his fists. Once a player has selected his wizard’s spells, the character is ready to play.

For example, Sibbe Stigandidottir, a Seeress from the north who is studying at a secret academy in the warm south. Her rough manners have made her the target of other students and when she struck out at one of her tormentors, Alzono, he challenged her to a duel in the academy’s arena.

Sibbe Stigandidottir
Strength 09
Dexterity 10
Intelligence 13
MA 11
Wizard’s Staff
Spells: Blur, Clumsiness, Confusion, Control Animal, Dazzle, Destroy Creation, Freeze, Magic Fist, Mage Sight, Reverse Missiles, Sleep, Stone Flesh, Summon Wolf


Wizard lists some sixty or so spells. They are rated according to the minimum Intelligence or IQ a wizard must have to learn them. Each has a cost in terms of Strength points which need to be expended when a wizard casts the spell and many have an ongoing cost if the wizard wants to maintain them. They are catagorised into four types. These are Missile spells such as Magic Fist and Lightning,  which are direct damage spells; Thrown spells, like Blur and Slippery Floor, which can be cast on a target, whether that is a person or a location, but which do not inflict damage; Control spells such as Control Animal and Control Person; and Creation spells, being further divided between spells which create an actual object like  Summon Bear and spells which create illusions like  Illusion. 

Wizard is played out over a series of turns consisting of six phases—initiative, renew spells (or spell upkeep), movement, the opponent’s movement, actions (physical attacks, spell casting, attempts to disbelieve spells, and so on), and forced retreats, and dropped weapons. None of which happens simultaneously, but it takes place across a five-second round. Now in Melee, the primary objective in play is for the combatants to close with other and fight, essentially go from Disengaged to Engaged. This provides the fighter with a number of options. If Engaged, he can ‘Shift and Attack’, ‘Shift and Defend’, ‘Change Weapons’, ‘Disengage’, and so on. If Disengaged, he can ‘Move’. Charge’, Dodge’, ‘Drop’ (to prone), ‘Ready New Weapon’, make a ‘Missile Weapon Attack’, and so on. All of these options are available for the wizards in Wizard, but in the main, it will not be the wizards who will enraging with each other at such close range. Rather, it will be the things that they have summoned, whether that is wolves, bears, myrmidons, gargoyles, giants, and even dragons, or illusions—of them and other things—which can also inflict damage if the defending wizard fails to disbelieve them, which are likely to be engaging in close combat.

Which in main means that wizards will be dueling it out with each other at range. Mostly obviously this means casting missile spells at each other in order to do direct damage, but with four types and sixty spells to choose from, a wizard has more options available to him than a fighter has in Melee. Spells like Blur, Reverse Missiles, Spell Shield, and Iron Flesh all provide various forms of protection, whilst Slow Movement, Clumsiness, and Trip will hinder a target. These though are spells that target either the casting wizard or his opponent, but a wizard has access to spells which can the environment between himself and his opponent. So spells like Shadow fills a hex with black shadow, so hindering sight; Create Wall places a wall which blocks sight and movement; and Slippery Floor makes a megahex slippery, which forces anyone entering it to make a Dexterity check or loose their footing. It is also possible for a wizard to hide in the arena, either by casting Invisibility or slipping into a hex containing the effects of the Shadow spell. 

Being companion games, both Melee and Wizard share the same mechanics. This is essentially a Saving Throw, rolled on the three six-sided dice, made against an attribute. Typically, this will be a roll against the wizard’s Dexterity in order to hit an opponent or object with a spell, but roll against a wizard’s Intelligence to avoid a Control Person spell, disbelieve an illusion, and so on. Damage is dealt in six-sided dice, more damage being done by spells by a wizard expending more Strength on the spell when cast. Damage is deducted from a wizard’s Strength, a wizard being knocked unconscious when it is reduced to zero and killed when it goes below that. Wizard duels in the arena are either to the death, arena combat, or practice combat, each awarding fewer—fifty, thirty, or ten—Experience Points to any survivors. It takes one hundred Experience Points for a wizard to increase one of his three attributes.

Alonzo Bianchi
Strength 11
Dexterity 10
Intelligence 11
MA 11
Wizard’s Staff
Spells: Blur, Control Animal, Control Person, Freeze, Illusion, Magic Fist, Reveal Magic, Reverse Missiles, Rope, Shock Shield, Summon Myrmidon
For example, Sibbe Stigandidottir and her challenger, Alonzo Bianchi enter the arena and stand ten hexes apart from each other. Each player rolls a six-sided die for initiative, Alonzo’s player rolling a two, Sibbe’s player rolling a five, so she acts first. She knows that Alonzo wants this duel over and done with as quick as possible, so suspects that he will launch an attack as soon as possible. So she casts Reverse Missiles. This costs two Strength to cast and one to maintain. Her player tells Alonzo’s player that Sibbe has cast a spell, but not what, and notes it down. As she suspects, Alonzo casts a missile spell—in this case Magic Fist. This is a telekinetic blow which will do 1d6-2 for each point of Strength powered into it. In this case, two points. Alonzo’s player makes a roll against Alonzo’s Dexterity—there are no adjustments for range—and rolling three six-sided six, hits with a result of a seven. Unfortunately, because Sibbe has cast Reverse Missiles, her player reveals the the Magic Fist rebounds and hits Alonzo. His player rolls 1d6-2 for each missile, getting a result of a three and a one. Adjusted, this would be a one and a minus one, but since the damage can never be less than the Strength points put into the spell, the adjusted damage is two and two, for a total of four damage! At the start of Round Two, Alonzo has a Strength of five, having lost two for casting Magic Fist and four for the damage that spell would have inflicted. Sibbe has a Strength of seven from casting Reverse Missiles. Alonzo’s player rolls a six for initiative, whereas Sibbe’s player rolls a one. Alonzo, reeling from damage that should have struck his opponent, fires of a quick Freeze, which would hold Sibbe in place for several rounds. It costs him four Strength, leaving him with just one! Sibbe will need to make a Saving Throw to shrug off this effect to act, her player rolling fourteen, so not enough to hold her in place. She will be held immobile for seven Rounds. In Round Three, Alonzo’s player rolls a four for initiative, whereas Sibbe’s player rolls a six. She gets to act first and her player makes another Saving Throw, this time with a result of seven, which means she throws off the effects of Freeze and acts, casting Summon Wolf. This costs two Strength to cast and one to maintain. The creature appears and Sibbe directs it to hound Alonzo. Being left with just one Strength, he can only hope to hold off the wolf long enough for Sibbe to use up her Strength, but otherwise it looks like the end of the duel for Alonzo...This is just a simple duel, but with the range of spellcasting options available in Wizard, players have a lot of choice terms of what spells they cast and when. Duels can become tense, tactical affairs, especially when summoned creatures and illusions come into play because then the wizards will not be fighting against just each other, but multiple opponents. One type of spell missing from Wizard is the healing spell, though were there any such spell, a wizard would in effect be expending Strength to cast it in order to increase his Strength and so have more points to cast spells and withstand damage. Rounding out Wizard are rules combining Wizard with Melee, which will provide more options and tactics, and provide for a more involved game. Together, they also lay the groundwork for a proto-roleplaying game, but that will have to wait until The Fantasy Trip: In the Labyrinth.

Physically, Wizard is well presented. It has a ‘Old School’ monochrome feel, but the writing is excellent and the rules clearly explained, and the new artwork in the rulebook is very nice. The cover artwork for the box is also excellent. The game is also supported by short piece of fiction which is explained with a fully worked example of play.

Wizard, much like Melee is a little game, but offers quite a lot of tactical play and options in terms of its rules, much of which will be later seen in Steve Jackson’s GURPS. It is pleasingly self-contained—there is room inside the box for another set of dice and index cards to record the details of every wizard—and easy to set up and play. Unlike Melee, this game is not as easy to teach and certainly not as easy to master, for Wizard offers more options and more tactics, than simple armed combat. Learning them and mastering them will bring players back to Wizard as they try out different spell combinations and tactics, providing a magical counterpart to the brutality of Melee.

A couple of big Kickstarters today.

First up a BIG one.

Swords and Wizardry: Limited and Collectors Edition Box Sets


https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/froggodgames/swords-and-wizardry-limited-and-collectors-edition-box-sets?ref=theotherside

This one is going fast.  The early bird options are all gone and all the original stretch goals we met in the first few hours.  I scored a Collector's Box (pictured above) but there are still great options to be had with this.


The Hero's Journey 2e


https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/gallantknightgames/the-heros-journey-2e?ref=theotherside

The Hero's Journey 1st edition was a delightful game. It was the perfect antidote for grim-dark murder hobo games that seem to be so popular.  A nice cup of tea vs whatever they sell in the local run-down dive where characters are supposed to meet.

We are in the last few minutes of this one!

A Bride for Dracula: A System neutral, one-shot adventure of bridal contests with bite. is one-shot camp gothic scenario from Mottokrosh Machinations, a publisher best known for Hypertellurians: Fantastic Thrills Through the Ultracosm. Indeed, Hypertellurians: Fantastic Thrills Through the Ultracosm is one for the systems for which A Bride for Dracula is written, although technically, and as its subtitle suggests, the scenario is entirely systemless and its plot and set-up could be run using a panoply of roleplaying games and systems—and genres! For A Bride of Dracula takes place in a time when Dracula still resides at his castle in Transylvania, his greatest victim still loves him, the Nazis lost World War II, and ‘brain in a jar’ technology is available. So there is a technological seam to the scenario alongside its gothic theming, much in keeping with its genre.

A Bride for Dracula takes place on one night at an event hosted by Count Dracula who seeks—or rather lusts after—a new wife. Thus six prospective brides—and thus six players—have come to his castle at his invitation, their suitability to be his wife to be tested. They include Princess Naomi Andress of the Pale Hills—the prospective bride and her mother, Queen Ursula Andress of the Pale Hills; Brigitte, a humble milk maid; Elsa Van Elseling (definitely not Van Helsing Senior’s daughter. Nope.); and the crimson-skinned Yvonna Fackelot, who comes with minions and an almost endless wardrobe. They are joined by John the Carriage Driver, who is just along for the ride. All six characters come with secrets, goals, fears, and a list of the things they are good at and bad at. As written, these characters are detailed enough for players to roleplay should the Game Master want to run A Bride for Dracula as a very rules light, almost freeform scenario.

Alternatively, the players could roleplay members of the entourage for one of the contestants in Dracula’s  bridal competition. The Game Master and the players can easily adapt A Bride for Dracula to the mechanics of their choice. It would work with just about any retroclone for the Old School Renaissance, but especially with the tone of Lamentations of the Flame Princess Weird Fantasy Roleplay, but also Troika, Into the Odd, or Numenera for example. Given that there are no stats given for any of the characters, it does mean that the Game Master will have some extra preparation to undertake prior to running the scenario. Plus, it is a pity that no stats are given for the characters written for the publisher’s own Hypertellurians: Fantastic Thrills Through the Ultracosm.

Plotwise, A Bride for Dracula is straightforward and linear. The characters start the game together and will experience the same encounters together before play opens up when the contest begins. The Game Master gets to throw in some complications too and much of the fun of the scenario will come as the players and their characters react to these complications and try to out-compete each other in Dracula’s contests. There is certainly enough to keep a playing group of six players occupied for the evening or session.

Physically, A Bride for Dracula is short book, neat and tidy. It is lightly illustrated, but the artwork is decent. The writing is clear and really, the Game Master could grab A Bride for Dracula as is and prepare it in ten minutes. So it really works as a pick-up game when not every player can make a regular session.

Unfortunately, there are couple of elements to A Bride for Dracula which may be problematic. One is the tone, which is camp and gothic, much in the style of the Carry on films—most obviously Carry on Screaming!—and the Hammer Horror series of films, and that tongue in cheek tone, even silliness, is not to everyone’s taste. The other issue is that one of the player characters is an ex-Nazi. Now the scenario does not dwell overly on this or go into further detail, but it does fit in with the campy, gothic tone of the scenario and the exploitation genre of films which inspired the scenario. As is, the character will need to be played with some care, but her very nature means that some players will find her inclusion offensive and not only will they not play her, they may not play the scenario because she is included. The Game Master will need to judge her players as to whether or not to include her, and if not, create a replacement. Arguably, it is a pity that the designer did not include an alternative.

A group need not even have a copy of A Bride for Dracula to play it, since the scenario is available online. Unless the Game Master and her group need to create characters, preparation for A Bride for Dracula is really, really quick, making it perfect to pull out and run at the last minute. There is scope for the Game Master to tinker with it at her heart’s content, but at the heart of A Bride for Dracula: A System neutral, one-shot adventure of bridal contests with bite. is a no fuss, straightforward, even linear scenario which can be run with the minimum of preparation.

The next D&D 5 book, Wildemount, is already breaking sales records for D&D and is well on it's way to being one of the most successful D&D books ever outside of a core rule book.

Yet some people are still not happy.

In fact, what they want is Greyhawk.


I get it. I do. There are some things I would love to see too. I love Greyhawk, it was my world for my high school days...back in the 80's.

There are petitions out now and some have been out for a while.  And let's be brutally honest here, petitions like this never work. Combined they are still just over 1,170. In other words nowhere near the 773,000 subscribers to the Critical Role YouTube channel.

I see postings of people complaining about the lack of Greyhawk, Planescape, Spelljammer, and others.  I have to be honest here, they are often from people that I also see claiming they don't play 5e.   Even if they do, they a tiny, tiny sliver of the potential buyers.


Sorry. But there are just not enough of us to make it financially viable.

There is an option for people that want Greyhawk in 5e.  Just get the Greyhawk boxed set from DriveThruRPG.

The World of Greyhawk Fantasy Game Setting for 1st Ed is still all you need to play.
It is just under $10 too.  I grabbed my boxed set and in 130 total pages, I found four (that's 4) that would need conversion.  You won't even need to convert these if you never use the Quasi-Deities.   I never have in 40 years.

The gods are all in 1st ed stats, but gods should not have stats in the first place.

Really. I have everything I need for a Greyhawk 5e game.  Would I like a Greyhawk 5e book? Yeah! I would love one really.  I am very much in that slim crossover on the Venn Diagram of "Just These Guys".  I am These Guys.

Maybe WotC will come out with it someday.  But in the meantime, I am doing ok and I suspect many of you really are as well.

 Exhibit / January 30, 2020 

Only in a decade as contradictory as the 1980s would one of America’s most respectable and historic companies spend nearly a million dollars on a commercial depicting new wave “adventurers” in a post-apocalyptic “third millennium” wasteland as part of a last ditch campaign to save its fatally outmatched consumer electronics line. The company was General Electric, and the commercial was aimed squarely, even obnoxiously, at the nascent MTV generation.

There were several different versions of the commercial, the longest a short film clocking in at two minutes. In all of them, our four Mad Max-garbed, shoulder-padded heroes come upon a city “imprisoned in silence,” whose princess is encased in a giant crystal (hilariously reminiscent of the alien cocoons in 1984’s This is Spinal Tap). Liking what he sees, the permed leader of the crew, his headphones curled suavely around his neck, signals for the boombox. A cassette is inserted, bad music rocks the cavern, and the people are freed from their “total audio block” helmets as the camera quick-cuts to various GE products (including a CD player in one version) no one ever bought. The crystal prison shatters, and hero and princess come together as the narrator intones: “The power of music. No one lets you experience it… like General Electric.”

The spot won a Clio award for best commercial in 1985 and was directed by Englishman Howard Guard, by this time well-known in the industry for his cinematic style. Guard had directed Roxy Music’s 1982 “Avalon” video (with then business partner Ridley Scott, who would soon set the benchmark in dystopian advertising), the 1983 “She’s In Parties” video starring goth legends Bauhaus, and a slew of commercials on both sides of the Atlantic, including a couple of impressive Maxell spots—one for blank cassettes, one for VHS tapes—featuring a smoldering Peter Murphy (Bauhaus’s frontman) and a host of ’80s aesthetic tropes: robots, ferns, lasers, prisms, neon, chrome, and… frogs?

The GE mini-epic sports obvious Cold War overtones, with the terse and swaggering warriors liberating the oppressed and repressed city with an arsenal of superior hair, superior tunes, and superior tech. The post-apocalyptic theme, which popped up in surprising corners of popular media throughout the decade, was even used in a print-advertised sweepstakes: grand prize was a 1986 Pontiac Fiero, and first prize was a trip for two to the ’86 MTV Music Video Awards. Alas, the good guys lost. GE’s consumer electronics division shuttered in 1986, soundly thrashed by another American Cold War nemesis: Japan and its bubble economy.

 Exhibit / January 29, 2020 

Object Name: “A Closer Look: Inside HBO’s City”
Maker and Year: Film produced and directed by Scott Morris; HBO intro bumper by Liberty Studios
Object Type: Short promotional film
Video Source: YouTube (archivefilms)
Description (Michael Grasso):

The pay-cable network Home Box Office grew out of the milieu of closed-circuit television in New York City. Charles Dolan, a pioneer in direct cable television in the New York metropolitan area, had already built closed-circuit TV infrastructure underground for use in Teleguide, a network that brought tourist information into New York City hotel televisions in the 1960s. Dolan sought to expand his offerings into actual programming brought by cable into individual consumers’ homes. With the skyscrapers of New York often obscuring over-the-air television reception, there was a desire there (and in other metropolitan areas) for direct cable TV, but there was a problem: exactly what programming could be sent to those homes, considering the major networks’ stranglehold on content production? Dolan got Time, Life, Inc., a company that was itself expanding into television production and distribution at the time, to take a flyer on his cable idea, and pilot systems were set up in two Pennsylvania cities—Allentown and Wilkes-Barre—to broadcast an array of movies and sporting events (Wilkes-Barre being chosen because it was outside of the Philadelphia 76ers “blackout” zone). The new channel’s name, Home Box Office, was meant as a temporary internal placeholder but remained in place after the network’s launch in 1972.

In the next ten years, as cable TV providers multiplied across the country in a rebuke of the long-perceived reluctance of American consumers to pay for a utility and medium that they’d long taken for granted as “free,” HBO’s new network backbone, powered by satellite relay, became a premier offering to entice new cable customers into the fold. Crystal clear reception was one thing, but a channel that could offer a variety of unedited films, live sporting events from outside the local area (including boxing matches, formerly a closed-circuit television staple and still one of America’s top sports attractions in the 1970s), turned HBO into a household name. By the beginning of the 1980s, HBO was running its programming 24 hours a day (at a time when most if not all over-the-air television channels still played the national anthem and a test pattern at the conclusion of their broadcast day) and starting to branch out more and more into original programming.

A large part of HBO’s dominance in the 1980s was an increased awareness of and attention to its branding. As a cable TV innovator with nearly a decade in the business, HBO understood the need to differentiate itself from a panoply of new nationwide cable competitors such as The Movie Channel, Showtime, and Ted Turner’s new pair of superstations out of Atlanta (WTBS and CNN), as well as local pay-TV innovators like ONTV in Los Angeles, PRISM in Philadelphia, Preview in Boston, and Spectrum in Chicago and the Twin Cities. HBO’s longer history, increased name recognition, and larger capitalization allowed the company to spare no expense in self-promotion, as can be seen in this mindblowing short film from 1982 documenting the making of the classic “HBO Feature Presentation” intro bumper used between 1983-1987, which should be familiar to anyone who had access to an HBO subscriber box at the time.

Earlier HBO idents had been relatively simple affairs, the kind of simply animated and crudely soundtracked bumpers you might see on your local UHF station’s movie revue. But this bumper—known here as “HBO Theater,” although it would eventually be titled “HBO Feature Presentation” when broadcast in 1983—combined live actors, models, motion control cameras, animation, and a full orchestra soundtrack. The spot begins in a family’s living room in a big city, and after the camera banks and turns out of the matted-in living room scene, it swoops down an intricate model of a busy city street resembling the channel’s New York City birthplace, full of model cars, buses, and pedestrians (as well as a marquee for the titular “HBO Theater,” a miniature of an old-school Golden Age of Hollywood movie house). But soon we are out into the leafy suburbs and the countryside, reproducing HBO’s own spread into all 50 states over the first ten years of its existence. We then head into outer space, where a giant shiny chrome set of HBO letters—a “space station,” the documentary narrator says—–leads us into a “Star Gate” sequence created using a combination of practical visual effects and computer animation, representing HBO’s presence across the satellite web now covering the United States. The final portion of the bumper, the colorful streaks of light inside the “O” of HBO, is created using a rig of multi-colored fiber optic cables, a relatively new technology in 1982.

One can’t help but be charmed by the extreme effort taken to produce this bumper—not to mention the ego it took to produce a ten-minute short film about the production of a ninety-second bumper. “Six craftsmen worked for over three months to create nearly 100 unique buildings for HBO’s City,” the narrator brags as we see tiny pedestrians, miniature potted plants on fire escapes, and actual working traffic lights and headlights. The craftsmen and effects specialists at Liberty Studios betray their New York roots as they discuss the supposedly idyllic city main street in this ostensibly family-friendly special. (One interesting note: the live-action actors sitting down in front of HBO in the original version of the bumper consisted of a young urban professional couple; in later versions of the “HBO Feature Presentation” bumper, the family had two kids.) In a hilarious, thick, only-in-New-York accent, director of special effects James Kowalski informs the viewer, “We threw a few extras in, seeing if people would spot ’em… we put a few bums on the street, a few hookers on the corner.” The mini-documentary portrays the animated portions of the bumper, on the other hand, in a much less earthy way, accentuating the high-tech computer guidance of both the animation and the motion control cameras.

This deluxe bumper expresses perfectly a liminal period between the physical and practical special effects era and the coming era of visual effects developed and produced on a video synthesizer or computer. It also presages the coming of HBO’s original programming, which would begin in the same year as this bumper’s debut (1983) with the TV movie The Terry Fox Story and the Jim Henson series Fraggle Rock.

One of the races I really enjoyed back in the Pre-TNG days of Trek (Pre 1987) was the Kzinti.  I was very familiar with the race from the Animated series and was aware, vaguely, of the "Man-Kzin Wars" books by Larry Niven.  I also knew of what would now be called fan-fiction in the form of some weird Trek zines I remember from the day.



The Kzinti in the Trek Universe
The Kzinti homeworld is called Kzin and it orbits 61 Ursae Majoris about 31 light-years away.  Humans of the late 21st century, pre-warp Earth headed to towards this system in the great migrations from Earth. On their way, they encountered the Kzinti and the first of three wars between the two races began.  The Kzinti are violent, expansionistic, and convinced of their own superiority.  The Kzinti lost each time to Earth's forces (then mostly sub-light ships) and they never got over that they lost to an "omnivorous" race.
The stellar cartographers of Starfleet named the Kzinti area of space the Kzinti Hegemony. Their own name for their government can be translated as The Patriarchy.

By 2151 Starfleet had pushed the Kzinti back to their homeworld and Archer IV, also orbiting 61 Ursae Majoris, was established as an Earth colony.  By 2371 it was a fully inhabited Federation planet.  The confusion came about because the Kzinti call any world they inhabit as their "homeworld".  The Federation not only defeated the Kzinti, they humiliated them.



So we have a chauvinistic race, that has a government called the Patriarchy, who is convinced they are superior to all other races and yet still got their asses kicked by the Federation. If you think I am not going to have a go at that then you have not been here reading this blog for long!

Besides.  Star Trek was doing Social Justice in the 60s.  This is a perfect subject to do in a Star Trek RPG.

I am planning on making them my "little bads" or at least make them appear to be the big bads.  They are not, they are just a pain in the ass.  Their area of space is close (ish) to other parts of the federation including Memory Alpha. This works out well since the first mission of the USS Protector is a "milk run" to Memory Alpha.  Yes I am making the first adventure a run to the Federation "Library" as an homage to all the library runs I made to read books about space, astronomy and then Lovecraft and Star Trek.



A couple reasons that make the Kzinti great for my BlackStar game is they are superstitious, still believe in magic and ghosts (and why not, they have a high level of psionic individuals in their population) and maybe best of all they allow me to use some ideas I have created for other games that would find fertile ground here.

Rebuilding the Kzinti for BlackStar
I am setting my BlackStar game between the TOS and TNG eras.  A time, calendar wise that also corresponds to the time when I first discovered the Kzinti and a time of evolution of Trek and in particular the Klingons.

In a fairly real sense, the Kzinti represent stepping stone really between the "old" and the "new" Klingons.  The honor, the violence, and even the warrior caste system of the Kzinti can be added to the old, or TOS Klingons to create the newer TNG and movie era Klingons. 
Since this "in-between" time is also covered fairly well by the FASA Trek game I will turn to it for ideas.

FASA Trek, much like Starfleet Battles, can be seen as an alternate evolution of the same core Trek from the Original Series on.  I am already borrowing a lot from FASA Trek, so I might take some of their ideas on Klingons and use them for the Kzinti.

In particular, their philosophy of "That which is not growing is dead." to explain their desire to expand their territory again.

I am not going to make Kzinti available as a playable race. If I want something like that I'll go with Caitians like M'Ress and Srrel.



White Star

Kzinti WarriorKZINTI WARRIOR
ARMOR CLASS: 7 [12]
HIT DICE: 2
HDE/XP: 2/25
SAVING THROW: 17
TOTAL HIT BONUS:  +2
MOVEMENT: 12 (12 when climbing)
SPECIAL: Dark vision 90 ft, Climb
ATTACK: Claws (1d6) or by weapon

KZINTI PSYCHIC
ARMOR CLASS: 9 [10]
HIT DICE: 1-1
HDE/XP: 1/15
SAVING THROW: 17
TOTAL HIT BONUS:  +1
MOVEMENT: 9 (0 when climbing)
SPECIAL: Dark vision 90 ft, Climb, Psychic Blast,
ATTACK: Psychic Blast (1d6)

Starships & Spacemen

Kzinti PsychicKZINTI WARRIOR
Encountered: 2d4 (2d10)
Movement: 120' (40')
Intelligence: Average
Psionic Potential: inactive
Hits: 2d8
Armor: 7 (2 with power armor)
Combat Skill: 12
Save: L1
Attacks: 1
Damage: By weapon
Morale: 10
XP: 25

KZINTI PSYCHIC
Encountered: 1 (1d6)
Movement: 90' (30')
Intelligence: Above-Average
Psionic Potential: active
Hits: 1d8
Armor: 9 (5 with power armor)
Combat Skill: 6
Save: L1
Attacks: 1, Psychic Blast
Damage: 1d6
Morale: 7
XP: 15

Kzinti Warriors are 2.1-meter tall  220 kg, barrel-chested felinoids.  They can attack with claws but prefer weapons.   They have long tails and hairless ears.  Their eyesight is good in the dark, but their sense of smell is superior to that of Terrans.  They are voracious carnivores and must consume raw meat. They can survive on replicated food, but they will claim it has "no life" to it.
They are a superstitious race and will not use the weapon of a fallen foe believing that the ghost of that foe still haunts the weapon.
Kzinti Warriors will often add honorifics to their name and title. So a captain of a Kzinti warship that has never been defeated might call himself Vrust-Captain, the Undefeated.

Kzinti Psychics almost apper to be a different race.  They are much smaller, 1.8-meter, and much thinner at 130 kg. They are hunched over and appear to ready to fall over.  They are powerful psychics and know many attack and defense modes.  They are often used to extract knowledge and secrets from other species.  Even though they appear frail they are driven by the same desires that affect the warrior caste.  This has caused many among the psychic class to adopt cruelty to others weaker than themselves which is even marked by Kzinti standards.

 Exhibit / January 28, 2020 

Object Name:  127 John Street neon tunnel
Maker and Year: Rudolph de Harak, Howard Brandston, 1971
Object Type: Corrugated iron tunnel
Image Source: Flaming Pablum, et al
Description: (Richard McKenna)

A rendering of the future in the form of a short stretch of corrugated steel, this neon tunnel that once greeted visitors to the foyer of 127 John Street in New York City feels innately familiar, even archetypal. Despite its appearance, the tunnel did not actually lead directly to a disconcertingly utopian future, but only to the elevators that ferried the building’s blue-collar workers up to their workplaces. Completed in 1971, 127 John Street was originally designed as a classic slab of second-wave International Style corporate office space by architecture practice Emery Roth & Sons. The building’s developers—brothers Melvyn and Robert Kaufman—were well-known for quirky decoration and the practice of turning ground level space into “plazas” that was not born simply out of generosity: forward-looking local construction ordinances offered floor space bonuses for their inclusion, encouraging developers to channel their greed into an engagement with public space. The Kaufmans employed graphic designer Rudolph de Harak to provide whimsical visual touches, which included a huge three-story digital clock and canvas covered scaffolds on the street outside to enliven the building’s otherwise bland frontage and foyer. 

Most of De Harak’s other contributions to the building’s appearance, however, feel as affected and dated as old greeting cards in comparison with the tunnel’s sleek glow. Accessible from the building’s entrance on Fulton Street, the corridor was illuminated by blue argon-gas-filled tubes, the work of architectural lighting expert Howard Brandston, with whom Harak had previously collaborated on the futurist Canadian Pavilion at the Montreal Expo in 1967 and the American Pavilion at Expo 1970 in Osaka, Japan. As well as providing a generation of New Yorkers with formative experiences, the tunnel’s ready-made shorthand for futurism provided an eye-catching backdrop for photography, and was especially popular with musicians for promo shots, NY band The System actually filming part of their monster “You Are in My System” inside it and the building’s lobby.

Why should a 250-foot stretch of corrugated steel sewer culvert decorated with neon piping constitute such a commanding and beguiling image of “the future”? Perhaps partly because of the optimism implicit in the the nature of tunnels themselves: like jet bridges and subway tunnels, they evoke passage, acceleration, the traversing of barriers, and perhaps even escape and transformation. Its cool visual temperature and paring down of space and perspective provided a sensation of propulsion that recalled TV series The Time Tunnel (1966-1967), hinting that the gateway would catapult those traversing it to some other place—perhaps one less venal and prosaic. The tunnel’s streamlined forms and its lack of sharp right angles also gave it a strange sense of weightlessness—of being unmoored from the everyday—and the neon punctuation seems almost to draw the onlooker inside, similar to the contemporary installations of artists like Doug Wheeler and James Turrell of the Light and Space arts movement. Vector graphics—the computer-generated geometric lines used to create “wireframe” images—had been around since the mid ’60s, and the glowing geometric lines seen on the Orion III shuttle’s control panel in 1968’s 2001: A Space Odyssey may be one source of the tunnel’s inspiration, as perhaps was that same film’s “Star Gate” sequence—which itself took up motifs developed by artists and animators like John Whitney and Jordan Belson. The tunnel also reflected the hunger for experimental environments pioneered by architectural practices like Archigram and Archizoom that produced the same year’s Instant City.

The tunnel was eventually dismantled in 1997, when the office building was in the process of being converted to apartments as part of the wave of gentrification then investing the city. Several of the artists—including Howard Brandston—-involved in creating 127 John Street’s installations successfully sued the new developers under the Visual Artists’ Rights Act; unfortunately, the elements of the decor preserved by the settlement did not include the tunnel. The images that remain of it, though, show a powerfully ethereal, dreamlike space that is one more small reminder of how much more stimulating our built environment could be if only we were in a position to demand it.

Working on all sorts of things, mostly getting my bits of Night Shift done and a TON of day job stuff.

I wanted to get The Pagan Witch out to you all soon, and I still might, it is done, minus some little bits. Here is something in the mean time.

Bánánach
Semi-transparent spectres of witches that haunt battlefields or other areas of great violence.
AC 3 [16], HD 5** (18hp), Att 1 × touch (1d6 +ability drain), THAC0 15 [+4], MV 120’ (40’) / 240’ (80’) flying, SV D10 W11 P12 B13 S14 (5), ML 12, AL Chaotic, XP 175, NA 1d4 (1d6), TT None

▶ Undead: Make no noise, until they attack. Immune to effects that affect living creatures (e.g. poison). Immune to mind-affecting or mind-reading spells (e.g. charm, hold, sleep).
▶ Mundane weapon immunity: Only harmed by silver weapons or magic.
▶ Damage reduction: Half damage from silver weapons.
▶ Energy drain: A successfully hit target permanently loses one point of Wisdom. This incurs a loss of all other benefits due to the drained ability (e.g. spells, saving throws, etc.). A person drained of all Wisdom becomes a wraith in one day, under the control of the bánánach that killed him or her.

A bánánach is the specter of a witch.  They are attracted to areas of great death and suffering.  They can be seen flying about the areas of death.  They drain the willpower of those she attacks. 
They are often accompanied by 2-3 wraiths.

Between October 2003 and October 2013, Chaosium, Inc. published a series of books for Call of Cthulhu under the Miskatonic University Library Association brand. Whether a sourcebook, scenario, anthology, or campaign, each was a showcase for their authors—amateur rather than professional, but fans of Call of Cthulhu nonetheless—to put forward their ideas and share with others. The programme was notable for having launched the writing careers of several authors, but for every Cthulhu Invictus, The Pastores, Primal State, Ripples from Carcosa, and Halloween Horror, there was a Five Go Mad in Egypt, Return of the Ripper, Rise of the Dead, Rise of the Dead II: The Raid, and more...

The Miskatonic University Library Association brand is no more, alas, but what we have in its stead is the Miskatonic Repository, based on the same format as the DM’s Guild for Dungeons & Dragons. It is thus, “...a new way for creators to publish and distribute their own original Call of Cthulhu content including scenarios, settings, spells and more…” To support the endeavours of their creators, Chaosium has provided templates and art packs, both free to use, so that the resulting releases can look and feel as professional as possible. To support the efforts of these contributors, Miskatonic Monday is an occasional series of reviews which will in turn examine an item drawn from the depths of the Miskatonic Repository.

—oOo—
Name: Pickman’s Legacy

Publisher: Chaosium, Inc.
Author: Keegan Sullivan

Setting: Modern Day

Product: Scenario
What You Get: 0.54 MB thirty eleven-page, full colour PDF
Elevator Pitch: A terrible legacy taken advantage of is still a terrible legacy. 
Plot Hook: A Cold Case in Lovecraft Country.
Plot Development: A missing daughter, a worried father, and a daughter drawn astray...
Plot Support: Four handouts, five monster and creature stats.

Pros
# Solid mystery
# Suitable introductory scenario
# Potential as a one-to-one scenario
# Adaptable to anytime after 1926
# Good use of a Lovecraftian bloodline
# Short, one or two session scenario
# Challenging epilogue

Cons# Needs editing
# Plot and clues poorly explained
# Not suitable for the new Keeper
# Underdeveloped
# Challenging epilogue
# No timeline
# Underwritten NPCs

Conclusion
# Underdeveloped 
# Keeper will need to make notes to understand the plot.
# Solid mystery and use of a Lovecraftian bloodline.

Liam and Connor's 5e game is going on this weekend.  They are going deeper into Curse of Strahd, but as typical the party made a left turn when they should have just kept going straight.

While looking for a passageway across a mountain range they came across a "cave", turns out it was a wormhole, or rather the passageway for a small purple worm.

A special treat, we are using my old Ral Partha Ravenloft minis.

On the dinner front.  Tonight we made chicken stroganoff,  potatoes, and homemade focaccia bread.




In the meantime, I got some Blu-Rays in the mail for my October Horror Movie Marathon.


50 movies so far, ready to go!

Ruins of the North is an anthology of scenarios for The One Ring: Adventures over the Edge of the Wild Roleplaying Game, the recently cancelled roleplaying game published by Cubicle Seven Entertainment which remains the most highly regarded, certainly most nuanced of the four roleplaying games to explore Tolkien’s Middle Earth. It is a companion to Rivendell, the supplement which shifted the roleplaying game’s focus from its starting point to the east of the Misty Mountains, upon Mirkwood and its surrounds with Tales from Wilderland and The Heart of the Wild to the west of the Misty Mountains. In particular, to present the Last Homely House of Master Elrond and then onwards through Eriador as far west as the town of Bree. Just as The Heart of the Wild has its companion volume in Tales from Wilderland, the Rivendell supplement has its anthology of scenarios in the form of Ruins of the North.

Unlike Tales from Wilderland, and especially unlike Bree, this anthology is not designed for beginning characters. In fact, two of the Heroic Culture character options presented in Rivendell—the Rangers of the North and the High Elves of Rivendell—are not designed to be equal to starting characters in The One Ring. There is a possibility that both can be introduced during the play through of Ruins of the North, which as written is designed to take the characters who have been part of a campaign set to the east of the Misty Mountains through the mountains and into Eriador. Then  once they have established Last Homely House as a sanctuary, they are free to go forth and adventure to the west. Sometimes at the direction of Elrond, sometimes not. To get the very best of the six scenarios in Ruins of the North, the Loremaster will definitely need access to a copy of Rivendell.

The sextet of scenarios presented in Ruins of the North take place between 2954 and 2977—so after the events depicted in Tales from Wilderland. They chart the growing influence of the Shadow as the once vanquished Witch-King of Angmar who in ages past, worked to bring down the Númenórean kingdom of Arnor, returns west of the Misty Mountains. They make use of the expanded rules given in Rivendell for treasure and Precious Objects and Wondrous Artefacts, as well as for The Eye Of Mordor, which reveals the presence of the player characters or company to the Shadow’s influence. In the case of the former, this means that the player characters are likely to uncover caches of treasure far greater than that found in previous titles for The One Ring, whilst in the case of the latter, they are in greater danger of accruing more points of Shadow and suffering other deleterious effects than before. Thus whilst the rewards are potentially greater, so are the dangers…

The anthology opens with ‘Nightmares of Angmar’. This begins in the Black Hills in the Vales of Gundabad where an isolated tribe of Hill-men has been raided by goblins and its children were kidnapped. As they suffer nightmares of desolate fortress, the player characters have to persuade that rescuing them is the best course of action and then chase the kidnappers west, over the mountains, and into Eridor. Dark alliances long past are revealed and there is an opportunity to make a new ally—or lose one in the rescue attempt. Whatever the outcome, the player characters, now west of the Misty Mountains, are given the opportunity to find rest in the House of Elrond. ‘Nightmares of Angmar’ is a gruelling affair, with long stretches of travel across blasted lands—something which will occur again and again through the anthology. It also provides some good roleplaying opportunities and exposes the characters to the reach of the Shadow down the long years.

The theme of the Shadow’s long reach continues in ‘Hard Than Stone’ as an ally appears from strange places to help the player characters in return for their help. Tasked with escorting a road maintenance crew, the company discovers evidence of a bandit attack and after managing to rescue some survivors, learn that the bandit party consists of both Men and Trolls! Learning what could bring such forces together lies at the heart of the scenario and brings into the open long term plans. Elements of the scenario are left for the Loremaster to develop and whilst some interesting options are given, it does leave the scenario with an underwritten ending.

‘Concerning Archers’ begins on a lighter note and a pleasing encounter with the protagonist at the heart of The Hobbit—one Mister Bilbo Baggins. Encountering characters from the books has always been well handled in The One Ring and this is no exception as Bilbo asks the company to help him settle a scholarly debate by visiting an ancient city where a legendary company of archers had its last stand. The company are free to tackle this whenever it wants, so once the request has been made, ‘Concerning Archers’ can either be run as is or added to a campaign as a side quest. This is an opportunity to delve a little into Hobbit history, especially for a Scholar character, and the Loremaster may want to have access to the Bree supplement as well for this and later scenarios.

The fourth scenario, ‘The Company of the Wain’, is a distinct change of pace and tone. The company encounters a caravan of travelling traders stopped off at a village. Initially, the player characters have an opportunity to spend a little money and interact with the traders, but when one of their number spots a possible kidnapping, it suggests that there is more to the caravan. The nature of the threat here is all but mundane, although is not to say that it is not evil. There is no quite right way to deal with the threat, potentially leaving the scenario open for further developments, some of which may lead south into the lands of The Horse-lords of Rohan and potentially, Oaths of the Riddermark.

The company comes to the aid of a Ranger in the fifth scenario, ‘What Lies Beneath’. He wishes to reclaim his family’s ancient mansion and establish a secure outpost for the Rangers near Weathertop. Unfortunately, it has been occupied by some bandits and he wants some help driving them out. This is very much a character piece, with the Loremaster having several NPCs—including the Ranger—to roleplay on one dark, murderous evening. The shortest of the scenarios in the anthology, the plot to ‘What Lies Beneath’ is well-worn, but hopefully good roleplaying upon the part of the Loremaster will divert the player characters enough for its events to play out.

In the sixth and last scenario in Ruins of the North, the player characters are asked by Gandalf himself to undertake a small quest. In ‘Shadows Over Tyrn Gorthad’, he asks that the company retraces its steps and return to the ruins of Angmar in order to determine why Barrow-wights from the Barrow-downs have been seen abroad far from their resting places. This is a much longer scenario than the previous five, and could be played out over several sessions, perhaps even running one of the earlier scenarios in the anthology between its events. Certainly there is room for the Loremaster to insert one of her scenarios here if suitable. Gandalf is not the only character from Middle Earth canon to appear here and the scenario gives another chance for the Scholar chance to shine, as well as be exposed to some dread dangers. The Bree supplement may also be of use here, but is not required. ‘Shadows Over Tyrn Gorthad’ brings Ruins of the North to rousing climax, standing alongside Gandalf attempting to stop a long slumbering threat rising again.

Physically, Ruins of the North is, like the other books for The One Ring, is a pretty book, done in earthy tones throughout that give it a homely feel that befits the setting of Middle Earth. The illustrations are excellent, the cartography decent, and the writing, although needing a slight edit here and there, is clear and easy to understand. The content is decently organised, making all six scenario easier to run.

Unfortunately, Ruins of the North is not quite as satisfying a set of scenarios as those given in the previous collection, Tales from Wilderland. They do not feel quite as cohesive, and certainly, they do not work as a campaign, since there are no strong threads running through the set, from ‘Nightmares of Angmar’ to ‘Shadows Over Tyrn Gorthad’. All together, they do delve into the region’s dark history and hint at the plans that Mordor has for the region, but this being a hint—admittedly a strong hint—Ruins of the North does very much feel as if it is laying the foundations for a bigger campaign, perhaps in the manner of The Darkening of Mirkwood. Of course, that is not be.

With six scenarios that are perhaps darker, nastier, and more challenging than previous anthologies, and definitely different in tone, Ruins of the North is a solid companion to Rivendell. Players and their characters will definitely want to find refuge in the Last Homely House after playing these six.

Conan the Barbarian is a supplement for Robert E. Howard’s Conan: Adventures in an Age Undreamed Of published by Modiphius Entertainment. It is the first in the ‘Conan the…’ series of supplements which focus on and take their inspiration from Conan himself at various stages of his life and what he was doing. Over this series, the supplements will track our titular character’s growth and progress as he gains in skills and abilities and talents. Thus this first supplement looks at Conan as a young man and his life among the people of his homeland, at the beginning of his career which will take him from barbarian to king, essentially the equivalent of a starting player character. Yet whilst the stats for Conan himself at this stage of his life do appear in the pages of Conan the Barbarian, they are more a side note than a feature, for the supplement is an examination of the countries of the north in the Hyperborean Age—Asgard, Cimmeria, Hyperborea, and Vanaheim. It includes new archetypes, talents, backgrounds, and equipment to help players create more varied barbarian characters and Game Masters more varied barbarian NPCs; a gazetteer and guide to the bleak lands of the north, either shrouded in fog or smothered in snow and; an array of detailed NPCs and monsters, including unique nemeses; and mechanics to help bring barbarian activities and attitudes to your game, including raids, contests, battle tactics, and more.

Conan the Barbarian opens with four new Barbarian castes and some changes to the castes given in the core rulebook for Robert E. Howard’s Conan: Adventures in an Age Undreamed Of. The latter are minor in nature, mostly name changes and slight adjustments in terms of Social Standing, whereas the five new castes are Barbaric, Law-speaker, Renegade, and Skald, each supported by new Talents, such as Savage Dignity and Uncivilised for the Barbaric caste, followed by Stories for each of the new castes enabling the creation of backstories for the characters of said castes. These are followed by four archetypes—Bard, Hunter, Raider, and Slaver, In addition, there are Barbarian Natures and Educations, and Talents, the latter the Skald and the Bard. Along with a small selection of equipment, including sun stones used as navigation aids and several sorcerous items, these options combine with those of the core rulebook to provide greater choice in creating characters from the barbaric north. This can be simply to create and play something different from the core rulebook, but it could also provide the diversity needed to create a party of barbarians from the north, whether for a campaign set there or looking to escape the frozen north…

Supporting these new character options is a gazetteer of the north. Beginning with the coming of the barbarians it looks in turn at the peoples, way of life, geography, and places of note in Cimmeria, Nordheim, and Hyperborea, with Nordheim being rent into two by great rivalry between Asgard and Vanaheim. Although other nations may look at the north as being wholly barbaric, the gazetteer begins to separate the four peoples and so emphasise their differences. So the Cimmerians live in clans belonging to four tribes and mainly live in independent villages dotted across the dreary Cimmerian Marches, their inhabitants only coming together when invaders, like the Aquilonnians, attempt to capture or colonise what the Cimmerians regard as their territory. The inhabitants of southern Nordheim recognise kings, queen, jarls, and more, whereas those of the north band together in nomadic tribes, constantly moving across the icy reaches of the north. Vanaheim also has a coast, enabling its inhabitants to build boats and fish and raid—their raiding ships with their carved figureheads being known as the ‘dragons of the sea’, whereas Asgard does not. To the East, the land of Hyperborea is known for its fortified cities and its participation in the slave trade. Again, there is a lot here to brought into a game, whether it is rolling on the Cimmerian village generator or nomad camp features table, or visiting the charm-bedecked Witch-Oak in Cimmeria said to be home to a witch, a crone to some, matronly to others, capable of lifting and bestowing curses.

If the gazetteer explores the cultures and places of the north, ‘Events’ describes the regular doings of the north. First and foremost is the ‘Thing’, a combined festival, council, and reunion, held by kings as much by lesser nobles. Here disputes and other matters are settled, to which the Game Master can add events from the accompanying table. Equally dramatic is the decision of a Nordheim tribe to migrate its camp across the snowy wastes or the members of Vanaheim village deciding to build a ship and conduct raids further along the coast. These are raids akin to those of the Vikings, rather than piracy, which will of course be covered in more detailed in Conan the Pirate, including ship-to-ship combat. There is a lot here to make all of these exciting and involving. 

The often dreary and unforgiving nature of life in the north is reflected in the discussion of its peoples’ gods and legends in ‘Myth & Magic’. None more so than the Cimmerian afterlife, which is even more dismal and dreary than their actual lives! Vahalla, the Hall of the Mighty is a more inviting prospect amongst the valorous of Nordheim. As well gods and legends, it presents rules for using geases and taboos, and Runes and inscribing them onto objects for one-off or even permanent benefits and the first Nemesis NPC in Conan the Barbarian. This is Atali, the Frost Giant’s Daughter, who plagues and plays with the lives of mortals. The following chapter, ‘Encounters’, includes even more Nemesis NPCs, from the generic Chieftain and Witch to the Lindorm, a two-legged serpent, a solitary hunter through the snow, and Bragi the Unloved, a seasoned chieftain who usurped his predecessor and who rules with an iron first, his ambition driving him to declare on his neighbours. This is in addition to the other thirty or so NPCs and creatures of varying capability. Not just Snow Apes, Boars, and Mammoths, but also Banshees, Draugrs, Were-Bears, and Wyrms. 

Rounding out Conan the Barbarian is ‘Hither Came Conan…’ which places our titular hero in the context of the supplement and provides a playable version of him early in his long career, rough equal to that of a beginning character. Running campaigns set in the north are explored in ‘The Barbarian Way’, discussing campaign set-ups—warbands and raiding parties in the main, whether the player characters part of or leading them, plus missionary and colonisation expeditions into the north; barbaric rites and traditions, and war and carousing, the latter including a lengthy table of carousing events. Lastly, Ali is a presented as a ‘Hero of the Age’, a female hero born to chattel slavery, a potential player character or an NPC, developed by a backer for the Kickstarter campaign for Robert E. Howard’s Conan: Adventures in an Age Undreamed Of.

Physically, Conan the Barbarian is a slim hardback, presented in full colour, illustrated with an excellent range of fully painted artwork. It is well written, although it needs to be edited in places. Otherwise, it is accessible and comes with a reasonable index.

As is, there is not really anything missing in Conan the Barbarian. There are plenty of ideas, places, NPCs, and monsters in its pages to spur a Game Master’s imagination, but perhaps for the neophyte Game Master, new to running Robert E. Howard’s Conan: Adventures in an Age Undreamed Of, some scenario hooks or adventure seeds would have been useful. Nevertheless, it is clear from Conan the Barbarian that its author has delved deep into Hyperborean lore and presented much of it in what is a multifaceted supplement. Although based on Conan’s early life, it goes beyond that to bring the world around him not just to life, but also to make it accessible and playable. Whether that is as Conan himself, using the provided write-up, or more obviously, as player characters. For the player who wants to create a barbarian character from the north, Conan the Barbarian offers welcome options, but for the Game Master wanting to run or take her Robert E. Howard’s Conan: Adventures in an Age Undreamed Of in or to the frozen, savage north, Conan the Barbarian is an excellent sourcebook.

Mutant Crawl Classics #7: Reliquary of the Ancient Ones is the seventh release for Mutant Crawl Classics Roleplaying Game – Triumph & Technology Won by Mutants & Magic, the spiritual successor to Gamma World published by Goodman Games. It is the second adventure to be designed for use with player characters who are Zero Level after the first, Mutant Crawl Classics #1: Hive of the Overmind. What this means is that it is a Character Funnel, one of the features of both the Mutant Crawl Classics Roleplaying Game and the Dungeon Crawl Classics Role Playing Game it is mechanically based upon—in which initially, a player is expected to roll up three or four Level Zero characters and have them play through a generally nasty, deadly adventure, which surviving will prove a challenge. Those that do survive receive enough Experience Points to advance to First Level and gain all of the advantages of their Class. In terms of the setting, known as Terra A.D., or ‘Terra After Disaster’, this is a ‘Rite of Passage’ and in Mutants, Manimals, and Plantients, the stress of it will trigger ‘Metagenesis’, their DNA expressing itself and their mutations blossoming forth. Mutant Crawl Classics #7: Reliquary of the Ancient Ones differs from Mutant Crawl Classics #1: Hive of the Overmind and other Character Funnels, in that it is designed for play under certain circumstances, with multiple players and characters, and in the case of the characters—none of them are expected to survive!

In the classic Character Funnel, each player begins play with three or four Level Zero characters and roleplays them from the start of the scenario until the end, hoping that one or more survives to accrue enough Experience Points to achieve First Level. In Mutant Crawl Classics #7: Reliquary of the Ancient Ones, each player gets one Zero Level character, not three or four, and when that character dies—which is highly likely in Mutant Crawl Classics #7: Reliquary of the Ancient Ones—his player is out of the scenario and leaves the table whilst a new player with a new character takes his place. When a second character dies and his player leaves the table, another player can join the table and take his place, including any player who has already lost a character during play. However, each time a new player—whether completely new or returning to the game after having lost a previous character—sits down and joins the game, he does so with a completely new, Zero Level character.

Essentially, Mutant Crawl Classics #7: Reliquary of the Ancient Ones is designed for high character and high player turnover. In order to facilitate this, a Judge wanting to run this will need a lot of players. The scenario is written for between eight and ten players, but that is just the number of players sat at the table, for the Judge will need half of that again—if not the same number to get the fullest use out of the scenario—in order to have a sufficient supply of replacement players. (The Judge will also have to prepare numerous Zero Level player characters.) This supports the play of Mutant Crawl Classics #7: Reliquary of the Ancient Ones as a tournament scenario at a convention. The winners of which will be the players who either had the most characters survive, or rather, killed the least number of characters.

To support all of this death and mayhem, Mutant Crawl Classics #7: Reliquary of the Ancient Ones is the post apocalyptic equivalent of the funhouse dungeon, a madhouse carnival of death, in which the player characters will fumble their way through, all but blindly making mistakes which hopefully, the other characters—either those currently in play or those waiting to be played by the players ready to step in with the death of the next characters—will learn from. In other words, this is an adventure in which the characters and their players learn from the deaths of other characters and the temporary ejection of their players from the game.

The adventure itself begins with an earthquake which exposes an artefact, some kind of portal, of the Ancients. It leads to a strange chamber beyond from which various rooms can be accessed, one at a time, almost at random. These locations, most of them single rooms, are of all historical significance, enabling the characters to explore some of the events which led up to the Great Disaster that resulted in Terra, A.D.—Terra ‘After Disaster’—the world in which the characters live. Most of them are fairly detailed and many of them have a puzzle element to them, as well as a combat element. In keeping with the tone and design of the ‘dungeon’ or complex, most are also deadly. Many of the encounters heavily reference an array of Science Fiction films old and new, and both Judge and players will enjoy spotting them, whilst the Judge will enjoy roleplaying these references. More obvious references are made in the actual random encounters, many of which can be played as is, or expanded upon by the Judge. There is also scope here for the Judge to create his own encounters, again drawing from iconic Science Fiction movies and other settings.

Interestingly, Mutant Crawl Classics #7: Reliquary of the Ancient Ones does something which few if any other scenarios for the post apocalyptic roleplaying do and that is, enable a player character to make contact with an AI patron. This is particularly important for the Shaman character Class, which specialises in ancient lore and knowledge and serves a god—or AI patron—which will in return grant wetware programs of great power as well as the Invoke Patron AI program. This always seems glossed over in Mutant Crawl Classics Roleplaying Game – Triumph & Technology Won by Mutants & Magic, so it is interesting to see it presented here, though a Shaman choosing and making first contact with his AI patron has the potential to be an adventure in itself.

Physically, Mutant Crawl Classics #7: Reliquary of the Ancient Ones is well presented. The artwork is a variety of styles, but all of it fitting. The centrespread map is clear and easy to read. If there is an issue with the scenario in terms of its presentation, it is that it is brought to an end somewhat abruptly.

Rounding out Mutant Crawl Classics #7: Reliquary of the Ancient Ones is a set of advice and notes on running it as a tournament adventure. These highlight how useful and useless the scenario actually is. Useful if the Judge wants to run a demonstration or tournament scenario at a convention involving a larger number of players than a scenario for almost any roleplaying game would normally ask for. Unfortunately that calls for certain circumstances and for the most part, because those numbers do not fit the standard pattern of six players and one Game Master, such numbers are rarely called for in convention scenarios and difficult to organise. Useless because this is not a scenario that can easily be run at home using the given format, so the Judge will need to adjust the player and character numbers accordingly.

Mutant Crawl Classics #7: Reliquary of the Ancient Ones is a mad funhouse dungeon comprised of excerpts from our future prior to the Great Disaster. It has some delightful Science Fiction film references that the Judge will enjoy bringing into play and the players will find themselves roleplaying encounters from those and other films as they explore the location. Mutant Crawl Classics #7: Reliquary of the Ancient Ones is deadly, fun, and silly, but ultimately of limited utility.

In this new series of posts, I want to look back at some of my favorite classic adventures both from TSR and others.  I'll give a review, though most everyone knows what is in these adventures by now, I'll also talk about how I have used them in the past and I'll also talk about what other games I have used them with or would like too.  So there is a little bit of Plays Well With Others in this too.

Why do classic adventures? Easy, I love these adventures.  I have written hundreds of my own adventures, some I have even published, but these are the adventures that everyone knows and we all have a history with them.

So to start off this series, what better adventure than the one that started it all?


Palace of the Vampire Queen

In the beginning, there was a belief that all DMs would naturally create all their own adventures and there was no market for pre-written ones.  The only printed adventure out at this time was "Temple of the Frog" in Blackmoor.  Seeing a need, the Palace of the Vampire Queen was written by Pete and Judy Kerestan. Yes, the very first adventure was co-written by a woman.
The first edition was self-published, followed by a second and third edition by Wee Warriors (1976 and 1977) and distributed exclusively by TSR.

The "Dungeon Master's Kit" (module was not being used yet) presented a simple adventure with a singular goal; defeat the Vampire Queen.  The plot, such as it is, is very thin even by the standards of what would later be the norm.  The maps are fantastic, but the descriptions are little more than that; what's in the room in terms of monster and treasure.  We get a background, the missing princess of the Dwarf King Arman of Baylor. Vampire Queen herself remains nameless.


The adventure itself is fairly straight forward.  Go to the Palace, defeat the monsters and the Vampire Queen and save the Dwarven Princess.

Despite, or maybe because of, this limited background this adventure can be used anywhere with nearly every version of the game.   I became aware of this adventure many years ago and it immediately went on to my "must find" list. Around 10 years ago I was able to get a copy and I ran it for a group using Moldvay Basic/ Cook Expert (BX) D&D.  It was a lot of fun.  There was no indication on how many characters were needed or what levels.

The adventure reminds me a bit of the Dungeon! board game.  You walk the halls, kick in the door, kill the monster, take the treasure, repeat.  Of course, this adventure is the first of such adventures so it gets a huge pass on this.  There is a lot though here to keep any DM and party busy.

Since 1976 the adventure has had a few reprints.  The first ones were by Wee Warriors.  These prints regularly go for over $1,000.00 on eBay.   There were two such covers, the "black" cover with a castle in the background and the "queen" cover, featuring the vampire queen herself.


The covers were folders with a pocket for notes or other sheets.  I nice idea and one I have used myself. Many of the early prints were 8.5" x 11", some later prints were digest-sized, 5.5" x 8.5" same as the OD&D books.

The next major set of reprints was made by North Texas RPG Con and Pacesetter Games and Simulations who printed a fairly accurate representation of the original back cover in digest format and then later a letter-sized one with images from all the covers.


While they are not the originals, but the content is all there and these were much cheaper.

Now today, Precis Intermedia has a new cleaned up reprint of the adventure.



Daughters of Darkness: Sequels to the Vampire Queen
As can be imagined such a classic adventure has had a number of sequels and homages.

North Texas RPG Con
This is the reprint of the original.  It is a fairly faithful reproduction of the 1977 version of the black cover version.  The first digest-sized version was a fairly faithful reproduction save for the NTRPG Con watermark on every page.  The digest size makes it perfect for use with OD&D, S&W, OSE or other OSR games.


To my knowledge there are no more of this print available save for on eBay and other game auctions.

Pacesetter Games

The first round of reprints and sequels after Wee Warriors came from Pacesetter Games & Simulations.



V2 Palace of the Vampire Queen

This printing was more properly letter-sized, the same as the original and features many of the cover variations on the cover of this edition.
This edition also includes introductions from the author Peter Kerestan and Pacesetter's Bill Barsh. Here we learned that the very first edition was printed by Peter himself with a printing press!
Here we also get a fair reproduction of the original.  After the introductions and the adventure background, we get to the levels proper.  On the two pages are the original maps and descriptions and on the following pages are "updated" AD&D 1st ed stats. These new pages usually cover 3-4 more pages till the next map. This repeats for all five levels.  On the new pages, a little more explanation is given and there is new art.  This makes for a fuller product and detracts none of the original charms.

Print at Pacesetter.

V5 Palace of the Vampire Queen: Castle Blood
The first sequel to PotVQ is Castle Blood.  Now here we get more modern adventure designs and maps. There is more background here too to hook the players in,
The adventure is brief, but it is supposed to be, at just 16 pages. It can be run in an afternoon.  I actually felt this worked better as a prequel to the PotVQ.  You learn more about her history here. The eponymous castle is all detailed and above ground.  You can meet the Vampire Queen here, but killing her is not the goal of this adventure, but rather finding out what is going on.
PDF at DriveThruRPG and Print at Pacesetter.

V6 Palace of the Vampire Queen: Crypts of the Living
Crypts of the Living was written as an explicit sequel to the Palace of the Vampire Queen and makes more overt references to the first adventure.  The booklet, 16 pages worth, says it is designed for 5th Edition, but all the stats are for OSRIC/1st Edition.  No worries. Converting is easy.
There are references to both the Palace of the Vampire Queen and Castle Blood.  The other adventures are not 100% required to play this one, but it does help.
The adventure is a fairly straight forward exploration affair.  There are new monsters and new magic items so that is a nice bonus. Can be played in an afternoon or combined with the others for a longer campaign.
PDF at DriveThruRPG and Print at Pacesetter.

V7 Palace of the Vampire Queen: Cries of the Tormented
This one is not presently available and I don't seem to have a copy oddly enough.
Print at Pacesetter.


Precis Intermedia
Palace of the Vampire Queen
This version of the adventure also preserves much of what made the original a classic.  The PDF of this book has a "special feature" to show a reprint of the original NSFW art.  The print copy is all paper, with the cover made out of heavier weight paper (like résumé paper).
At 24 pages it might be the most faithful reproduction yet.  While the cover is new art, the interior looks like the classic.  No additions have been made to the text. The maps are cleaned up, darker ink and clearer to read.





Other Vampire Queens
Dark Wizard Games gave us the fantastic Hanging Coffins of the Vampire Queen. But I have talked about that adventure many places here. Most of my posts on this are captured below.

0one's Blueprints: Megadungeons - Palace of the Vampire Queen
This product is a pretty bare-bones affair, and that is exactly why you want to get it.  You get 7 pages of "Blue" maps and 7 pages of black and white maps covering over 210 rooms.  The rooms are labeled but that is all the description you get.  There are sheets for you to detail the rooms with monsters, occupants, and treasure.  This is perfect if you want to create a mega-palace for our mysterious Vampire Queen and stock it full of her undead minions.  At just under $2.00 it is a steal.

Other Games / Plays Well With Others

The strength of this adventure is how easy you can adapt it to nearly anything.  The adventure itself, regardless of which one you have, is so bare-bones it begs to be adapted and added too.  I have run this both for Basic, B/X D&D and for D&D 5th edition with no problems.  The level of characters can be adapted to easily with the challenges and the monsters you add.




Palace of the Vampire Queen and D&D5
Converting for D&D is easy. What might be more fun is to run something like Curse of Strahd, but replace the count with a Queen.


Palace of the Vampire Queen and Astonishing Swordsmen & Sorcerers of Hyperborea
This is the easiest of all really.  AS&SH is close enough to AD&D with hints of Basic to make it possible to run this without any conversions at all.
How to run it?  Well all I can say is have you ever read the Conan stories "Red Nails" or "Hour of the Dragon".  The queen would make for a good stand-in for Akivasha.



Palace of the Vampire Queen and Blue Rose
Ah. Now this one has a bit more going on for it.  This is no simple dungeon crawl, to play this one the Vampire Queen is in a battle of wills or "chess game" with the Sovereign, Queen Jaellin. This style of adventure would play heavily on the investigation skills of the envoys/characters.   Our Vampire Queen might even be known as a vampire even, just as a new ruler of a previously unknown island (Baylor).  Of course, you have your suspicions and you are fairly sure there is a strong taint of shadow about the land.



Palace of the Vampire Queen and Buffy,  Ghosts of Albion or Leagues of Gothic Horror
Here is something fun.  A twist on the Dracula story.  The cast comes to an old palace in the mountains from their home.  Expecting an old Lord they are instead greeted by a woman, the Lady of the castle.  Here the horror begins.
Both game systems have plenty of creatures and elements to cover everything in the adventure.  What you as the game master will need to do is smooth out some "D&D" elements and add some gothic elements, but that is so easy that I can't decide which one would be more fun Unisystem or Ubiquity.
All three would be fun to try sometime.




One could get easily lost in the potential of this adventure.  I do hope that future reviews of classic adventures prove to be just as fruitful.

Links
Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palace_of_the_Vampire_Queen
The Acaeum, https://www.acaeum.com/ddindexes/modpages/dmk.html

Links to Adventures

• V2 Palace of the Vampire Queen reprint from Pacesetter Games
• V5 Palace of the Vampire Queen: Castle Blood (Pacesetter Games)
• V6 Palace of the Vampire Queen: Crypts of the Living (Pacesetter Games)
• V7 Palace of the Vampire Queen: Cries of the Tormented (Pacesetter Games)
• MM1 Hanging Coffins of the Vampire Queen (Maximum Mayhem Dungeons / Dark Wizard)
• COA04SE: Guidebook to the Duchy of Valnwall Special Edition (SNG) Where my Vampire Queen is mentioned.
• 0one's Blueprints: Megadungeons - Palace of the Vampire Queen

Links to my 'Vampire Queen' posts

• Palace of the Vampire Queen
• Getting Basic
• All Hail the Vampire Queen!
• Into the Lair of the Vampire Queen
• A to Z of Vampires: Vampire Queen
• Weekend Gaming: Halloween Gaming, Return of the Vampire Queen
• Darlessa the Vampire Queen

Michael Grasso / January 23, 2020

At the beginning of the 1970s, a sense that techno-industrial man’s ongoing destruction of the environment would ultimately lead to global doom was widespread in the West. Married to these concerns was a parallel worry about the exponential impact of a population explosion due to these same 20th-century agricultural, medical, and scientific advancements. Dread warnings from philosophers and scientists representing the global technocratic establishment filled the airwaves. According to books such as 1968’s The Population Bomb and studies such as the Club of Rome‘s influential and infamous 1972 report The Limits to Growth, the writing was on the wall: the industrial world would soon meet its doom from a combination of demography and natural resource depletion. For audiences in our own “far-future” year of 2020, these ’70s anxieties probably live on most memorably in pieces of pop culture and entertainment. Films such as Soylent Green (1973), based on the 1966 Harry Harrison novel Make Room! Make Room!, depicted a suffocating, overpopulated future where humans resort to a pair of extreme social taboos—mass euthanasia of the elderly and concomitant cannibalism—to simultaneously alleviate both the population and resource crises. Two lesser-known population crisis sci-fi films—No Blade of Grass from 1970 and Z.P.G. (Zero Population Growth) from 1972 (both available as part of the Criterion Channel’s “Seventies Sci-Fi” series during the month of January)—provide a fuller context for the countervailing hopes and fears of a Cold War-era society unsure of its formerly gleaming technological future: would we descend into brutality and barbarism as soon as the worldwide system collapsed? Or would our future require ever more intricate and intimate technocratic control over every aspect of our lives to ameliorate the very conditions that were created by technocratic control?

These “science fiction” tales of population collapse and its ensuing horrors, of course, have a long tradition in the West, specifically in Britain. At (and even before) the dawning of the Industrial Revolution, it became evident to some writers and natural philosophers that increased living standards and agricultural production could lead to longer lifespans, larger families, and associated labor “surplus,” and ultimately a nation (or planet) unable to support its population. In works as widely different as Jonathan Swift’s 1729 satire of the English colonization (and exploitation) of Ireland, A Modest Proposal, and English clergyman and economist Thomas Malthus’s more earnest exploration of the topic, An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798), thought experiments probe the demographic reality staring the British Isles in the face. Even Benjamin Franklin, like many American thinkers who would come after him, looked to colonization, expansion, and permanent settlement in the Americas as a cure for overpopulation in the home countries of white Europeans in his 1755 essay Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind, Peopling of Countries, etc. In all of these works, the problem of overpopulation is quantified as a combination of lack of useful work for laborers, and a lack of food able to feed a swelling population. Both of these factors in tandem lead inevitably to famine and social disorder. Malthus identified the factors that had historically conspired to keep human population under control. Either human factors take effect—economics forces people into accepting smaller families; social conditions lead to shorter, more brutal lives; or wars are waged over resources—or Nature, in the form of disease and famine (both helped along by the associated material conditions that come with overpopulation), does the job. Malthus indicated that human societies could take elective “preventive” measures to head off a population crisis; his clergyman’s mind, of course, wandered to ideas proper to his time and place, such as widespread postponement of marriage or voluntary celibacy. The roots of later 20th century proposed population solutions, such as availability of and education around birth control, statutory limitations on family size, sterilization, or elective (or compulsory) abortion, are present in Malthus’s calls for population checks.

As technology continued to enable larger families and longer lifespans throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries, the primary “positive check” counterforce identified by Malthus—war—itself became more and more mechanized. As the two great World Wars proved, geopolitical pressures would continue to impel empires to deadly conflict, consequently sending their “surplus” populations to trenches and early graves. But with the guarded optimism about a peaceful future for humanity and the efficacy of liberal internationalism that emerged after the end of World War II, the Western world sought, in some small way, to compensate for the population crimes that European colonialism had wrought over the past four centuries: modern agricultural technology was shipped to parts of the world which had seen widespread famine and privation in the past. This so-called “Green Revolution” was simultaneously meant to foster global stability and a political bludgeon, with the capitalist West seeking to impart agricultural “gifts” to nations—Mexico, Brazil, and India, for example—that might act as bulwarks against the spread of Communism. Mass-production agricultural techniques involving genetically-selected breeds of grains soon became widespread in parts of the world that had known mostly small-scale, indigenous methods of subsistence farming throughout their histories. At the same time, public figures in the West began citing these same developing nations’ population explosions as dangers to the balance of the world ecology and economy. As can be seen in the 18th century books mentioned above, bestowing the “gifts of civilization” (and thus building economic dependency) with one hand while taking away autonomy with the other is a tactic as old as colonialism itself.

These events set the stage for the aforementioned “population scare” films of the early ’70s. Paul and Anne (not credited) Erlich’s The Population Bomb exploded onto the scene in 1968, but the book was preceded by dozens upon dozens of postwar science fiction stories and novels that predicted an overpopulated, underfed future. The film No Blade of Grass was itself based on one of these, John Christopher‘s 1956 “cosy catastrophe” novel The Death of Grass, which used elements of the nascent Green Revolution as inspiration for its tipping-point event: a disease that begins wiping out grain species in Asia before migrating to the West. As mentioned, these Cold War sci-fi stories tended to split neatly into two categories: one explored modern society collapsing under the pressures of overpopulation, famine, and war into a worldwide barbarism, while the other posited the weird and brutal changes that an omnipresent global system would need to institute in order to simultaneously preserve both the population and a high standard of living. One unique example of population fiction from this period, Anthony Burgess’s 1962 The Wanting Seed, covers both territories. Burgess’s follow-up to 1962’s A Clockwork Orange is a Swiftian satire examining a society that has instituted futuristic Malthusian measures such as childbirthing limits and societally-encouraged homosexuality to head off the population crunch. But the precarious stability of a world-state patrolled by “the Population Police” collapses into the chaos of widespread cannibalism and, eventually, meaningless state-sponsored wars where casualties are chopped up and put into tins to feed the rest of the population. The implication at the end of Burgess’s novel is that the world will oscillate between these two extreme states, forever.

* * *

No Blade of Grass is hands down the most unrelentingly grim film it has ever been my displeasure to view. It is a nasty little piece of exploitation cinema mixed with weak and muddled agitprop, and it offers the viewer zero opportunity for ironic detachment or campy enjoyment to distract from its gleeful depiction of human brutality and horror. No Blade of Grass takes the old saw of “any society is nine meals from anarchy” to its extreme conclusion: postwar Britain turns from a cozy land full of brave ex-military men, sober scientists, and doughty gentleman farmers into a wild landscape of opportunistic murder, brutal rape, and the abandonment of those perceived to be weak and useless, virtually overnight. The plot of the film closely matches that of the book: a virus is killing all grasses and grains, beginning in Asia, and the protagonists, a family headed by architect and Korean War veteran John Custance (Nigel Davenport), must escape London and make it to Custance’s brother’s farm compound in the north of England before British cities are cordoned and quarantined (and either nerve-gassed or atom-bombed to cull the excess population). Accompanying Custance are his Canadian wife Ann (Jean Wallace), his 16-year-old daughter Mary (Lynn Frederick), and Custance’s young colleague (and Mary’s boyfriend) Roger Burnham (John Hamill), who was working on a cure for the grain disease when collapse occurred. No Blade of Grass begins with a montage of disturbing scenes of pollution and famine (quite reminiscent, in fact, of Godfrey Reggio’s montages of pollution and human misery in Koyaanisqatsi from a decade later) set to the warbling voice of folk singer Roger Whittaker (“When we were younger the earth was green/When we were children the ocean was clean…”) and somehow gets even more over-the-top from there. In flashbacks we see the year that led up to the collapse: Custance and Burnham and other well-off Britons enjoy ample food and drink while the television warns of the coming worldwide famine.

As Custance rounds up his family to save them from the coming chaos, we see the first in a series of “them or us” murders. Custance robs an acquaintance (a firearms dealer) of his weapons and the dealer’s apprentice, a Cockney named Pirrie (Anthony May), shoots his boss and strikes a deal with Custance to take him and his shrill wife Clara (Wendy Richard) to the North with them. As their journey continues, the dangers and brutality multiply as the film hammers the viewer over the head with repeated images of polluted streams, dead livestock, and flash-forwards to some of the more disturbing scenes yet to come. The gross awfulness peaks only a third through the film when Custance’s wife and daughter are both abducted by an Iron Cross-wearing biker gang who proceed to gang rape them; Custance, Pirrie, and Burnham come to the rescue and murder the remaining bikers, with Ann killing her own rapist herself. This scene hangs over the remainder of the film like a cloud of pollution, with both Ann and Mary displaying clear symptoms of post-traumatic stress. In this new barbaric landscape, women become nothing but mere bargaining chips; Pirrie himself cold-bloodedly murders his own wife for acting flirtatious towards Custance and takes Mary for his own as Burnham proves himself useless under the brutal “new law.” Glimmers of the former civilization pop up here and again as Custance becomes reluctant leader to a gang of refugees and tries to instill some of the “spirit of the Battle of Britain” in them. Forestalling racial strife in the group, Custance brokers discipline between a feuding pair of refugees—one white Brit and one Pakistani—by offering the Pakistani man, Surgit, the opportunity to strike his white harasser. Surgit lightly chucks him on the chin and all is soon forgiven. But by the end of the film, the refugee band has been decimated by encounters with both the biker gang (now larger and better-armed) and Custance’s own brother, David. David says he cannot support the refugees; in the Malthusian sense, they would be “surplus population,” unable to be useful even as drudges and serfs on David’s land. Custance then leads a raid on his brother’s compound, his loyalty to his chosen tribe now thicker than blood. Pirrie kills Custance’s brother before dying of a gunshot wound himself and the two groups eventually merge under Custance’s leadership, burying their shared dead under a flag of peace, offering prayers that they all might be forgiven for the awful things they have done. A shallow patina of civilization returns… or perhaps that’s all that “civilization” ever was.

It becomes clear upon watching No Blade of Grass with the benefit of half a century of hindsight that many of the trappings of the “cosy catastrophe” apocalypse so popular among British authors and audiences of the period are in fact festering fears over the crimes of colonialism come back to haunt that “green and pleasant land.” It’s no accident that both John Christopher and No Blade of Grass director Cornel Wilde accentuate the plague’s origins in East Asia. In the aforementioned restaurant flashback scene, the various wealthy and well-off white Britons feasting messily upon their bounty are alternately subtly and overtly racist towards the Chinese once it’s announced they may begin mass culls of their population (and once the rumors of cannibalism begin to spread). Within months, those “civilized” Britons are considering precisely the same measures. Custance picks up his son Davey at a boarding school early in the journey, accompanied by Davey’s school friend Spooks, and the two boys learn the brutal new rules of the road quickly. “Everything’s different now, boys. We have to fight to live,” Custance tells the lads. “Like in the Westerns?” Spooks asks. Later Davey and Spooks somewhat blithely compare the biker gang’s deadly assault on the refugees to “Custer’s Last Stand.” The spectre of white European colonization hovers over No Blade of Grass; a spectre of violent retribution and might-makes-right brought finally to the homeland of empire, with the Custance fratricide marking the culminating crime of survival: a fellow well-off, rationalistic white man—a literal brother—killed off in the faint hopes of survival.

* * *

After the endless misery of No Blade of Grass, the equally grim but essentially satirical far future of Z.P.G. practically felt like an amusement park ride. In Z.P.G.‘s future, the Earth is cloaked in “smog”: pollution has been left unchecked and has killed virtually all plant and animal life on Earth… aside from humans. Overpopulation is the clear culprit of these conditions, and in the opening moments of the film, the “President of the Society” (one of the only characters in the film who wears a 20th-century-style suit; his physical and vocal resemblance to a cross between Peter Sellers’s President Merkin Muffley and real-world Cold War eminence grise Henry Kissinger seems completely intentional) announces that the World Federation Council has decided that all human childbirth must be utterly eliminated for the next 30 years. The death penalty is instituted for any humans who reproduce; offspring will also be terminated. An outcry among the people quickly dies down as Malthusian control measures are put into place. Every home bathroom cubicle is equipped with an abortion device; informers who identify breeders are given additional ration cards; corporations market uncanny robot children to the baby-hungry populace. In this dystopia we’re introduced to the McNeils, Russell (Oliver Reed) and Carol (Geraldine Chaplin), a married couple who work at a historical museum that presents a parade of propaganda meant to remind humanity how they got into this mess in the first place: the overindulgence of their 20th-century ancestors. Taxidermied animals and rare plants in the museum remind citizens of the world of plenty that once existed. Overconsumption is systematically pilloried, and “leaders of industry, [and] political and religious leaders” are depicted at the museum in a “Gallery of Criminals.” At the museum, Russell and Carol portray middle-class citizens of the 20th century West during a live historical reenactment along with another couple, George and Edna Gordon (Don Gordon and Diane Cilento). The now-ancient era’s social and sexual hypocrisy (the two couples are depicted as dissolute and gluttonous 1970s swingers) and seething dysfunction are played for the edification (and amusement) of the museum-goers.

The plot of Z.P.G. focuses on Carol’s desire to have a baby. She balks at the opportunity to get a mechanical “child” at Babyland and video-phones her therapist with the confession that she wants to become pregnant. Despite all her privileges as a member of the societal elite—extra space, plenty of oxygen, and her own vegetable garden—Carol is not happy. The psychiatrist uses futuristic therapy—a near-hypnotic assault of sound and visuals—to reinforce this society’s norms of non-reproduction (the scene also acts as a sharp satire of modern-day psychiatry, subtly expressing a suspicion widespread in the film’s own time that psychiatry is merely another instrument of social control). When Carol eventually does become pregnant and refuses to abort her baby, she is forced to hide from society, to “drop out” into an ancient fallout shelter adjoining her and Russell’s futuristic apartment. Lit by an old-fashioned light bulb and stacked with newspapers whose ancient headlines (“Los Angeles Killer Smog: 90,000 Dead,” “Famine Riots”) remind them of the price they could pay by reproducing, Russell sets Carol up to have the baby. He tells his co-workers that Carol has left him, straining his relationship with George and Edna. After Carol delivers the baby, a boy named Jesse, on her own, she realizes she needs outside help to keep the baby alive. Russell almost gets caught by the authorities while trying to access data files on “premature births”; meanwhile, Carol takes her baby to “Twilight City,” the home for senior citizens, to be treated by her own retired doctor who remembers a time before the anti-birth Edict. The conspiracy eventually envelops George and Edna: when Carol returns to work at the museum with her child wrapped in blankets as if he were one of the toy children at Babyland, Edna’s envy eventually consumes both couples in an eerie reflection of their museum historical reenactments of petty 20th-century bourgeois jealousies. As a public “execution chamber” suffocation dome descends upon the McNeil family, Russell—who has spent the film demonstrating his ability to survive both outside the bounds and between the cracks of the giant metropolis—springs into action, digging into a prearranged escape tunnel and leading the family to sanctuary in one of the few natural reserves left—which also happens to be the home of some decommissioned nuclear warheads from the old world.

Z.P.G.‘s satire is quite often broad and in spots derivative. Throughout the film one can see reflections of a bunch of very different dystopian narratives (Brave New World, the novel Logan’s Run, THX 1138, Beneath the Planet of the Apes). But there is something about how the film centers the very concept of “history” that is fascinating. The choice to make the central couple of this film historians—historians who are possibly more aware than anyone else in their society that overpopulation and overconsumption led to this grim and disturbing future—and to have those very same historians nevertheless choose to reproduce, speaks to just how much (or how little) people are willing to make lifestyle changes when their own right to reproduce is threatened. Because concerns over overpopulation most often involved the West’s fear of a perceived population explosion in the developing world, arguments for population control took on the complexion of yet more white supremacy, neo-colonialism, and ultimately eugenics. (Malthus himself believed that smarter breeding could create a better quality population, and Malthus’s writing was a substantial influence on Darwin’s theory of evolution). It was widely believed that the standard of living enjoyed by the Western bourgeoisie in the 1970s—gas-guzzling automobiles, jets to hundreds of different cities worldwide, fine dining, designer clothing, home ownership, all the comforts and luxuries seen in Z.P.G.‘s state museum and in No Blade of Grass‘s pre-collapse world—would simply not be possible if the entire world were allowed to enjoy the same amenities. Like Malthus’s warnings about a huge unemployed underclass or Benjamin Franklin’s warnings about allowing non-Anglo-Saxons into colonial America, the population crisis only becomes a crisis per se when populations deemed undesirable—either because of their race or their class—are perceived to be overbreeding.

* * *

We unequivocally support the contention that a brake imposed on world demographic and economic growth spirals must not lead to a freezing of the status quo of economic development of the world’s nations.

If such a proposal were advanced by the rich nations, it would be taken as a final act of neocolonialism. The achievement of a harmonious state of global economic, social, and ecological equilibrium must be a joint venture based on joint conviction, with benefits for all. The greatest leadership will be demanded from the economically developed countries, for the first step toward such a goal would be for them to encourage a deceleration in the growth of their own material output while, at the same time, assisting the developing nations in their efforts to advance their economies more rapidly.

—Point 9 from the Executive Committee’s Commentary in The Limits to Growth: A Report for the Club of Rome’s Project on the Predicament of Mankind (1972)

In the same year that The Population Bomb was released, a group of academics, political scientists, economists, and computer scientists, gathered by Italian industrialist Aurelio Peccei, met at the Renaissance-era Accademia dei Lincei in Rome to discuss “the present and future predicament of man.” Four years later, in the same year that Z.P.G. was released, their report hit the bookshelves of the world. The Limits to Growth utilized then-cutting edge computer modeling as well as expertise from the fields of economics, geopolitics, agricultural and biological sciences, computer science, and sociology to predict what kind of global circumstances could be expected from then-current trends in demography and resource depletion. The conclusions and prescriptions arrived at were welcomed by few and heralded by even fewer. While The Limits to Growth used standard Malthusian arguments and science to explain the “world problematique,” their conclusions did not center the popular options of encouraging birth control or other methods of contraception, which they saw as merely preventing an inevitable end-point that would result from an over-polluted world. In summary, it was not population that was destroying the Earth, but overconsumption. Every computer model that used a Malthusian framework, even with mitigating factors like birth control, simply shifted the “end dates” for a global lifestyle of Western consumption: “The basic behavior mode of the world system is exponential growth of population and capital, followed by collapse.” That inclusion of “capital” in the concept of “growth” is absolutely crucial. The Club of Rome’s solutions asked much more of the world than education or vague “lifestyle changes.” The core of the solution was convincing the peoples of the Western world to make real, tangible social and economic changes to avert both population disaster, resource exhaustion, and environmental collapse. The Club asked the rich nations of the world to share freely with their poorer brethren, to cease capitalism’s bottomless need for economic growth. In dedicating the First World to a concerted program of degrowth, the resulting bounty would then be shared with the Third World. While spurious accusations such as “world government” and “Communist control” were flung far and wide at the Club of Rome after the publication of The Limits to Growth, the authors’ conclusions were eminently reasonable and, in 1972, quite doable.

Our predicament in 2020 is slightly different from those depicted in both the films examined here, as well as the computer models used by the Club of Rome. Certainly, pollution has led to our current predicament, and nothing as anodyne as the mere dry ice “smog” of Z.P.G., of course. (At one point in No Blade of Glass, Davey and Spooks, the two young schoolboys, eerily ponder climate change in the dueling possibilities of either global warming or nuclear winter as their world falls apart.) These films and the Club of Rome’s report forewarned and forearmed us nearly half a century ago with the inconvenient facts behind the irrational historical behavior of homo economicus. Not only have those facts and warnings gone unheeded, but they have been consistently and vehemently denied since the 1970s by the same people who profit from the world’s slowly baking climate. But the essential idea of degrowth as a possible solution to our global problems, of slowing the hamster wheel of endless, cancerous capitalistic churn, remains in the 21st century, even if our runway for change is much much shorter now. Whether it’s John Custance’s brutal Hobbesian British countryside or the McNeils’ radioactive Garden of Eden, each of the futures in No Blade of Glass and Z.P.G. depict the near impossibility of gently stabilizing a mechanized society that does not swerve from its obsession with eternal profit. “This supreme effort is a challenge for our generation,” said The Limits to Growth. “It cannot be passed on to the next… We are confident that our generation will accept this challenge if we understand the tragic consequences that inaction may bring.” We live in the midst of these tragic consequences, and will live in them for the rest of our lives. To ensure that our future never slips into either of the extremes depicted in these films—lives that are either nasty, brutish, and short or regulated by a dehumanizing panopticon—we will need to take up the difficult mantle refused by our forebears and the fools of our endangered present.

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.