In 2020, King Arthur Pendragon is thirty-five years old and in that time it has seen five editions, the last of which–apart from some minor updates, appeared in 2008. In that time, the award-winning King Arthur Pendragon—still the preeminent roleplaying game that explores Arthurian legend, has not received a quick-start, a means of introducing the setting, the mechanics, and the style of play. That changes with The Adventure of the Great Hunt, the quick-start designed to introduce Pendragon, Sixth Edition released  to observe the third anniversary of its designer’s—the late Greg Stafford—passing. As with any good quick-start, it is designed to introduce and explain the core rules, provide a scenario which can be played in a single session, and the pre-generated characters necessary to play. The new version of Pendragon is intended as Greg Stafford’s ‘ultimate’ edition and whilst the style and play of the game remains the same, there are a number of modifications to the rules—as evidenced in The Adventure of the Great Hunt.

For anyone coming to The Adventure of the Great Hunt via King Arthur Pendragon, rest assured that the fundamentals have not changed. Players take the role of knights seeking Glory and honour during the reign of Arthur, King of the Britons; a knight will primarily be defined by his physical attributes—there is no equivalent of the Intelligence stat in Pendragon; a knight’s personality will be defined by thirteen pairs of opposed Traits, such as Chaste and Lustful, Just and Arbitrary, and Valorous and Cowardly, which can guide his decisions, help him pass (or fail) a moral test, influence others, and so on; a knight may be swayed by his Passions, such Love (Family) and Hate (Saxons); and the mechanics still involve the rolling of a twenty-sided die.

The rules to The Adventure of the Great Hunt and thus the basics of Pendragon, Sixth Edition—whether coming to Pendragon for the first time or having played previous versions of King Arthur Pendragon, are explained with no little efficiency. It covers the core mechanic—rolling under a skill, attribute, trait, or passion, on a twenty-sided die, with the critical success being equal to the exact value of the target, and a natural twenty being a critical failure. It also explains how skills, traits, and passions can be rated above twenty. Traits and Passions of sixteen or more, are of course, something that a Knight is considered to be Famous for, whilst he is Exalted if they are twenty or more. The Adventure of the Great Hunt explains the results when Passions are invoked, typically an Inspired +5 bonus to a skill on a success and an Impassioned +10 bonus on a critical success, but a loss of a point of the Passion on a fumble as well as several days of melancholia—or oven madness, depending upon if the Passion is Famous or Exalted. Mechanically, Passions are a great way of Knight gaining a bonus to his next actions, but they are simply great roleplaying hooks too.

Combat is resolved using opposed rolls against the combatants’ skills, for example sword versus sword or spear versus axe. To make a successful attack, a knight’s player must successively roll under his attack skill and roll better than the opposing knight’s player. It is possible for both players to make successful rolls, in which case the player with the lower result has achieved a partial success and although his knight does not inflict damage, he can use his shield or weapon to help block damage from the incoming attack. The combat system allows for dropped or broken weapons on a Fumble, for a Knight to be knocked down if the base damage—before armour deducts any points—inflicted in greater than his Size attribute, and Major Wounds to be suffered if the damage inflicted after armour stops it is greater than a Knight’s Constitution. Understandably, given the historical period in which Pendragon, Sixth Edition is set, Major Wounds are difficult to recover from. So woe betide any Knight who suffers a critical strike in combat—the base damage for most weapons is four six-sided dice, and critical strikes add another four six-sided dice!

As well as healing, mounted combat, and so on, the last thing that The Adventure of the Great Hunt covers is the squire who a Knight is responsible for training in arms, courtesy, and the other skills necessary to bear the title of knight. In return, the squire is a servant for his Knight and may conduct certain actions in combat, such as rendering First Aid, and bringing a new weapon or a fresh horse should a Knight need them.

The scenario in the quick-start is ‘The Adventure of the Great Hunt’. Set during the Conquest Period of Arthur’s reign, it can be played in one long session or two shorter ones, and is suitable to be run as a one-shot or as part of a campaign. If part of a campaign, the Player-Knights will gain Experience Checks for critical successes, as well as Glory for their actions. If run as a one-shot, the Player-Knights will simply gain Glory, and the Knight who gains the most Glory over the course of the adventure will be the one best remembered in the tales told about its events in the winter months to come.

As the title suggests, ‘The Adventure of the Great Hunt’ involves a great deal of hunting—of creatures great and small, Courtesy, Orate, travel, one of their unmarried sisters, and logistics! The scenario comes with a built-in time limit and it is entirely possible for the players to scupper their Knights’ efforts if they are too inefficient in terms of where they decide to travel to. It begins with the Player-knights as guests at the hunting lodge of Sir Servause le Breuse, a veteran knight and renowned hunter, when suddenly their discussions are interrupted by the arrival of Sir Ector, the foster-father of King Arthur Pendragon! He seeks the aid of Sir Servause le Breuse in either slaying or driving off a fearsome dragon which is ravaging some of his holdings in Norgales (North Wales). There is the chance here that one or more of the Player-knights will valorously, if not prudently, decide to rush off and attempt to slay the dragon himself—or help Sir Ector do so. Fortunately, for more Player-Knights, their host has a plan, and this forms the meat of the scenario.

The plan requires the sweet perfume that is the belch of the panther!

Ordinarily, every other beast in Christendom—and likely beyond, finds this scent to be attractive and fragrant, but not the dragon. To such a fearsome creature, it is a stench, a small so strong it will drive the beast into a torpor, or even deep into the earth. To gain such an eruction, the Player-Knights not only have to acquire a Panther, but also such beasts whose special qualities are so efficacious to a Panther’s digestion that it will emit the richest and most pleasing of belches, and so have the greatest effect upon the dragon! So begins the great hunt!

‘The Adventure of the Great Hunt’ will see the Player-Knights travel back and forth across England to the various locations where Sir Servause le Breuse suggests the desired beasts may be found. Many times, this will see the Player-Knights pursuing various beasts, such as cranes in the fens of Anglia or stags in the nearby forest, on day-long hunts using the given hunting and pursuit rules. However, not every creature can be obtained with as simple a task as a hunt, and the Player-knights have opportunities too to persuade the great and the good of the land to lend them their aid and their beasts. There is even a hunt which will not involve the Player-Knights at all! Ultimately—and if they are in time, the Player-Knights will have assembled their menagerie, driven it Norgales, fed the panther, satisfied its appetite, and have eruct the sweetest of belches imaginable!

Of course, this is all up against the time limit and the Player-Knights may not necessarily have acquired sufficient beasts and not fed them to the panther in time—and so, there is the chance that they will fail. There is also the chance that Sir Ector may not wait around long enough for them to arrive and ride out in one last valorous attempt to drive off the dragon from his lands… So as much as the Player-knights to be successful in obtaining the necessary animals, they really do need to effectively manage their time.

In addition to the stats for the NPCs and various beasts, The Adventure of the Great Hunt comes with six pre-generated Player-Knights. They include an adventuring knight, a champion knight, a courtier knight, a hardy knight, a hunter knight, and a religious knight. The hunter knight will be the most obviously useful, but all of the knights will have a chance to shine in the adventure. The adventure includes a map showing the locations of where the various creatures may be found and the travel distances between each location. The Game Master will not only want to provide the sample Player-Knights for her players, but also some tokens to track the Player-Knights and their various quarries on the many hunts they have to undertake, and probably a calendar to track how many days the Player-Knights have spent on their tasks so far and how many they have left.

As well appointed as The Adventure of the Great Hunt is, there are one or two issues with it. It would have been nice if the pre-generated Player-Knights had been given a single sheet each and perhaps an explanation as to what makes them stand out. That would have been useful for players new to Pendragon rather than just Pendragon, Sixth Edition. Also a list of names, both male and female as the Knights can be ‘Sirs’ and ‘Dames’, would have been useful for ease of play—especially if The Adventure of the Great Hunt is run as a convention adventure, for not only do the players have to name their Knights, they also have to name their squires. Another issue is with the map. It is not obvious where the Player-Knights start. Reading through The Adventure of the Great Hunt, it becomes clear that it is the site of the stag hunt, but it is not clear from the text.

Physically, The Adventure of the Great Hunt is well presented. It is neat and tidy, and easy to read. The illustrations are suitably medieval in style and the monkish marginalia adds to the PDF’s illuminated style.

As has been stated before, King Arthur Pendragon is Greg Stafford’s masterpiece, design classic, a master class in using mechanics to both model its Arthurian genre and to encourage its players to roleplay its knightly character types, in a setting that was a labour of love upon the part of the author. The Adventure of the Great Hunt is a great introduction to knightly adventuring in the time of King Arthur, efficiently explaining the rules and key mechanics before presenting the players and their Knights with a grand challenge, and constantly testing them throughout using a variety of skills, traits, and passions.

The Symbaroum Game Master’s Guide is a supplement for Symbaroum, the near-Dark Ages fantasy roleplaying game from Swedish publisher, Free League Publishing, distributed in English by Modiphius Entertainment. The supplement does two things. First, it collects and collates material from previous titles for the Symbaroum roleplaying line, but not only that, builds upon them. The titles include the Advanced Player’s Guide and Monster Codex, as well as Thistle Hold – Wrath Of The Warden, Karvosti – The Witch Hammer, and Yndaros – The Darkest Star. Second, it builds on and expands on this content as well as adding new content of its own. This has a number of consequences. First, in replicating content from previous titles, there is a sense of redundancy to it, more so if the Game Master already has those supplements. Second though, in collating the content, it brings it all together in one place for easy reference, and that does mean it is useful. More so, of course, if the Game Master lacks one or more of the earlier volumes it draws from

Intended as the capstone to the core books for Symbaroum, the Game Master’s Guide essentially explores the adventures, challenges, and rewards to be had in the setting, giving advice and practical suggestions  that the Game Master can bring to her game. It is divided into three sections, each of which is further divided into chapters. The first section, ‘The Adventure’ essentially covers the design and creation of game worlds, chronicles, and landscapes—the latter better known as scenarios or adventures. It begins with the primary building blocks such as theme—most obviously Symbaroum’s ‘struggle between civilisation and nature’, stories, and tone, before adding secondary building blocks such as history, nature, cultures, population, and more. It guides the Game Master through the process, and then it does the same for chronicles—better known as campaigns, from establishing a chronicle’s theme and the importance of the first adventure through the course of the chronicle to its climax. Adventure landscapes are treated in the same fashion. The opening chapters of the Game Master’s Guide narrow their focus again and again, going from an overview down to individual scenarios, throughout referencing various scenarios for Symbaroum, as well as the Crown of Thorns campaign begun with Thistle Hold – Wrath Of The Warden.

However, these opening chapters are not overly engaging, particularly early on when examining the base building blocks. The references, especially to roleplaying games from Free League Publishing for other than Symbaroum feel somewhat superfluous and the chapters feel overwritten. This is not to say that the advice is poor, but the writing becomes more engaging and to the point when subject being covered is more specific, for example, when discussing the concept of Troupe Play in Symbaroum, in which the players take the roles of more than one character, suggesting the roles that the players might take in particular organisations. Thus, for a Barbarian village, the first set of Player Characters would be the chieftain’s council, the second his guard warriors, and the third, common villagers. ‘Adventures for Heroes’ gives advice on presenting scenarios and encounters for experienced Player Characters, not just adjusting the enemy’s numbers, but also adapting the enemy’s tactics and altering the terrain. It also suggests weaknesses against particular character types, not necessarily to defeat them, but rather to present such characters with challenges. So for the giant berserker with a two-handed weapon, the Game Master might counter with ranged enemies, monsters which bind or hinder movement, and enemies using mystical powers.

More specific to the setting is ‘Under, Above, and Beyond’ which explore the realms beyond Ambria and Davokar—the Underworld, the Yonderworld, and the Spirit World. It covers what might be found in each as well as encounter tables, adventure suggestions, and more. None of this is intended to be definitive, but more a guide for the Game Master for the few occasions when her Player Characters have to visit or traverse such realms. Again, more specific, ‘Goal Oriented Roleplaying’ presents objectives that the Player Characters might want to achieve, such as a conquest or staging an expedition, and examines each through five phases, the problems and challenges that they might face. Here the Game Master’s Guide most obviously draws from, and builds on, content from Thistle Hold – Wrath of the Warden and the Symbaroum Monster Codex, so is much more a case of developing content further along with the straight reprint and presenting it in the one location.

The practicality of the second section, ‘Challenges’, means that the focus in the Game Master’s Guide strengthens further. ‘Advanced Traps’ is useful for adding to the tombs and treasure vaults know to be located in the Davokar Forest and comes with some rather nice illustrations reminiscent of Grimtooth’s Traps, whilst ‘Pitched Battle’ enables the Player Characters to take to the battlefield, whether as combatants or commanders. It is an abstract system which calculates battle odds via the ratio between attackers and defenders, adjusting for factor such as resistance levels and battle location, to determine the outcome and casualties suffered. It also allows for random events, such as waking amongst the dead or being saved by allies, whilst an adjacent article provides a good examination of the nature of Ambrian Wars. This covers the Great War, the invasion of Ambria, and the battles of Karo’s Fen, as well as discussing the tactics used by the Dark Lords, the Ambrians, and the Barbarian clans. However, what the ‘Pitched Battle’ rules lack are an example or two, not an issue with the ‘Managing a Domain’, which puts the Player Characters in charge of a small fiefdom, from a fortified farm to a small market town. It includes events and improvements which can occur over the course of a year, as well as ways to protect the domain should it come under attack.

Equally as well supported by examples are the rules for ‘Social Challenges’, which cover Player Character scheming as well as tracking the relationships between them and Symbaroum’s various factions. However, the Player Characters’ favour with any one of the factions will wax and wane, so it is not merely a case of doing a deed or conducting a task to gain a faction’s support, but doing more deeds and conducting further tasks to maintain that support.

Travelling through and exploring the Davokar forest comes under the spotlight in first ‘Expeditions in Davokar’, followed by ‘Exploring Ruins’. These are perhaps the most familiar chapters, covering content previously presented in Symbar – Mother of Darkness. ‘Expeditions in Davokar’ covers the dangers and travails of moving through the forest—planning, misfortunes, companions, treasures to be found, reasons to delve underneath the canopy, and more. ‘Exploring Ruins’ provides a set of tables for the Game Master to create various that might be found in the forest. The penultimate chapter in the section, ‘Ceremonies’, expanded from The Darkest Star, covers powerful rituals the casting of which comes with significant corruption and side effects, and which are outlawed by the Ambrians. Numerous examples are given, but for the most part, these remain the province of NPCs and likely events which the Player Characters will either have to investigate, prevent, or interrupt. Lastly, ‘Legendary Creatures’ draws on the Monster Codex to present legendary, climatic challenges for the Player Characters, such as Sakofal the Slaughterer, legendary dragon, recently awoken and emaciated, and very, very hungry…

The third section, ‘Rewards’, is the last and shortest, consisting of two chapters. The first, ‘Enhanced Rewards’ covers everything from thalers to artefacts as rewards, but there are some non-traditional options too, including ‘burdens as rewards’. The idea being that the Player Characters will have faced great, probably stressful challenges and dangers, and the likelihood is that they will come away hurt in body or mind, if not both. This is an interesting way of developing a Player Character, plus the ‘burden’ grants both roleplaying opportunities and Experience Points! The second, ‘Great Artifacts’ gives almost unique devices of a magical nature, such as Bunefor’s Death Mask, which enables the wearer to find gaps in an enemy’s armour as well emit a piercing scream under certain circumstances or Desdemorgos’ Iscohedron, a device which protects the user against environmental corruption, but which also allows the user to draw corruption and use it as an attack! Each of the artefacts comes an adventure hook ready to develop.

Physically, the Game Master’s Guide is up to the standard you would expect of the Symbaroum line. It needs a tighter edit perhaps in the earlier chapters, but is otherwise well written and the artwork is up to the usual standard.

As much as the Game Master’s Guide reprints content from previous titles, it also expands upon them and it collates them, all in one handy reference tome. In doing so, it supports whatever type of campaign set in Symbaroum the Game Master is running, whether that is the Crown of Thorns or one of her own devising, with advice on set-up and theme, handling traps and ruins, Player Character goals and rewards, and really, quite a lot more. It goes further though, in offering ideas and suggestions for running campaigns in Symbaroum other than that presented in the Crown of Thorns campaign. The chapter on troupe play lends itself to roleplaying and adventure opportunities aplenty, as does managing a domain, so that a campaign could be location-based rather than travelling hither and thither.

However, as good as much of the content in the Game Master’s Guide is, it is difficult to describe as a must-have title—and less so if the Game Master already has many of the other supplements and titles for Symbroum. As much as the content has been expanded upon, it is simply a case of being less useful if the Game Master already has it. On the other hand, it does collate as well as expand that content and that means that it is useful reference tome to have alongside the core rulebook instead of having to leaf through numerous supplements. So for the Game Master new to Symbaroum, the Game Master’s Guide is a worthy purchase, but for the veteran Symbaroum Game Master, the Game Master’s Guide is worth considering before making the purchase.

Sinking the Stercorarius: The Salty Funnel Level 0 Adventure is a ‘Character Funnel’ for use with Dungeon Crawl Classics Role Playing Game and thus features one of the feature elements of  both Mutant Crawl Classics Roleplaying Game and Dungeon Crawl Classics Role Playing Game. The set-up for this requires each player 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 chosen Class.

Published by 2 Old Guys Games, following a successful Kickstarter campaign, Sinking the Stercorarius dumps the Player Characters aboard what turns out to be a sinking ship—whether as criminals, slaves, members of the elite, or simply day-trippers—and has them fight their way on the deck just as something tentacular takes advantage of the ship going down.

The adventure is the first to use the publisher’s ‘Multi-Adventure-Theme System’. What this does is present different themes or ways in which the set-up for adventure can be played. In the case of Sinking the Stercorarius, these themes explain why the Player Characters are aboard the ship when she springs a leak. Four are given. They are in turn, prisoners, rushed through a trial, found guilty, and now bound for the gaol on the island of Prison Rock; as slaves in the hold; as pompous members of the elite aboard a jolly cruise; or as day-trippers getting an ‘Authentic Pirate Experience’. To support the first three of these set-ups, but not the fourth as for that, the Player Characters could be of any background, Sinking the Stercorarius includes three Occupation tables. One for Prisoners, one for Slaves, and one for the Elite.

Whichever of the themes—singly or combined, which is also discussed as an option—the set-up for Sinking the Stercorarius finds the Player Characters aboard the ship as it springs a leak and begins to sink. The Player Characters must find their way out of their confinement and fight their way onto the deck, and then just as quickly, off the ship before they are dragged into the depths by the undertow! As this happens, the water swirls around the Player Characters, something tentacular moves between them, attacking some, grabbing others, and dragging them away. When the Player Characters find themselves in the freezing seas, they spot a strangely isolated, conical island of black rock within swimming or rowing distance.

What the Player Characters find atop the cone is a crater, at the heart of which is a strange metal tower-like structure, bent, even crumpled. Equally as strange are the armoured and betentacled, two-armed and four-armed figures moving stiffly about the crater and the structure. Can the Player Characters find out what the structure is and who the figures are—and perhaps find a way of the island?

Designed to be played between one and two sessions, Sinking the Stercorarius is decently supported. Besides the Occupation tables, it comes with maps of both the Stercorarius and the strange structure, details of three new weapons, five alien and aquatic monsters, plus handouts. There is also some decent staging advice for the Judge as well as playtest notes throughout which make for an enjoyable read.

Physically, Sinking the Stercorarius is reasonably well presented. The new artwork is decent, as are the maps, although those of the strange structure on the island are really too small to be used with any ease. It is a pity that the two pages left ‘intentionally blank’ could not have been put to better use. The scenario could have done with another edit as well.

Now whilst Sinking the Stercorarius is adequately playable, it unfortunately suffers from a number of problems. The most obvious one is the inclusion of the ‘Player Characters as slaves’ theme, which some playing groups are going to find objectionable, especially since they begin play as slaves in the hold of a ship. It should be made clear that the Player Characters are not Africans and that the adventure does not take place in the real world—the authors have in no way been that insensitive. However, the difficult nature of this theme and its set-up could at least have been addressed by the authors and the Judge been given some advice about handling what could be a difficult theme for some. Or at least told to avoid that theme if she knows that her players would find it objectionable and insensitive.

Another problem is that the authors commit the cardinal sin of not explaining what the scenario is about. There is no explanation of the plot anywhere and essentially, the Judge only learns what Sinking the Stercorarius is about and what its plot twist is by reading through the scenario herself. On a first read through at least, it feels as if the authors are pulling the same bait and switch on the Judge as much as they are on the players.

That bait and switch is the fact that Sinking the Stercorarius is not salty, is not nautical, and is definitely not piratical. It might begin on a ship, but since the ship sinks, the only nautical things that the Player Characters get to do is cling to some flotsam, swim to ‘safety’, and possibly row a dinghy. They do not get to sail a ship, they do not meet any pirates, and they do not get to be abused by ‘salty’ language. In fact, the only ‘salty’ language that the Player Characters might be abused by is their own.

What the bait and switch involves is a crash-landed alien spaceship—the strange, metal tower-like structure, bent and crumpled, and this will become immediately obvious as soon as one of the handouts is shown to the players. The majority of the new monsters are aliens and the new weapons are basically, ray guns. In essence then, Sinking the Stercorarius: The Salty Funnel Level 0 Adventure starts at sea, goes to a mysterious island—and completely ignores the possibilities that exploring a mysterious island, especially in what is supposed to be nautical adventure—might provide an adventure with, and presents the Player Characters with a miniature version of S3 Expedition to the Barrier Peaks, the classic Science Fiction adventure for Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, First Edition.

Sinking the Stercorarius: The Salty Funnel Level 0 Adventure is a ‘Character Funnel’ and undeniably so, but equally undeniable is the fact that Sinking the Stercorarius is not salty. Obviously, it does not taste of salt nor is it preserved with salt (I checked); equally, it is neither down-to-earth or coarse in terms of its language or humour; and nor is tough or aggressive, or angry or resentful in terms of its attitude. Ultimately, without the salt, whether that is in terms of the tone or the nautical theme, Stercorarius: The Salty Funnel Level 0 Adventure is a bland and uninspiring adventure.

 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: Cages of Light & Lenses - A Call of Cthulhu adventure of lost film

Publisher: Chaosium, Inc.
Author: Alison Cybe

Setting: 1980s New York glamour & Soviet-era Bulgaria grime

Product: Scenario
What You Get: Twenty-seven page, 1.18 MB Full Colour PDF
Elevator Pitch: Sometimes lost media should stay lost.
Plot Hook:  A collector wants the only copy of a once-thought lost Silent Era film; guess who he hires to get it? Plot Support: One creature, four Mythos entities, two maps, and five pre-generated Investigators.Production Values: Tidy layout, plain maps, and decent illustrations, but needs an edit.

Pros
# Engaging introduction and theme
# Potential convention scenario
# Solid climax
# Room for development
# Scope to play up the Capitalist/Communist culture clash

Cons
# Needs an edit
# No stats for the lost film as a tome# Antagonists underutilised
# Missed opportunity for Capitalist/Communist culture clash 
# Missed opportunity for Committee for State Security involvement# How does the bear get out of the basement?

Conclusion
# Engaging introduction and theme
# Underdeveloped, but plenty of Cold War-horror potential 
# The King in Yellow, but in reverse?

Harper’s Tale: A Forest Adventure Path for 5e is a campaign for Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition. Funded via Indigogo and published by Saturday Morning Scenarios, it is an adventure path of ten connected scenarios which will take the Player Characters from First Level to Tenth Level and is designed for players as young as ten. This is reflected in the name of publisher—Saturday Morning Scenarios—for the fantasy of Harper’s Tale is very American, being that of Saturday morning cartoons, so light in tone and with elements that are simply cute, such as Sir Cheddar, a magic-wielding Corgi, and Fred, a rainbow-maned, purple Allicorn—both of whom are likely to join or aid the Player Characters, but nevertheless still with elements of peril. However, its fantasy is neither grim nor dark, so it is thus suitable for a younger audience. Some older or more mature players may perhaps find its fantasy too light in tone, but that tone also means that Harper’s Tale is suitable for a family audience.

Notably, Harper’s Tale is the final result of a successful fundraiser for Friends of Kids with Cancer. This was because the publisher’s youngest daughter, Harper, was diagnosed with leukaemia. Fortunately, Harper is in remission, and in response to the support that she and her family received during her treatment, she and her father decided to devise a story for a Dungeon & Dragons adventure book, which once she was discharged, was developed into a proper outline. This is because Harper is a gamer and enjoys creating stories. Her father took the outline and together with a team made up of industry luminaries, including Jeff Stevens, Ben McFarland, Brian Suskind, Hannah Rose, Ashley Warren, Kienna Shaw, Bill Barnett,  MT Black, Donathin Frye, Anna Landin, Gwendy B, Anna Meyer, Dyson Logos, Jessica Ross, Kobold Press, Petersen Games, and more, has brought it to print.

The campaign begins in the village of Grove. Whether the Player Characters are merely passing through, visiting, or returning home, they discover a farming community devoid of its inhabitants, its animals run amok, its crops in danger of rotting before they are harvested. Eventually they will find two villagers, the sisters Rose and Grace, who can tell them what happened. The other villagers have all fallen asleep and cannot be woken, the sisters caring for them as best they can. Further investigation as the source of the illness points to the activities of outsiders and a previously unknown series of caves underneath Grove. Here, the Player Characters will encounter the first of a number of entertaining NPCs whom the Dungeon Master will undoubtedly enjoy roleplaying. Most obviously, this will be Sir Cheddar, the magic-using Corgi who will join the party on its adventures, but they also include a Goblin hermit, an out-of-his-depth Wizard, and more…

From the caves, the clues lead onto a number of other settlements which also seem to have been beset by strange illnesses and outbreaks of odd behaviour. The highlight of these is the seventh adventure, ‘The problem with Prattle Creek’, where amidst a rash of sickness and bizarre happenings, the town is being visited by Professor Piewright and his travelling medicine show with promises of a cure for that ails the townsfolk. Amidst the oddness, a murder occurs and in the ensuing investigation, the Player Characters will discover further links to the overarching plot. Of course, the ‘Snake Oil Salesman’ nature of the encounter is pure Americana, enforcing the ‘home on the range’ feel of earlier encounters, whilst giving the Dungeon Master a fun NPC to portray in the form of Professor Piewright.

For the most part, the encounters and scenarios in Harper’s Tale are rural or forest-based in nature, barring the larger cave system near the campaign’s start, there is very little in the way of traditional dungeons—and what there are, is not necessarily very interesting. Thankfully, the other encounters make up for it, much of the middle part of the campaign involving the Player Characters’ attempt to gain an audience with Deng, the arch-druid of the forest who might have a cure to the rash of poisonings and illnesses flooding the region—not once, but twice, and then going out to find the necessary ingredients. There is even a touch of the Lovecraftian here as the search for ingredients takes the Player Characters into the forests within the Dreamlands and back again, where they will encounter both Zoogs and Cats of Ulthar. In general, the encounters and scenarios will reward the player and their characters for clever play and roleplaying than the use of brute force, the encounters and scenarios themselves primarily requiring exploration and investigation.

Each of the ten encounters is presented in a similar format. Each gives a synopsis of the adventure, hooks to the adventure if not played as part of the campaign, a description of the locations in the adventure plus any events which will happen, and the conclusion. Each is followed by an appendix containing all of the stats for the scenario’s monsters and NPCs, plus any magic items. In general, they are well organised, and the hooks for running them separately decent enough. However, the scenarios do all work together and even with a coterie of different authors, the publisher has done a good job of keeping the tone and feel generally consistent throughout.

Harper’s Tale comes with eight pre-generated adventurers. They include a Faunkind Fighter, a Lion Paladin, a Tielfling Cleric, a Firbolg Druid, a Panthaka Monk, a Human Barbarian, a Gnome Wizard, and a Halfling Bard. This is a mix of traditional and non-traditional races, some of which may not be necessarily familiar to Dungeon & Dragons players. All eight are presented with a full colour illustration and their character sheets are tidily presented and easy-to-read. However, of the octet, given the campaign’s forest setting, it seems odd that a Ranger is omitted, but more problematically, the campaign includes challenges involving the use of thieves’ tool, and so the inclusion of a Rogue would have been more useful. Perhaps another useful addition for the Dungeon Master would have been some advice on creating the type of Player Characters presented in this set of pre-generated ones, especially as fall outside of the scope of the standard options in Dungeons & Dragons.

Physically, Harper’s Tale is well presented and has a bright and breezy look to it. The artwork in particular, tends towards more vibrant or pastel colours, which further enhances the tone of the campaign. However, in places, the book needs another edit and could really have done with a campaign overview before diving into the first episode. The background and story to the campaign is simple enough, but the Dungeon Master should not really be discovering the backstory as she reads through the campaign. There are also a couple of issues with the maps. One is that some of them are not quite as well presented as they could have been, another is that the regional map, showing the location for all ten of the campaign’s episodes is decidedly bland. The campaign could also have done with more maps, in particular those of individual buildings and their immediate surrounds, to help the Dungeon Master bring them to life during play.

Harper’s Tale is not perfect, it is underdeveloped in places and slightly unpolished in others, such the Dungeon Master will need to do more preparation than the campaign really needs. Those, however, are issues with the production rather than the core story and its adventures, which are light and accessible, and supported by some entertaining NPCs. Overall, Harper’s Tale is an enjoyably light, straightforward campaign for Dungeons & Dragons well suited for a younger or a family audience. 

October 10th marks the second anniversary of Greg Stafford’s passing. To both commemorate that date and celebrate Greg’s contribution to the roleplaying hobby, today’s review from Reviews from R’lyeh is of The Smoking Ruin & Other Stories, the first anthology of scenarios for RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha.

—oOo—

The Smoking Ruin & Other Stories is an anthology of ready-to-play scenarios for RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha, the roleplaying game set in Greg Stafford’s mystical world of gods, faith, magic, cults, and great heroes that is Glorantha. Published by Chaosium, Inc., it presents three scenarios and source material that will take the Player Characters west of Sartar and into the South Wilds of the Dragonspine Mountains where they will discover ancient ruins and encounter ancient legends, rabid troll spirits, creatures out of the past, dinosaurs and Dragonnewts, Beastmen of every stripe and colour, priests and politicians, and more. It is designed for beginning Player Characters, but can easily be run using more experienced Player Characters, and that includes Player Characters who have played through ‘The Broken Tower’ from the RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha – QuickStart Rules and Adventure and the RuneQuest Gamemaster Screen Pack—and that includes the roleplaying game’s signature beginning Player Characters from RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha – QuickStart Rules and RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha core book. This is because the first adventure in the anthology—‘The Smoking Ruins’ begins and ends at Clearwine Fort, which if the players have played through the scenarios from the ‘RuneQuest Gamemaster Adventures’ book from the RuneQuest Gamemaster Screen Pack, their characters should have visited and forged links with, and further, the events of The Smoking Ruin & Other Stories take place after those of the scenarios in the ‘RuneQuest Gamemaster Adventures’ book.

To play through The Smoking Ruin & Other Stories, the Game Master will need access to RuneQuest – Glorantha Bestiary as it provides more details of the foes and NPCs that the Player Characters are very likely to meet as they adventure through the three scenarios in the anthology. Ideally, the Game Master will want the ‘RuneQuest Gamemaster Adventures’ book from the RuneQuest Gamemaster Screen Pack. It is not absolutely necessary to run The Smoking Ruin & Other Stories as the anthology includes background information and the major NPCs from Clearwine Fort described in the ‘RuneQuest Gamemaster Adventures’ book. However, the full information on both is given in the ‘RuneQuest Gamemaster Adventures’ book and will be useful. Access to a copy of King of Sartar will serve as an interesting corollary, but is definitely not required and only the most dedicated of Gloranthaphiles should be concerned about its inclusion. 

In terms of the types of adventurers required for The Smoking Ruin & Other Stories, a Shaman will prove more than useful, but again, not essential to its play through. Orlanth and Ernalda worshippers will find much to do in the scenarios—especially in ‘The Smoking Ruins’, and if such Player Characters have played through the scenarios in the ‘RuneQuest Gamemaster Adventures’ book from the RuneQuest Gamemaster Screen Pack, then all the better. This is because one of their number is likely to have been appointed Thane of Apple Lane and will have begun forging political links with Queen Leika’s court at Clearwine Fort. Similarly, a priestess of Ernalda or worshipper is likely to have links to the Ernalda temple at Clearwine Fort and at least be aware of its politics. Lastly, one of the Player Characters should have some kind of performance skill, such as Dance, Orate, Play Instrument, or Sing. The likelihood is that one or more of the Player Characters will have some of these skills, so again, a specialist with a high rating in any of these performance skills is not necessary. However, ‘The Smoking Ruins’ will present an opportunity for any Player Character with a good performance skill to shine—and more!

In addition to presenting its three scenarios, The Smoking Ruin & Other Stories presents some background and history of the region where they take place as well as the locations particular to each of the three scenarios. This starts with a gazetteer and history of the South Wilds, but also covers Clearwine Fort, political and religious centre of the Colymar Tribe; the Lost Valley, home to an isolated farming and herding community loyal to the Feather Horse Queen, but also the site of ruined ancient tower out of time and myth; and the Grove of Green Rock, for which the Aldryami have great plans. Each of these locations is accompanied by full descriptions and stats for each of the monsters, creatures, and NPCs to be found there, plus for the Lost valley, there are notes should a player want his character to originate from there. Arguably, the most notable of these locations is The Wild Temple, an eight-kilometre-wide web of megalithic standing stones which dominates the valley it stands in, sacred to both Beast People and the Grazeland Pony Breeders, particularly the former as it is centre of their spirit religion. Here may be encountered a wide array of creatures and peoples, from Centaurs, Satyrs, and Minotaurs to ‘Things No Longer Found in this World’, spirits, and Fox Women. All of them are given full stats, individualising them as you would expect for a RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha supplement.

The main scenario in The Smoking Ruin & Other Stories is the eponymous ‘The Smoking Ruin’, which takes the Player Characters from the political tensions at Clearwine Fort to an ancient ruined settlement high in the Dragonspine Mountains filled with Troll corpses set alight long ago and still burning such that the smoke blights the sky and back again to political tensions at Clearwine Fort. Beginning in Sea Season, 1626, Player Characters are hired by a priestess at the Temple to Ernalda to lead an expedition into the South Wilds where an ancient, sacred artefact might be found. They will need to conduct some research first, but accompanied by a precocious NPC, they must make the trip there and back again in a matter of just weeks. Despite the limited time frame, they are treated to something of a travelogue across the South Wilds before getting to the Smoking Ruins themselves. There are plenty of opportunities here for the Player Characters to meet people, learning something of the region, and lay the foundations for some firm friendships.

The limited time frame means that the Player Characters are unlikely to do more than make a brief exploration of this ancient complex of buildings and temples, for there is a lot more going on here than is presented in the plot of the scenario, ‘The Smoking Ruin’. In fact, so much more, that the location deserves at least more scenarios which will bring the Player Characters back to it to explore and play through the threads the scenarios hints at, but leaves hanging. As to the plot of ‘The Smoking Ruin’, it is both weird and wondrous, both mysterious and magical, and both mythical and epic in its storytelling. The scenario is lengthy and rich in detail, focusing on roleplaying, exploration, and Glorantha as a magical place, rather than on combat, offering multiple sessions of play. Plus, the beginning and the end pull the Player Characters into the politics at Clearwine Fort, also offering opportunities for further roleplaying and if playing the ‘Apple Lane’ series of scenarios, tying them further to the region—or beginning to if The Smoking Ruin & Other Stories is the Player Characters’ first scenario.

Whilst ‘The Smoking Ruin’ is an epic in length, the other two scenarios in The Smoking Ruin & Other Stories are shorter. All three though, share a sense of the epic in their scope. The first of these is ‘Urvantan’s Tower’, which takes place in the Lost Valley described earlier and begins with the Player Characters at the mouth of the valley, having been sent there as observers at the behest of Queen Leika. (This might be a punishment, or it might be an indication of trust, depending upon how Queen Leika regards the Player Characters after the events of ‘The Smoking Ruin’). The captain of the Wardens, essentially the militia for the Lost Valley and its village of True Ford, has come to Clearwine Fort to petition the Queen for help following the Lost Valley’s occupation of the Company of the Manticore, a band of mercenaries in the service of the Lunar Empire. 

Like many of the inhabitants of the Lost Valley, the Warden captain had hoped that another denizen of the Lost Valley, the Zzaburi Urvantan, a great sorcerer, might have come to their aid, but he has not left his tower retreat in some seasons. The likelihood is that the Player Characters will be outmatched by Company of the Manticore, so ultimately the sorcerer may be their only hope, as well as that of the Lost Valley’s inhabitants. Thus, they will need to find their way into Urvantan’s Tower—which will probably involve a certain amount of stealth upon the part of the Player Characters, and determine what has happened to him, before hopefully getting to come out and drive the Company of the Manticore out of the valley. 

‘Urvantan’s Tower’ is playable in two or three sessions and certainly gives the Game Master an incredibly powerful NPC to roleplay. The danger to avoid in the climax is making the final showdown between the sorcerer and the Company of the Manticore all about the sorcerer, for although he plays a major role, the Player Characters should also. Good advice is given to that end. Now whilst ‘Urvantan’s Tower’ has the structure of a traditional fantasy roleplaying adventure—‘village in peril, mercenary/monstrous threat, mysteriously disappeared wizard who is the only hope’—the scenario gives a very different spin on the set-up. Again, it is tied very much into the background and history of Dragon Pass, which gives the scenario a richness and introduces the players and their characters to more aspects of Glorantha.

Where ‘Urvantan’s Tower’ involved a mixture of stealth, exploration, and combat, the third scenario in The Smoking Ruin & Other Stories is all about combat, well combat and secrecy, but primarily combat! ‘The Grove of Green Rock’ is not designed to be played in a few long sessions, but really played out over the course of a few years. The Player Characters are hired as mercenaries by an Aldryami, but as to their mission, they are sworn to secrecy! In fact, they are hired to help protect a ritual which will strengthen the Aldryami presence in Dragon Pass, but to complete the ritual, the Elves will have to repeat it several times over the next few years, which means that the Player Characters will be hired again and again, each time to protect it from enemies sworn to prevent the return of the Aldryami to the region. Each time the Player Characters will face increasingly more difficult foes, but will receive some aid from their employer and better and better reward! Essentially this is the RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha equivalent of a ‘base defence’ game and the likelihood is if the incidences or ‘waves’ of the ritual defence are played out one after the another, they will lose their impact. Plus, returning to protect the ritual year after year means that each time the Player Characters are more powerful and capable of facing the increasingly tougher foes. 

Physically, The Smoking Ruin & Other Stories is a well presented, sturdy, hardback. The artwork is excellent throughout, some of it being repeated from other supplements, and the cartography very clear. However, it needs an edit in a few places and writing could have been clearer too in places, and sometimes the artwork feels as it could have served the scenarios better. It certainly would have been nice to be able to show some illustrations of specific locations in the Smoking Ruins as handouts for example. Another issue is the placement of the maps. Although there is a handy book in The Smoking Ruin & Other Stories, it would have been perhaps useful if the maps of the South Wilds and the Smoking Ruins had been printed inside the front and back covers respectively for easy access. Nevertheless, The Smoking Ruin & Other Stories is another good-looking book for RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha.

It feels like there has been an age to wait for new scenarios for RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha, but with the publication of The Smoking Ruin & Other Stories, the wait has definitely been worth it. The three scenarios it contains are all begging to be played and in particular, added to a campaign, because each one has ramifications for campaign play. After ‘The Smoking Ruin’, the Player Characters might improve their standing at Clearwine Fort and of Clearwine Fort itself—or not, they may help forge a friendship and an alliance with the inhabitants of the Lost Valley in ‘Urvantan’s Tower’, and in ‘The Grove of Green Rock’, the Player Characters may help return the Elves to Dragon Pass. They will also reveal more of the history of the Dragon Pass, perhaps even some of its secrets, bringing both to live through play. Yet The Smoking Ruin & Other Stories only details so much, whilst hinting at so much more. There can be no doubt that The Smoking Ruin & Other Stories deserves a sequel, especially one which focuses on the Smoking Ruin itself.

The Smoking Ruin & Other Stories contains interesting setting material and two decent scenarios. The comparative brevity of ‘Urvantan’s Tower’ and ‘The Grove of Green Rock’ and the emphasis on combat in the latter means that they are unlikely to be quite as memorable as the first scenario in the anthology, but do not take that as meaning that either scenario is bad. Far from it. However, in comparison, ‘The Smoking Ruin’ is a fantastical epic, rich in the flavour and detail that Glorantha is so famous for, an impressive epic that draws the Player Characters into it, and it is simply begging for a return visit.

Overall, The Smoking Ruin & Other Stories presents a fantastical trilogy of scenarios for RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha, opening up some of the wonders and wondrous nature of Glorantha. Hopefully, future scenarios will return to explore the South Wilds in further detail and to as high a quality.

Kelvin Green hates small villages. He must do. After all, in Fish Fuckers – Or, a Record, Compil’d in Truth, of the Sordid Activities of the People of Innsmouth, Devon, he unleashed aspects of H.P. Lovecraft’s ‘The Shadow Over Innsmouth’ on a small west Country village with piscine horrors wanting to procreate with the inhabitants of said village, whilst in More Than Meets The Eye: A Short Adventure with Lots of Tentacles, he unleashed a weird, fantasy homage to a certain franchise of films involving giant robots capable of transforming into everyday objects, but with aliens/not-shoggoths rather than robots. Both scenarios are written for use with Lamentations of the Flame Princess Weird Fantasy Roleplay, whereas the third of what has become Kelvin Green’s ‘village vitriol’ trilogy is a systemless scenario. However, despite the scenario being systemless, it is set during the Early Modern Age, between 1625 and 1725—the default period for Lamentations of the Flame Princess Weird Fantasy Roleplay, and its tone and playstyle matches that of the Old School Renaissance.

The Seed, published by Games Omnivorous, is a system agnostic scenario of fantasy horror which would work with any number of Old School Renaissance retroclones. The most obvious one is Lamentations of the Flame Weird Fantasy Roleplay, another is the publisher’s own 17th Century Minimalist: A Historical Low-Fantasy OSR Rulebook, but with some adjustment it would work with Cthulhu by Gaslight or a darker toned version of Leagues of Gothic Horror for use with Leagues of Adventure: A Rip-Roaring Setting of Exploration and Derring Do in the Late Victorian Age! Take it away from its European setting and The Seed would work well with Mörk Borg as they share a similar tone and sensibility. Notably though it adheres to the Manifestus Omnivorous, the ten points of which are:

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

So yes, The Seed adheres to all ten rules. It is an adventure, it is system agnostic, it takes place on Earth, it has one location, it has the one monster (the others are extensions of it), it includes Osteophagy—the practice of animals, usually herbivores, consuming bones, it involves a voracious eater, the word count is not high—the scenario only runs to twenty-eight pages, and it is presented in two colours—in this case, fluorescent pink and black. Lastly, The Seed does lack good taste. Be warned, just like The Feast on Titanhead before it, this scenario is one of gut churning—in some cases, literally—horror, bodily fluids, and madness. 

The setting for The Seed is the village of Midwich. And being the village of Midwich, it has its own cuckoo—a giant alien terraforming bio-machine which sits at the centre of the village and pumps out a fluorescently pink, corrosive—mentally and physically, miasma which rots mind, body, and anything else it envelops. Its aim, or rather it is programmed to transform the planet into a world suitable for colonisation by an alien species from another dimension. Which requires that it is fed, which is why a bunch of misogynist cultists—members of the Final Brotherhood—are feeding whatever organic material they can into the Seed’s greedy maw, whilst phallic-headed alien dogs which ejaculate acid patrol the mist and protect the Seed. Meanwhile, the Storm Society, a semi-secret scientific society has sent agents—inspired by a pair of Marvel Comics’ legendary creators, to investigate the Seed and what it is doing in Midwich. So, at some point, the Player Characters should expect figures in diving suits to loom out of the fluorescently pink gloom…

Which is the point at which the Player Characters turn up. Perhaps they want to find someone in the village, or the Storm Society has sent them to check on its agents already in Midwich, but whatever their reason for being in the village, they find something really weird going on. Of course, to determine what requires penetrating the pink miasma and potentially suffering its deleterious effects, ranging from hair loss and sudden uncontrollable anger to constant vomiting and the sudden, inexplicable attack by a random monster from the Game Master’s preferred Wandering Monster Table. Within the miasma, the Player Characters are free to wander wherever they like, explore as they like, and do as they like, and were it actually not for the effects of the Miasma, then determine what is going on would be relatively easy, as for the most part, the physical threats present in Midwich are not all that challenging.

Physically, The Seed is a vibrantly pink and white booklet with a separate cover, on the inside of which is the map of Midwich. The illustrations are a mix of the weird and the gruesome, whilst the map is large and easy to read. It needs a slight edit in places, but is overall quite a sturdy product, being done on heavy paper and card stock.

Like The Feast on Titanhead before it, The Seed is short and brutal, it being possible to play through the scenario and even survive in a single session. Unlike The Feast on Titanhead, the effect of failure in The Seed is disastrous, but not necessarily apocalyptic, however unless the Player Characters have a strong motive to investigate or a strong sense of altruism, the corrosive effects of the Miasma may be too strong for them, and so may drive them away rom Midwich, keeping them from investigating further. To that end, The Seed is need of some development upon the part of the Game Master to create hooks strong enough to motive the Player Characters, whether she is planning to run it as a one-shot or as part of a campaign.

Much like the earlier More Than Meets The Eye: A Short Adventure with Lots of Tentacles, Kelvin Green serves up another slice of ‘village as victim’ horror, this time weird Science Fiction horror for a profoundly pink encounter. The Seed is literally the seed of a session’s worth of weirdness and horror for the roleplaying game of the Game Master’s choice. 

Noah Berlatsky / October 8, 2020

John Fawcett’s 2000 Canadian werewolf film Ginger Snaps is usually discussed as a feminine and feminist allegory: “the most complete feminist horror film ever made,” as this site’s K.E. Roberts puts it. There’s no doubt that the linking of the werewolf cycle to menstrual blood, and thus to female adolescence and female stigmatization, demands a feminist reading. Hidden inside the story about women, though—like a dirty secret, never to be spoken—is a story about queerness. The tragedy of Ginger Snaps, in fact, is that patriarchy makes queerness unspeakable and unthinkable. As a result, the film can imagine no future for women in patriarchy other than death.

The movie starts, in fact, with imagining death. The Fitzgerald sisters, Brigitte (Emily Perkins) and Ginger (Katharine Isabelle), live in a dreary, lower-middle-class, mostly white Ontario town, which they hate, and which hates them. Disgusted at the thought of being normal, they swear to each other to die together before they get old. To seal their love affair with death, they create a kind of slide-show horror movie as a school project, with images of Ginger impaled on suburban fences and run down by suburban lawn mowers. The bloody show is successful in nauseating their instructor. It’s also a winking ironic foreshadowing: the sisters are about to experience the horror movie story they long for, and it’s not going to be fun at all.

But beyond that, the film–within-a-film is a camp signal to the viewer that all is not as it appears. Or rather, it’s a signal that all is exactly as it appears. The movie shows the Fitzgerald sisters as they use fake blood and special effects to stage bloody scenes of death, just as the filmmakers of Ginger Snaps stage their dog disembowelments and nightmare janitor eviscerations. The truth of the movie, which you know going in, is that it’s fake. And the thing that is most obviously fake is not the blood and gore, but the pretense that the Fitzgerald sisters are sisters.

Obviously, the actors, Isabelle and Perkins, are not sisters. They look nothing alike. Isabelle as Ginger is a conventionally attractive movie lead, while Perkins as Brigitte is mousy, big-nosed, and human- rather than Hollywood-shaped. You’re supposed to suspend disbelief about their blood ties. And yet, the movie pushes at the edge of that suspension, as if it wants you to notice the artifice. The girls are not twins, but are in the same grade: Brigitte skipped a year, Ginger too casually explains. The boys in the film notice and comment on the fact that the two don’t resemble each other. And in a queasy scene towards the films end, Ginger, more than half-transformed into wolf, leans into Brigitte and husks, “We’re almost not even related any more.”

If sisterhood is a convention, rather than a truth, then the girl’s intense friendship, and indeed their shared room, takes on a different valence. So does their alienation from their peers. The narrative provides no real reason why the Fitzgeralds feel like outsiders, or why they’re hated by their classmates. But if you accept what you’re actually seeing, then the dynamic is obvious. Two girls who really are not sisters are engaged in a passionate, intense, open same-sex relationship. Their peers hate them for it.

In this context, Ginger’s transformation isn’t just a metaphor for female adolescence; it’s a metaphor for queer adolescence, in which increasing evidence of deviation in gender and sexuality must be pushed ever further into the closet. Ginger grows a tail—a penis metaphor, surely—and hair on her chest, even as she gets her period for the first time. She becomes more femme, wearing tight clothes, redoing her hair, flirting with boys. At the same time, she becomes more masculine. She just about sexually assaults Jason (Jesse Moss), a boy she’s making out with, after he asks her who the guy in their relationship is.

The chaotic confusion of gendered presentation and gendered desire could be a metaphor for trans experience, for lesbian experience, for male gay experience. The common through-line is social ostracism, shame, and a need for concealment. Most of the movie is devoted to Brigitte and Ginger’s efforts to keep Ginger’s condition closeted, so that she can pass.

Part of obscuring Ginger’s condition involves hiding it from the film’s viewers. It seems likely that Brigitte and Ginger were made sisters in the script specifically to defuse queer possibilities. The erotic tension between them is expressed through misdirection, and routed especially through relationships with guys. Ginger has unprotected sex with Jason, infecting him. Werewolf Jason later almost assaults Brigitte, who stabs him with a phallic needle to cure him. In a parallel triangle, Brigitte has a possibly more than platonic relationship with local drug dealer Sam (Kris Lemche), who Ginger then tries to sleep with. And most explicitly, Ginger viciously murders a school janitor who she believes has been staring at Brigitte. “I don’t like the way he looks at you!” she hisses. That could be read as the anger of an overprotective sister. But it could also be jealousy.

Brigitte and Ginger’s desires aren’t just hidden from onlookers, diagetic and otherwise. They’re  hidden from themselves. When Brigitte first approaches Sam for help with a werewolf cure, she tells him that she’s the one infected, rather than Ginger. That’s an admission as much as a lie; if the curse in the movie is queerness rather than lycanthropy, then it touches both (supposed) sisters. Brigitte, notably, still has not gotten her own period, even though she’s 15. Her femininity is queer too.

Ginger, for her part, says that she has a hunger inside her that she at first mistakes for a desire for (heterosexual) sex. But then she realizes that what she actually wants is “to tear everything to fucking pieces.” We learn what that means in practice when she claws two men to death, and then suggests to Brigitte that the two of them “swap fluids” and go away together. You have to wade through apocalypse, blood, death, and the destruction of all things to get to a place where you can love that girl who is not your sister.

There’s a moment when the movie seems to foresee a plausible happy ending for that love whose name it never speaks. The sisters’ mom, Pam (Mimi Rodgers), discovers that Ginger is killing her way through her classmates. She’s understandably upset, but she doesn’t turn them in. Instead, she reacts the way you’d hope a small town mom would on learning that her kid is queer. She offers to burn down her house and chuck her mediocre husband to support her child.

The filmmakers aren’t as supportive, alas. Brigitte does agree to swap blood with Ginger, making some feeble denials to Sam about how it’s the only way to lure Ginger out to cure her with the good heterosexual injection Sam’s whipped up. But, inevitably, the taste of Brigitte causes Ginger to rage ever more out of control. Brigitte, knife in one hand, injection in the other, tries to save her, but Ginger again chooses the wrong thing to impale herself upon, and expires in the arms of her sister, who can’t be her lover.

“I’m not dying in this room with you!” Brigitte shouts right before the end. It’s a rejection of the teen sisters’ suicide pact, and an embrace of adulthood and possibility. Or, alternately, it’s a stifling acceptance of heteronormativity. “To die” is a standard double entendre, especially when it’s used to refer to what you’re doing in a bedroom. Ginger is beckoning, with bared fangs, to a realm of monstrous difference, where the girls can admit they are unrelated, and still wrestle and thrust and experience release together. Brigitte says no and kills her rather than be consumed by queer desire.

Ginger Snaps is about how patriarchy destroys women. But, as its callous title indicates, the film itself is only ambivalently opposed to that process of destruction. The movie cares about Ginger and Brigitte, but it’s also invested in denying some of the possible ways they might care about each other. In Ginger Snaps, death is better than, and the natural result of, girls loving each other intensely, or too well. Ginger wants to tear down the whole world. Ginger Snaps tears down Ginger instead.

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

If you name your publishing label "Basic Witch Games" you are going to get my attention. 

So last night I got a new PDF from a just-as-new company.  The PDF is The Muse and the company is Basic Witch Games.  Now full disclosure, I knew about this class a while back and gave the author a tiny bit of advice about it and encouraged her to add a bit and publish it.  

So ethically I can not provide you all an unbiased review. 

Also, the book uses some of my own OGC, so there is another reason.

But I do want to tell you this is a fun class. It's not for every group, but that is true of all classes really, but for the right group this can be a lot of fun. 

The Muse is the first in what I hope will be more Basic era content from Basic Witch Games.
The class is something of a tempter or even a seducer.  I am immediately reminded of the old Houri Class from White Dwarf.  

The class itself is 14 level B/X style class.  The cover has a nice visual transition from red to blu to cover the red and blue of the beloved Basic and Expert books. In addition to the spells from my witch classes, there are new spells too.  There is also a new magic sword.

Basic Witch Games will be coming out with more material and even a Dark Fantasy / Romantic Fantasy setting. So I am looking forward to seeing what they do. 

So check them out. Spend a buck for this.

They can also be found on Twitter at, @BasicWitchGame

Another full class today.  This time one that is based on the classic Dragon Magazine #5 and #20 witches. 

The rules for my reviews are here.

D&D Witch Class From David Belmonte

I am, without a doubt, a huge fan of the witches for Dragon Magazine. I have spent hours reading and rereading those articles. I have many witch characters I have made using those rules and spent many, many more hours playing them.  So if you say that your class is based on those, you have my attention.

The Witch Class from David Belmonte is a 10 (1 cover, 1 title, 1-page addendum, 7 pages content) page PDF that is Free on DMSGuild.  So the price point is already good. It also presents a full witch class.

The pdf is sparce really. There is no art save for the cover art and the artist is not credited. 

The witch in this case is a Wisdom spellcaster. (They were Intelligence and Wisdom in Dragon #20).  

The powers this witch gets are in line with the witch from Dragon #20. Though the witch in Dragon got a lot more powers, this witch is a little more inline with the D&D 5 rules.  There are no subclasses listed even if the obvious choice would have been High and Low Order witches with some different powers.

There are 8 new spells.  One of the Spells "Oracle" only works "in obscure woods"  whatever that is supposed to mean.  

So nice effort, but it falls a little short for me.  Though it is tough to argue the price I guess.

Oh. Now this was fun.
I have heard that some people didn't care for this one, but you can't watch it thinking it is a Lovecraft movie.  Lovecraft never translates well on screen.  Watch this one thinking it is a crazy Nick Cage movie.

Sadly I did not see this one when it came out, but I had heard a lot of good (and bad) about it.   Well the movie itself did not disappoint.  I mean really, Lovecraft, Nick Cage?  This has disaster written all over it but it gets pulled together well.

So the movie follows the story rather well. Well, as can be expected.
Our narrator, the unnamed surveyor, becomes Ward Phillips a hydrologist played by Elliot Knight.  I have to admit I did enjoy that the narrator, our POV character, is played by a mixed-race, Nigerian-British actor who is very active in gay rights.  Lovecraft would be so happy.

Nick Cage is at his Nick Cage best.  Super serious when he needs to be, and bat-shit insane with an accent when the movie needs that.  He reminded me of his characters in  Vampire's Kiss and National Treasure. And let's not forget, Cage has won an Academy Award, a Golden Globe, and Screen Actors Guild Award.  He is great as troubled Nathan/Nahum Gardner. 
The sons are changed and there is a daughter, Lavinia played by Madeleine Arthur (who has some solid geek cred with credits in "Supernatural", "Legends of Tomorrow", "Tomorrow People", "X-Files", "Magicians", and "Spooksville").  Oh, and Lavinia, who plays a Wiccan, also has a copy of the old 1980 Simon Necronomicon.  That made me rather happy to see, to be honest.
And Tommy Chong.  Seriously.
Tommy Freaking Chong playing the "crazy man" Ezra/Ammi Pierce.

The hardest thing I think is to capture the horror of Lovecraft on film.  I am not sure how many half-failed attempts I have watched over the years.  In fact, I think the only good ones have been "From Beyond" and "Re-Animator".  Maybe, MAYBE, 1970 The Dunwich Horror with Dean Stockwell.

What I REALLY enjoyed about this was I watched it with my two boys.  We all love Lovecraft and we all love Nick Cage movies.  So this was a nice treat.

This is supposed to be the first of a shared universe of Lovecraft films, but it did rather poorly in the box office.

Watched: 7
New: 7
NIGHT SHIFT Content
What NOT to use here?  Might need to grab my 5e Cthulhu Mythos book and give this one a go using the Night Shift game.  The characters can play the parts of investigators to the scene.  My kids would LOVE that.

So there is a new bit of errata out for D&D5.  Nothing new there, in today's Internet age errata is easy to get and often flows out easy enough. For some reason, this latest one has some of the old-school crowd up in arms. Again.  Let's see what it is all about.

This is the Errata for Volo's Guide to Monsters. A book that is described by all accounts as optional. 

What does it say exactly? Let's have a look.

Kobold Traits (p. 119). In the Ability Score Increase trait, the text has changed to read “Your Dexterity score increases by 2.”
The adjustment to Strength has been removed.

Orc Traits (p. 120). In the Ability Score Increase trait, the text has changed to read “Your Strength score increases by 2 and your Constitution score increases by 1.” The adjustment to Intelligence has been removed.

Orc Traits (p. 120). The Menacing trait has been replaced with the following trait:

Primal Intuition. You have proficiency in two of the following skills of your choice: Animal Handling, Insight, Intimidation, Medicine, Nature, Perception, and Survival.

Ok. So this is all for characters. Optional characters. 

Checking online...oh. For fucks sake.

A message to my fellow 50+-year-old gamers. Lighten the fuck up.
Seriously. You all look like a bunch of Chicken Littles, running around screaming about the damn sky is falling.

Wizards of the Coast doesn't care what people who don't buy their product think, to be honest. 

The world didn't end when the whole Oriental Adventures debacle happened back in July.  Everyone was claiming it was the start of censorship and that Wizards would start taking down or editing older books. Censorship! Censorship! CENSORSHIP!!

These optional rules, in an optional rule book for two races that 99% of you would never allow in the first place in a system you never play has fuck-all to do with you.

In D&D5 there are 15 standard races with 28 sub or variants for a total of 34 choices. None of which have negative ability mods. The only two that did have them were in a supplement and those two are being edited to come into line with the other 34 choices. These are two outliers. They are being brought back into line.

How is this any different than say a new rule in Savage Worlds?  Or even in Monopoly? 

Yet, people are losing their shit online and looking like a bunch of idiots. 

The OSR gets a bad reputation online for the reactions of a few. This is just another example.  On one hand, the old-school community will claim not to care or even pay attention to what WotC does with D&D and then turn around and freak out when they release a rule errata that many in the 5e gaming community might just ignore.

So, stop freaking out all the time. 

Daniel Elkind / October 6, 2020

Mort Künstler illustration for a March 1960 True magazine story on “America’s Mystery Giant,” Bigfoot.

During Christmas 1879, the last known wild tarpan (Equus gmelini) was run off a cliff somewhere in Ukraine. Native to the forests of Poland, this undomesticated horse species had survived in Europe’s ancient woodlands since at least the time of Herodotus. Apart from a few individuals scattered among various zoos, its death left Przewalski’s horse the sole wild species. 

Apparently some wild horses remain in Poland’s managed old-growth Bialowieza Forest, but their population is the result of Nazi-era experiments in back-breeding extinct animals, the tarpan included, from captive specimens. Lutz Heck, a Nazi zoologist and head of the Berlin Zoo, was not alone in his enthusiasm for resurrecting the dead. He and his hunting buddy, Hermann Göring—who, in addition to being propaganda minister and chief of the Luftwaffe, was also Reich Hunt Master and Forest Master—intended to reinvent a host of ancient and endangered “native” animals like the auroch and wisent to populate their future game reserve. In the future Europe they imagined, they and other elite Nazis would retreat to lodges in forests like Bialowieza to hunt and kill these impossible animals.  

Impossible animals—animals that do not, should not, or cannot possibly exist—have been part of human iconography and myth from the art of cave paintings to medieval bestiaries. Their absurd anatomies have been used to symbolize and subjugate, to parody and portend. (Think of the details in The Garden of Earthly Delights.) Ironically, it was the discovery of very real fossils belonging to implausible behemoths in the earth beneath our feet that renewed a belief in fantastic creatures. Since the dinosaurs were extinct, however, living anachronisms would have to be found. And because science values “skulls and skins” above all, a whole menagerie of freakish and often fraudulent specimens have cropped up to support one claim after another of isolated species still stalking remote parts of the globe. 

With the introduction of photography, new opportunities for deception arose. Using nothing but their father’s camera and some painted specimens, two girls from Yorkshire managed to fool Sherlock Holmes inventor Arthur Conan Doyle into believing that fairies lived all around us. Obviously, Conan Doyle was less of a skeptic than his invention. In dispelling the shadows, he seemed to believe, science had also purged the world of mystery: “Victorian science would have left the world hard and clean and bare,” he wrote, “like a landscape in the moon.” 

First American edition, 1959

In the early days, these pretenders tended to come from the ranks of the learned—from disciplines such as evolutionary biology, zoology, and Egyptology. Their hoaxes appealed not to fear but to the equally compelling desire to confirm whatever pet theory one had already developed. George Montandon, for example, was happy to christen De Loys’ Ape (Ameranthropoides loysi) a new species based on nothing more than a single, staged photograph taken by a Swiss petroleum geologist named François De Loys. After much publicity and speculation, however, this new primate species turned out to be a dead white-bellied spider monkey (Ateles belzebuth). Erudition can entrap as effectively as ignorance—perhaps more so. Montandon apparently “endorsed and required the creation of a large, vaguely human-like South American primate because—as a supporter of the then seriously regarded ‘hologenesis’ hypothesis—he needed a primate that could serve as an ancestor of South American humans.” 

Sergei Isaakovich Freshkop (often Frechkop), a mummy expert from Moscow, was an early proponent of another theory, now likewise discredited: the initial theory of bipedalism, which suggested that all mammals started out upright. One of his most promising students at the Free University of Brussels was Bernard Heuvelmans, who coined the term cryptozoology, and dedicated his 1955 opus Sur la Piste des Bêtes Ignorées (translated as On the Track of Unknown Animals in 1958) to his former mentor. 

Heuvelmans’ book is an exasperating, encyclopedic bestiary located at the “frontier of science and fantasy.” It’s also a beast of a book, a doorstop-sized chunk of zoological history with no less than 50 photographs, 120 illustrations—from the “monkey-eating eagle of the Philippines” to a “reconstruction of the abominable snowman”—and five hand-drawn maps. (To my eternal disappointment, neither my home state of New Jersey nor the Jersey Devil seems to merit any mentions.) If you’ve ever wondered about how we got from Conan Doyle’s The Lost World and nineteenth century Forteana to the Weekly World News of the checkout aisle, you would do well to look him up.  

Heuvelmans, who died in 2001, lived through some radical transformations in the state of the art. On the one hand, he was a trained zoologist with a dissertation on aardvark teeth; on the other, he marshaled folklore as scientific evidence and wasn’t shy about slapping his name on sensational pulp. (Allegedly, the Yeti bits in Hergé’s Tintin in Tibet derive from his input.) For Heuvelmans, as for Conan Doyle, it was all about bringing back a sense of faded romance. Along with German mammalogist Ingo Krumbiegel and Ivan T. Sanderson, Heuvelmans is often considered one of the founders of the field of cryptozoology. Perhaps more important, he embodied the embattled crypto figure as a righteous scholar who stalks the unknown while reminding the “armchair naturalists” and stuffy old Pharisees in the academy of the great mysteries that still remain in the forests of Minnesota. 

Much of Unknown Animals is thus spent in attempting to “confound the skeptics”—i.e. agreeing that we cannot say we don’t know for sure—rather than in attempting to demonstrate that there is any evidence for his claims. Heuvelmans casts this power struggle as a kind of religious schism. In Searching for Sasquatch (2011), Brian Regal attributes the contest between “eggheads” and “crackpots” to the growing professionalization of natural science as a discipline. Folklore scholar and zombie expert Peter Dendle puts it even more diplomatically: 

Unconfirmed species served as an implicit ground of conflict and dialogue between untutored masses and educated elite, even prior to the rise of academic science as a unified body of expert consensus.

What’s particularly interesting about 1950s cryptozoology is the way it seemed to exploit this haunted zone of possibility between fiction and verifiable fact, using doubt to its advantage. After all, dinosaurs, too, were once considered the stuff of fantasy. It was only with Cuvier and the bones unearthed by American paleontologists Edward Cope and Othniel Marsh in the 19th century that the systematic study of fossils could take place, bringing dinosaurs closer to the realm of nonfiction, if not yet science. But Sanderson and Heuvelmans went even further. Leveraging their status as outsiders, they argued that dinosaurs not only existed, but likely still survived in some remote corner of the globe. Though they claimed to despise the academy, the cryptozoologists simultaneously aspired to remake it in their image. At the same time, they were right to call out the overreliance on fossil evidence and the role of colonialism. Too often native accounts were dismissed, while white administrators who rarely left the comforts of their coastal abodes were given the benefit of the doubt regarding matters in the interior. Then there was and still is the practice of naming a new species after the first western interloper to lay hands or eyes on it. 

Fawcett Publications, 1970. Cover art by Frank Frazetta

Take the gerenuk. Native to Somaliland, where it is known as garanuug, this beautiful giraffe-necked creature is often called the Waller’s gazelle because in 1879 a hunter-naturalist “discovered” and named it after the Waller who procured the specimen. Ditto Clarke’s gazelle, Père David’s deer, Burchell’s zebra, Hunter’s hartebeest, Meinertzhagen’s forest-hog, and so on. But in what sense can one claim to discover something well-known or to name something that already has a name?

It echoes an earlier struggle, during the 18th century, when European naturalists were skeptical about biological life in the New World. The Comte de Buffon was especially vocal in his doubts that any significant new species remained to be discovered there. Thomas Jefferson, perhaps the founder of American paleontology, disagreed. Jefferson had a network of people supplying him with newly-discovered fossils, specimens that ultimately convinced him that mammoths or mastodons must still exist somewhere out in the American wild. “It may be asked, why I insert the mammoth, as if it still existed,” he wrote in 1785’s Notes on the State of Virginia. “I ask in return, why I should omit it, as if it did not exist? […] [the north and west] still remain in their aboriginal state, unexplored and undisturbed by us, or by others for us. He may as well exist there now, as he did formerly where we find his bones.”

In sowing doubt and helping to bust down the door to amateurs, Heuvelmans and his descendants also opened up the flood gates to crowdsourced conspiracy, in which one begins with the desire to believe and then seeks corroborating evidence among the like-minded. The more corrupt our political and environmental reality seems to get, the more technocratic the solutions proposed, the more desperate the reaction from people with nothing left to lose. In a world of constant contact, ubiquitous information, and surreptitious surveillance, doubt has become a powerful weapon against orthodoxies of all kinds. For some self-styled freethinkers, it serves as a shield from truths too ugly and dangerous to perceive directly. It reminds me of the Toynbee Tiles, an anonymous graffiti phenomenon that started with tantalizing mosaics pressed into the asphalt of major cities in the US and abroad, promising some kind of utopian TOYNBEE IDEA/IN MOVIE ‘2001/RESURRECT DEAD/ON PLANET JUPITER, but ultimately spelling out a paranoid Protocols-like media conspiracy: MURDER EVERY JOURNALIST I BEG OF YOU.

We need monsters. Without them, the world is somehow more terrifyingly rational, shrunken, diminished. The imagination rebels against such austerity, casting shadows where they didn’t exist. “But then everyone thinks himself better than his neighbours and gives them beastly habits or animal appearance,” writes Heuvelmans. “Most of the ancient travellers gave tails to the savages they found, especially on islands. Marco Polo mentions men with tails in Sumatra. Gemelli-Careri finds them in Luzon, Jean Struys in Formosa, the Jesuit missionaries in Mindoro near Manila, Köping, a Swede, in the Nicobar Islands.” Then, as if looking in the mirror, he turns back to Europe and the West: “in Europe in the seventeenth century the Spaniards believed Jews had tails, in France the people of Bearn attributed them to the Cagots who lived at the foot of the Pyrenees, and in England the Devonians believed the same slander about their Cornish neighbours. . . . Every savage believes in someone more savage than himself.”

Daniel Elkind is a writer and translator living in San Francisco.

 

Another full class today.  This one has been selling well so let's see what is inside.

Again, here are my rules and guidelines for these reviews. 

Hex Witch - 5E Player Class

This is a 9 page PDF (1 cover, 1 title page, 7 pages of content) and sells for $2.95 straight. So well above the 10 cents per page guide at 42 cents per page. This presents a full witch base class and three subclasses, known as "Wiccan Pathways." Now for myself, I try to avoid using the term "Wicca" in games since it is a recognized religion.  Even in the stuff I wrote for the WitchCraft RPG we used "Wicce."

The paths are the Augury Witch (seer), the Fey Witch (combat spellcasting), and the Wyld Witch (healer). So some nice variety. 

This witch also gets Hex powers that a little like the Hexes the Pathfinder witch gets or the Occult powers I give my witches. 

This witch uses Charisma as their main spell-casting ability. 

Some powers sound good, but are not 100% clear on what they really do or how they work. Living Objects for example is described as inanimate objects coming to life. But are they still made from the material they were or are they flesh and blood?  Will Dispel Magic turn them back?

This one also properly credits the artists which is good.

I like it, but it left me wanting something more in the end. 

Wait...didn't I watch this one last night?  Well, you would think so just comparing the posters.
Also known as "Sex of the Witch" this one came out a year after Byleth did.  Though in fairness BOTH movies do have a scene that the cover could represent.

An old wine merchant is dying so he curses his family, in particular his greedy grand-children.

One by one people start to die.

The plot, minus the sex and witchcraft, could have been a thriller or even a comedy.  There are some parallels to some murder mysteries like Clue and Knives Out.  In the sense that people keep dying and there are a bunch squabbling children trying to get Daddy's wealth.

There is lots of sex and nudity and it is pretty much the ultimate evolution of the Italian Giallo, Eurosleaze flick.  It was only missing a deformed henchman in my mind. Though there is a creepy dude in black.

I will admit that I am now likely to use "fondling the goldfish" as a sexual euphemism after watching this movie.  The said scene is about 40 mins into my copy.

It is notable that Camille Keaton of "I Spit On Your Grave" fame appears in this one as well as one of the nieces, Anna.  she gets clawed by the previously mentioned creepy dude.

The movie's biggest crime though is that it is a slog and actually kind of dull.

Maybe a Byleth +  Il Sesso Della Strega supercut is needed.  In fact, I know just how to do it.At least we know what poster to use.
Watched: 6
New: 6
NIGHT SHIFT Content
The rich brother writes his sister out of his will because she was a witch and seduced him when they were younger.  Now their illegitimate daughter is back. She is also a witch (more powerful since her blood is "concentrated") and begins to kill off all her half-siblings (they think she is "just" a cousin) so she can have all the inheritance for herself.Since she is a diabolic witch her patron is Byleth, the Demon Prince of Incest. While Byleth, or Beleth, has a history this version is closer to the D&D/Pathfinder demon Socothbenoth.
Now, this would obviously be a more R or even NC-17 rated game. To borrow a Scooby-doo trope one of the characters is a distant relative to the brother's wife (so no weird blood relations here).

Seriously. It is. 

Like Old-School D&D was a pioneer of gaming,  Run-DMC was a pioneer of old-school rap and hip hop.  Many hip-hop groups cite Run-DMC as their primary influence and for many of us Run-DMC was out first exposure to the wider world of rap and hip-hop.  Could there have been a Public Enemy without Run-DMC? Wu-Tang Clan? NWA? Snoop-Dogg? Outkast? Salt-n-Peppa, De La Soul? Cypress Hill? US3? Digable Planets? TLC? (damn, I still love TLC).

We owe it all to Run-DMC.

Silly?  Yeah, a little. But my love of Run-DMC is pure and true. And yeah I know all the words to these songs. 

But making a claim, any claim, about the OSR is pointless.  While there are trends, there are no main drivers here. No one setting policy or dictating terms save for collective memory of a time when you could turn on your radio and hear "It's Tricky."

Consequently, the claim that OSR is conservative only track because the OSR is as has been often pointed out, full of old fucks.

I am pretty far left and get more liberal and more left and more blue with each passing year. 

I shouldn't need to say this, but here it is.

Like THAC0 BLOG and The Elf Game, I don't just reject Nazis and White Supremacists, I utterly reject them and condemn them, and they are not welcome in any part of the games I play, write or enjoy.  They can take their orange shitgibbon Trump with them. 

Oh. 

And Black Lives Matter. 

And fuck Trump.

Don't like it? Get the fuck out of the OSR.

Welcome to the FIRST Monstrous Monday of October 2020.

If you are on social media you might have seen this little gem from last week.

The answer of course is, me. I had Zombie Witches on my bingo card!   

Well if I didn't I do now.

Photo by Thirdman from PexelsZombie Witch
Medium Undead (Corporeal)
Frequency: Very Rare
Number Appearing:  2d4 (2d4)
Alignment: Chaotic [Chaotic Evil]
Movement: 90' (30') [9"]
Armor Class: 5 [14]
Hit Dice: 4d8+4** (22 hp)
Attacks: 2 claws + 1 bite, Cause Fear
Damage: 1d6, 1d6, 1d4
Special: Only harmed by silver, magic. Cause Fear 1x per day as per spell. Curse.
Size: Medium
Save: Witch 4
Morale: 12 (12)
Treasure Hoard Class: None; see below
XP: 100

When a powerful lord or lady dies they are often interred with fine weapons, treasures, and other grave goods that will support them in the after-life.  But these lords also know that these good are desired by the less pious and greedy.  So the lords will often arrange for a coven of witches to be sacrificed in a dark ritual and buried with the grave goods.  The witches do not volunteer for this task, they are captured and sacrificed after the lords' death. It is believed that the anger of the witches will transcend death and the tomb will be protected.

This is true and the undead witch, now a mindless zombie will attack anything living that enters the tomb.  Appearances may differ, but they are all undead witches in various states of decay or mummification.

Often lower level witches are used (under 6th level) and the only remains of their magic is a cause fear ability they can use as a group 1x per day.  They then attack as fast-moving zombies (normal initiative).  They will fight until they are destroyed. If the last zombie witch is destroyed and there are still combatants alive they will lay their final curse.  Anyone taking goods away from the tomb must save vs. death or be afflicted with a rotting disease that drops their HP by 1d6 per day until death. Healing magics, potions, or other means will not stop the spread of the curse.  Only a remove curse or similar magic can stop this curse. Then the victim can be healed. 

If destroyed, zombie witches will reform by the next new moon.  Only a cleric casting bless or a witch casting hallow or  remove curse on the tomb will stop their return. 

Zombie witches are turned as wights or 4HD undead.

Zombie Witch
(Night Shift)
No. Appearing: 2-8
AC: 5 
Move: 30ft.
Hit Dice: 4
Special: 3 attacks (2 claw, bite), cause fear, bestow curse

Weakness: Vulnerable to silver, magic weapons and holy items.  Holy water does 1d6+1 hp of damage to them.

If you want to see the other undead witches I have made over the years here is a list:

• Baobhan Sìth
• Bell witch
• Eretica (Vampire)
• Jigarkhwar (Vampire)
• Rusalka
• Strigoi (Vampire)
• Soucouyant (Vampire Hag)
• Umbral
• Zugarramurdi Brujas, more Zugarramurdi Brujas.

Today I want to focus on a Witch class proper.  I grabbed this one a bit ago and it has been languishing on my harddrive ever since.

Again, here are my rules for these reviews of this series. 

A lot of pdfs on DMSGuild are named "The Witch" and I guess I am not really any better on DriveThruRPG, so to distinguish them I am going to include the author's name in the titles.

The Witch from Greg Baxter

This is an eleven-page PDF (8 pages of content, 1 cover, 1 title, 1 legal) that sells for $1.33 on DMSGuild (PWYW, suggested). So just a little over that 10 cents per page rule of thumb.

This product covers an entire witch base class.

These witches are very tied in with Hags and have the first witches as human women that have broken free from their transformation into hags. 

The main ability of these witches is Intelligence. 

The subclasses for this witch are Haglore Scholar, Athame Witch, and Rune Witch.  They have a lot of flavor, to be honest, and would be fun to try out.

No new spells, but the spell lists are rather extensive covering the Player's Handbook and many of the other sourcebooks.

The art is minimal, but at least there are credits to the artists. 

All in all there are some fun options here and I'd give them a try

Best known as a manufacturer of props—both gaming and comic book related, Type 40 has now entered the actual gaming industry with the first of its ‘Seeds of Terror’ for use with Call of Cthulhu, Seventh Edition. Each Seed is designed to be concise and easy to run, and not only that, be easy to purchase, prepare, and run all within a single session. To that end, each includes a set-up and a plot, all of the necessary maps and handouts, and five ready-to-play pre-generated Investigators. The very first in the series is The Mummy of Pemberley Grange.

The Mummy of Pemberley Grange: A 1920s Call of Cthulhu Seed of Terror for 4 or 5 investigators takes place at a country mansion in the 1920s to which the Investigators have been invited. Their host, Jessica Pemberley, rich socialite and Egyptophile, has shipped a mummy to her home all the way from Cairo and has invited them to an exclusive ‘unwrapping party’. This is a great event, an especially prestigious event which promises great, even macabre spectacle, made all the more so because of its intimacy, just a handful of attendees rather than the very public spectacle of a Mummy unwrapping as had occurred during the Victorian Era.

Essentially, the unwrapping in The Mummy of Pemberley Grange goes ahead as planned. Then something happens and the Investigators find themselves in a perilous situation—hunted from room to room and down corridor after corridor by a nigh-on unstoppable monster. All the Investigators have to do is keep out of the monster’s clutches and find a means to stop the threat facing them. Fortunately, everything that the Investigators needs is contained within the walls of Pemberley Grange—maps, clues, books, et cetera. The solution, once found, is gruesomely entertaining, though some players and their Investigators may find it quite unpalatable.

For all that there is a plot in The Mummy of Pemberley Grange, it is a simple plot and a straightforward plot. In fact, The Mummy of Pemberley Grange is primarily the set-up for a trigger event, and once that event is triggered, whatever happens next is driven by the actions of the Investigators. Aided, of course, by the occasional nudges from the Keeper in the form of the unstoppable monster…

The Mummy of Pemberley Grange comes with five ready-to-play pre-generated Investigators. They include an Egyptian archaeologist, a reporter, a businessman, a socialite, and a dilettante. Each comes with a little background, but for the most part, the players have plenty of space in which to create the details of their Investigators’ backgrounds. The three handouts are also well done.

However, there are a couple of issues with The Mummy of Pemberley Grange. The first is the map, which shows the floorplans of Pemberley Grange. The floorplans are in fact excellent and have a period feel, but they are only of the ground floor. Which is a bit of a problem should the Investigators want to go upstairs. The second is that there are twenty or so locations given on the map, but only a handful are given any description, which means that the Keeper is going to have to make up whatever might be found in these rooms. This should not be a problem if the Keeper has watched her fair share of episodes of Downton Abbey or Poirot, but if not, the flavour and feel of the scenario might suffer, let alone the pacing if the Keeper has to improvise too much.

Physically, The Mummy of Pemberley Grange is presented and easy to read. The handouts and the map are available to download separately, as are the Investigator sheets. They are also easy to use.

A classic Mummy unleashed horror scenario rather than a Mythos scenario, The Mummy of Pemberley Grange has potential to be great fun and the nature of its monster and set-up makes it easy to run as a Cthulhu by Gaslight scenario during the Victorian Era. Equally, it could be shifted to the USA or Australia just as easily—or another country with a few name and language changes. In fact, those changes would only take a few minutes, but really, that would only double the set-up time, because The Mummy of Pemberley Grange really can be downloaded, read through, and prepared in ten minutes—and that is being generous. Overall, The Mummy of Pemberley Grange really delivers on its low preparation promise; after that, it is up to the Keeper to deliver the horror and the Investigators to run scared as the Mummy stalks them in the halls of Pemberley Grange.

—oOo—

A full play through of The Mummy of Pemberley Grange is available to watch on YouTube recorded as part of Melbourne International Games Week.

This is another one from last year.  The Blu-Ray was not available till November, so here we are. This is another one of those notorious movies of the 70s Euro-sleaze horror. One I had been looking for a while mostly because I never thought I'd find it.

Byleth: The Demon of Incest is a little Italian gem that features murders, gratuitous nudity and enough brother/sister incest for an episode of Game of Thrones.

Let's get right to the point. It's not good. It is slow and the lead Mark Damon as Duke Lionello is not great.

The movie revolves around Duke Lionello, his sister Barbara and Barbara's new husband Giordano.  This is a problem of course since Lionello and Barbara have been having an incestuous affair.   An affair that Lionello is loathed to give up.

The movie does make use of the demon Beleth, which is expected.  At one point Barbara asks her brother, Lionello, if he still has his white horse.  They later talk about "Byleth" on his white horse.

Of course, you are never sure if Lionello is possessed by Byleth or just crazy.  I like to think possessed because that is what I do here.

The Severin Blu-Ray version is really good.  There are some color issues from the original negative, but otherwise, it looks great.  Too bad the movie could not live up to the hype.

Watched: 5
New: 5
NIGHT SHIFT Content
Come back tomorrow night for my ideas on this one!