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

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

—oOo—
Name: Pickman’s Legacy

Publisher: Chaosium, Inc.
Author: Keegan Sullivan

Setting: Modern Day

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




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


50 movies so far, ready to go!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


Palace of the Vampire Queen

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

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


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

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

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

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


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

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


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

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



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

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


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

Pacesetter Games

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



V2 Palace of the Vampire Queen

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

Print at Pacesetter.

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

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

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


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





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

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

Other Games / Plays Well With Others

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




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


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



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



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




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

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

Links to Adventures

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

Links to my 'Vampire Queen' posts

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

Michael Grasso / January 23, 2020

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

2019 was the start of my Back to Basics theme here at the Other Side.  I have covered a LOT of Basic-era/BX/BECMI/RC type products.  It got me thinking. In addition to the the base four human classes and three demi-human classes how many classes have been added to Basic D&D?

Answer. 113*
This includes at least four kinds of Barbarians, Bards and Paladins.  Three types of Rangers and Gnomes and duplicates of many others such as necromancers and illusionists.
*There are likely even more.

I am not sure if all of these are needed, but I am glad they are here.  Variety is the spice of life after all and these classes are all about variety.

The trick now is, can they all be played in same world? OR maybe a better question.  Is anything missing?

Basic Classes
Cleric, Fighter, Magic-user, Theif, Dwarf, Elf, Halfling

ACKS Player's Companion
Anti-paladin, Barbarian, Dwarven Delver, Dwarven Fury, Dwarven Machinist, Elven Courtier, Elven Enchanter, Elven Ranger, Gnomish Trickster, Mystic, Nobiran Wonderworker, Paladin, Priestess, Shaman, Thrassian Gladiator, Venturer, Warlock, Witch, and Zaharan Ruinguard.

Advanced Labyrinth Lord
Assassin, Druid, Illusionist, Monk, Paladin, Ranger

OSE (Advanced)
Acrobat, Assassin, Barbarian, Bard, Drow, Druid, Duergar, Gnome, Half-elf, Illusionist, Knight, Paladin, Ranger, Svirfneblin

BX RPG
Druid, Gnome, Half-elf, Monk, Necromancer, Paladin, Ranger

Mazes & Perils Deluxe Edition
Enchanter, Shaman

Psionics Handbook
Monk, Mystic

Class Compendium
Acrobat, Alienist, Angel, Automation, Bandit, Barbarian, Bard, Berserker, Bounty Hunter, Burglar, Commander, Cultist, Damphir, Dark Elf, Death Knight, Dragon, Dragon Slayer, Eidolon, Explorer, Fairy, Familiar, Feast Master, Fortune Teller, Friar, Gladiator, Goblin, Greensinger, Half-Elf, Half-Ogre, Half-Orc, Huckster, Inquisitor, Investigator, Knight, Lost Boy, Lucky Fool, Metaphysician, Pirate, Raging Slayer, Rune-Smith, Samurai, Shootist, Sword Master, Sylvan Elf, Tavern Singer, Thopian Gnome, Treant, Undead Slayer, Wanderer, Warchanter, Watchman, Wild Wizard (That's 52 classes!)

The Complete B/X Adventurer
Acrobat, Archer, Barbarian, Bard, Beastmaster, Bounty Hunter, Centaur, Duelist, Gnome, Mountebank, Mystic, Ogre-Kin, Scout, Summoner, Tattoo Mage, Witch, Witch Hunter.

Magical Theorems & Dark Pacts
Cleric, Wizard, Elven Swordmage, Elven Warder, Enchanter, Fleshcrafter, Healer, Inquisitor, Merchant Prince, Necromancer, Pact-Bound, Theurge, the Unseen.

Odysseys & Overlords 
Bard

Theorems & Thaumaturgy Revised Edition
Elementalist, Necromancer, Vivimancer

Class Catalog for B/X Essentials
Aasimar, Dragonborn, Dwarven Priest, Dwarven Thief, Elven Rogue, Gnome, Halfling Burglar, Half-Orc, Pixie, Tiefling

 Exhibit / January 22, 2020 

Object Name: How a Baby Is Made
Maker and Year: Per Holm Knudsen, Piccolo Books, 1973 (UK edition)
Object Type: Children’s book
Image Source: Author’s copy
Description: (Richard McKenna)

In 1973, construction toy Lego was joined on the shelves of British shops by another Danish product aimed at children—one which could hardly have been any more different in its aims, though which perhaps shared some of its underlying philosophy. How a Baby Is Made was the English language translation of Danish psychotherapist and “sexologist” Per Holm Knudsen’s children’s picture book Sådan får man et barn, published in Denmark in 1971. After winning the Danish Ministry of Culture’s children book prize in 1972, the rights were acquired in Britain where Piccolo Books, the children’s division of paperback publisher Pan, published it the following year. Using illustrations as gauche as they were explicit, and simple, straightforward text, How a Baby Is Made described exactly—and, given the age range of its intended readership, with remarkable thoroughness—what its title announced it intended to.

The book’s publication took place in the context of a UK that was trying to persuade itself it could be a low-rent version of its more urbane Scandinavian neighbors across the North Sea: we envied the “Scandis” their cool furniture, bold patterns, saunas, Abba, Volvos, Scania truck cabs, and laid-back approach to nakedness. Where we had drizzle, they had endless spring; and where we had seedy knee-tremblers in grotty bedsits, they had carefree sex under mulberry bushes or something equally healthy-seeming. How a Baby Is Made fell under the umbrella of this Scandiphilia, and its appearance also provided me with a a fleeting moment of junior school infamy. Both my parents were teachers, so the copy I was given in 1978 had presumably been passed on to them by some book company rep doing the rounds: given contemporary photographs of me, it seems unlikely that anyone would have splashed out hard cash on the possibility of me ever being in a position where I needed to know about conception. After studying How a Baby Is Made in my bedroom and learning with amazement about the mysteries of the human reproductive process, I guilelessly packed it in my satchel to show my friends at playtime the next day.

My classmates were intrigued, even though, as my friend Tracy pointed out, none of the mechanics on show made much sense and the book begged more questions than it answered—she said that she would be asking her older sister, the worldly Debbie, for further explanation that evening. Word spread among the mothers waiting at the school gates that someone had been flashing a “mucky book” around the playground, and the next morning several parents came in to see our teacher—the wonderful Mrs. White—to remind her that this was Doncaster, not Denmark, and to demand that any further ad hoc sex education be nipped in the bud. Mrs. White very tactfully told me that it would probably be better if in future I left How a Baby Is Made at home, and at hometime, I—now an accidental progressive-cum-sleazemonger—was subject to several stern glares and pitying looks from the parents waiting at the gates.

Unfortunately, though, the glimmer of kudos my time as a purveyor of filth had earned me from my peers faded rapidly, and How a Baby Is Made was soon forgotten. Forgotten but not gone, however: the book has continued to rear its strange head over the decades, though so saturated are we in postmodern irony these days that it’s almost impossible to mention it as anything other than a fucked-up freakshow of typical 1970s inappropriateness. And in fairness, it sort of is a fucked-up freakshow of typically 1970s inappropriateness; its blythe candor was pretty disconcerting, at least for this buttoned-up Brit. Beneath the patina of disconcerting oddness, though, there is something genuinely admirable: the intention to free children of their ignorance and fear and inform them in the least melodramatic, most straightforward way possible about something that parents down the ages have struggled, or totally neglected, to communicate: “We owe children honesty,” the book’s introduction says, and How a Baby Is Made takes it as read that children are capable of understanding the world around them if it is explained to them in a way that they can understand and without the filters of adult prudishness—and it presumes moreover that children have a right to know this stuff, however uncomfortable that might make adults still clinging to their schmaltzy Victorian ideas about childhood.

As fellow mutant Amy points out, by today’s standards How a Baby Is Made might appear a little reductive and essentialist in the way it conflates the act of reproduction with ideas about what should constitute a family, something that a modern version would need to take into account, but despite that, we agree there is something genuinely commendable about what it attempts to do and the way that it goes about it.

Quite a few of my schoolmates later ended up having unplanned kids when they were still very young, forcing them to abandon their educations and in some cases making their subsequent lives very difficult. While I’m not saying that youthful exposure to Sådan får man et barn would necessarily have changed that, growing up in an environment where open, honest discussion of sex, family planning, and pregnancy was a normal part of life certainly would have. It’s a mistake to fetishize other cultures and societies the way we Brits have a habit of doing, but a culture or society that attempts to reduce the amount of misinformation and misdirection all its children are fed about such basic human functions as reproduction (and birth control) is one we should already be living in.

Eve Tushnet / January 21, 2020

“It is my dubious privilege to confirm the fact that man never invented anything that he didn’t eventually put to use.” That’s how Tomata du Plenty (played by the punk singer of the same name) describes the nuclear apocalypse that has left him the eponymous sole survivor in Dutch writer-director Rene Daalder’s 1986 film Population: 1, and in the scrawny, wiry actor’s voice there’s as much delectation as warning. Population: 1 is a short film that feels sprawling: it clocks in at just over an hour but manages to be a science fiction dystopia, an embittered tour of American history, a series of music videos hitting several points on the art-punk spectrum—and an ironic, ambivalent love letter to the Bomb.

The movie’s atmosphere can be guessed just from the cast list, full of names like Helen Heaven, Gorilla Rose, Tequila Mockingbird, and El Duce. Even the normal-named people include Penelope “Avengers” Houston, Maila “Vampira” Nurmi, and—wait for it—a teenaged Beck. The movie emerged from a collaboration between Daalder and the Los Angeles punk band the Screamers (fronted by Tomata), whose live shows were intended to become a series of music videos. They became this instead.

The film opens in black and white with tape hiss and synth, a half-dressed woman running through debris amid signs reading POST MORTEM and LAST HOPE. This is Sheela (Sheela Edwards, who performed IRL with Tomata), film-Tomata’s love interest. She’s a broken-toothed beauty and a howling chanteuse, screaming “I’m so alone!” just before the atomic sunrise. As Sheela lies abandoned at the edge of a lake, we cut to color film of Tomata in an underground bunker, promising that what we’re about to see will be a “tribute to my country and [its] good, fearless people.” Our hero, scrawny to the point of being skeletal, rattles off a disjointed series of patriotic quotations: “Purple mountains’ majesty… by the dawn’s early light… corn as high as an elephant’s eye.” The music scatters hints of “Star Wars” and “Dixie.” Eagles, flags, vultures circling the prairie schooners—an entire American history course unfurls in self-aggrandizing, performatively dumb couplets like, “The land of the brave/Is now my grave.” All of these elements were chosen to explain how we ended up in this bunker, the last of the Yankees, at home at the end of the world.

There are generational resentments in Tomata’s rant: “But when it was my turn to run the show, they nuked the place and took it away,” the cry of someone who believes he deserved power. He’s not a trustworthy narrator. Population: 1 gets its American history from television: cowboys and Indians, buffalo dying for entertainment. This isn’t exactly a political film. If anything, it’s a spiritual indictment; it’s about “the American character,” and the TV images of naked women on display or a black man carrying a tray on his head are presented purely as symptoms of the spiritual disease of the white American soul. This isn’t Lizzie Borden’s Born in Flames, is what I’m saying. The movie replaces political theory and praxis with global thermonuclear contempt. Its hero is a stand-in for the resentful, defeated viewer: You’re probably just the kind of little cockroach, it says, who’d thrive in the nuclear dawn.

It’s a complicit movie, totally entertaining in its attacks on entertainment. As soon as we see the cameras watching Tomata in his hideout, the marathon dance competition on his TV (as soon as we see the TV, for that matter), we can guess that the film won’t spare arts and entertainment any more than it spares science, history, or consumer culture. Tomata capers around the bunker, chased by his appliances. He’s all alone and yet surrounded: by the people on the TV, by the cameras, by the dancing saxophone and hair dryer and shower head and electric toothbrush that hunt him through the bunker as he sings a paean to that most American ideal, “hard work to make a home sweet home.” This imagery of crowded domestic isolation could only be more contemporary if he addressed his hard-work song to Alexa. It’s a fantasy of servants who aren’t people (“Give your appliances the afternoon off,” he counsels, quoting a 1984 energy-conservation slogan from Southern California Edison). Tomata does his post-apocalyptic laundry in a home filled with “people” who are really projections of his own wants.

Population: 1 depicts America as a country defined by restless and relentless loneliness. This is why Hollywood became the entertainment capital of the world. Imagine Laura Ingalls Wilder as the prequel to 2015’s The Witch. Daalder’s film could’ve just as easily been titled “Little Bunker Under the Prairie.” And the movie enjoys the hell out of this violent, paranoid nation, a country whose laughter sounds like gunshots. There’s a carnivorous pleasure, a willingness to give us the very entertainment it condemns. It’s Savonarola cabaret.

Even the romance that shapes what passes for the movie’s plot is defined by entertainment and loneliness. Edwards is gorgeous in a stray-cat kind of way, and she can smolder as well as she can shriek. She takes her own American history tour through music, hitting the 1920s with a goth avant la lettre song called “Jazz Vampire” and the Depression with Rodgers and Hart’s taxi-dancer anthem “Ten Cents a Dance.” Tomata falls hard for her. “And then an idea struck me,” he reminisces, and the verb choice is apt: “The Punch and Judy show… escapist entertainment in which, for one fleeting moment, it would be me who took a beating from my own woman. I showed men that in weakness there lies strength, and encouraged women to show their teeth. And because of it, became the world’s favorite male role model.”

This whole episode is one of the places where Population: 1 is a lot smarter and twistier than it had to be. Nuclear apocalypse reveals both national and universal character, and here, one of the central human characteristics is a drive for self-immolating ecstasy. Sheela howls, “I wanna hurt!” as her man pleads in a cartoon swain’s voice, “I wanna love.” But their moth/flame romance is interrupted by World War II, and the movie returns to the more cliched tactic of playing “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” over a montage of soldiers dying in flames. Still, the movie resists any political interpretation—any hope of an alternative—as we return to the devastated future. Tomata stumbles drunk through his bunker, holding a gun in one louche hand, at once underlining and undermining the film’s antiwar statement with slapstick. With the gun to his head, he muses, “But what is a man left alive to do but look himself in the eye and wonder where he got the power for so many things to go wrong?”

Sheela died in the atomic attacks, as we saw at the film’s beginning; Tomata was originally one of many survivors who retreated to an underground world ruled by fetishistic doctors and nurses in ’80s makeup. “We were a people who believed in fun, joy,” Tomata says, “yet here we were, knocked out of commission by a few man-made thunderclaps… We submitted to everything.” (A nice thing about nuclear war is that it makes your problems somebody else’s responsibility.) Tomata declares, “We never gave up on the pursuit of happiness, although the limits were many. For some reason, ecstasy always resulted in defeat and collapse.” He spits out recovery-culture slogans (“Easy Does It! One Day at a Time!”) while a sort of dance-riot plays out behind him. Huge swathes of the pop culture of the ’70s and ’80s tell the same story, of pleasure-seekers who discover that fun is bad. Those stories of chastening are themselves often both pleasurable and haunting, but Population: 1 denies itself the pleasures of being chastened; the defeat of fun is only prelude to the defeat of recovery.

The survivors mutate, of course, but for this movie the purpose of the mutations is to entertain us with their weirdness while also condemning us for being entertained: “They became the audience to their own midnight mutant movie,” Tomata says about his comrades, and about us. Life after war descends into a kind of Orgy on Dr. Moreau’s Island, and somehow Tomata ends up totally alone, “just as life starts with one individual sperm.” (That this isn’t how life starts—typically one does need an egg—is presumably part of the point.) With crazy eyes, in camo shorts and a Western shirt, Tomata declares his fealty to the American dream in lines laden with the movie’s heaviest sarcasm.

And then one last survivor bursts in on him! He isn’t alone! His lady love is dead, but perhaps there’s still companionship outside the television screen… Tomata shoots him. Capering and firing the gun, yelling more catchphrases (“A stitch in time. A tit for a tat. Jumpin’ Jehovah! … Long ago we would’ve been dead”), he shoots at the retreating camera and the rubble of the bunker closes him in. Roll credits.

A 2008 two-disc DVD release by Cult Epics includes an interview with Daalder, the usual trailers and stills, as well as many more music videos from the various performers involved with the movie, including previously unreleased material from the Screamers, Sheela Edwards solo, and Penelope Houston.

Eve Tushnet is the author of two novels, Amends and Punishment: A Love Story, as well as the nonfiction Gay and Catholic: Accepting My Sexuality, Finding Community, Living My Faith. She lives in Washington, DC and writes and speaks on topics ranging from medieval covenants of friendship to underrated vampire films. Her hobbies include sin, confession, and ecstasy.

I have not done a weekend gaming post in forever, despite having a game or two going every weekend.  If you follow me on Facebook or my personal Instagram page then one thing is pretty obvious.  My family and I LOVE food.  My wife has won baking awards, my oldest son is in culinary school, my youngest loves to experiment in the kitchen and even I have won 1st place in my local chili cook-off for my "Mississippi Queen" Chili.

It should be no surprise then we LOVE to cook for our D&D sessions.  My oldest son runs three D&D 5e campaigns, one Call of Cthulhu game (3 of which my youngest son is a part of), and I have my three D&D games that meet more rarely, but the bottom line is we have anywhere from two to three groups here every week and we cook for all of them.

These are all high school and college-age kids, so other than one or two other than my kids, their palettes are still forming.  I mean in our groups we have people from South Korea, Equador, Mexico, Spain, and even a 2nd generation Greek (the Greek Orthodox Church is just down the road), so we have ethnicities all covered. So we still like to branch out a bit from just plain old "gamer faire" of burgers, hot dogs and chips, though we still do those a lot.  We have made chili for them (of course), homemade mac-n-cheese (they are still kids), but homemade enchiladas, pulled smoked pork, bbq chicken, homemade ramen (complete with soy marinaded eggs), eclair cakes, banana bread, tacos, homemade chicken sandwiches (because fuck Chik-fil-a), homemade pizza, mini pies,  and homemade wings of various spiciness from mild to "oh dear god make it stop mommy!"





Fortunately for us, we love to cook all this.  My wife has a huge garden (over 2,200 square feet) where we can grow an absolute ton of veggies, so that helps.  In fact, there are many times throughout the year where we don't even need to buy vegetables (and we eat a lot of veggies).

You can see my wife's garden from space!We only have a couple of food allergies to deal with, but that fine with us. 
The great thing is that everyone wants to come here now for the games!  Yeah it means we have a lot of cooking to do, but we enjoy it and we know some of these guys in college with my oldest don't get a homecooked meal very often.

Today's game is Liam's college group and on the menu is the Curse of Strahd and Taco Pie.  Yeah, not haute cuisine, but it is still homemade AND we used enchilada sauce made from our own dried peppers, garden onions, and tomato sauce (yes, we make our own tomato sauce). 





Much better than a bag of chips and a Mountain Dew.

Monstrous Monday will return next week.

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


—oOo—

What is it?
Rocks Fall: A slot-in scenario for Runequest: Roleplaying in Glorantha is a short, one-session scenario set in Dragon Pass wherever Trolls may be found.

It is a sixteen page, full colour, 22.96 MB PDF.

Rocks Fall is well presented and decently written, but needs an edit in places. Both illustrations and cartography are decent, the maps being particularly clear.

Where is it set?
Rocks Fall is set in a dry, rocky place anywhere Trolls might be found and so can easily be slotted into most campaigns.

Who do you play?
The scenario is combat-focused, so warriors and combat capable characters are recommended. The scenario will hold significance to Ernalda and Babeester Gor worshippers.

What do you need?
Rocks Fall can be run using just RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha. For more information about Trolls, the RuneQuest: Glorantha Bestiary may be useful.

What do you get?
Rock Falls is a combat heavy scenario set in a small cave and temple complex which a Troll band is excavating and will defend any attempt to intrude upon their efforts. The complex has just nine locations and is linear in nature, although it does make good use of vertical space. Each of the locations is decently described. Also detailed is the reason of the Trolls’ activity in the complex and some hints as what the complex was prior to its partial collapse.

The opposition consists of several Dark Trolls and a mixed band of Food, Value, and Warrior Trollkin. The Trollkin are not initiates, but advice is given on each of their tactics and how to scale both them and the Dark Trolls in order to make them more of a challenge. In addition, each of the Dark Trolls and Trollkins has its own character standup. These accompany the large, but simple maps of the complex.

One issue with Rocks Fall is the overview of the scenario is underwritten and could have done with a stronger explanation, especially concerning the reasons why the Trolls are digging there and possible legends related to the complex. That would have expanded the versatility of the scenario, perhaps giving a good hook for Ernalda and Babeester Gor worshippers to seek out the complex or for a rival band of Trolls.

Is it worth your time?
Yes. As a ‘Slot-in’ scenario, as a short and location scenario, Rock Falls is easy to insert into an ongoing campaign. It is particularly suitable for a combat orientated group of player characters or a combat capable group looking for a change of pace.
No. Less combat capable player characters will find Rock Falls a challenge, if not deadly.
Maybe. The background to Rocks Fall is lightly drawn, giving scope for development by the Game Master.

Riot at Red Plank is a scenario written and published for use with Call of Cthulhu, Seventh Edition by Golden Goblin Press. Like the earlier Riding the Northbound: A Hobo Odyssey, Riot at Red Plank was released as a stretch goal for the Kickstarter campaign for the scenario, Cold Warning: A chilling 7th Edition scenario, and like Riding the Northbound: A Hobo Odyssey it is a one-shot scenario which explores a different aspect of American history. Where Riding the Northbound: A Hobo Odyssey explored the lives of Hobos, Tramps, and Bums in the desperate decade of the 1930s, Riot at Red Plank takes in the first decade of the twentieth century in the mines worked by and company towns lived in by immigrant workers amidst growing labour unrest, union agitation, and the often armed response of the mine owners.

Riot at Red Plank takes place in 1904 and is set on the Keweenaw Peninsula on Lake Superior in Northern Michigan where a number of copper mines are worked by immigrants from Scandianavia and Northern Europe. One of these is the Hecate or ‘heck-eight’ mine, worked by mostly Finnish immigrants. Two years ago it was purchased by the Monadnock Trust, a Boston-based cartel of investors, which has appointed a new mine agent, Hiram Noyes. Since then, Noyes has made many changes, replacing seasoned miners with his own men, and cutting corners which ultimately lead to a disaster and several deaths. He also began testing the use of one-man pneumatic drills, the introduction of which would likely lead to the loss of jobs from amongst the workforce. This has resulted in discontent among the miners, many contemplating unionisation and forcing an independent inspection of the mine. This is where the Riot at Red Plank opens…

In fact, Riot at Red Plank opens with a bang. In the default set-up, the player characters—for they are not investigators in the traditional sense of Call of Cthulhu—are mine workers of various types, including actual miners, carpenters, track layers, and trammers. (Suggestions are given as alternative characters should the players not want to all play miners.) Either way, they are assigned to accompany the mine inspector when disaster strikes and an explosion separates them in a cave from the rest of the mine where they discover a strange mineral and encounter monsters from beyond. When this results in the death of the inspector, the other miners blame Noyes and tensions escalate as the miners agitate for strike. Noyes’ response only makes the situation worse and as labour relations collapse, there remains the question, what was the mineral that the miners found in cave and just what killed the mine inspector?

Riot at Red Plank is a relatively short scenario, a one-shot investigation which has the players take the roles of miners—not investigators—and has them do something that they would ordinarily avoid. That is, conduct an investigation into the mine manager’s anti-labour activities and the horrifying weird events at the mine. They are hampered by the Keweenaw Peninsula isolated location, so getting outside help may prove difficult, but potential help may come from an unexpected quarter (but also sets up a possible sequel in both the 1920s and the modern era). To support this, Riot at Red Plank provides not just the seven pre-generated mine workers, each complete with detailed backgrounds, but also information about the Keweenaw Peninsula, the Hecate mine, and how mining is conducted during this period. Further support comes in the form of maps, terminology guide, and a number of decent handouts.

Physically, Riot at Red Plank is very nicely presented. Reuben Dodd’s artwork is excellent as ever, Stephanie’s McAlea’s cartography is decent, and the layout is clean and tidy. The writing is good too. The cover though does give away who the Mythos villains are in Riot at Red Plank.

Structurally, Riot at Red Plank is different not just because it gets the players to take roles different to those of standard Call of Cthulhu investigators and its places them in an interesting period of the USA’s social history—much like Golden Goblin Press’ Northbound: A Hobo Odyssey—but also because it delivers a short, sharp horrifying shock right from the outset. This shock sets up the mystery which pervades the whole of the scenario and lies behind all of the antagonists’ motives. Suitable as a one-shot or a convention scenario, Riot at Red Plank is an effective piece of corporatised horror which forces the labour force to confront the Mythos.

In classic post apocalypse gaming—by which we mean Gamma World—players get to roleplay a variety of character types Humans, Mutants, Mutated Animals, and Mutated Plants. Although it seems highly unlikely that players will get to roleplay Mutated Plants in the Mutant: Year Zero series, so far in the Swedish post apocalypse roleplaying game, Mutant: Year Zero – Roleplaying at the End of Days, players have got to play Mutants, leaving the Ark that is their home to explore the Zone beyond and the metaplot which underlies the setting—a search for Eden and perhaps the fate of the Ancients. Then with Mutant: Year Zero – Genlab Alpha, they got to play mutated animals, living in Paradise Valley under the careful eye of the metallic Watchers from their base in the Labyrinth. This was followed by Mutant: Year Zero – Mechatron – Rise of the Robots Roleplaying in which the players roleplayed not Androids, but robots, suddenly self-aware sent out to prevent other robots from achieving self-awareness, in a giant undersea manufacturing dome whose facilities have long begun to deteriorate. This only left the Humans. Just where are the Humans in the future of Mutant: Year Zero? All that is explained in the setting’s latest expansion and fourth standalone roleplaying game in the line, Mutant: Year Zero – Elysium. Like those previous expansions and roleplaying games, Mutant: Year Zero – Elysium includes everything necessary to play—character generation, rules, and a complete campaign, all of which leads up to the start of something new…

The last of humanity has ridden out the worst of the apocalypse in an enclave dug deep into the bowels of the earth. This is Elysium I—named after the meadows of eternal Spring of Greek mythology—founded by four powerful industrial and financial dynasties that continue to rule the enclave to this day. Decades after the end of the world, contact has been lost with the other enclaves, resources are growing scarce, the enclave is close to losing its manufacturing capabilities, and the four great houses—Warburg, Fortescue, Morningstar, and Kilgore—plot and feud against each whilst other putting on a public face of co-operation and optimism. Meanwhile, the workers agitate for better conditions, criminal gangs seem to have free reign, acts of sabotage seem to go unchecked, and rumours abound that the surface might be safe to walk upon and the air clean enough to breathe, a paradise awaiting the first footsteps of humanity once again. In response, the four houses have established a force of Judicators tasked with preserving law and order in the enclave.

The players take the role of members of the four houses—junior members or heirs—who have been assigned to the Judicators, every Judicator patrol consisting of at least one officer from each of the houses. Their loyalties are, of course, to their patrol and the Judicators, but in secret, they report to, and take orders from their house, which often means they have to follow agendas at odds with the rival houses, if not the fellow Judicators in their patrol. Effectively, this means that at any one time, one of the player characters in a patrol will be a double agent! In essence, Mutant: Year Zero – Elysium has much in common with Mutant: Year Zero – Mechatron. The player characters are tasked with policing and dealing with an issue that they are either part of or responsible for. In Mutant: Year Zero – Mechatron it is dealing with difficult situations caused by self-aware robots, whilst also being self-aware, whilst in Mutant: Year Zero – Elysium, the Judicators are investigating acts of sabotage, whilst one of their number is supporting or conducting similar acts of sabotage in the name of their House. If Mutant: Year Zero – Elysium can be described in terms of other roleplaying games, it is Mongoose Publishing’s Paranoia meets EN Publishing’s Judge Dredd & The Worlds of 2000AD and Contested Ground Studios’ Cold City. All of which is played out in a giant inverted underground city equipped with advanced, but increasingly decrepit technology and infrastructure and the look and style of late-nineteenth century, though more central Europe than the Victorian era of Great Britain.

As with player characters in the other Mutant: Year Zero roleplaying games, characters in Mutant: Year Zero – Elysium have four attributes—Strength, Agility, Wits, and Empathy. Each attribute has three basic skills associated with it. Instead of the Mutations of Mutant: Year Zero – Roleplaying at the End of Days, the species of Mutant: Year Zero – Genlab Alpha, and chassis and models of Mutant: Year Zero – Mechatron, characters or Judicators in Mutant: Year Zero – Elysium are all Human. They belong to one of the houses—Warburg, Fortescue, Morningstar, and Kilgore—each of which favours one of the four attributes. They also belong to one of six professions—Investigator, Officer, Procurator, Scholar, Soldier, and Technician. A seventh option is a Psionic, but the playing group will need access to Mutant: Year Zero in order to use such powers of the mind. Each profession provides a single professional skill, for example, Investigate for the Investigator and Command for the Officer, plus options in terms of a Judicator’s appearance, talents, relationships to the other player characters and NPCs, objectives, and equipment.

Unlike the previous roleplaying games and expansions in the Mutant: Year Zero family, the Humans of the Enclave I in general do not have any ‘special’ powers, such as the mutations of the mutants in Mutant: Year Zero. Exceptions to this are the aforementioned Psionics from Mutant: Year Zero and Biomechatronics—cybernetic implants, such as Data Banks, Polygraph, or Heat Vision. Their use though has the potential to cause Machine Fever in those implanted with them. It could be argued though, that the Contacts that each Judicar has, for example, ‘Deadbeat Child’, ‘Grandfather’s Trove’, or ‘Loan Shark’, are the equivalent of ‘special’ powers, but with more social rather than physical or mental effects. Similarly, like the use of Biomechatronics, the use of Contacts is not without its potential backlash.

To create a Judicator a player selects a House and Profession, making choices from the options that these provide. This includes one of the three talents available for the profession, for example, Defender, Pettifogger, and Public Servant for the Procurator. When a character gains experience, he can choose more of these profession-only talents, as well as talents from a wider selection, such as Double Wielder, Machine at Heart, and Rot Resistant. He also assigns points to both attributes and skills, the points for each varying according to a character’s age. A younger character will have more points to assign to his attributes and fewer to his skills, whilst the reverse is the case for an older character. In addition, a player also selects his Judicator’s contacts and what he thinks of them. These are important because they form the pool of NPCs in ‘Guardians of the Fall’, the campaign in Mutant: Year Zero – Elysium.

Our sample character is Horatio Kilgore, a historian who has written a number of books about society before the Titan conflict. The recent circulation of rumours about the surface world being safe made the head of the Judicars wonder where they might be coming from and what they might be based on. So, an expert on the past was requested and unfortunately, Horatio, was reassigned. Much to his dislike, he finds himself having to get out and about instead of spending his days reading and teaching. 

Commissar Horatio Kilgore
House Kilgore
Profession: Scholar
Appearance: Glasses, Hunched build, Smooth and buttoned uniform
Age: 52

Attributes
Strength 2, Agility 3, Wits 5, Empathy 4

Talents
Crucial Insight

Skills 11
Enlighten 4, Fight 1, Shoot 1, Comprehend 3, Know the Zone 3, Manipulate 2

Relationships (Fellow Judicars)
Niamh Warburg is your apprentice and you wish to teach her everything you know.
David Fortescue is ill-mannered and should be disciplined.
Lulu Morningstar has knowledge you thought was unimportant that proved to be otherwise.

Relationships (Contacts)
You hate Theodora Warburg, a fellow Scholar and former colleague. An imbecile, totally undeserving of the career at the academy which should have been yours.
You want to protect Melina Fortescue, a brilliant scholar at the academy and your former teacher.

Your Big Dream
To learn about the surface world and maybe even experience it. You suspect that the Council is not saying everything they know on the subject.

Gear
Stun gun, E-pack, emergency rations, Class IV ID card, comm radio, 9 Credits

Mechanically, Mutant: Year Zero – Elysium uses the same system as Mutant: Year Zero—a mix of specialised dice and cards, also published by Free League Publishing and distributed Modiphius Entertainment. The content of the cards though, in the main artefacts as in Mutant: Year Zero, are reproduced in the pages of Mutant: Year Zero – Elysium and so are not absolutely necessary to play the game. Indeed, arguably, the artefacts do not play as strong a role in Mutant: Year Zero – Elysium as they do in other roleplaying games and expansions in the line. The dice are another matter. All six-sided dice, they are divided into three types—the yellow Base dice, the green Skill dice, and the black Gear dice. In addition to the number six, all dice are marked with the radiation symbol on that face. This indicates a success when rolled. On the one face of the yellow Base dice there is a biohazard symbol, whilst on the one face of the black Gear dice, there is an explosion symbol. Rolling either symbol is counted as a failure. The green Skill dice do not have an extra symbol of their one faces. Now a game of Mutant: Year Zero – Elysium can be run without using the specific Mutant: Year Zero dice, but it does at least require pools of the three different coloured dice to represent the Base, Skill, and Gear dice.

To undertake an action, a Judicator’s player assembles a dice pool consisting of Base, Skill, and Gear. These should be yellow Base dice equal to the attribute used, green Skill dice equal to his skill, and black Gear dice equal to the Bonus for the item of any Gear used. A roll of six (radiation) on any of the dice rolled counts as a success, but rolling more successes are better as these can be spent on stunts. The types of stunt available are listed skill by skill. So with the Fight, you might inflict extra damage, grab an opponent’s weapon, or knock it over, while with Know the Zone, you would not only work out what a creature or phenomenon is, but also whether or not it could hurt you or you could hurt it. If no sixes are rolled, then the action is a failure. The results are even worse if ones or biohazard symbols on the yellow Base dice or explosion symbols on the black Gear dice are rolled. If a player fails to roll any radiation symbols—or not enough, he can push the roll and reroll any dice that did came up as Biohazard, Explosion, or Radiation symbols. Even if a player makes a successful roll, his Judicator can still suffer trauma for any Biohazard symbols rolled.

For the most part, combat in Mutant: Year Zero – Elysium works in the same way as it does in Mutant: Year Zero – Roleplaying at the End of Days and Mutant: Year Zero – Genlab Alpha, with one major exception. Characters have access to advanced healing, although it takes time. Social conflicts use the same mechanics as physical combat.

The play of Mutant: Year Zero – Elysium differs significantly ways both minor and major. The first and minor difference is that where in Mutant: Year Zero – Roleplaying at the End of Days and Mutant: Year Zero – Genlab Alpha, the player characters were trying to improve their lives and those of their community by inventing new technologies and building devices, here they are attempting to hold back the enclave’s ruin and eventual collapse. Instead of working to raise Development Levels, here the player characters are attempting to prevent them from degrading, though ultimately, this is unlikely. This sets up one half of the conflict that lies at the core of Mutant: Year Zero – Elysium. The other is that the player characters, the Judicars, are often expected to place their loyalties to their respective Houses above their loyalty to the enclave and the last of humanity overall. When asked to do so by their House, the Judicar becomes, in effect, a traitor to his patrol and fellow Judicars, and the enclave in general.

This core conflict is supported by the roleplaying game’s set-up and play, which again is different to that of Mutant: Year Zero – Roleplaying at the End of Days and Mutant: Year Zero – Genlab Alpha. Mutant: Year Zero – Elysium is best played by four players so that their patrol is comprised of one heir from each of the four houses. Play is divided into Strategic and non-Strategic rounds. Strategic rounds are player controlled and are when each represents not his characters, but his whole House. They plan and stage Incidents which will hopefully either increase their respective House’s Control or decrease the Control of a rival House in a sector. By increasing a House’s Control in a sector, the more Influence Points a character has during play, which enables him to bring in more of his contacts into play. Each House’s degree of Control is also used when voting to determine which Incident is assigned to the Judicar squad that the player characters are in. Each Incident will have a starting effect which is unavoidable and a final effect which will take place if the Judicars fail to deal with it—and that is in addition to the final effects of the Incidents which take place at the same time as the Incident being investigated, and which the Judicars do not deal with. Thus there is a constant sense of ongoing decline and decay that the Judicars just cannot hold despite their best efforts—which are often undermined.

At this point, the Strategic round pauses, the non-Strategic round begins, essentially normal play with each player roleplaying his character conducting the investigation of the Incident. This includes one of the squad being a double agent who is following his House’s agenda rather than that of the squad or the enclave. Following the resolution of the Incident, the players get to vote on who they think the double agent is and can get Experience Points if they all do. An exposed double agent is punished for misconduct and can be imprisoned for multiple infractions.

All of this is supported not just by a detailed description of Enclave I, sector by sector, and solid advice for the Game Master, but also the ‘Guardians of the Fall’ campaign. It is built around fifteen key NPCs and eleven Incidents, divided into eight standard Incidents and three Special Incidents. The eight standard Incidents will occur again and again up and down the Enclave, until such times as the Judicars investigate them and then they do not occur again. As the Incidents pile up and Enclave I begins to degrade, the Special Incidents occur. These tie the events of the  ‘Guardians of the Fall’ campaign into previous events in other Mutant: Year Zero campaigns and ultimately will push the Judicars out of Enclave I. The ‘Guardians of the Fall’ campaign is generally very good, but it does feel relatively short at eleven episodes and its constant focus on the debilitating effects of the Houses undermining each other, does make it a bit of grind with no let up. Now the Game Master is provided with the means to create other Incidents, which are really necessary if she wants to run Incidents that are normal in comparison, but it would be nice to see ordinary Incidents as detailed as those in the campaign. Especially as that would also allow the Game Master and her players to involve their characters more in what is the nicely detailed and rich setting of Enclave I. The last part of ‘Guardians of the Fall’ campaign takes the whole of the Mutant: Year Zero into the future, but hopefully there will be support for that future from Free League Publishing.

Physically, Mutant: Year Zero – Elysium is of the same standard as the rest of the Mutant: Year Zero line. Although it needs an edit in places, the writing is decent, the cartography is clear, and the artwork is excellent, the latter including a rather nice pastiche. Lastly, it comes with a good index.

Although, Mutant: Year Zero – Elysium bears similarities to Mutant: Year Zero – Mechatron – Rise of the Robots Roleplaying, it is a very different campaign in tone and nature. It is divisive—it is House against House, and thus player character against player character; it is collective in nature—each Judicar’s House matters more than the individual or the Enclave; is is oppressive—the Judicators are officers of an autocratic state; the enemies are internal—that is, the inhabitants of Enclave I—rather than external; and ultimately, the Humans of the future of Mutant: Year Zero are committing the errors of the past once again. Also the satirical aspect previously seen in Mutant: Year Zero – Mechatron – Rise of the Robots Roleplaying is not as strong in Mutant: Year Zero – Elysium and there is a darker, more oppressive feel to both setting and campaign. That said, the campaign does end on a wondrous and positive note, and perhaps the fact that it is short at just eleven episodes is something of a relief given its oppressive feel. It will be interesting to see how all of these differences are contrasted and handled in future releases for the Mutant: Year Zero line.

If a Game Master and her players have played through the first three Mutant: Year Zero roleplaying games, then they will certainly want to play Mutant: Year Zero – Elysium, but be warned, it is radically different in terms of tone and play than the others. It would also work as a one-shot campaign, but is best played as the fourth part of the Mutant: Year Zero line because it is so different. Darker, decaying, and Dickensian, Mutant: Year Zero – Elysium takes the Mutant: Year Zero in a wholly new direction, just as each of the Mutant: Year Zero titles have done before it. This is the Mutant: Year Zero which brings them all together and which sets up what will hopefully be the next chapter. 

It is pretty well documented that I am a hardcore DC guy.
But there are few Marvel comice I really enjoy, and all of them are getting new movies!  Where to start?



Ok, let's go with what might be some of the best castings ever, Jared Leto as Dr. Michael Morbius in Morbius.



This comes from the comic Morbius the Living Vampire about a scientist who tries to cure himself with vampire blood.  Some changes will be made to this for the movie to be sure, but it looks fantastic. The cameo by Michael Keaton is also a shocker and what role is Matt Smith playing?  (Loxias Crown according to the Wikipedia).

My second favorite casting (and this is so weird to say since up till Morbius this one was my favorite) in Marvel movie gives us Anna Taylor-Joy as freaking Magick in the New Mutants.



"I killed 18 men. One. by. one." Oh Magick, you keep doing you.

I mean really, ATJ as Magick the only thing that would keep me from geeking out over the casting of Maisie Williams as Wolfsbane.  I read a lot of New Mutants back in college and was the last X-men/Marvel comic I kept up with.  Plus it has a solid horror vibe.

Those are the ones we have trailers for.

We are also getting Doctor Strange 2: The Multiverse of Madness.  That is like, three of my favorite things in the title alone.  Now the rumor is Scarlet Witch will be in the movie too. I like the movie Wanda much more than the comic one so this is great.

AND the hits keep coming with the Blade reboot with the amazing Mahershala Ali as the day-walking half-vampire Blade.

It's going to be great really.  And this is not even looking into the DC movies coming up.

Until one hundred and fifty years ago, the world of Scarn was rent by a horrific war between the Gods and Titans, as the Gods, the children of the Titans, sought to rid the land of their whimsical and dangerous parents. Yet even as the battles raged and the mortals suffered beneath the combatants’ notice, the Gods found they could not kill the Titans. As its creators, the essence of the titans is inseparably bound to the world of Scarn, and destroy them, and the world is also destroyed. So instead of killing them, the Gods simply sought to incapacitate their parents, either chaining them in place or hacking them apart, their bodies and body parts becoming part of Scarn’s landscape where they fell. Now decades later, the felled titans are the targets of titan-worshippers wanting to resurrect their masters and the divine races to continue their war against the titanic abominations.

This is the set-up for the Scarred Lands, originally a setting for the d20 System published by White Wolf Publishing under its Sword and Sorcery Studios imprint since the year 2000. Now published by Onyx Path Publishing for use with Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition as a Scarred Lands Player’s Guide, but a gaming group need not grab this rulebook in order to get a taster and a feel for this post-apocalyptic fantasy setting. The alternative is Gauntlet of Spiragos: An Introductory Adventure for 1st-Level Characters, an adventure designed to take a quartet of adventurers from First Level to Third Level. Advice is included to help a Dungeon Master adjust the scenario to make it more or less of a challenge as required.

The focus of Gauntlet of Spiragos is the Chasm of Flies, a crack in the earth left when the titan Spiragos the Ambusher was smote down by one of the young gods, Vangal the Ravager. The location is now is inhabited by spider-eye goblins and their spider allies, but has long been rumoured to be the resting place of powerful artefacts leftover from the Divine War. A torn and stained map has fallen into the hands of the Player Characters which possibly shows the location of a cleft or chasm in the Devil’s March and depicts what could be three magical items. The Player Characters are presented with three ways of discerning about information about the map, the Devil’s March, and the cleft in the ground. The first is from their general knowledge, whilst the second is to examine the map and work out the meaning of its various clues, and to that end, the designers have provided a number of skill tests for the players to roll and discover what their characters can learn. The other is to go to the edge of the Bronze Hills and Creagfort, which lies a few miles south of the Devil’s March and perhaps learn what those posted there know. This is optional, but the scenario assumes that the Player Characters will start there anyway, and to be honest, this is really the only opportunity for any roleplaying to take place in the adventure.

Unfortunately, after this, Gauntlet of Spiragos takes on a rather singular note with a series of combat encounters between Creagfort and the Chasm of Flies with an extra optional one should the Party be making easy progress. This optional encounter introduces an NPC which could be used to harass the Player Characters’ progress, but as written this option is one that the Dungeon Master will need to develop herself because he is only present to increase the number of combat challenges. This is a missed opportunity since it might have given something or someone for the Player Characters to interact with and oppose, and something or someone for the Dungeon Master to roleplay.

The Chasm of Flies presents an interesting physical challenge for the Player Characters, consisting of a pair of parallel columns which descend into the darkness, festooned with webs. This gives it an eerie atmosphere with a verticality derived for what the ‘dungeon’ actually is, something entirely in keeping with the setting and the consequences of the Divine war. Yet the encounters in the Chasm of Flies are not all that interesting in themselves, being again combat orientated and singular in nature. Nevertheless, the objects indicated on the map at the start of the adventure, the reasons for the Player Characters to undertake the journey are actually very nicely done, quite powerful and flavoursome given the low Level nature of the scenario.

Physically, Gauntlet of Spiragos is something of a mixed bag. Some of the artwork is excellent, but some of it is cartoonish. Likewise, some of the cartography is murky and a waste of space, in fact, the best map in the scenario is actually the player handout given out at the scenario. Similarly, the scenario suffers from being overwritten and dense in places, hampering the efforts of the Dungeon Master to extract material from the book and present it to her players.

There are some great elements in Gauntlet of Spiragos—the nature of the dungeon, the excellent magical artefacts, and the map handout as a means of delivering clues and information—which together do impart some of the feel and flavour of the world of the Scarred Lands. In fact, the importance of the magical artefacts come into play in Dagger of Spiragos and Ring of Spiragos, the two sequels to Gauntlet of Spiragos.) As an introduction, they work well, but they are hampered by the scenario’s linear design, lack of variety in terms of play, and the sometimes stodgy writing, the ultimate effect being that Gauntlet of Spiragos is not as interesting and as dynamic as an introduction to Scarred Lands it deserves to be. This should not be taken as Gauntlet of Spiragos: An Introductory Adventure for 1st-Level Characters being a complete disaster, for it is far from that. Rather it is a scenario that will work better with some tinkering and adjustment upon the part of the Dungeon Master.

The hottest new property in OSR gaming is Old-School Essentials.  Justifiably so too.   It is a great reinterpretation of the Basic/Expert rules and it is a lot of fun.  It is also on sale today as the DriveThruRPG Deal of the Day.

I am still a little bit away, further than I want to admit, from finishing up The Craft of the Wise: The Pagan Witchcraft Tradition.  But in celebration of OSE's sale here are some new witch spells.

First Level Witch Spells

Call Spirits of the Land
Duration: 1d4 hours
Range: The Caster
Call Spirits enables the witch to gather local spirits of the dead and elements, which appear to the caster as small ghostly disembodied heads, and listen to their tales about the surrounding
land and people.
▶ Characters listening can make an Intelligence Ability check to learn something about the local area.
▶ Characters who fail the check by five or less hear nothing but endless ramblings and chattering, possibly in an unknown or ancient language, that have nothing to do with the subject at hand.
▶ Those who fail by more than five hear nothing.
▶ A roll of a natural 20 provides completely false and maliciously misleading information.

Material Components: The caster must pay for the information with offerings of food, alcoholic beverages, incense, song, and pleasant conversation. The offering should total at least 1 gp.

Salving Rest 
Duration: Special
Range: The caster or a creature touched
This spell allows its subject to enjoy soothing, peaceful sleep, free of pain and sorrow, whenever she slumbers. As a result of this salving rest,
▶ The subject of the spell will heal an extra 1d3 hit points during each day of complete rest.
▶ The spell ends when the subject stops completely resting or if she takes any damage.

Material Components: A tea made from valerian root and lavender.

Second Level Witch Spells

Chameleon
Duration: 1 turn per level
Range: Touch
This spell allows any character touched to blend into her surroundings to the point of becoming nearly invisible. The character gains a +4/+20% to hide in shadows. Characters affected by a chameleon spell can always hide in shadows with a skill of at least 25% chance. This spell is used to create elven cloaks.

Material Components: The scale of a chameleon or a bit of skin from a cuttlefish. Alternately a bit of multi-colored cloth will also work.

Inscribe Tattoo I
Duration: Permanent
Range: One willing target
With this spell the caster inscribes a tattoo onto a willing subject. Only three such tattoos can ever be placed on one subject.
Tattoos have different abilities
Become animal: Allows the subject to shift into a normal animal, chosen at the time of inscribing. The animal’s HD must be equal to or less than the subject’s level. The subject can only shapeshift once per month.
Strike true: The subject gains a +1 to hit/damage. Magical creatures can be hit with this magic.
Magical protection: +1 to saves vs. magic. This can be from spells, wands, rods or magic-like effects.
Battle protection: +1 bonus to AC. Tattoo must be visible to have effect.
Magical Affinity: Used by spell casters this gives as -1 penalty to target’s saves.

Similar tattoos do not add their effects. Two Magical Protection tattoos do not prove +2 protection.  Only higher-level tattoos can.
The caster cannot tattoo herself.

Material Components: Special tattoo pens, needles, and inks are required.

Third Level Witch Spells
Hopping Doom Duration: 1 turn/level Range: 60 feetThe witch can summon 1d10 x 1,000 slimy wet bullfrogs to a spot designated (crawling out from rocks, nooks and crannies, or otherwise dropping from the ceiling or sky). They jump madly about, getting underfoot, and croak at a deafening volume that prevents conversation within the area of effect. The distraction is such that spellcasters must save (spells) before they can cast, and missile users roll to hit at -2. Movement within the area is halved.▶There is a base 10% chance (+5% per level) that 1d10 poisonous frogs will be in the group. ▶They will attack non-frog targets within the area of effect, forcing them to save (poison) at +2 or die. The poisonous frogs are colorful but otherwise identical to the rest.▶The caster can move the mass of frogs by telepathic command, at a maximum speed of up to 60 ft per round.▶The area of effect is determined by the number of frogs summoned (10 ft² per 1,000 frogs).
Material Components: A small fly.
MaliceDuration: 6 turnsRange: Touch Malice weakens the target creature's attacks: each time the target creature inflicts hit point damage on an enemy (by any means), damage dice must be rolled twice, and the lesser result used.
Material Components: The witch must be able to touch the target while giving a word of power.
Fourth Level Witch Spells
Venus GlassDuration: InstantaneousRange: One glass of waterThe witch sends a prayer out to the spirits of her ancestors and to the spirits of those not yet reborn into her life for a vision. A question is asked to give her a vision of a face. Typically the witch casts a venus glass for a maiden hoping to see the face of her future husband.She then cracks an egg and suspends the egg white in a glass of waterShe can then see the future, usually, the face of someone important to the witch or whomever the witch is asking about.▶ Face: the face of someone will appear. It may be indistinct or quite clear.▶ Portents: If the egg has blood in it means that the person they seek with bring them death.▶ Visage of Death: If the face switches from normal to a skull face then the person they seek will die.▶ Unclear: No face is revealed. The witch may try again the next night.
Material Components: An egg from a hen taken at or just before the dawn and a clear glass of pure water.
Fifth Level Witch Spells
Flood of TearsDuration: Instantaneous and one round per levelRange: Cone 60’ The witch begins to cry and creates a flood to wash away her foes. ▶ In the first round, the tears flow creatures caught in the flood must make a save vs. paralysis or take 1d6 hp of damage for every two levels of the witch (max 7d6). Save for half. ▶ For the rounds that follow the area remains inundated with water and the flotsam and jetsam of debris. Movement is reduced to half in this area. 
Material Components: The witch must cry.
Sixth Level Witch Spells
Eye BiteDuration: 1 round per 3 levelsRange: 25’ + 5’ per 2 levelsThe witch glares at a target. Each round, the witch may target a single living creature, striking it with waves of arcane power.  Depending on the target’s HD, this attack has as many as three effects.

HDEffect10 or moreSickened5-9Panicked, sickened4 or lessComatose, panicked, sickened
▶ Sickened: Sudden pain and fever sweeps over the target’s body. A sickened creature takes a -2 penalty on attack rolls, weapon damage rolls, saving throws and ability checks.  A creature affected by this spell remains sickened for 10 minutes per caster level.  The effects cannot be negated by a remove disease or heal spell, but a remove curse is effective.▶ Panicked: The target becomes panicked for 1d4 rounds as if under the influence of a fear spell.  After the initial effect is over, the target can become panicked again if he sees the witch and fails a saving throw.▶ Comatose: The target falls into a catatonic coma for 10 minutes per caster level.  During this time, it cannot be awakened by any means short of dispelling the effect.  This is not a sleep effect, and thus elves are not immune to it.
The witch can affect victims for 1 round per three caster levels.  Spell effects can last longer than this depending on the effect. 
Material Components: The witch needs to be able to see the victim.  She needs to touch her eye and point to the victim.

The Craft of the Wise: The Pagan Witch Traditions

Michael Grasso / January 16, 2020

The Voice That Thunders
By Alan Garner
The Harvill Press, 1997

Over the course of my many explorations of British hauntology of the 1970s over the past five years, I found myself enjoying a pair of television adaptations, produced a decade apart, full of deep mystical themes reaching back into the marrow of ancient Britain. In The Owl Service (1969) and Red Shift (1978), mythic emanations from the distant past return in our present, revenants who live again through the lives of young people in the postwar UK. These themes, echoed again and again in British fantasy dramas set in the contemporary era, hold a profound fascination for me, as an American cut off from a deep sense of magic, time, and place. One man was behind the novels upon which both these adaptations were based: British novelist, amateur archeologist and folklorist, and essayist Alan Garner. His 1997 collection of essays and lectures, The Voice That Thunders, lays bare the origins of his unique mode of storytelling. Garner’s upbringing suffused in the magic of Old Britain, his working-class family long-situated in one place (Garner’s home of Alderley Edge in Cheshire); and his early life marked by dual traumas—the Second World War and a brush with death thanks to childhood illnesses—gave Garner a unique insight into the borderlands between life and death, between the mythic and the material.

The Voice That Thunders consists of sixteen essays, prepared lectures, and newspaper columns that return to the mythic themes that Garner’s more than half-century of novels explore. The collection is in effect an expressionistic autobiography, where lectures on topics such as education, the state of children’s literature (Garner found himself long-characterized as a “children’s author” because many of his protagonists were young people), and linguistics circle back to the material conditions of Garner’s own early life. Like Nigel Kneale and his childhood home on the Isle of Man, or Alan Moore and his lifetime home of Northampton, or Mark E. Smith and his home and haunt, Salford, all of Garner’s universes, no matter how far afield over the British Isles they may roam, always seem to return, psychologically and mythopoetically, to Alderley Edge.

In the book’s first chapter, a lecture given in 1983, Garner spells out the specifics of his early life and the legends that populated Alderley Edge. While World War II rages outside the fairly idyllic grounds of “the Edge,” young Alan has his own battle against mortality, and an eye-opening, hallucinatory set of experiences in the “forest in the ceiling” of his room while he was recovering from his various childhood illnesses. The mystical road that led into this bedroom fantasyland is connected in some deep way to the Edge and to the various legends told to him by older relations: the faerie tree, once long ago clad in rags beside the Holy Well; an ancient Hero King slumbering in the ground. Garner tells a 1996 audience of headmasters and headmistresses in the book’s second essay that “I assure you that children are, by nature, spiritual beings, until we destroy through our example… A child knows, whether it be in the traditional structure of fairy tale, or the special use of an archaism, when the Mystery is engaged.” Surely we all recognize the impulse of childlike wonder at myths and folktales. But for young Alan, in his throes of illness, myth had a much more important, mature purpose. He managed to use the bits and pieces of myth entrusted to him by the very particular vibrations of locality, the genius loci of Alderley Edge, to deal with the possibility of his own incipient mortality by creating a mythological playground in his own ceiling, complete with symbols of shamanic journey (the road), safety (the wood) and the threat of young death:

Sometimes I would look up, and see no road, no forest, clouds or hills, but a plump little old woman with a circular face, hair parted down the middle and drawn to a tight bun, lips pursed, and small pebbled eyes…

The little old woman came only when my life really was threatened. She was a part of the plaster in the ceiling, not of my room but of my parents’ room, and I was taken there when I was too ill to be left alone. She was my death, and I knew it.

The mythic courses through both the marrow of the very landscape of the Edge and in Garner’s own family bloodline. It is mostly because of the Garners’ long family association with Alderley Edge that he has access to the myths that would inspire his Cheshire-set novels, including his 1960 debut The Weirdstone of Brisingamen and its sequels. Garner’s knowledge of the area led him to a love of archeology from a very early age: his childhood realization that a shovel hanging in a teacher’s classroom might have a neolithic origin is confirmed almost fifty years later by an archeologist friend of Garner’s. Garner also considers the origin and meaning behind one of the folktales told around Alderley Edge and does some armchair ley line-plotting to determine its possible origins in pagan alignments of sun and landscape (all while remaining a bit dubious about possible “arcane conclusions” drawn by most amateur ley line enthusiasts). But Garner’s exploration of the physical landscape—with the complementary eye of a storyteller and straightedge of a mason—allows him to see the pagan Celtic memories thrumming under the local landmarks and place names. The Cheshire of hundreds of years ago is even imprinted on the very language of the inhabitants. The rural Cheshire dialect of his parents and grandparents had kept alive the poetic tongue of the medieval alliterative poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: “My grandfather was an unlettered smith, but he would have not needed all these footnotes if a native speaker had read the poem to him aloud.” Garner’s ancestors were even carved into the very stone of the countryside; the moss-covered face on the cover of The Voice That Thunders was carved by his great-great-grandfather Robert, a stonemason. Garners were always “makers,” says Alan, his grandfather Joseph one of the last real blacksmiths and whitesmiths in the area, putting his skills to work for both local community and Empire (he made tens of thousands of horseshoes for the British forces in World War I).

But in each generation of craftsmen, Alan Garner writes, there was the undeniable sense of preternatural intelligence chafing at the class-based chains placed on the Garners since time immemorial. Robert had a head for mathematics that found its expression in stonemasonry and in music, as he was a vital member of local brass band; he heard music “listening to the zephyrs in the trees: always in the minor key.” Grandfather Joseph used his own prodigious mathematical mind to memorize London bus timetables, which came to great use during his one trip to London with Alan’s grandmother. Alan clearly saw the postwar British system of wider schooling and competency testing as his way out of a lifetime of manual labor he felt ill-suited for: “[My ancestors] had shaped the place in which I had grown; everywhere I turned, their hands showed me their skills; yet my hands had no cunning; with them I could make nothing, and my family despaired of me.” Garner soon finds that the masons and smiths that populate his mythic memory find expression in his ability to mortar and fuse together words: “[My unique quality] was staring me in the face. It was Robert’s wall. On it was carved his banker mark, the rune Tyr, the boldest of the gods.” Magic and language meet the dignity of manual labor and craftsmanship: all flow together in Garner’s mythic imagination. “One of the first things I discovered when I began was the esoteric meaning of ‘getting aback of.’ Whether it be building walls, mending kettles or writing a book, the activity is the same: it is the pursuit, through dedication, of the godhead.”

As mentioned, many of Garner’s speeches in The Voice That Thunders are delivered to educators, for whom Garner has both a deep respect and words of warning. In his musings on the Cheshire dialect that exists in medieval sources virtually unchanged over a half a millennium, Garner wonders if the standardization of English through formal education has not completely displaced an essential cultural legacy among the regions of Britain with their own traditions in literature and oral storytelling. Garner also tells of the letters he had received from his readers, both children and adults, noting quite strongly that the children who find his books on their own tend to be enchanted and drawn into the worlds he creates, while the children assigned his books as students invariably find them stultifying, boring, or confusing. As someone who owed so much of his own life to education, Garner is sympathetic to what teachers need to accomplish but devastatingly cold to the system that strips students of their imaginations. These letters, in Garner’s words, demonstrate “the headlong enthusiasm children can show for a book, if the reading of it has not been shackled by an adult.”

Which brings us to an aspect of Garner’s life story and The Voice That Thunders that initially simmers under the surface and finally bursts forth fully in a tale of his time on the set of the Granada TV adaptation of The Owl Service: Garner’s struggles with mental illness. Throughout his explications of deep time and of familial trauma and childhood shamanistic journeys, there is the sense that Garner’s gifts leave him on the outside looking in, vouchsafed to deeper truths and mythic realities unseen by most. In a lecture titled “Inner Time,” Garner explores the mental breakdown that occurred on set in Wales as his discomfort with the process culminates in a near-assault on one of The Owl Service cast because of the actor’s inability to take a scene seriously. He retreats from the set and finds himself in the office of a psychotherapist to explore this breakpoint more fully. Garner uses his case to wander through an exploration of the modern condition and how it has created a humanity utterly disconnected from spirituality. This in turn creates an inability to deal with hidden traumas, which Garner calls “engrams.” Garner offers the theory that his connection with myth through his work made him more sensitive to this disconnect: “A writer of fiction, willy-nilly, plants encapsulated engrams in his characters.” Garner’s further work with the therapist brings up a pair of deeply-buried childhood traumas around his childhood illnesses and a fearful first visit to the cinema as a three-year-old (where young Alan was filled with terror at the sight of the Wicked Queen in Snow White). Trauma, buried childhood memory, unaccountable anger, and the threat of death: all linked through the power of a child’s mythic imagination, a man’s attempt to grapple with his life-narrative through storytelling, and buried trauma’s sudden reappearance upon seeing those stories acted out in the real world.

As someone who’s only now, in middle age, begun to explore my own metaphysical associations around childhood and trauma, Garner joins other writers and explorers of the mythic in the role of teacher, fellow explorer—magician, for lack of a better word—who share a need to more deeply understand their lives, to finally see the invisible shackles laid upon us all by place, by family, by history, and by the exercise of political and economic power upon us. But the important lesson to be gathered from Garner’s tales and life story is that none of these shackles are eternal. The myth that is written in our histories is not destiny, and a dedicated “maker,” a runesmith of words and dreams, can craft new tales to deliver themselves out from under the weight of history. “Can we write the world?” Garner asks in “The Voice in the Shadow,” the highlight essay of the collection for me:

We can; if we are willing to pay. The problem with learning to read and being subject to the writing, is that it ends up by being our only way into constructive dreaming. But certain people have innate skills, and they are the visionaries, the poets, those who use language that is the great constructor when it is on the page. They release it into the subconscious by providing us, not with factual information of history, but with ambivalence and the paradox that enables us to interpret what is being said, and what we read, just as we would if we were dreaming. That is the way, via the poet, to the myth, to the truth.

In more succinct form, delivered in a single pair of statements at the beginning of this lecture by Garner: “Believe the fairy tales. What were fairy tales, they will come true.”

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

I updated my layout a bit over the last few day here at the old Other Side.


I updated my Books page, which I have not done since 2016 or so.  Witch Links is getting updated more frequently now. I am still unsure if I'll update Downloads or OGL anymore, so they might go.

The biggest update is a new link above to my War of the Witch Queens old-school Campaign.

Here is some of the information I have on that page.

The War of the Witch Queens

The basis of this campaign was something I scrawled on my notes one day while working on one of my books.

"The Witch Queens gather every 13 years to discuss politic, issues of their realms, to share magical discoveries and socialize. But mostly they meet to make sure they stay out of each other's way.  Each Conclave a new High Queen is chosen to make sure that all witches abide by the rules.  This year however one the first day of the Conclave the current High Queen was murdered.
With the High Queen dead and her successor unchosen, the Witches are threatening to go to war with each other and worlds are caught in between."

The idea is these war of these powerful witches will happen.  The PCs get pulled in to this drama and must discover who killed the High Queen and how to stop it.

The Witch Queens 

A big old-school campaign I am working on is War of the Witch Queens.  I have been collecting these NPCs for years.  Not all are Witch Queens, but all have something to do in the campaign and all were at the Conclave of Witches, so each one is a suspect.

I will admit I have some ideas on who the murderer is.  I am also split on which of these will be the victim, though I have two in mind.  Part of the fun here is to build the mystery.

Check the link above for a list of all the Queens and adventures.

In addition to figuring out the mystery, it is also an excuse to try to use as many different D&D-like systems I can.  So DCC, S&S, Labyrinth Lord, OSRIC and D&D proper all live in harmony on my shelves.

Ben Schwartz / January 15, 2020

The hectic, global nightmare of early 2020 seems like a good time to reappraise our perception of Disney, an increasingly powerful demigod in the media-saturated hellscape we live in. Outlets and organs of multiple disciplines put out breathless articles about the conglomerate’s “unprecedented” success last year. A brain-thudding stream of MCU, Star Wars, remakes, a streaming service, sequels, even the long-anticipated arrival of Kingdom Hearts III: it’s a constant content deluge that runs to hundreds of hours and billions of dollars. And this is the new standard, not a freakish exception. Disney continues to run unchecked, requisitioning more and more head- and life-space with gleeful juggernauting rapaciousness. Thus the recent-ish reappearance, in English, of How to Read Donald Duck (Para Leer Al Pato Donald) by Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart, couldn’t come at a better (worse) time.

Originally published in 1971 in Chile during the brief tenure of socialist Salvador Allende and the Unidad Popular government, How to Read Donald Duck scrutinizes the sociopolitical messaging in Disney comics disseminated throughout Chile by the US. The book was first published by Editorial Quimantú, a UP-owned publishing house focused on cultivating literacy and cultural awareness with domestic rather than imported media. Quimantú produced comics of its own, including Cabro Chico and La Firme, that attempted to depict authentic Chilean experience rather than promulgate a mediated American one.

Donald Duck exposes the culture of Disney comics as a quiet inculcation of imperialist doctrine. Disney characters like Donald Duck are imprisoned in a candy-colored vision of capitalist reality: a world full of isolated individuals, unconnected from one another but endlessly kinetic, rocketing from one situation into another—into jobs, feuds, foreign countries (inevitably portrayed as backwards)—in an attempt to grasp some nebulous brass ring that, inevitably, they lose in the extended gutter between the end of one comic and the start of the next.

Dorfman and Mattelart—the former was, at the time, a cultural advisor to Allende, and the latter a Vatican-appointed demographer turned media analyst—grok the “clast” in “iconoclastic”; there’s a destructive glee in Donald Duck, a cheerful violence lobbed at Disney’s insidious, facile world, which punctures many of the hilariously inflated conceptions about Disney. The “Uncle, Buy Me a Contraceptive…” chapter, for my money, murders once and for all the Parent Question. If you’re unfamiliar, the question is: why do so many Disney characters not have parents? You can find film historians, YouTuber film critics, and general Disneyphiles somberly attributing the answer to tragedies in Walt Disney’s own life, mythological reference, and/or attempts to create independent thinkers out of children. Dorfman and Mattelart see something much more sinister:

In Disney, characters only function by virtue of a suppression of real and concrete factors; that is, their personal history, their birth and death, and their whole development in between, as they grow and change. Since they are not engendered by any biological act, Disney characters may aspire to immortality: whatever apparent, momentary sufferings are inflicted upon them in the course of their adventures, they have been liberated, at least, from the curse of the body.

A Disney character comes ready-made, optimized to function eternally in the false worlds created for him. In the comics under examination, that world is a capitalist, imperialist vacuum. Capitalism is fundamentally prudish, obsessed with order, control, regulation. Rejection of biological origin neatly eliminates the messy reality of human interdependence and community. Imperialism inherently fears being beholden to someone or something external, precisely because that’s the relationship it imposes on everything around it. So, parentless as any product, Disney characters don’t owe anybody anything. They’re free to define themselves exclusively through their actions, however hollow those actions might ultimately be. This is one example among many in this slender little fulgurant. Donald Duck is literally packed with figurative explosives of equal brisance. For six chapters, Dorfman and Mattelart keep digging and dynamiting their way through the Disney mythos. Naturally, they attack the easy targets with scholastic thoroughness and writerly aplomb: the racism, sexism, and jingoism prevalent in Disney comics. But they go far beyond that and arrive at a diagnosis of the (very contagious) American Sickness:

The threat [of the comics to Chile] derives not so much from their embodiment of the ‘American Way of Life,’ as that of the ‘American Dream of Life.’ It is the manner in which the U.S. dreams and redeems itself, then imposes that dream upon others for its own salvation, which poses the danger for the dependent countries.

That dream is one of Innocence, a vision of eternal, misremembered childhood simplicity projected by prudish, frightened, powerful adults. The American impulse careers manically toward simplicity, a reduction of everything to Good or Bad, Positive or Negative, Profit or Deficit, Winner or Loser. And as an imperialist force, when its binary worldview doesn’t map onto reality, it’s the fault of the franchisee, not the franchiser. This, Donald Duck says, is the central falsity of Disney, as dangerous as a hundred other American fantasies: the Noble Loner, the War Worth Fighting, the Good Cop.

In Chile, Disney, like the US, is an invasive species. What crosses borders as an innocent entertainment is in fact a foreign contagion working to assimilate the local hosts. This happens literally as well as figuratively. Disney comics are subcontracted to domestic printers and writers. Thus, in 1974, a year after Pinochet’s junta took over, there was this explicitly pro-violence, anti-Allende Disney comic in the Chile Monitor:

As Dorfman and Mattelart point out, the messaging isn’t always this explicit, but it extends logically from the values instilled by US-made Disney comics. As How to Read Donald Duck’s English translator David Kunzleman says, “The native contributes directly to his own colonization.”

The domestic-undomestic Disney comic is a particularly ugly metaphor for the relationship between the US and Chile in the ‘70s. It’s no secret that American interests were firmly against an Allende presidency, and it’s a safe bet that US politicking and influence at the very least exacerbated the conditions that led to the Pinochet junta. From there it’s not a very long mental walk to some umbrageous extrapolations regarding the present-day situation in Chile and the protests and struggles going on there (already forgotten by the magpie US media).

Donald Duck is a timely book for this very ugly present moment. But too, it finds universality in its particularity. In its depiction of subsumed messages in Disney comics it reveals the threat of brain colonization facing any human consuming media. To some degree, this process is inevitable, involuntary. As an adult I hate Disney, hate everything it’s ever done and all of its glittering, superficial, asinine media properties. But after decades of exposure, much of it “willing” when I was a child, some residue remains inside me that reverberates to the sterile Disney fantasy: its cleanness, its simplicity, its comfort and ease.

So, among the lessons to be found in Donald Duck are: Everything Says Something; and also: Everything Leaves a Mark. Directly and indirectly, people are shaped by what they read, watch, hear, play. Indiscriminate consumption leaves wounds, and neglecting to consider the Hows and Whys of what we take in, whether that’s the latest curlicued Disney confection or the Kojiki is, in very real ways, socially and morally irresponsible. Discriminate consumption also leaves wounds, but if we’re conscious of what we’ve consumed, if we’re vigilant about what it can do to us and others, maybe we can, somehow, become better. As it was upon its initial release, How to Read Donald Duck is an exhilarating taste of sanity in an ugly, ugly time.

OR Books released How to Read Donald Duck in 2018 for first time in the US since the original 1975 edition was seized by Customs at the behest of Disney. It includes a new introduction by Ariel Dorfman in addition to the original preface to the English edition by Dorfman and Mattelart, as well as the introduction to the English edition by David Kunzleman. As mentioned above, Kunzleman did the English translation and it is excellent. A new appendix includes a piece by John Shelton Lawrence called “Donald Duck vs. Chilean Socialism: A Fair Use Exchange,” which is also well worth reading.

Ben Schwartz is a freelance writer working out of Ohio.