Recollections  / November 12, 2024

ROBERTS: I don’t know if I told you guys this, but I worked at Musicland/Sam Goody for a couple of years in the early ‘90s, a pretty good time for popular music. I was actually a store manager for a few months—yes, Richard, it’s true—before my location closed down (there was another Musicland down the street in the mall). That’s what you did back then—you worked in stores that sold the stuff you liked so you could buy more of the stuff you liked. This brochure is before my time, and that’s probably why I find it so fascinating. The ‘70s aesthetic is in full effect, and I forgot just how much merch you could get at “the record store”: stereo systems, speakers, transistor radios, tape recorders, sheet music—even guitars! But it’s the intimacy and immediacy of this environment that gets me. How do you describe to someone who hasn’t experienced it before exactly how it felt to walk into the record store before the internet? When music was your life.

GRASSO: I first took a trip to the record store in what would have been late 1982 or early 1983: it was the Medford, Massachusetts location of the Northeastern US chain Strawberries and I came in search of 45s of two songs that had been in heavy rotation on our newly-acquired cable box’s channel 25, MTV: Thomas Dolby’s “She Blinded Me With Science” and Toto’s “Africa.” I found a lot more there, though, thanks to the giant sales catalog, bigger than a city Yellow Pages, full of import and (presumably) out-of-print vinyl. I was only seven years old, so I was a little overwhelmed by it all, but thanks to that Big Book and the help of my dad and the clerk I was able to grab a copy of Dolby’s The Golden Age of Wireless, which I seem to remember being in short supply in the record racks.

It’s kind of amazing that I’m able to access those memories 40-plus years later—but that’s the impact that very first trip to the record store had on me. I’d drift away from music after my initial early-’80s spate of 45-purchasing (Tracey Ullman’s “They Don’t Know,” Yes’s “Leave It,” and the Kinks’ “Come Dancing” were some of my other early-MTV-inspired singles purchases); it wouldn’t be until junior high in 1987 that I’d start going to the mall on my own to buy cassettes and eventually CDs. Our record chains in Boston—Strawberries, Newbury Comics, and the big HMV and Tower Records outlets in Harvard Square—were great for finding import CD singles and discovering new local favorites, but I also treasured a little hole-in-the-wall used record store on Route 1 in Saugus, whose name very sadly escapes me at this time. 

These stores all had knowledgeable clerks who, if you were able to demonstrate your cred by asking for the “right” album, would put a young, uncertain music fan on the path to finding new artists who’d join your personal pantheon of favorites. Posters, music periodicals, merch of all kinds, ways of proving your fandom: the local record store was a place to equip yourself for doing battle in the trenches of junior high and high school music-cred combat.

MCKENNA: Hmm, what a peculiar coincidence: you were a store manager, Kelly—and then the store closed down, you say? Yep, that definitely sounds like the fault of the other Musicland in the mall, not of the vision-impaired management style that almost deprived the world of the best Phil Collins article that has ever been written. Anyway, you two city slickers seem to be forgetting something: like John Denver, I’m a country boy, and in the provinces of Airstrip One, record shop history follows a slightly different timeline. The chains like Our Price, HMV, and Virgin Megastores didn’t arrive anywhere outside of London until way later than in the States, and when they eventually did, the light-years-out-of-my-league goth girl I fancied from school started working in the only one I could get to, which did not exactly incentivize me to spend my supermarket trolley-boy and lettuce picking money there. 

In any case, at least as I remember it, record buying in Northern England at the time was more likely to be in independent shops like Jumbo in Leeds or Red Rhino in York, or in the more institutional environs of a Sydney Scarborough or a Bradleys. If you were seeking the full beige rainbow of corporate experience, the music departments of the W.H. Smiths shops dotted around the country were for a long time perhaps the nearest thing a lot of us outside London had to something like Musicland. The people running the Smiths’ music departments often seemed to have a weirdly free hand about what they could have in stock (which could be good, or could mean the LP section suffocating under the weight of the thirty least-appetizing Zappa LPs). Was that similar to what went on at Musiclands, or was the choice of stuff more corporate generic? Also, where can I get a copy of that killer Moody Blues poster? And Kelly: which of the Musicland management styles modeled in the brochure photo top left were you channeling? Stranger Danger, Cromwell henchman, Lawyer who thinks he’s outsmarted Columbo, Italo-American SFX tech at the Academy Awards, John Boy Walton, or that slick MF on the right?

ROBERTS: I’m not sure I had a style other than “you watch the store while I smoke and I’ll watch the store while you smoke,” because we were all pounding Marlboro Reds in the back room whenever we could. I remember pulling all-nighters at various stores to put all the cassettes and CDs into the new security trays (“shrinkage” was every retail operation’s worst nightmare). The manager would order pizza and during “lunch” we would wander around the dark, empty mall and the corridors behind the stores. To answer your question, Richard, we did not really have a free hand in what we stocked—it was a pretty corporate environment—but we did get to open and play “store copies” of new music, and we could special order the obscure stuff we wanted to hear. I remember playing the first Weezer and Sunny Day Real Estate LPs, Dr. Dre’s The Chronic, Nirvana’s In Utero, Cypress Hill’s Black Sunday, PJ Harvey’s Rid of Me. As long as the district manager was not around or rumored to be around, we were good.

Record stores were where we bought our concert tickets too, although we didn’t do that at Musicland. There was another store called Music Plus (we had a lot of chains in SoCal) that was the go-to for tickets. One of the employees would bring out a binder, show you a layout of the venue, and tell you how much the tickets were for each section. But nothing beat Tower Records—I still have dreams about sifting through the import section, discovering lost albums from my favorite bands. As we’ve talked about time and again (ad nauseam to some, I’m sure), these physical spaces were designed to take your money, but they were also where we discovered art and, yeah, meaning. Remember that line from Dawn of the Dead? Francine asks Stephen why all the zombies are trying to get into the mall and he says: “Some kind of instinct… Memory of what they used to do. This was an important place in their lives.” That’s me. I’m one of the undead now. 

GRASSO: Probably as good a time as any for me to get (historical) materialist about the mall record store from the consumer side, seeing as how I have no behind-the-scenes memories of working at one (my college job was at a video rental joint, which had its own set of amazing fringe benefits, not the least of which was free unlimited borrowing privileges).

After my MTV-inspired single-purchasing in 1983, my music-collecting years with my own hard-earned money kicked off in earnest in the late 1980s, and thus I was fortunate enough to get in on buying compact discs on the ground floor. My friends who were just a few years older than me had massive cassette collections they’d assembled throughout the ’80s; honestly, I don’t remember many of them owning much vinyl at all. And dollars to donuts, I bet the seedling of most of those tape collections were courtesy the Columbia House Record Club, the infamous direct-mail outfit that would send you “8 tapes for a penny” and then shackle you to an onerous “negative option billing” obligation that could be very difficult to weasel out of. Score one more for the friendly local record store.

So yes, from the very beginning of my time as a music consumer—around 1987, 1988—CDs were my format of choice. Remember longboxes? Those massive, wasteful cardboard sleeves were developed for the CD specifically because physical record stores didn’t want to refit their LP-sized storage racks (and because, like tapes, CDs shorn of these boxes were easy to nick before the rise of anti-theft RFID tags). Sort of laughable to think about these half-empty cardboard sleeves cluttering up shelf space and landfills just so the record stores would promote this new format, but the music industry has always tried to get consumers to (re-)buy their favorite music on an “exciting” new format, going all the way back to Thomas Edison. 

The CD also outpaced the LP and cassette on price during this era: I cringe to think of blowing my meager early-’90s wages on a few $14.99 CDs a week while vinyl and tapes were still going for, like, $7.99 or so. (Let’s see, a $15 compact disc in 1990 would be the equivalent of dropping nearly thirty-seven 2024 dollars on a new album, according to the always-shocking Bureau of Labor Statistics Consumer Price Index calculator.) Sure, the artists didn’t get a huge cut of my afterschool job money (RIP Steve Albini, who nailed the state of the record industry and its exploitative garbage at this very moment in history pretty much perfectly), but at the end of the day the artists got some of it, and I had a physical emblem, a totem, a real piece of art—yes, even in CD jewelboxes!—that served as a testament to my love for a band.

Think about all the jobs that existed in this very conspicuously late-20th century supply chain: the execs, the artists and repertoire scouts, the producers, technicians and engineers, the bands and their entourages, the label designers, comms personnel, promoters, the radio DJs playing the records, the manufacturing plants, the intermediaries bringing the CDs, posters, buttons, and merch to the record stores, and all those Marlboro-smoking clerks like Kelly in malls across the country. A good chunk of these jobs just don’t exist anymore. Seems pretty obvious which end of the labor pyramid got screwed over the past 30 years—and it wasn’t the execs.

Of course, when the 20th century ended and the nascent Internet enabled file sharing to take off, the industry bigwigs definitely panicked about the future of music. But in the end it wasn’t the suits who lost their livelihoods—it was the artists. And for the past quarter-century, pop musicians have been bifurcated into a two-class system: giga-stars whose (over)exposure ensures they never have to worry about a paycheck again, and touring musicians forced to sell merch like carnival barkers just to make a (barely) living wage. Like everything else under late capitalism, the music industry has materially consolidated, diluted its product’s quality and diversity, and turned a thriving, living underground into a manicured garden where spontaneity and apprenticeship have largely vanished as concepts. As Kelly says, the locus at the base of that massive commercial pyramid was the local record store, where taste was made, music was shared, and fans’ connections with the band were consolidated.

MCKENNA: One thing that saves me from feeling like some deranged, backwards-looking nostalgist troglodyte, constantly harping on about how things used to be better back in the Mesozoic, is that one of my day jobs involves teaching Zoomers. Their fascination with the random, uncurated physical realities that used to be part and parcel of engaging with music, art, people, and the world in general—before business got so good at interring you inside your interests—reinforces my feeling that having stuff like Musicland around actually was just objectively healthier. Yes, it was an anodyne corporate product of aggressive capitalism, and yes, more egalitarian situations that foster a wholesome tactile involvement in the world are definitely imaginable, but as shitty as it might have been, it was at least real, ergo better.

This is something that I think gets lost in the—sorry for using the horror word—discourse around these things: there’s this implicit idea that as a society we just naturally evolve past certain realities, and that to think of them fondly, or even—god help us—think they might have been better is somehow axiomatically regressive. I think that’s bullshit for several reasons, but mainly because we didn’t evolve past them at all: they were removed in service of someone else evolving themselves more money. Like I say, you can argue that they were in any case the products of unfair wealth and extrusions of capitalism into our imaginations, and you’d be right, but isn’t the way things are today an even more brutal product of those forces? 

When I reminisce with people my age about the immersion in physical reality that was necessary to buy, say, the 12” of Genesis’s Mama, their perspective is often purely one of convenience, but if I talk about it with a 16-year-old, their reaction is often ecstatic shock, because they sense the increased possibilities that the less curated experiences inherent in the kinds of spaces you two are talking about offered. Even when they were the kind of shitty corporate boxes that would employ someone as musically illiterate as Kelly.

ROBERTS: Look, we’ve all discovered quite a bit of great music cruising around the internet, and we’ve written about a ton of it, from library music and ambient to ‘80s pop and sci-fi synthesizer epics. Sometimes, the algorithm works (God bless Sounds of the Dawn, for instance). Was the record store better? I don’t fucking know. We’d have to ask more of Richard’s students. What I know is this: if I ask Pandora or Spotify to make me a playlist based on, say, This Mortal Coil’s cover of “Song to the Siren,” I’m going to hear a lot of good stuff. If I ask you guys to make me a playlist (or, better, a mixtape) based on that same song, I’m going to hear a lot more good stuff—as long as you don’t fuck around and throw Phil Collins into the mix. The difference is that you know me, and the algorithm doesn’t, and it never will.  

Also, the process of discovering music was fundamentally different when we were young. One of my favorite albums is The Chameleons’ Strange Times (1986). I heard the first American single, “Swamp Thing,” on KROQ’s Rodney on the ROQ, a late night LA radio show that played underground/alternative music. I had never heard anything like it—I was obsessed. Every night (for days? A week? Two weeks?) I waited for Rodney to play it again, a blank tape ready in my boombox, my fingers ready on the orange-red record button. He finally did, and I taped it (the songs weren’t always introduced before they were played, so you had to be quick), and I listened to it over and over again. Bought the LP when it came out in the States. How did I know when the album came out? I kept asking the clerks in the record store. I still remember pulling the record out of the bin at Tower, marveling at the cover, taking it home, putting it on my record player. Would the whole thing be as good as the single? (Yes!) I still smell the cardboard and the plastic sleeves that protected the vinyl. I still see the labels on the middle of the LPs (Strange Times is a double album). It was a physical experience—call it crass and materialistic—and a spiritual experience all at once: from the radio to the record store to the home record player. Every time I hear the album, all of the emotions inherent in that process of discovery are embedded in the experience of the music itself. 

There. I have tried my best to describe to someone who hasn’t experienced it before exactly how it felt to discover music before the internet. 

 

 I am eye-balls deep in a new project and I am not 100% ready to share it all with you yet.

But I am having a lot more fun with it than I expected.

This is also my first realyl big project since moving over to Affinity Publisher and Photo from Indesign and Photoshop. Bit of a learning curve for somethings, but I am enjoying the results.

Hope to let you all know very, very soon.

Much like the Miskatonic Repository for Call of Cthulhu, Seventh Edition and the Jonstown Compendium for RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha, The Companions of Arthur is a curated platform for user-made content, but for material set in Greg Stafford’s masterpiece of Arthurian legend and romance, Pendragon. It enables creators to sell their own original content for Pendragon, Sixth Edition. This can original scenarios, background material, alternate Arthurian settings, and more, but none of this content should be considered to be ‘canon’, but rather fall under ‘Your Pendragon Will Vary’. This means that there is still scope for the authors to create interesting and useful content that others can bring to their Pendragon campaigns.

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What is the Nature of the Quest?The Adventure of the Arcadian Bull is a scenario for use with Pendragon, Sixth Edition, the first part of ‘The Faerie Trilogy’, which throws the Player-knights into a war between two duchies and sends them on a cattle raid.

It is a full colour, twenty-six page, 12.93 MB PDF.

The layout is tidy and it is nicely illustrated.

Where is the Quest Set?The Adventure of the Arcadian Bull is set between the duchies of Clarence and Glevum in Logres after the year 512 and ideally after the events of ‘The Adventure of the Forest of the Silver Deer’ from The Sword Campaign.
Who should go on this Quest?
The Adventure of the Arcadian Bull does not have particular requirements in terms of its Player-knights.
What does the Quest require?
The Adventure of the Arcadian Bull requires the Pendragon, Sixth Edition rules or the Pendragon Starter Set.
Where will the Quest take the Knights?The Adventure of the Arcadian Bull begins with the Player-knights coming upon a single knight who has been set about by group of five knights. Upon going to his rescue, they discover that the knight they have saved is actually saved is the son of the Duke of Clarence. Afterwards, he is grateful and offers them the hospitality of his home. However, whilst his father is also grateful and will gives gifts to each of the Player-knights, the son wants his revenge and begs his father to allow him to respond in kind to the knights that attacked him and conduct a raid on the rival Duchy of Glevum. Much to his annoyance his father forbids this, because the Pendragon—which could be Arthur or another king to hold that position—has forbidden such acts. Desirous of his revenge nonetheless, the son approaches the Player-knights to aid him in an endeavour that will see them conduct a raid, he and his men mount a diversion, the Duchy of Glevum be humiliated, and thus the son avoid violating a command issued by the Pendragon. This will be a cattle raid, specifically of a fabled Arcadian Bull. (It should be noted that neither son nor father are specifically named, though options are given for both depending upon the source material that the Game Master wants to draw from and when she is setting the scenario.)
The adventure focuses not so much on the raid or theft of the cattle, so much as the challenges tat the Player-knights face in getting the Arcadian Bull and the rest of the cattle back to Clarence via the haunted Cotswold Hills. Although they may encounter knights loyal to the Duchy of Glevum, the main threat they face is otherworldly in nature. A chance encounter with ghosts will test any Player-knight of Cymric or Roman heritage, perhaps to the point where they are lost entirely—although this will take some very bad rolls upon the part of a player, but the best encounter is saved until last when a delightfully magical Butterfly Knight challenges them for ownership of the Arcadian Bull. This sets up a trio of contests that opens up the scenario in terms of what the Player-knights can really say or do, giving them more choice than they have had up until this point. In fact, the contest, which will consist of at least a contest of arms and then two out of contests of either lore, faith, singing, riddles, and a race, really does save the scenario from its linearity and lifting up above what is up to that point a rather simple journey. (In fact, even if the Game Master does not necessarily want to run The Adventure of the Arcadian Bull, it is still worth having so that she take the contests and use them in her won campaign.)

The Glory rewards at the end of the scenario favour smaller groups of Player-knights rather than larger ones. The Game Master might want to change them to flat values rather than having the total Glory divided amongst them.
Should the Knights ride out on this Quest?Up until the point when the Butterfly Knight appears, The Adventure of the Arcadian Bull is more serviceable than exciting, so had he not appeared, then the quest would not been worthy of the Player-knights. Fortunately, he does appear and the scenario is all the better for it. Hopefully, it raises a standard that will be maintained for the rest of ‘The Faerie Trilogy’.

Much like the Jonstown Compendium for RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha and The Companions of Arthur for material set in Greg Stafford’s masterpiece of Arthurian legend and romance, Pendragon, the Miskatonic Repository for Call of Cthulhu, Seventh Edition is a curated platform for user-made content. 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.

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Name: God’s Tears: A Modern Scenario Against an Imported HorrorPublisher: Chaosium, Inc.
Author: Keith Craig

Setting: Omaha, 2023Product: Scenario
What You Get: Fourteen page, 1.07 MB Full Colour PDF
Elevator Pitch: “Life is too short to drink bad wine.”Plot Hook: A bad, but well intentioned gift has eye-opening consequencesPlot Support: Staging advice, two handouts, one map, four NPCs, one big cat, one Mythos tome, two Mythos spells, and one Mythos monster.Production Values: Plain
Pros# The Entwine Bone spell# Dramatic set-up# Fast playing one-shot# Easy to transfer to other Call of Cthulhu times and settings# Easy to transfer to other wine-growing regions# Ommetaphobia# Animotophobia# Oenophobia
Cons# Needs a slight edit
Conclusion# Straightforward, easy to run scenario# Would make a decent scenario for The 7th Edition Guide to Cthulhu Invictus: Cosmic Horror Roleplaying in Ancient Rome

The bride was not scorned by her betrothed, but by her father-in-law, who sacrificed his son and the rest of his family to defeat the threat of plague and death. He became a god in return for his victory, whilst she, pregnant with her unborn son, raged at him in her grief and anger. She spurned his offer of marriage, outraged even further by his audacity, and exiled herself from the life she would have had. She still wants that life and she wants her beloved returned to life. Even after accepting a place at her would be mother-in-law’s court, her anger burned and her desire for revenge seethed. She turned it into a blade and became a feared warrior in service to the Ever Ones and amongst the Fae. Even this outlet for her rage was denied to her when the gods signed the Ever Pact that ensured peace amongst the fae and their withdrawal from the mortal realms. The bride was incensed. She had come close to freeing her beloved and the chance had been denied to her. She scorned the Ever Ones. She repudiated the Ever Pact. She would free her would be groom and together, they would kill the Ever Ones and all the gods, and then take the crown of Avallen, which was theirs by right and so fulfil their destiny. The Faerie Queene stalks the land of Avallen, her plans close to fruition…

This is the set-up for Against the Faerie Queene: A Celtic Campaign for Legends of Avallen & 5E Queene, a campaign for Legends of Avallen: A Tabletop RPG Inspired by Celtic Mythology in Roman Britain. Published by Adder Stone Games, Legends of Avallen is not, despite it inspirations, a roleplaying game about the conflict between the invaders and the invaded. Rather, it is a roleplaying game about two cultures attempting to keep the land and its people safe, protect it from incursions from the Otherworld, and about men and women who grow beyond their ordinary lives to become heroes and forge legends that the bards will sing of in tales down the ages. Against the Faerie Queene is the first campaign for it, published following a successful Kickstarter campaign. The campaign not only uses the card-driven mechanics of Legends of Avallen, as its subtitle suggests, it gives stats compatible with ‘5E’ or Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition, opening up the world of Avallen to devotees of that game system. However, in opening up Legends of Avallen to Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition, what Against the Faerie Queene does is provide a lot more than just a simple campaign.

Against the Faerie Queene begins with an introduction to the setting of Avallen, its history and its peoples, along with a map. The latter consists of the native Vallic, divided between five clans, cattle-herders, charioteers, and blacksmiths, renowned for their song and poetry, and the Raxians, invaders from the Ataraxian Empire, known for their architecture, structured society and military, and application of logic and reason to magic. All five Clans are detailed through their legends and songs, before Against the Faerie Queene presents five new Legendary Paths linked to the roleplaying game’s professions.

The Automaficer is an Alchemist or a Crafter who constructs an Automaton which can be used to fight or pass messages or even be piloted in combat. The Enwyr is a Bard or Tamer who studies the knowledge and use of true names, pulling at the Threads of reality to discover them and then use them to place someone at an advantage or disadvantage, force them to speak truthfully or accept the Enwyr’s lies, to change into an inanimate form, to summon someone temporarily, and so on. The Faceless is a Thief or Scavenger who is able to change his face and body. The Paragon, either a Priest or Socialite, champions an ideal and can make allies out of enemies. Beginning as either a Scribe or Merchant, the Philosopher learns to change the world through words, whether this is to remake a failed check to spot, learn, or uncover something, to set someone up to succeed with enlightening advice or fail through inscrutable paradoxes, and so on. All of these have Legendary trials which the Player Character must undergo or achieve to grow into the Legendary Path and gain the abilities that each grants.

Against the Faerie Queene does not give any new Classes for Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition. Instead, it adapts the five Legendary Paths given in the supplement as well as those in Legends of Avallen into archetypes. Thus, the Automaficer is an Artificer archetype, the Enwyr a Monk archetype, the Faceless a Rogue archetype, the Paragon a Paladin archetype, and the Philosopher a Cleric archetype. For the Barbarian, there is the Gladiator Primal Path, the Fili is a Bardic College for the Bard, the Druid enters the Circle of Oak, the Fighter becomes a Primus, and so on. Effectively, there is an archetype for each Class in Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition, sometimes more than one, and although a player does not have to pick one of the archetypes for his character provided in Against the Faerie Queene, doing adds to the flavour and feel of the setting. One other difference between most worlds for Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition and Legends of Avallen is that the latter is a Human world. Elves, Dwarves, and Gnomes are not unknown, but they reside in the Otherworld and thus deep into the setting. In addition, Against the Faerie Queene provides rules for Parleys, scenes where the Player Characters try to persuade others to some course of action or support in spite of their objections; the use of Fate Cards to represent risk and the passage of time; and entertainingly, ability tells for big monsters, giving a sign that a boss monster is about to unleash a devastating attack which will affect all of the Player Characters and thus the chance for them to prepare or react. Part of the campaign in Against the Faerie Queene involves travel, so there are rules for journeys as well, these providing different roles for the Player Characters to fulfil and challenges being created by drawing cards from the Fate Deck. These journey rules are similar to those seen in other fantasy roleplaying games. Overall, the adaptation of Legends of Avallen to Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition is solid and should provide a Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition game with plenty of interesting options ready for the campaign Against the Faerie Queene.

Against the Faerie Queene: A Celtic Campaign for Legends of Avallen & 5E is designed to take Player Characters from Third Level to Tenth level, in both Legends of Avallen and Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition. (Parts one, two, and three—‘Caer on the Borderlands’—of the campaign are available to download for free, starting here, but are not required to play through the campaign.) The campaign is divided in five acts and each part is divided into three branches. However, calling them branches is a misnomer since what they are not branches in the sense that they have different or alternate storylines that the Player Characters could follow. Instead, they are more like chapters, with the first chapter setting the situation for the act, the middle chapter containing the main events, and the third chapter dealing with the climax and its consequences. However, not all of the acts are structured like this, as will be explained below. In addition, although the first act introduces and sets up the campaign, and the fifth act brings it to a climax, the middle three acts can be played in any order. This can be a problem for the Game Master as one act is far more complex than the others.
In the first act, ‘The Hunt’, the Player Characters come to the Pen Baedd forest to hunt down Ysgithyrwyn, a vile, otherworldly boar that attacked the royal wedding of the daughter of Daedica the Brenin, one of the chieftains of the five Vallic clans. They quickly discover that not only are they not the only ones hunting Ysgithyrwyn, but that the creature is also unkillable. They will be given information as to what they need to gather in terms of magic to defeat the beast and to cure the wounds that they may have suffered in facing it the first time. This requires a number of sub-quests to be fulfilled and in addition to this, there are side-quests which will grant the Player Characters boons that may come in handy later on in the campaign. ‘The Hunt’ has a mythic earthiness to it, played out across a land scarred by the Otherworldly darkness of Ysgithyrwyn’s rampages, but leavened by encounters with often playful, even whimsical Otherworldly figures. Also appearing in this early part of the campaign are its villains, the Faerie Queene of the title and her son, though their villainy is not yet apparent. The son appears as a fellow hunter and the Faerie Queene as herself rather than his mother to thank the Player Characters for their efforts. Throughout this act, the Player Characters are advised by the blue-tattooed Myrddin the Wild, and here at the end, he tells them that he suspects the Faerie Queene to be a villain behind the release of Ysgithyrwyn and asks them to investigate her activities further. The Player Character will also be approached to visit other parts of Avallen and in doing so, find other signs of the Faerie Queene’s activities.

As the title of the second act suggests, ‘The Heist’ is a complete change of pace and tone. The second act takes the Player Characters to Raxian city of Vallonium, the capital of the Ataraxian Empire’s presence on Avallen. Here Commius the Collector, a wealthy merchant who has a love of both Vallic and Raxian culture, and he asks the Player Characters to steal an important Pen Levi idol said to be linked to the Vallic god of death. Currently, it is in the possession of Fulvia Pilius, the Princeps Collegium Commercia, head of the shipping guild in the port city. She plans to host a viewing party in five days and then ship it to Ataraxia as a gift to the Twin Empresses. So, the Player Characters have five days in which to plan and carry out the eponymous heist, but before that they have to get into the city itself. The problem is their weapons—which are banned in Vallonium unless they are commercial items. Which can be taxed! So, the Player Characters had either better pay up or find another way in and be very careful about displaying their weapons. As well as finding a way to get into the domus of Fulvia Pilius, the Player Characters will get mixed up in the city’s gang politics and try their very best to avoid any imperial entanglements. The act includes details on what the city guard will do to the Player Characters if they are caught committing any crime and it is not good. Overall, ‘The Heist’ is typical of its scenario type, but decently done and gives the Player Characters plenty of leeway in how they carry it out.

The third act again switches tone and style, but also ramps up the complexity. ‘The Horror’ is set on the island of Arainn, one of the islands belonging to the mysterious Pen Afanc clan, perhaps best known for the highly imaginative masks that its members wear. Once the Player Characters get to islands, which lie in the north-east of Avallen, and that is a challenge in itself, they find themselves trapped, waking up at the start of the same day again and again. The islands have been beset by a curse, which the Player Characters will need to find the curse and then find a way of breaking it. Although they do not know it, the Player Characters also have a time limit before the curse takes full effect. There is a lot going on in this scenario, almost too much and certainly a great deal of information that the Game Master has to relay to her players so that they can understand it and have their characters act. Consequently, this is the hardest of the five acts in Against the Faerie Queene for the Game Master to prepare and run. To that end, a better breakdown of the act’s set-up, what the Player Characters have to do to break the curse, and where they have to go would have been useful. Once the Game Master does grasp what is going on, then this is a horrific treatment of the classic time loop, infused with Celtic mythology. It has some great scenes too, such as when the Player Characters have to descend ‘Beneath the Waves’ to enter the Otherworld version of Pen Afanc and challenge mirror versions of the NPCs they have already encountered on dry land.

The penultimate act in Against the Faerie Queene is ‘The Games’. After the events of ‘The Hunt’, Brenin Ena of the Pen Draig, Avallen’s most famous clan, invites the Player Characters to attend the Cabar Games. These are held annually to bring the clan’s tribes together, but it does not seem to be working this year. The Player Characters arrive late, but are quickly asked by Brenin Ena to attend a banquet and mix with the clan’s leading figures and perhaps determine whether tribes do all fully support the current regime. It is an excuse to have a party, play some games, and pick up on some politics before the action begins the next day. The Player Characters are expected to participate in the ‘Y Tair Tasg’, a triathlon race which combines chariot racing, a delve into a cave, and a fight with a monster back in the arena. The race around and out of the amphitheatre and up a mountain to the caves is handled as a series of complications generated by the Fate Cards before the Player Characters enter the caves in search of what turn out to be magical cabars that they will have to toss at the beasts in the arena to defeat them. Unfortunately, the friendly competition—primarily between the Player Characters and Peredur, the son of Brenin Ena and hunter the Player Characters encountered in the first act, who has recently returned to his family after going missing as a child—takes a darker tone, when those who had been preparing the prize for the winner of the Cabar Games are found dead and the prize missing. All evidence points to the Pen Gwyllgi, a rival borderlands clan being responsible, but is it? The Player Characters’ diplomatic and interpersonal skills are sorely tested to prevent an outbreak of hostilities. The games come to a climax with a battle to first blood between Peredur and his allies and the Player Characters and by the end of the act, the Player Characters should have confirmation as to who Peredur really is.

The last part of Against the Faerie Queene is ‘The Cairn’. The Player Characters are charged with tracking down signs of the Pen Gwyllgi and Faerie Queene’s activities in the swamps where she is said to make her home on the Borderlands. Following signs of a terrible battle between the Pen Levi and Pen Gwyllgi clans, the Player Characters can gain clues as to where to find the Faerie Queene from a Pen Gwyllgi prisoner held by Pen Levi survivors. These will point them to the entrance to the Ever Stranger’s Cairn on the Stranger’s Mound and enable them to access the Otherworld where the god of death has built his Cairn, which is as much prison as it is fortress. Again, gaining access, this time to the Otherworld via the Stranger’s Mound, is a challenging task, either involving answering a question with something learned earlier in the campaign or with a Player Character sacrificing himself. Fortunately, this is not as campaign ending as might be first thought. It is in keeping with the epic fantasy of the campaign and the Player Character does have a role within the Otherworld and if the Player Characters are successful in defeating the Faerie Queen, it is also perfectly in keeping with the campaign that the Player Character who sacrificed himself returns to the land of the living. Inside the Cairn—the nearest that the campaign has to a dungeon—the Player Characters will be faced with a series of puzzles to solve and traps to overcome in order to finally confront the Faerie Queene, her son Peredur, and even the object of her plans. This is an epic battle, but much more than a simple stand-up, knockdown fight, which brings the campaign to a rousing climax. The campaign ends with an otherworldly conclusion that is nicely judged in terms of how the NPCs react and decently rewards the Player Characters.

Physically, Against the Faerie Queene: A Celtic Campaign for Legends of Avallen & 5E is a fantastic looking book. The artwork is excellent, though it is used again and again throughout the book, and the individual acts are nicely colour-coded. However, the book does need an edit in places and the writing is not always as clear as it could, especially in some of the more complex parts of the campaign. The book does not have an index, unfortunately.

Against the Faerie Queene: A Celtic Campaign for Legends of Avallen & 5E is a solid supplement for Legends of Avallen, a decent introduction to the setting for Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition. The campaign is better, nicely showcasing the setting of Avallen and its different cultures, and giving the Game Master and her players the opportunity to both experience and save it from the dangers and wonders of the Otherworld in an epic storyline.

A young woman suddenly moves from Birmingham, Alabama to the Vermont hills in the middle of the night, in the space of an hour—as indicated by her smartwatch. To the local authorities it looks like youthful activities—likely something drug related—gone wrong at best, an abduction at worst, the young woman seeming to have wandered out of the hills where the local kids like to party. Probably the former. To the members of Delta Green, the secret organisation with the U.S. government, it looks like something worse. It looks like signs of the Unnatural. Agents are quickly dispatched to the small-town hospital when the young woman, an African American student at university in Alabama. Their assignment is to investigate and potentially, negate an occurrence of the Unnatural before it even happens. From the start this is a challenging investigation. The Agents will need to develop a sufficiently strong reason for their being there and conducting an investigation. The victim, Robyn Bullock, seems profoundly shocked by the experience and there is something just a little odd about her experiences. By the time her family arrive, the initial difficulty of the investigation ramps up. They will not deal with strangers and whilst they will deal with Federal law enforcement, such is their distrust, they do it under strict circumstances. It is this lack of distrust in the Federal government and in law enforcement that runs the rest of the investigation.

This is the set-up for Presence, a scenario published by Arc Dream Publishing for Delta Green: The Role-Playing Game. This is the modern roleplaying game of conspiratorial and Lovecraftian investigative horror with its conspiratorial agencies within the United States government investigating, confronting, and covering up the Unnatural. There are no specific requirements in terms of the Agents needed to play it, though strong interpersonal skills are going to be useful given the reaction that the Agents will receive during parts of the investigation. The investigation will switch from Vermont back to Alabama, which effectively means that the Green Mountain State is a diversion should the players surmise that its location suggests the involvement of the Mi-Go. What the Agents should learn is that Robyn has an interest in the New Age, astrology, and modern Wicca, and here the scenario is particularly modern in what they have to investigate—her social media presence. This will enable them to discover other several women in the same Facebook community who appear to have suffered similar situations to Robyn, and begin to close in on a suspect. The investigation is rich and superbly detailed and will take them into rural Alabama and take on a more physical nature.

If the players and their Agents have found the investigation difficult to date due to distrust of the Agents, it gets worse, as some of the inhabitants actively hate the Federal government and will not help the Agents at all. When they track down the culprit, it is effectively a ‘kill house’, but one infused with the Mythos as well as booby traps. It is a very nasty end to a difficult investigation.

This is a scenario that will directly change at least one of the Agents, such is the trauma and power of Robyn Bullock, and the scenario includes rules for that and the way in which they will be changed. These are psychic rituals, and there are six of these described. They include Apportation, Divination, Psychic Intrusion, and so on, and they all require the expenditure of Will Points and Hit Points to empower. This is in addition the Sanity loss involved too.
One of the issues with Presence is with the number of the NPCs who loath the Federal government and law enforcement. This makes for good roleplaying, but it will not be familiar to audiences and gaming groups outside of the USA. For example, one of the NPCs is described as a “Deranged dominionist and sovereign citizen”. Non-American audiences are unlikely to understand what this is and perhaps time and space could have been found in the scenario to explaining it.

Physically, Presence is well done. The artwork is excellent, though unfortunately the maps, done on aerial photographs with swathes of green forest are slightly difficult to read.
Presence is a really tight investigation bookended by some really weird nasty encounters with the Unnatural. At least one Agent will come away radically changed and some may not survive the final encounter, and that is to be expected for Delta Green: The Role-Playing Game.

These are the voyages of the starship FSS Brazen. Under the command of Captain Wayjane, the ship has been directed by the Federated League of Planets, to undertake a mission of exploration beyond the frontier to discover strange new worlds, weird never before encountered species, and promote the benefits of life in Federated League of Planets (a.k.a. FloP). With the engines primed and ready, the crew buzzing with exciting, the FSS Brazen is ready to set out from Near Space 9 and begin her five-year mission. However, this mission will not be without its difficulties. The crew will have to learn to get along as it discovers mysteries and uncover strange stellar phenomena and faces numerous enemies. These may be mighty starships from the martial Kulkan Empire or the devious infiltrators from the Boredian Dominion, but they could be old enemies too, such as Duchess Ali Cann, a super soldier who served FLoP until a truce was signed with the Kulkan Empire. Now she feels abandoned and has sworn her revenge, so guess which FLoP vessel she has in her sights? Then there is ‘R’, a super being incensed that the members of FLoP even exist and could even go so far as to put them on trial to prove that they have the right to continue living in the same universe! This is the continuing mission of the FSS Brazen: to recklessly go where plenty of people have probably been before… and hope that nobody gets too upset to start major interstellar war! This is the set-up for Beam Me Up, a scenario and mini-supplement for ACE!—or the Awfully Cheerful Engine!—the roleplaying game of fast, cinematic, action comedy. Published by EN Publishing, best known for the W.O.I.N. or What’s Old is New roleplaying System, as used in Judge Dredd and the Worlds of 2000 AD and Level Up: Advanced 5th Edition, where previous entries in the series have tended to be one-shot, film night specials, here the given scenario (or scenarios) is more expansive.
Beam Me Up is very obviously and unsubtly inspired by the Science Fiction franchise, Star Trek. Which has the advantage of making everything in Beam Me Up more than a little familiar to most people. As with other supplements for ACE!, it very much wears its inspirations on its sleeve—or in this case is that on its spandex one-size too small, but still fits all, jumpsuits? Whilst a player may find it just a little too familiar, he will also find the genre and setting very easy to grasp. Similarly, as with other supplements for ACE!, a set of pre-generated characters is available to download to use with Beam Me Up, but the players can create their own. Several new roles are suggested. These include Captain, Chief Engineer, Comms Engineer, Hologram, Gunner, Ship Counsellor, and Pilot. The simplicity of the ACE! system means that whilst Beam Me Up defaults a mish-mash of elements drawn from across multiple different iterations of the Star Trek franchise, the Game Master and her players could easily adjust their game to fit whichever era of the setting that they want to game in.
Given that this is a Science Fiction roleplaying game involving starships and high technology, there are some details on its role in the game. The setting is post-scarcity, starship crews can replicate almost everything bar weapons of mass destruction, and are usually armed with blazers, which they should mostly use with the stun setting. Also, translocators enable crews to beam up and down from planets and even move instantly within a ship. Beam Me Up also defines its starships and provides rules for starship combat. A starship has four stats—Science, Shields, Size, and Warp—typically rated between one and ten—plus ratings for Health, Defence, and weapons and damage. Where a ship’s stats are higher than those of a Player Character for a particular action, then they can be used for a skill check instead. For example, the Chief of Security might want to use the ship’s scanners, but his Smarts is lower the ship’s Science, so his player can roll using that it instead. It is a nicely little levelling effect and it highlights the fact that the Player Characters are aboard an advance starship. Combat is handled in a narrative fashion and each Player Character have a particular role when it comes to combat. Thus, the Chief Pilot will fly the ship, the Gunner will fire weapons, the Chief Science Officer will operate the scanners, and so on. Here Beam Me Up is underwritten, really relying on the skill of the Game Master to adjudicate the different roles and how they affect combat. Some pointers as to what the roles might do would have been helpful. Should an attack hit a starship, it will reduce the shields and then health, and once the latter has gone, the ship will suffer critical hits.

The scenario in Beam Me Up is in line with its inspiration, episodic in nature. Effectively, its three acts are separate and the first two can be run in any order (though they are written and presented in a simple and playable order). In the listed first act, ‘Shotgun Ali’, the FSS Brazen sets out on its maiden voyage and is sent to check up on a missing vessel, the FSS Independent. When the crew find her, they are suddenly attacked by the ship and then boarded! After driving off the super tough boarding party, the Player Characters need to return the favour and beam aboard the FSS Independent to find out what is going on. The second act is ‘Incident at Boredia I’ when on a trip visit the world, the crew’s weekly report time is interrupted by the appearance of ‘R’, an alien super being who puts the crew and the FLoP as a whole on trial. To do this, he drags a ship from the Kulkan Empire to Boredia I and the Kulkan Empire vessel has the manpower to invade and conquer the planet below. Effectively this is a test to see how the Player Characters and the crew of the FSS Brazen will react to the Kulkan interference. Lastly, in act three, ‘Gunfight at the Brazen Corral’ in which the Player Characters get trapped in the holosuite and themselves cast as members of the Clanton-McLaury gang an hour before they face Virgil, Wyatt, and Morgan Earp, and Doc Holliday on October 26, 1881. Events occur again and again until the Player Characters can spot and break the pattern and find out who or what is responsible.
None of the three acts are connected except for the FSS Brazen and the obvious inspiration. For example, ‘Shotgun Ali’ is drawn from Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan; ‘Incident at Boredia I’ is inspired by ‘Encounter at Farpoint’, the pilot for Star Trek: The Next Generation; and ‘Gunfight at the Brazen Corral’ is based on ‘Spectre of the Gun’ from the original Star Trek. These are not the only Science Fiction references in Beam Me Up, but they are, of course, the big ones. Both the Game Master and her players will have fun spotting the rest, likely groaning at them, as they appear.
Physically, Beam Me Up is a bright and breezy affair. The artwork is decent and the supplement is well written.

Beam Me Up veers widely between being cringeworthy in the broad parodying of its inspiration to actually being amusing. Part of the issue is not just the familiarity of the source material, but also with the parodying of it, so both feel over done and not really all that funny. What saves Beam Me Up are the three different episodes which dig deeper into the source material and play around with it to elevate the humour a little. In some ways, Beam Me Up is the most accessible and the least accessible of the supplements for ACE!, being too familiar, too on the nose, its humour underwhelming as a consequence.

In the weird and otherworldly Bazaar of the Gods in Punjar, the City of a Thousand Gates, stand temples, chapels, and churches to gods, goddesses, and demi-gods of almost an unknown number. Cults and faiths have risen and fallen, been promoted and persecuted, banished and proselytised. One of these is the Cult of the Carnifex, dedicated to death and suffering, whose members were drawn from the city’s lowest castes. The sick, the mad, the crippled were welcome amongst its ranks and from them, the Overlord of Punjar picked his personal executioners. Thus, the chthonic rose in favour, a reminder to the city’s nobility of the transience and suffering of their mortality and perhaps their eventual fate. However, not all were prepared to suffer this, and thus, the priest, Azazel of the Light, led a band of the city’s finest young swordsmen from amongst the nobility, known as the Swords of the Pious, and set to cleanse Punjar of the profane presence of Carnifex and her filthy cultist adherents. They smashed the cult and toppled its chapel, but never returned from beneath the city where the true temple to Carnifex was located. Carnifex and her cult were all but forgotten, only the young noblemen of certain families being sent to guard the broken site where the temple to Carnifex once stood, though they have long forgotten why. There are others though who have not forgotten, the knowledge whispered of and even noted down. Now, a band of adventurers and ne’er-do-wells have come into the possession of a map that shows the location of the forgotten passage which leads to the ruins of the temple. If no one has returned from the temple in hundreds of years, then there is still the chance that its wealth remains. Can they find their way into the underground temple, penetrate its secrets, survive its dangers, and return as wealthy men and women?

This is as much set-up as there is for Dungeon Crawl Classics #70: Jewels of the Carnifex, the fourth scenario to be published by Goodman Games for use with the Dungeon Crawl Classics Roleplaying Game. Designed for a group of six to ten Third Level Player Characters, it is an important scenario for four reasons. One is that it is the fourth scenario to be written for the Dungeon Crawl Classics Roleplaying Game and the third to be written for Player Characters who are not Zero level, and the third is that it is the first scenario for Third Level Player Characters. However, it is also important because in tone and setting, the scenario is clearly inspired by tales of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser. It even admits this at the end, suggesting that the Judge read ‘The Two Best Thieves in Lankhmar’. Even though this scenario was published five years before the Dungeon Crawl Classics Lankhmar Boxed Set, it feels like it would fit right into a Lankhmar campaign. Being designed for Third Level Player Characters for standard Dungeon Crawl Classics play, it is probably too tough an adventure, given the comparitive lack of healing and magic in Dungeon Crawl Classics Lankhmar, for similar Level Player Characters, but adjust that and the Judge will have a fine addition to her campaign. That aside, whether the Judge decides to set it in the city of Lankhmar or not, Dungeon Crawl Classics #70: Jewels of the Carnifex is still a great Swords & Sorcery-style scenario.
The Player Characters have the opportunity to learn a rumour or two before following the map to the temple’s location and finding their way inside. What the Player Characters find below is a trap- and puzzle-infested complex, much of it overgrown with rotting vegetation—the scenario pointedly notes the smell—and occupied by the Swords of the Pious, twisted by their long existence inside the temple complex and exposure to the power of Azazel of the Light. Even getting to the temple entrance is challenging, across a chasm and through a waterfall of effluence from a broken sewer pipe! There is a lovely sense of decrepitude to temple. Not just the prevalent layers of matted and rotten vegetation hanging from the ceiling and along the walls, but partially collapsed rooms where the Player Characters might be able to dig something out of the rubble, hopefully without setting off a further collapse, and riding an avalanche of collapsed saints’ skulls downstairs to a lower room! What is interesting at this point is that the adventure does not make the finding of the secret door to the next level above, a mechanical roll. Rather, ways are suggested as to how the Player Characters might find it, whether Elf, Dwarf, or another Class, but ultimately lets them find it. This is because the point is not to find the door, but have then open it. This requires the solving of a puzzle, actually a fairly simple puzzle. However, there is another exit and that leads to a room of further exits, but all trapped. So essentially, the Player Characters are punished—though punished with some entertaining little encounters, but punished nonetheless—for taking the obviously easier option, but rewarded where the players have to think a little. It is a feature that occurs again later at the end of the scenario. Obviously, the room with the trapped doors are a diversion for anyone foolish enough to break into the temple, but not experienced in ways in which this tomb-like complex is designed.
If there is a sepulchral feel to the complex and Dungeon Crawl Classics #70: Jewels of the Carnifex in general, but the Swords & Sorcery aspect of the scenario delightfully twists the antagonists here. Whilst her cultists are long dead, Carnifex herself, remains imprisoned, and if the Player Characters manage to free her, she is revealed as icily alluring, yet unsettling, a goddess who will actually reward them before she leaves the temple. The Swords of the Pious are the loyal, but physically twisted servants of Azazel of the Light, who unbeknownst to them, are his victims. Trapped in the temple because of his power, a power that he was unwilling to give up and sacrifice himself to permanently seal Carnifex in the temple. Certainly, Azazel of the Light will fight to prevent this from happening in what likely to be the scenario’s big set-piece battle. There is a handy description of the tactics used by the Swords of the Pious—they are no fools, and Azazel of the Light even has his own Critical Hit Table!
The outcome of the scenario is, of course, down to the action of the Player Characters, but all of the options are covered. Also discussed is the possibility of the Player Characters exiting the temple with a lot of treasure. The advice for handling this is very good, basically using the wealth to drive further stories rather than something that the Player Characters can go on a mad shopping spree with. In addition, there are some terrific treasures and magical items to be found in the scenario, many of them dedicated to Carnifex, so looting them may not necessarily be the wisest option, but it does lend itself to further encounters with both her and worshippers from outside of Punjar.
One issue with the scenario is that there are relatively few opportunities for roleplaying. In fact, beyond a madman whom the Judge will have immense pleasure in portraying, the only NPCs who will talk with the Player Characters are Azazel of the Light and Carnifex. This is a very action and exploration orientated scenario.
Lastly, Dungeon Crawl Classics #70: Jewels of the Carnifex, a separate, smaller adventure unconnected to the first. This is ‘Lost in the Briars’. Again, written for Third Level Player Characters, this takes place in the Briarwood Deep, a forest near the village of Garland’s Fork. A thick bramble wall has surrounded the forest and both villagers and travellers, as well as local animals, have begun to go missing. This is due to Nockmort, a treant poisoned and twisted by the forces of Chaos, wanting to take his revenge on anyone and everyone and complete a ritual which will see him elevated into a god! There are some great scenes here, such as animated trees passing humans and animals from one to another like a line of firemen (who will throw them at the Player Characters if they attack), cowardly bandits wanting to get out of there, and a decidedly unhelpful hermit! There is the hint that the scenario is connected to The Sunless Garden (both are by the same author), but this is not developed. Otherwise, this is a short, little forest crawl that is easy to add to a campaign and a very enjoyable bonus scenario.

Physically, Dungeon Crawl Classics #70: Jewels of the Carnifex is a very nicely done book. The maps are good—for both adventures—and the artwork is excellent. That of Russ Nicholson really stands out, giving the scenario a profane feel whilst the depiction of the Player Characters is slightly grubby and desperate. 
Dungeon Crawl Classics #70: Jewels of the Carnifex is a really enjoyable, really good Swords & Sorcery, Conan the Barbarian or Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser-style tomb (temple)-robbing scenario, nicely detailed with some suitable genre twists. It should challenge any party of Player Characters, but the risk is worth it as the reward will make them wealthy, if only for a while.

 I mentioned before that one of the reasons I have not done a 5e Witch class myself is that I have wanted to have some joy in discovery of something new for D&D. If I make a 5e witch, then I am always comparing it to the new stuff to mine. 

So today there are two witch-related 5e Kickstarters I want to share. They are in their last days of funding, so get on these while you can.

Witchfyre: A Dark Fantasy RPG for 5E+ & Pathfinder

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/witchfyre/witchfyre-a-dark-fantasy-rpg?ref=theotherside

This looks like a lot of fun and has a great Folk Horror vibe. It is for 5e and Pathfinder, so that is really great.  And it comes with minis and a tarot set, so I am very intrigued. While the deluxe cover looks nice, I think I prefer the standard cover.

Any looks great, to bad I will have to wait a year to get it.

The Mystery of Witchhaven: A 5e Solo Adventure

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/obviousmimic/the-mystery-of-witchhaven-a-5e-solo-adventure?ref=theotherside

I admit a little trepidation to this one. First, I am generally not a fan of Solo adventures. Nothing against them, I just prefer to play with a group. Secondly I have my own "Witch Haven" but the name is so common I should not be surprised when a variation of it gets used.

But this does look fun and I'd be remiss if I didn't check it out.

ETA: Another one!

Wicked Echoes - Whispers of the Samodiva: A 5E Supplement

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/wicked-echoes/wicked-echoes-whispers-of-the-samodiva?ref=theotherside

Folk Horror is pretty hot right now. And this one looks great.  This is more horror than Witch focused, but that is fine by me!

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Both look great and hopefully ship quickly.

Kingdomino is notable for both for the word play of its clever title and being the 2017 Spiel des Jahres award. Published by Blue Orange, the game combines the matching game play of traditional Dominoes with a tile drafting mechanic in a bright, attractive, and tactile package that can played and enjoyed by the family, whilst also offering just enough complexity to keep the experienced games player interested. It is designed to be played by between two and four players, aged eight and above, and can played in fifteen minutes. In the game, players will take it in turn to draft and play tiles to create the different terrain of their kingdoms. Some of the terrain is marked with crowns. Each player will score points for the areas of terrain that he creates, the bigger the area and the more crowns he has in an area, the more points he will score. The player at the end of the game with the most points wins the game.

The game consists of four starting tiles, eight King meeples, and four castles, all in four colours. The meat of the game consists of its tiles. There are forty-eight of these, eight centimetres by four centimetres in size, numbered from one to forty-eight on the back, and divided into two squares on the front. The front of the tiles are marked with six different terrain types—Field, , Forest, Lake, Meadow, Mine, and Swamp. Some have two different terrain types on the front, others have the same terrain on the whole of the tile.

At the start of the game, the forty-eight tiles are mixed up and a number randomly selected, adjusted for the number of players. These are mixed up again and placed face down in a draw pile. Four tiles are drawn and placed face up in ascending order. Each player places a King meeple on a tile that he wants, the order on the first turn, determined randomly. Then a second set of four tiles are drawn and placed alongside the first, again in ascending order. Then the player who selected the last tile, takes that tile and adds it to his kingdom, and with his spare King meeple, places it on the tile of his choice in the other row of tiles. Then the next player does the same, until the player who chose first gets to take the tile of his choice, adds it to his kingdom, and places his spare King meeple on the remaining tile which has not be selected. In later turns, the order in which a player takes a tile, places it in his kingdom, and then picks a new tile to place next turn, is determined by the tile number. Tiles with lower numbers are taken first and the players who chose them, get to pick a new tile before the players who selected a tile with a higher value. Thus, from one round to the next, the order of play will change and fluctuate.

Tiles with higher numbers tend to have crowns on them which are necessary to score points—if an area of terrain in a kingdom has no crowns, it scores no points! Conversely, lower numbered tiles, whilst not having crowns on them, do tend to have the same terrain on both squares. So, they have value in increasing the size of areas of terrain in a player’s kingdom. This essentially, is the flow of the game play.

When a player adds a tile to his kingdom, the terrain on one square must be placed adjacent to a tile which matches. The only limit on tile placement, is that the total kingdom size of any one player cannot exceed a five-by-five grid of squares. Tiles which do not fit into this grid are discarded and do not score any points.

Play continues until all of the tiles in play, have been drawn and placed. Then each player adds up the value of his kingdom. This is done for each area of terrain. The value is determined by the number of tiles being multiplied by the number of crowns on the terrain.

The luck of Kingdomino lies in the draw of the tiles. The skill lies in the getting the best tile available in what choice remains to a player and then placing it to get the best use out of it that will increase a player’s score. There is also a balance between taking a tile with crowns on it and then connecting terrain to it to increase its score, and perhaps building areas of terrain in the hope of being able to pick a tile with matching terrain and crowns on it. In general, there is a greater chance of scoring points with the former than the latter, but there is still the possibility of getting the right tile at the right time towards the end of the game.

Physically, Kingdomino is very nicely presented. The tiles are big and feel good in the hand and the rules are easier to read. The tiles would be easier to track if there were numbers on the front as well as the back. The rules cover play with two, three, and four players, and also include several extra options beyond the base game.

If there is a criticism of Kingdomino, it is that play order is sometimes determined by whomever is sat closed to the box containing the tiles when it is placed on the table. It feels oddly arbitrary and not random at all.

Kingdomino is a thoroughly attractive and pleasing game. It has a lovely flow back and forth so that no player has constant access the tiles with crowns and dominate the game, and this flow lies at the heart of the game, balancing it all the way to the finish.

Jonathan gives us a final update seven years later.

NOTE

Seven years ago we all went through the flames; and the happiness of some of us since then is, we think, well worth the pain we endured. It is an added joy to Mina and to me that our boy’s birthday is the same day as that on which Quincey Morris died. His mother holds, I know, the secret belief that some of our brave friend’s spirit has passed into him. His bundle of names links all our little band of men together; but we call him Quincey.

In the summer of this year we made a journey to Transylvania, and went over the old ground which was, and is, to us so full of vivid and terrible memories. It was almost impossible to believe that the things which we had seen with our own eyes and heard with our own ears were living truths. Every trace of all that had been was blotted out. The castle stood as before, reared high above a waste of desolation.

When we got home we were talking of the old time—which we could all look back on without despair, for Godalming and Seward are both happily married. I took the papers from the safe where they had been ever since our return so long ago. We were struck with the fact, that in all the mass of material of which the record is composed, there is hardly one authentic document; nothing but a mass of typewriting, except the later note-books of Mina and Seward and myself, and Van Helsing’s memorandum. We could hardly ask any one, even did we wish to, to accept these as proofs of so wild a story. Van Helsing summed it all up as he said, with our boy on his knee:—

“We want no proofs; we ask none to believe us! This boy will some day know what a brave and gallant woman his mother is. Already he knows her sweetness and loving care; later on he will understand how some men so loved her, that they did dare much for her sake.”

Jonathan Harker.

THE END

Our final note from Jonathan tells us all this took place seven years ago. So my idea that this all took place in 1892 is suspect since that would put his final note at 1899, two years after the publication of the novel.

One of the conceits many modern Dracula writers use is that Harker told all of this to Stoker and then Stoker published it all as a warning and a guide to other Vampire hunters. It's a fun idea. I imagined the two them sitting out for lunch as Harker gives Stoker Mina's meticulously copied notes of all the journal entries. 

Mina's and Jonathan's has been born. Jonathan Quincey Harker. He would later go on to be the main protagonist in the 2009 sequel from Darcy Stoker's Dracula the Un-dead. I am not really a fan of that book to be honest. It really has a "Brian Herbert" thing going. 

I have used him as my base idea on how to square the novel with the Hamilton Deane-John L. Balderston play. With the younger Harker now engaged to Mina Seward who is friends with a Lucy Van Helsing. This would have given us the "1913" events of the 1979 John Badham movie. IF we stick with my 1892 idea it would make Jonathan Quincey Harker in his early 20s. The earlier dates I have proposed would work even better. I just need to figure out why Seward and Van Helsing don't remember the Count from the 1890s. But Dr. Seward naming his daughter Lucy and Van Helsing naming his daughter Mina (maybe his wife died and he remarried) is the easiest thing to figure out. The Count coming back for revenge is also easy to see. Maybe Märy Land fits into this somewhere?

Both this novel and the 1924 version of the play are in the public domain. 

A lot is made about the nature of Dracula's death. A topic covered in varying degrees of quality. But most agree that since Dracula was killed with a stake to his heart he can come back. We see that in Dracula the Un-dead and in Fred Saberhagen's The Dracula Tape.

My only issue with the death of Dracula in the novel is it came after this huge build up and it was over so fast. I also don't care for the death of Dracula in the FFC 1992 movie though either.

Final Thoughts

This has been a great experience. I loved doing this. I kinda want to go back and recheck some of my dates. It would be a process, but I do want to recheck with 1886 and 1888. 1888 would make JQH's birth in 1889, and make him 24 in the Badham movie. I do like that.

I would also like to go over some of this again with a map of Europe from the time. I still have my Victorian-era map of London up in my office. 

Where do I take this from here?

No idea, I kinda want to compile all these posts and see how long it all is. That might be fun. I also think that after doing this I kinda want to go back a re-read it for pleasure with my new insights.

But that is a task for another day. Maybe even next year.

Though, I do have a copy of Frankenstein I have been meaning to get back too. 

Our hunt is at an end, but the cost is high.

Mina Harker’s Journal.

6 November.—It was late in the afternoon when the Professor and I took our way towards the east whence I knew Jonathan was coming. We did not go fast, though the way was steeply downhill, for we had to take heavy rugs and wraps with us; we dared not face the possibility of being left without warmth in the cold and the snow. We had to take some of our provisions, too, for we were in a perfect desolation, and, so far as we could see through the snowfall, there was not even the sign of habitation. When we had gone about a mile, I was tired with the heavy walking and sat down to rest. Then we looked back and saw where the clear line of Dracula’s castle cut the sky; for we were so deep under the hill whereon it was set that the angle of perspective of the Carpathian mountains was far below it. We saw it in all its grandeur, perched a thousand feet on the summit of a sheer precipice, and with seemingly a great gap between it and the steep of the adjacent mountain on any side. There was something wild and uncanny about the place. We could hear the distant howling of wolves. They were far off, but the sound, even though coming muffled through the deadening snowfall, was full of terror. I knew from the way Dr. Van Helsing was searching about that he was trying to seek some strategic point, where we would be less exposed in case of attack. The rough roadway still led downwards; we could trace it through the drifted snow.

In a little while the Professor signalled to me, so I got up and joined him. He had found a wonderful spot, a sort of natural hollow in a rock, with an entrance like a doorway between two boulders. He took me by the hand and drew me in: “See!” he said, “here you will be in shelter; and if the wolves do come I can meet them one by one.” He brought in our furs, and made a snug nest for me, and got out some provisions and forced them upon me. But I could not eat; to even try to do so was repulsive to me, and, much as I would have liked to please him, I could not bring myself to the attempt. He looked very sad, but did not reproach me. Taking his field-glasses from the case, he stood on the top of the rock, and began to search the horizon. Suddenly he called out:—

“Look! Madam Mina, look! look!” I sprang up and stood beside him on the rock; he handed me his glasses and pointed. The snow was now falling more heavily, and swirled about fiercely, for a high wind was beginning to blow. However, there were times when there were pauses between the snow flurries and I could see a long way round. From the height where we were it was possible to see a great distance; and far off, beyond the white waste of snow, I could see the river lying like a black ribbon in kinks and curls as it wound its way. Straight in front of us and not far off—in fact, so near that I wondered we had not noticed before—came a group of mounted men hurrying along. In the midst of them was a cart, a long leiter-wagon which swept from side to side, like a dog’s tail wagging, with each stern inequality of the road. Outlined against the snow as they were, I could see from the men’s clothes that they were peasants or gypsies of some kind.

On the cart was a great square chest. My heart leaped as I saw it, for I felt that the end was coming. The evening was now drawing close, and well I knew that at sunset the Thing, which was till then imprisoned there, would take new freedom and could in any of many forms elude all pursuit. In fear I turned to the Professor; to my consternation, however, he was not there. An instant later, I saw him below me. Round the rock he had drawn a circle, such as we had found shelter in last night. When he had completed it he stood beside me again, saying:—

“At least you shall be safe here from him!” He took the glasses from me, and at the next lull of the snow swept the whole space below us. “See,” he said, “they come quickly; they are flogging the horses, and galloping as hard as they can.” He paused and went on in a hollow voice:—

“They are racing for the sunset. We may be too late. God’s will be done!” Down came another blinding rush of driving snow, and the whole landscape was blotted out. It soon passed, however, and once more his glasses were fixed on the plain. Then came a sudden cry:—

“Look! Look! Look! See, two horsemen follow fast, coming up from the south. It must be Quincey and John. Take the glass. Look before the snow blots it all out!” I took it and looked. The two men might be Dr. Seward and Mr. Morris. I knew at all events that neither of them was Jonathan. At the same time I knew that Jonathan was not far off; looking around I saw on the north side of the coming party two other men, riding at break-neck speed. One of them I knew was Jonathan, and the other I took, of course, to be Lord Godalming. They, too, were pursuing the party with the cart. When I told the Professor he shouted in glee like a schoolboy, and, after looking intently till a snow fall made sight impossible, he laid his Winchester rifle ready for use against the boulder at the opening of our shelter. “They are all converging,” he said. “When the time comes we shall have gypsies on all sides.” I got out my revolver ready to hand, for whilst we were speaking the howling of wolves came louder and closer. When the snow storm abated a moment we looked again. It was strange to see the snow falling in such heavy flakes close to us, and beyond, the sun shining more and more brightly as it sank down towards the far mountain tops. Sweeping the glass all around us I could see here and there dots moving singly and in twos and threes and larger numbers—the wolves were gathering for their prey.

Every instant seemed an age whilst we waited. The wind came now in fierce bursts, and the snow was driven with fury as it swept upon us in circling eddies. At times we could not see an arm’s length before us; but at others, as the hollow-sounding wind swept by us, it seemed to clear the air-space around us so that we could see afar off. We had of late been so accustomed to watch for sunrise and sunset, that we knew with fair accuracy when it would be; and we knew that before long the sun would set. It was hard to believe that by our watches it was less than an hour that we waited in that rocky shelter before the various bodies began to converge close upon us. The wind came now with fiercer and more bitter sweeps, and more steadily from the north. It seemingly had driven the snow clouds from us, for, with only occasional bursts, the snow fell. We could distinguish clearly the individuals of each party, the pursued and the pursuers. Strangely enough those pursued did not seem to realise, or at least to care, that they were pursued; they seemed, however, to hasten with redoubled speed as the sun dropped lower and lower on the mountain tops.

Closer and closer they drew. The Professor and I crouched down behind our rock, and held our weapons ready; I could see that he was determined that they should not pass. One and all were quite unaware of our presence.

All at once two voices shouted out to: “Halt!” One was my Jonathan’s, raised in a high key of passion; the other Mr. Morris’ strong resolute tone of quiet command. The gypsies may not have known the language, but there was no mistaking the tone, in whatever tongue the words were spoken. Instinctively they reined in, and at the instant Lord Godalming and Jonathan dashed up at one side and Dr. Seward and Mr. Morris on the other. The leader of the gypsies, a splendid-looking fellow who sat his horse like a centaur, waved them back, and in a fierce voice gave to his companions some word to proceed. They lashed the horses which sprang forward; but the four men raised their Winchester rifles, and in an unmistakable way commanded them to stop. At the same moment Dr. Van Helsing and I rose behind the rock and pointed our weapons at them. Seeing that they were surrounded the men tightened their reins and drew up. The leader turned to them and gave a word at which every man of the gypsy party drew what weapon he carried, knife or pistol, and held himself in readiness to attack. Issue was joined in an instant.

The leader, with a quick movement of his rein, threw his horse out in front, and pointing first to the sun—now close down on the hill tops—and then to the castle, said something which I did not understand. For answer, all four men of our party threw themselves from their horses and dashed towards the cart. I should have felt terrible fear at seeing Jonathan in such danger, but that the ardour of battle must have been upon me as well as the rest of them; I felt no fear, but only a wild, surging desire to do something. Seeing the quick movement of our parties, the leader of the gypsies gave a command; his men instantly formed round the cart in a sort of undisciplined endeavour, each one shouldering and pushing the other in his eagerness to carry out the order.

In the midst of this I could see that Jonathan on one side of the ring of men, and Quincey on the other, were forcing a way to the cart; it was evident that they were bent on finishing their task before the sun should set. Nothing seemed to stop or even to hinder them. Neither the levelled weapons nor the flashing knives of the gypsies in front, nor the howling of the wolves behind, appeared to even attract their attention. Jonathan’s impetuosity, and the manifest singleness of his purpose, seemed to overawe those in front of him; instinctively they cowered, aside and let him pass. In an instant he had jumped upon the cart, and, with a strength which seemed incredible, raised the great box, and flung it over the wheel to the ground. In the meantime, Mr. Morris had had to use force to pass through his side of the ring of Szgany. All the time I had been breathlessly watching Jonathan I had, with the tail of my eye, seen him pressing desperately forward, and had seen the knives of the gypsies flash as he won a way through them, and they cut at him. He had parried with his great bowie knife, and at first I thought that he too had come through in safety; but as he sprang beside Jonathan, who had by now jumped from the cart, I could see that with his left hand he was clutching at his side, and that the blood was spurting through his fingers. He did not delay notwithstanding this, for as Jonathan, with desperate energy, attacked one end of the chest, attempting to prize off the lid with his great Kukri knife, he attacked the other frantically with his bowie. Under the efforts of both men the lid began to yield; the nails drew with a quick screeching sound, and the top of the box was thrown back.

By this time the gypsies, seeing themselves covered by the Winchesters, and at the mercy of Lord Godalming and Dr. Seward, had given in and made no resistance. The sun was almost down on the mountain tops, and the shadows of the whole group fell long upon the snow. I saw the Count lying within the box upon the earth, some of which the rude falling from the cart had scattered over him. He was deathly pale, just like a waxen image, and the red eyes glared with the horrible vindictive look which I knew too well.

As I looked, the eyes saw the sinking sun, and the look of hate in them turned to triumph.

But, on the instant, came the sweep and flash of Jonathan’s great knife. I shrieked as I saw it shear through the throat; whilst at the same moment Mr. Morris’s bowie knife plunged into the heart.

It was like a miracle; but before our very eyes, and almost in the drawing of a breath, the whole body crumbled into dust and passed from our sight.

I shall be glad as long as I live that even in that moment of final dissolution, there was in the face a look of peace, such as I never could have imagined might have rested there.

The Castle of Dracula now stood out against the red sky, and every stone of its broken battlements was articulated against the light of the setting sun.

The gypsies, taking us as in some way the cause of the extraordinary disappearance of the dead man, turned, without a word, and rode away as if for their lives. Those who were unmounted jumped upon the leiter-wagon and shouted to the horsemen not to desert them. The wolves, which had withdrawn to a safe distance, followed in their wake, leaving us alone.

Mr. Morris, who had sunk to the ground, leaned on his elbow, holding his hand pressed to his side; the blood still gushed through his fingers. I flew to him, for the Holy circle did not now keep me back; so did the two doctors. Jonathan knelt behind him and the wounded man laid back his head on his shoulder. With a sigh he took, with a feeble effort, my hand in that of his own which was unstained. He must have seen the anguish of my heart in my face, for he smiled at me and said:—

“I am only too happy to have been of any service! Oh, God!” he cried suddenly, struggling up to a sitting posture and pointing to me, “It was worth for this to die! Look! look!”

The sun was now right down upon the mountain top, and the red gleams fell upon my face, so that it was bathed in rosy light. With one impulse the men sank on their knees and a deep and earnest “Amen” broke from all as their eyes followed the pointing of his finger. The dying man spoke:—

“Now God be thanked that all has not been in vain! See! the snow is not more stainless than her forehead! The curse has passed away!”

And, to our bitter grief, with a smile and in silence, he died, a gallant gentleman.

Notes: Moon Phase: Waning Gibbous

Our action packed finale here has our two groups of men coming back together to pursue the Count's forces. 

Here we see Dracula's "final" demise. His throat is cut by Harker and Morris lunges his knife into the Count's heart.  Then he disappears into dust. Not at all like Van Helsing said he needed to be destroyed. With the death of Dracula we see his forces disperse. Even the wolves run back to the woods. Mina's curse is also lifted. 

This scene also gives us the loss of the American, Quincey Morris. 

I'll post the final, undated, entry tomorrow.

More updates from Van Helsing and Dr. Seward

Memorandum by Abraham Van Helsing (cont).

5 November, morning.—Let me be accurate in everything, for though you and I have seen some strange things together, you may at the first think that I, Van Helsing, am mad—that the many horrors and the so long strain on nerves has at the last turn my brain.

All yesterday we travel, ever getting closer to the mountains, and moving into a more and more wild and desert land. There are great, frowning precipices and much falling water, and Nature seem to have held sometime her carnival. Madam Mina still sleep and sleep; and though I did have hunger and appeased it, I could not waken her—even for food. I began to fear that the fatal spell of the place was upon her, tainted as she is with that Vampire baptism. “Well,” said I to myself, “if it be that she sleep all the day, it shall also be that I do not sleep at night.” As we travel on the rough road, for a road of an ancient and imperfect kind there was, I held down my head and slept. Again I waked with a sense of guilt and of time passed, and found Madam Mina still sleeping, and the sun low down. But all was indeed changed; the frowning mountains seemed further away, and we were near the top of a steep-rising hill, on summit of which was such a castle as Jonathan tell of in his diary. At once I exulted and feared; for now, for good or ill, the end was near.

I woke Madam Mina, and again tried to hypnotise her; but alas! unavailing till too late. Then, ere the great dark came upon us—for even after down-sun the heavens reflected the gone sun on the snow, and all was for a time in a great twilight—I took out the horses and fed them in what shelter I could. Then I make a fire; and near it I make Madam Mina, now awake and more charming than ever, sit comfortable amid her rugs. I got ready food: but she would not eat, simply saying that she had not hunger. I did not press her, knowing her unavailingness. But I myself eat, for I must needs now be strong for all. Then, with the fear on me of what might be, I drew a ring so big for her comfort, round where Madam Mina sat; and over the ring I passed some of the wafer, and I broke it fine so that all was well guarded. She sat still all the time—so still as one dead; and she grew whiter and ever whiter till the snow was not more pale; and no word she said. But when I drew near, she clung to me, and I could know that the poor soul shook her from head to feet with a tremor that was pain to feel. I said to her presently, when she had grown more quiet:—

“Will you not come over to the fire?” for I wished to make a test of what she could. She rose obedient, but when she have made a step she stopped, and stood as one stricken.

“Why not go on?” I asked. She shook her head, and, coming back, sat down in her place. Then, looking at me with open eyes, as of one waked from sleep, she said simply:—

“I cannot!” and remained silent. I rejoiced, for I knew that what she could not, none of those that we dreaded could. Though there might be danger to her body, yet her soul was safe!

Presently the horses began to scream, and tore at their tethers till I came to them and quieted them. When they did feel my hands on them, they whinnied low as in joy, and licked at my hands and were quiet for a time. Many times through the night did I come to them, till it arrive to the cold hour when all nature is at lowest; and every time my coming was with quiet of them. In the cold hour the fire began to die, and I was about stepping forth to replenish it, for now the snow came in flying sweeps and with it a chill mist. Even in the dark there was a light of some kind, as there ever is over snow; and it seemed as though the snow-flurries and the wreaths of mist took shape as of women with trailing garments. All was in dead, grim silence only that the horses whinnied and cowered, as if in terror of the worst. I began to fear—horrible fears; but then came to me the sense of safety in that ring wherein I stood. I began, too, to think that my imaginings were of the night, and the gloom, and the unrest that I have gone through, and all the terrible anxiety. It was as though my memories of all Jonathan’s horrid experience were befooling me; for the snow flakes and the mist began to wheel and circle round, till I could get as though a shadowy glimpse of those women that would have kissed him. And then the horses cowered lower and lower, and moaned in terror as men do in pain. Even the madness of fright was not to them, so that they could break away. I feared for my dear Madam Mina when these weird figures drew near and circled round. I looked at her, but she sat calm, and smiled at me; when I would have stepped to the fire to replenish it, she caught me and held me back, and whispered, like a voice that one hears in a dream, so low it was:—

“No! No! Do not go without. Here you are safe!” I turned to her, and looking in her eyes, said:—

“But you? It is for you that I fear!” whereat she laughed—a laugh, low and unreal, and said:—

“Fear for me! Why fear for me? None safer in all the world from them than I am,” and as I wondered at the meaning of her words, a puff of wind made the flame leap up, and I see the red scar on her forehead. Then, alas! I knew. Did I not, I would soon have learned, for the wheeling figures of mist and snow came closer, but keeping ever without the Holy circle. Then they began to materialise till—if God have not take away my reason, for I saw it through my eyes—there were before me in actual flesh the same three women that Jonathan saw in the room, when they would have kissed his throat. I knew the swaying round forms, the bright hard eyes, the white teeth, the ruddy colour, the voluptuous lips. They smiled ever at poor dear Madam Mina; and as their laugh came through the silence of the night, they twined their arms and pointed to her, and said in those so sweet tingling tones that Jonathan said were of the intolerable sweetness of the water-glasses:—

“Come, sister. Come to us. Come! Come!” In fear I turned to my poor Madam Mina, and my heart with gladness leapt like flame; for oh! the terror in her sweet eyes, the repulsion, the horror, told a story to my heart that was all of hope. God be thanked she was not, yet, of them. I seized some of the firewood which was by me, and holding out some of the Wafer, advanced on them towards the fire. They drew back before me, and laughed their low horrid laugh. I fed the fire, and feared them not; for I knew that we were safe within our protections. They could not approach, me, whilst so armed, nor Madam Mina whilst she remained within the ring, which she could not leave no more than they could enter. The horses had ceased to moan, and lay still on the ground; the snow fell on them softly, and they grew whiter. I knew that there was for the poor beasts no more of terror.

And so we remained till the red of the dawn to fall through the snow-gloom. I was desolate and afraid, and full of woe and terror; but when that beautiful sun began to climb the horizon life was to me again. At the first coming of the dawn the horrid figures melted in the whirling mist and snow; the wreaths of transparent gloom moved away towards the castle, and were lost.

Instinctively, with the dawn coming, I turned to Madam Mina, intending to hypnotise her; but she lay in a deep and sudden sleep, from which I could not wake her. I tried to hypnotise through her sleep, but she made no response, none at all; and the day broke. I fear yet to stir. I have made my fire and have seen the horses, they are all dead. To-day I have much to do here, and I keep waiting till the sun is up high; for there may be places where I must go, where that sunlight, though snow and mist obscure it, will be to me a safety.

I will strengthen me with breakfast, and then I will to my terrible work. Madam Mina still sleeps; and, God be thanked! she is calm in her sleep....

Dr. Seward’s Diary.

5 November.—With the dawn we saw the body of Szgany before us dashing away from the river with their leiter-wagon. They surrounded it in a cluster, and hurried along as though beset. The snow is falling lightly and there is a strange excitement in the air. It may be our own feelings, but the depression is strange. Far off I hear the howling of wolves; the snow brings them down from the mountains, and there are dangers to all of us, and from all sides. The horses are nearly ready, and we are soon off. We ride to death of some one. God alone knows who, or where, or what, or when, or how it may be....

Dr. Van Helsing’s Memorandum.

5 November, afternoon.—I am at least sane. Thank God for that mercy at all events, though the proving it has been dreadful. When I left Madam Mina sleeping within the Holy circle, I took my way to the castle. The blacksmith hammer which I took in the carriage from Veresti was useful; though the doors were all open I broke them off the rusty hinges, lest some ill-intent or ill-chance should close them, so that being entered I might not get out. Jonathan’s bitter experience served me here. By memory of his diary I found my way to the old chapel, for I knew that here my work lay. The air was oppressive; it seemed as if there was some sulphurous fume, which at times made me dizzy. Either there was a roaring in my ears or I heard afar off the howl of wolves. Then I bethought me of my dear Madam Mina, and I was in terrible plight. The dilemma had me between his horns.

Her, I had not dare to take into this place, but left safe from the Vampire in that Holy circle; and yet even there would be the wolf! I resolve me that my work lay here, and that as to the wolves we must submit, if it were God’s will. At any rate it was only death and freedom beyond. So did I choose for her. Had it but been for myself the choice had been easy, the maw of the wolf were better to rest in than the grave of the Vampire! So I make my choice to go on with my work.

I knew that there were at least three graves to find—graves that are inhabit; so I search, and search, and I find one of them. She lay in her Vampire sleep, so full of life and voluptuous beauty that I shudder as though I have come to do murder. Ah, I doubt not that in old time, when such things were, many a man who set forth to do such a task as mine, found at the last his heart fail him, and then his nerve. So he delay, and delay, and delay, till the mere beauty and the fascination of the wanton Un-Dead have hypnotise him; and he remain on and on, till sunset come, and the Vampire sleep be over. Then the beautiful eyes of the fair woman open and look love, and the voluptuous mouth present to a kiss—and man is weak. And there remain one more victim in the Vampire fold; one more to swell the grim and grisly ranks of the Un-Dead!...

There is some fascination, surely, when I am moved by the mere presence of such an one, even lying as she lay in a tomb fretted with age and heavy with the dust of centuries, though there be that horrid odour such as the lairs of the Count have had. Yes, I was moved—I, Van Helsing, with all my purpose and with my motive for hate—I was moved to a yearning for delay which seemed to paralyse my faculties and to clog my very soul. It may have been that the need of natural sleep, and the strange oppression of the air were beginning to overcome me. Certain it was that I was lapsing into sleep, the open-eyed sleep of one who yields to a sweet fascination, when there came through the snow-stilled air a long, low wail, so full of woe and pity that it woke me like the sound of a clarion. For it was the voice of my dear Madam Mina that I heard.

Then I braced myself again to my horrid task, and found by wrenching away tomb-tops one other of the sisters, the other dark one. I dared not pause to look on her as I had on her sister, lest once more I should begin to be enthrall; but I go on searching until, presently, I find in a high great tomb as if made to one much beloved that other fair sister which, like Jonathan I had seen to gather herself out of the atoms of the mist. She was so fair to look on, so radiantly beautiful, so exquisitely voluptuous, that the very instinct of man in me, which calls some of my sex to love and to protect one of hers, made my head whirl with new emotion. But God be thanked, that soul-wail of my dear Madam Mina had not died out of my ears; and, before the spell could be wrought further upon me, I had nerved myself to my wild work. By this time I had searched all the tombs in the chapel, so far as I could tell; and as there had been only three of these Un-Dead phantoms around us in the night, I took it that there were no more of active Un-Dead existent. There was one great tomb more lordly than all the rest; huge it was, and nobly proportioned. On it was but one word

DRACULA.

This then was the Un-Dead home of the King-Vampire, to whom so many more were due. Its emptiness spoke eloquent to make certain what I knew. Before I began to restore these women to their dead selves through my awful work, I laid in Dracula’s tomb some of the Wafer, and so banished him from it, Un-Dead, for ever.

Then began my terrible task, and I dreaded it. Had it been but one, it had been easy, comparative. But three! To begin twice more after I had been through a deed of horror; for if it was terrible with the sweet Miss Lucy, what would it not be with these strange ones who had survived through centuries, and who had been strengthened by the passing of the years; who would, if they could, have fought for their foul lives....

Oh, my friend John, but it was butcher work; had I not been nerved by thoughts of other dead, and of the living over whom hung such a pall of fear, I could not have gone on. I tremble and tremble even yet, though till all was over, God be thanked, my nerve did stand. Had I not seen the repose in the first place, and the gladness that stole over it just ere the final dissolution came, as realisation that the soul had been won, I could not have gone further with my butchery. I could not have endured the horrid screeching as the stake drove home; the plunging of writhing form, and lips of bloody foam. I should have fled in terror and left my work undone. But it is over! And the poor souls, I can pity them now and weep, as I think of them placid each in her full sleep of death for a short moment ere fading. For, friend John, hardly had my knife severed the head of each, before the whole body began to melt away and crumble in to its native dust, as though the death that should have come centuries agone had at last assert himself and say at once and loud “I am here!”

Before I left the castle I so fixed its entrances that never more can the Count enter there Un-Dead.

When I stepped into the circle where Madam Mina slept, she woke from her sleep, and, seeing, me, cried out in pain that I had endured too much.

“Come!” she said, “come away from this awful place! Let us go to meet my husband who is, I know, coming towards us.” She was looking thin and pale and weak; but her eyes were pure and glowed with fervour. I was glad to see her paleness and her illness, for my mind was full of the fresh horror of that ruddy vampire sleep.

And so with trust and hope, and yet full of fear, we go eastward to meet our friends—and him—whom Madam Mina tell me that she know are coming to meet us.

Notes: Moon Phase: Waning Gibbous

More text and imagery here that Dracula, and Mina now to a greater degree, sees his "Vampire Baptism" as a dark marriage of sorts.  I am going to assume this is the source of all the Immortal Beloved nonsense we see in the movies. I mean there is a seed here obviously, but as we see with the Brides he has (and then doesn't have anymore thanks to Van Helsing), they are not equals to him; they are possessions. 

Before he does that we see Van Helsing casting a magic circle around Mina. Well, that is what he is doing in all but name. Seems to work well enough. Though Mina does show a kin-ship, or better yet, a sisterhood with Dracula's other Brides now that they are closer. 

With the magic circle in place the Brides can't take Mina, nor feed on Van Helsing, so they attack the horses.  This was all wonderfully done in the FFC movie.

Seward and Holmwood find the body of a Szgany. So death is all around everyone. 

Van Helsing creeps into Dracula's castle with more ease than Jonathan had in getting out. He dispatches the Vampire Brides, but even while they sleep that cast a powerful spell allure on him. 

Mina tells us "my husband...is coming towards us."  But does she mean Jonathan or Dracula?

 So this one was a bit of a surprise for me this week. I honestly kinda forgot I backed it over two and half years ago. But it came in yesterday and I thought I would share it.

Hexbound: A Witchy Supplement for 5e

There are a lot of reasons why I have never put together a witch class of my own for 5e. One of the biggest is I have wanted to see what others have done with their own ideas. You know, try and recapture that thrill of discovery that I had back in the 1980s and 90s when I'd find a new witch class. 

Hexbound is the first big 5e "Witch" class Kickstarter I have backed.  So how did they deliver?

I got the PDFs and STLs a while back and they looked great, but I have been waiting on the book.

Here is what I was sent.

The level I pledged at was for the  Collector's Edition cover of the Hexbound Hardcover, a set of Hexbound Reference Cards, two pins, four minis and digital files of the book and minis.

The book is really nice. I love the art and in particular the Art Nouveau style cover. Really fits the vibe I want for my witches in 5e. 

The add-ons are nice. I am a sucker for a deck of tarot-like cards for a game. I want to make a witch character for 5e JUST so I can use these cards.

And the minis are also nice. I am not sure I recall what that big one is, but it is in the book.

Hexbound: The Good

REMINDER: I am always sensitive when I am reviewing someone else's witch material. I am not aware of any RPG author who has written as much about witches as I have, so I need to be careful on how critical I could be. 

Like I said, the book is really attractive. The art is really nice I think I need some dice to go with it to fit the aesthetic (that should have been an option really.) The author of the book, Antonio Demico, is also the illustrator. 

What attracted me most to this book was there was not just one "Witch Class" but rather witch subclasses for each class. And there are some really fun ones here. All are considered "Witches" and they just have different ways of expressing their magics. This is the same idea I have witches but going in the opposite direction.  I have one witch class with a lot of options, aka Traditions which can be viewed as "subclasses." I rather like it to be honest and it would be a fun way to build a coven of witches in 5e. Everyone takes a class and then the witch sub classes. Each one has a lot of unique options to help keep the witches very flexible.

The classes and their witch subclasses are: 

• The Intoner for Bards. I kinda love this one.
• The Medium for Clerics. This one is so obvious that I am kicking myself for not doing it myself.
• Circle of the Brew for Druids. Not how I would have gone, but it is certainly clever. 
• The Witchblade for Fighters. File under "Why the hell didn't I think of that." Well, I guess I do have my Witch Knights.
• Way of the Specter for Monks. Interesting, I'd have to play it to really understand it.
• Path of the Coven for Paladins. Cool, different enough from my Green Knight to be fun.
• Coven Conclave for Rangers. Similar to my Huntsman but more powers.
• Duskwalker for Rogues. This one is interesting. I rarely mix rogues/thieves with witches. So I will have to try this one.
• Coven of Spirits for Sorcerer. This one calls on the magic of family spirits. Pretty much exactly my Family Witch.
• Witch Patron for Warlocks. This one is also pretty obvious, and likely one of the more popular ones that will get played. 
• School of Witchcraft for Wizards. Now this one is both obvious and yet still a lot of fun. It also has conceptual roots going all the way back to the earliest editions of D&D. 
• Path of the Witch for Barbarian. This one was added later on. In some ways it reminds me of my Cowan for the Pagan Witch, OR (better yet) this is how you can play Cú Chulainn (with Scáthach as his witch) OR even like the warriors on their dajemma with the Witches of Rashemen.

So yeah, if you have a witch concept then there is likely a subclass here that will fit your needs.

There are some new backgrounds for your new witch. All look great really. 

We also get some new familiars here too including a personal favorite, the Jackalope. 

There are some new spells, but only 10. That seems to be a bit, well, underwhelming to be honest. 

Part II of the book is for GMs.

This includes magic items (again, there should have been more), some wands (some really fun ones too), and some magical hats.

Part III is called "for the table." This discusses how to run and play a game filled with witches. There are adventure hooks, NPCs (lots of those), monsters, and some adventures to run. 

Hexbound: The Not So Good

While the book is great to look at, it is not without some issues.

I am not going to quibble about how long it took us to get this and how it may (or may not) sitll be compatible with D&D 5.5. That stuff happens and this is likely a one man show. They get a pass from me on that.

Some issues are like the cards above. Great idea, but I'd have to try them out to see how well they work in a game. And as you can see two of the cards went to press with their placeholder art and not the art for their NPCs.

The minis are nice, but they are really too small. As you can see above compared to HeroForge minis; one I printed myself and one I bought color printed. 

I have the 3D printer, I can print new ones if I want to get them to 25/28 mm Not everyone has that option. OR I just redo the characters as halflings, dwarfs, gnomes and/or goblins.

There should have really been more spells. I know all to well that page count is all important when it comes to this Kickstarters fulfilments. But spells are important to the witch, and there should have been a lot more. 

Ok, so I do not know much about the creator Antonio Demico, but I think I have been writing about witches for longer than he has been alive. So I can't hold his work up to the same critical lens I would hold my own up too, but really. Ten spells is not even close to enough. Reduce the font size by a point and get at least 13 in there. Respect the source material. 

One last thing. Antonio Demico is a great artist and he certainly knows someone that is great at layout, there really should have been a redesigned witchy character sheet. I mean that cover BEGS to have a character sheet to match. I mean really, I do love that cover. 

Overall I am happy with the book and the cards. The minis are too small really and the pins, while nice, are largely forgettable. I mean I put them on my gamer bag and will I even remember what they were from next Gen Con?

At the end of the day, I am still happy to have another witch class and book for my collection. Since at last count I had, well, all of them.

More updates from Dr. Seward, a rare one from Van Helsing himself, 

Dr. Seward’s Diary (cont).

4 November.—To-day we heard of the launch having been detained by an accident when trying to force a way up the rapids. The Slovak boats get up all right, by aid of a rope and steering with knowledge. Some went up only a few hours before. Godalming is an amateur fitter himself, and evidently it was he who put the launch in trim again. Finally, they got up the rapids all right, with local help, and are off on the chase afresh. I fear that the boat is not any better for the accident; the peasantry tell us that after she got upon smooth water again, she kept stopping every now and again so long as she was in sight. We must push on harder than ever; our help may be wanted soon.

Memorandum by Abraham Van Helsing.

4 November.—This to my old and true friend John Seward, M.D., of Purfleet, London, in case I may not see him. It may explain. It is morning, and I write by a fire which all the night I have kept alive—Madam Mina aiding me. It is cold, cold; so cold that the grey heavy sky is full of snow, which when it falls will settle for all winter as the ground is hardening to receive it. It seems to have affected Madam Mina; she has been so heavy of head all day that she was not like herself. She sleeps, and sleeps, and sleeps! She who is usual so alert, have done literally nothing all the day; she even have lost her appetite. She make no entry into her little diary, she who write so faithful at every pause. Something whisper to me that all is not well. However, to-night she is more vif. Her long sleep all day have refresh and restore her, for now she is all sweet and bright as ever. At sunset I try to hypnotise her, but alas! with no effect; the power has grown less and less with each day, and to-night it fail me altogether. Well, God’s will be done—whatever it may be, and whithersoever it may lead!

Now to the historical, for as Madam Mina write not in her stenography, I must, in my cumbrous old fashion, that so each day of us may not go unrecorded.

We got to the Borgo Pass just after sunrise yesterday morning. When I saw the signs of the dawn I got ready for the hypnotism. We stopped our carriage, and got down so that there might be no disturbance. I made a couch with furs, and Madam Mina, lying down, yield herself as usual, but more slow and more short time than ever, to the hypnotic sleep. As before, came the answer: “darkness and the swirling of water.” Then she woke, bright and radiant and we go on our way and soon reach the Pass. At this time and place, she become all on fire with zeal; some new guiding power be in her manifested, for she point to a road and say:—

“This is the way.”

“How know you it?” I ask.

“Of course I know it,” she answer, and with a pause, add: “Have not my Jonathan travelled it and wrote of his travel?”

At first I think somewhat strange, but soon I see that there be only one such by-road. It is used but little, and very different from the coach road from the Bukovina to Bistritz, which is more wide and hard, and more of use.

So we came down this road; when we meet other ways—not always were we sure that they were roads at all, for they be neglect and light snow have fallen—the horses know and they only. I give rein to them, and they go on so patient. By-and-by we find all the things which Jonathan have note in that wonderful diary of him. Then we go on for long, long hours and hours. At the first, I tell Madam Mina to sleep; she try, and she succeed. She sleep all the time; till at the last, I feel myself to suspicious grow, and attempt to wake her. But she sleep on, and I may not wake her though I try. I do not wish to try too hard lest I harm her; for I know that she have suffer much, and sleep at times be all-in-all to her. I think I drowse myself, for all of sudden I feel guilt, as though I have done something; I find myself bolt up, with the reins in my hand, and the good horses go along jog, jog, just as ever. I look down and find Madam Mina still sleep. It is now not far off sunset time, and over the snow the light of the sun flow in big yellow flood, so that we throw great long shadow on where the mountain rise so steep. For we are going up, and up; and all is oh! so wild and rocky, as though it were the end of the world.

Then I arouse Madam Mina. This time she wake with not much trouble, and then I try to put her to hypnotic sleep. But she sleep not, being as though I were not. Still I try and try, till all at once I find her and myself in dark; so I look round, and find that the sun have gone down. Madam Mina laugh, and I turn and look at her. She is now quite awake, and look so well as I never saw her since that night at Carfax when we first enter the Count’s house. I am amaze, and not at ease then; but she is so bright and tender and thoughtful for me that I forget all fear. I light a fire, for we have brought supply of wood with us, and she prepare food while I undo the horses and set them, tethered in shelter, to feed. Then when I return to the fire she have my supper ready. I go to help her; but she smile, and tell me that she have eat already—that she was so hungry that she would not wait. I like it not, and I have grave doubts; but I fear to affright her, and so I am silent of it. She help me and I eat alone; and then we wrap in fur and lie beside the fire, and I tell her to sleep while I watch. But presently I forget all of watching; and when I sudden remember that I watch, I find her lying quiet, but awake, and looking at me with so bright eyes. Once, twice more the same occur, and I get much sleep till before morning. When I wake I try to hypnotise her; but alas! though she shut her eyes obedient, she may not sleep. The sun rise up, and up, and up; and then sleep come to her too late, but so heavy that she will not wake. I have to lift her up, and place her sleeping in the carriage when I have harnessed the horses and made all ready. Madam still sleep, and she look in her sleep more healthy and more redder than before. And I like it not. And I am afraid, afraid, afraid!—I am afraid of all things—even to think but I must go on my way. The stake we play for is life and death, or more than these, and we must not flinch.

Jonathan Harker’s Journal.

4 November, evening.—The accident to the launch has been a terrible thing for us. Only for it we should have overtaken the boat long ago; and by now my dear Mina would have been free. I fear to think of her, off on the wolds near that horrid place. We have got horses, and we follow on the track. I note this whilst Godalming is getting ready. We have our arms. The Szgany must look out if they mean fight. Oh, if only Morris and Seward were with us. We must only hope! If I write no more Good-bye, Mina! God bless and keep you.

Notes: Moon Phase: Full Moon

Seward and Godalming are making their way by boat. Van Helsing has a rare journal entry. Of course it is needed because Mina is slipping under Dracula's power more and more and it unreliable for the first time in 27 chapters. Mina knows the countryside, not just because she read her husband's journal but because she is in mental communication with Dracula. We also see she is sleeping more. 

Jonathan has little to offer here.

Much like the Jonstown Compendium for RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha and The Companions of Arthur for material set in Greg Stafford’s masterpiece of Arthurian legend and romance, Pendragon, the Miskatonic Repository for Call of Cthulhu, Seventh Edition is a curated platform for user-made content. 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: Stage Fright at the Playhouse
Publisher: Chaosium, Inc.
Author: John Hedge with The Miskatonic Playhouse

Setting: Arkham, 1923
Product: Scenario
What You Get: Thirty-Nine page, 36.38 MB Full Colour PDF
Elevator Pitch: It’s a sequel to ‘Edge of Darkness’
Plot Hook: Arcane marks add to the mystery of the theatre
Plot Support: Staging advice, five pre-generated Investigators, six NPCs, six handouts, one map, seven Mythos artefacts, and three Mythos monsters.
Production Values: Excellent

Pros
# Sequel to ‘Edge of Darkness’
# Can be played using the Call of Cthulhu Starter Set# Part of ‘The Next Adventure’ series
# Part of the Call of Cthulhu – Ongoing Horror BUNDLE# Seedy feel of small town theatre with big dreams# Suitably overwrought# Kinemortophobia# Theatrophobia# Achondroplasiaphobia

Cons
# Needs a slight edit# Alternative hook stronger than the sequel hook# Pre-generated Investigators an odd Miskatonic Repository medley
Conclusion
# Once it gets going, turns into a frothy Mythos farce
# Underwhelming sequel, but an entertaining scenario

Much like the Jonstown Compendium for RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha and The Companions of Arthur for material set in Greg Stafford’s masterpiece of Arthurian legend and romance, Pendragon, the Miskatonic Repository for Call of Cthulhu, Seventh Edition is a curated platform for user-made content. 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: Beyond the Edge of Darkness
Publisher: Chaosium, Inc.
Author: Matthew Tansek

Setting: Egypt, 1923
Product: Scenario
What You Get: Thirty-Seven page, 36.38 MB Full Colour PDF
Elevator Pitch: It’s a sequel to ‘Edge of Darkness’
Plot Hook: If the father cannot be saved, then at least the son can be.
Plot Support: Staging advice, five NPCs, two handouts, one map, seven Mythos artefacts, and one Mythos monster.
Production Values: Decent

Pros
# Sequel to ‘Edge of Darkness’
# Can be played using the Call of Cthulhu Starter Set
# Part of ‘The Next Adventure’ series
# Part of the Call of Cthulhu – Ongoing Horror BUNDLE# Alternative hooks provided# Solid set-up for a sequel to ‘Edge of Darkness’# Heliophobia
# Pyrophobia# Achondroplasiaphobia

Cons
# Needs a slight edit# ‘Speakeasies’ [sic] of Cairo?# Clues to the finale location could have been stronger
Conclusion
# Investigation loses momentum
# Suitably straightforward sequel to ‘Edge of Darkness’

Much like the Jonstown Compendium for RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha and The Companions of Arthur for material set in Greg Stafford’s masterpiece of Arthurian legend and romance, Pendragon, the Miskatonic Repository for Call of Cthulhu, Seventh Edition is a curated platform for user-made content. 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: One Step Further
Publisher: Chaosium, Inc.
Author: Quico Vicens-Picatto

Setting: Boston, New England, 1920
Product: Scenario
What You Get: Thirteen page, 3.62 MB Full Colour PDF
Elevator Pitch: It’s a sequel to ‘Paper Chase’
Plot Hook: None
Plot Support: No staging advice, three NPCs, two Mythos spells, and one Mythos monster
Production Values: Reasonable

Pros
# Sequel to ‘Paper Chase’ from the Call of Cthulhu Starter Set and the Cthulhu Companion – Ghastly adventures & Erudite Lore
# Can be played using the Call of Cthulhu Starter Set
# Part of ‘The Next Adventure’ series # Part of the Call of Cthulhu – Ongoing Horror BUNDLE# Nice artwork# ‘Hauntophobia’
# Ostraconophobia

Cons
# No plot# Who are Keiko and Jessie?# No plot hook or Investigator motivation
Conclusion
# A sequel to ‘Paper Chase’ in name only
# A stream of consciousness does not a scenario make # Reviews from R’lyeh Discommends

 Another Halloween has come and gone.

And what a month it was! Normally I post this right after Halloween, but had a lot going on this past weekend. So lets get to it.

By the Numbers

This was one of my busiest Octobers so far, with 118 posts! I reviewed over two dozen Ravenloft products spanning all the editions of Dungeons & Dragons. I also watched 43 horror movies, 21 of which were first-time views.

I also opened my Advent-ure Dice Advent Calendar.

In Search Of...R.I.P.

My In Search of feature of the TSR Horror game that never was, R.I.P. was very popular. I was featured on Episode 16 of Table Top Weekly where I had a discussion with Flint Dille about it. And my post was the feature of a recent Christian Lindke's Geekerati post.

RPG Blog Carnival

I dedicated a few posts to this, and there were a lot of other great posts, too. Please check them all out. There is some really great material listed here. 

• Tuesday Magic Item – Corpse Mask
• Tuesday Magic Item – Necroanimate Prothesis
• Death by a Thousand Claws
• Tuesday Magic Item – Contagious Curse Collar
• Describing and Modifing Zombies to Better Evoke Horror
• RPG Blog Carnival October: Horror in Different RPG Settings
• The Selv
• Vol. I: Vampires and werewolves
• Vol. II: Zombies and ghosts
• Tuesday Magic Item – Liquid and Powdered Skeletons
• Evoking Horror in Old School Games
• Why am I sharing this old Geekerati Interview?

There are a few Dracula posts left to go still and this season will be wrapped up.

Much like the Jonstown Compendium for RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha and The Companions of Arthur for material set in Greg Stafford’s masterpiece of Arthurian legend and romance, Pendragon, the Miskatonic Repository for Call of Cthulhu, Seventh Edition is a curated platform for user-made content. 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: The Echoing Whispers
Publisher: Chaosium, Inc.
Author: Ekin Ergün

Setting: Boston, New England, 1920
Product: Scenario
What You Get: Thirteen page, 3.76 MB Full Colour PDF
Elevator Pitch: It’s a sequel to ‘The Haunting’
Plot Hook: The Chapel of Contemplation is congregating again
Plot Support: Staging advice, five pre-generated Investigators, one NPC, two Mythos spells, and six Mythos monsters
Production Values: Reasonable

Pros
# Sequel to ‘The Haunting’
# Part of ‘The Next Adventure’ series# Part of the Call of Cthulhu – Ongoing Horror BUNDLE# Can be played using the Call of Cthulhu Quick-Start
# ‘Hauntophobia’
# Oneirophobia
# Blennophobia

Cons
# Needs an edit
# Not all of the information is where it is needed
# Too many unnecessary skill checks
# Needs to tell the Keeper the plot, not have her discover it
# Minimalist background

Conclusion
# Overwritten and underdeveloped, the Keeper will need to prepare this hard
# A sequel worthy of ‘The Haunting’ is yet to come