Original Roleplaying Concepts
Joe Banks / December 23, 2020
Hawkwind live in 1973. Photo from the Japanese single for “Urban Guerilla”
Hawkwind are an indelible part of the UK’s underground culture. It’s been over 50 years since they formed in the seedy cradle of London’s Ladbroke Grove, but they still enjoy a fanatical cult following both in Britain and around the world. They may never have scaled the commercial heights of Pink Floyd or Led Zeppelin, but the influence they’ve exerted on modern music is profound. You can break down the components of their sound—barbarian psychedelia, propulsive rhythms, raw electronics—but what’s far harder to quantify is Hawkwind’s distinctive persona, their essential otherness within the story of rock.
In many ways, they’re a sub-genre to themselves, the house band of the British counterculture during the 1970s and beyond. There’s a parallel often made with the Grateful Dead in the US, and certainly from that period they share a similar sense of communal self-sufficiency (plus a propensity for extended jamming, though of a very different stripe to the blues ragas of Jerry Garcia’s crew). But whereas the Dead evoked a mystic vision of Americana, Hawkwind channelled the apocalyptic spirit of the age, fuelled by a combination of Cold War paranoia and pulp science fiction.
Along with the fearsome, if sometimes surprisingly complex, noise they made, it’s the SF-derived image and mythology that built up around Hawkwind that makes them truly unique in the annals of popular music, and that’s what I’m going to talk about in this article. My book Days Of The Underground – Radical Escapism In The Age Of Paranoia is an analysis of the band’s music and cultural impact during their “classic years” of the 1970s, and it looks at some depth into their sci-fi connections—but Hawkwind were still a potent force and SF nexus point in the early ‘80s, which was when I first seriously began to get into them.
Actually, I’d already had a head start; my older brother had a copy of their 1975 album Warrior On The Edge Of Time, which I would hear blasting out of his bedroom—its crashing riffs, rampaging Mellotron, and thunderous drumming loudly announcing a band that seemed to exist outside of the ‘70s rock continuum of Deep Purple, Pink Floyd, and Queen. But there were two features in particular that both fascinated and slightly unnerved my pre-teen self. Warrior’s sleeve depicted a silhouetted knight on horseback dwarfed by a garishly colored vision of the edge of time, with a mirror image of the same scene (minus the knight) on the back cover. The sleeve folded out and down to reveal a plunging panorama of the abyss below—but flip it over, and an impressive Shield of Chaos is revealed, giving a clue to the presence of a special guest within…
However, if the unusual sleeve created a frisson, the album’s spoken word interludes positively freaked me out. The bleak, pulsating chill of “Standing At The Edge” evokes a purgatorial nether zone of lost souls condemned to live forever, a voice full of petulant affront declaiming, “We’re tired of making love.” It’s like the final nail in the coffin of the hippie dream, calling time on the long ‘60s as the cold grip of the ‘70s takes hold. Elsewhere, the gentleman delivering “The Wizard Blew His Horn” and “Warriors” sounds alternately in the grip of mild hysteria and robotic possession.
Taking a closer look at the credits a few years later, I discovered that the voice behind those last two pieces belonged to none other than Michael Moorcock, whose Eternal Champion books the album is very roughly based around. Moorcock had first drifted into Hawkwind’s orbit in 1971, being also based in Ladbroke Grove. From here, he edited and published New Worlds magazine, the key journal of the so-called science fiction New Wave, as epitomized by the writings of J.G. Ballard. Moorcock could often be found of a weekend manning a second-hand book stall in the local market (as part of the constant effort to keep New Worlds afloat) or helping to organize open-air gigs under the Westway, the concrete overpass that looms above the area. Hawkwind too would play for free in the same location, and when Moorcock asked if he could do some readings with them, the band jumped at the opportunity to get a bona fide sci-fi author on board.
Moorcock’s first impressions of the band are telling, describing them as “barbarians with electronics” and “like the mad crew of a long-distance spaceship who had forgotten their mission.” And when I interviewed him for the book, he admitted that Hawkwind felt like a band he’d conjured into existence, so perfectly did they fit into his entropic universe. The first piece he wrote and performed with them has become Hawkwind’s most iconic spoken word track: “Sonic Attack.” While its title is often used as short-hand for the brain-blasting shock and awe of Hawkwind in full flight, the track itself is all creeping dread and terror, a blackly comic parody of WW2 propaganda broadcasts distorted by the chilly logic of the Cold War, and very much a piece of New Wave SF.
Of course, discovering Moorcock’s connection with Hawkwind further piqued my interest in the band. As a young teen, I had moved seamlessly from reading Target’s Doctor Who novelizations to greedily consuming Moorcock’s Eternal Champion books. At the same time, it was becoming apparent that the one thing I was really interested in was music, and coming from a market town in the East Midlands, this almost inevitably meant heavy metal. If you combine those elements together, then it almost inevitably leads you to Hawkwind, particularly their early ‘80s incarnation. Yet even if you weren’t a big music fan, but were the type of young person who dug SF, Hawkwind would still find you one way or another, so embedded were they in British sci-fi and fantasy culture.
Working my way through Moorcock’s dizzying output—how had this man managed to produce so many books?—meant regular visits to the local library, which also had an eclectically stocked record section, and it was here that I had my next close encounter with Hawkwind. Flicking through the racks, I was literally stopped in my tracks by the front cover of their 1973 live album Space Ritual. Etched in retina-sizzling technicolor, and featuring a stylized cosmic messiah flanked by gape-mouthed star cats, it was as though I’d stumbled across some bizarre alien artifact. Like a portal to another world, it was illustrated and designed by Colin Fulcher, aka Barney Bubbles, the man responsible for creating Hawkwind’s striking visual identity, from record sleeves, posters, and adverts. He even painted their equipment. As both a skilled professional designer and mystically-inclined freak, Bubbles was instrumental in creating an image for the band as sci-fi warriors and sages waging a sonic assault on the staid conventions of the straight world.
Hearing Space Ritual for the first time is an unforgettable experience. Lemmy—perhaps the band’s most famous ex-member—memorably described Hawkwind as being “a black fucking nightmare – a post-apocalypse horror soundtrack,” and this was surely the album he had in mind when he made that comment. It begins with what sounds like some deep space transmission, a massive interstellar hulk slowly heaving into view, before the ship’s grimy engines fire and you’re pushed back into your seat by the inertial intensity of opening track “Born To Go.” It’s dark, dense, and blurry, a nuclear-powered battering ram smashing through the cosmos, threatening to tear a hole in the fabric of space-time.
I can’t say it was love at first hearing, because it felt so outside my normal listening experience then, which was the relatively polite hard rock pyrotechnics of bands such as Rainbow and Judas Priest. But as I was eventually to realize, Space Ritual simply doesn’t sound like anything else, certainly not any other band. Yet staring at that sleeve as the record’s strange combination of cyclical riffs, chanted vocals, and electronic bleeps, howls, and whooshes poured out of the speakers, the thing it did sound like was science fiction—futuristic and dystopian, but with a vague sense of wonder still peeking through the cosmic gloom. And that was before “The Awakening,” the first spoken word piece on the album, and my first encounter with Robert Calvert, space-age poet extraordinaire.
More so than even Moorcock and Bubbles, Calvert was the man responsible for transforming Hawkwind into a science fiction band, first building a mythos around them as star-faring freedom fighters and prophets, then using SF as a vehicle for satire and social comment in the latter half of the 1970s, when he became their full-time singer and frontman. One of the first things he did for the band was to create (alongside Bubbles) The Hawkwind Log, a booklet that came with 1971’s In Search Of Space album. It tells the discontinuous, Burroughs-esque story of Hawkwind’s mission to liberate the human race from its essential emptiness, but sees them compressed “into a disc of shining black, spinning in eternity.” This depiction of Hawkwind as space travelling saviors puts the band themselves at the heart of an SF-inspired narrative, rather than merely writing songs about flying saucers and aliens.
It was Calvert who had come up with the concept behind the Space Ritual tour—the dreams of a crew of starbound explorers held in suspended animation—but even if the idea of staging a “space opera” was ultimately abandoned, traces of its storyline are still discernible, particularly in “The Awakening.” Calvert had first appeared on stage with Hawkwind reading his poems between songs, with “The Awakening” being part of a longer piece entitled “First Landing On Medusa.” Against plaintive warbles from the electronic chorus line, Calvert contemplates the cryogenically frozen members of his crew, his voice a chilly combination of precision and dispassion, his words full of ear-catching rhymes and imagery: “The nagging choirs of memory / The tubes and wires worming from their flesh to machinery / I would have to cut.” In the concluding part of the poem, the crew set foot on Medusa, and are quickly turned to stone.
There are a number of other readings from Calvert on the album that firmly locate the band in the New Wave SF universe of Ladbroke Grove. There’s the aforementioned “Sonic Attack,” bleakly Darwinian instructions for surviving a future war—“Do not panic! Think only of yourself!” —delivered by Calvert with malicious intent. “The Black Corridor,” another Moorcock piece that uses the opening lines of his novel of the same name, is typical of Hawkwind’s take on space as “a remorseless, senseless, impersonal fact.” And there are two other Calvert-penned pieces: “10 Seconds Of Forever” is a countdown through the last moments of someone’s life, while “Welcome To The Future” is a concentrated hit of eco-terror—“Welcome to the oceans in a labelled can / Welcome to the dehydrated lands.” Both are indebted to the apocalyptic landscapes of Ballard’s inner space.
But it wasn’t just Calvert writing from a science fictional perspective, with Space Ritual also highlighting other members’ take on the genre. Band leader Dave Brock had been writing in a paranoid, pessimistic vein from the first album onwards, with “Time We Left This World Today” neatly encapsulating Hawkwind’s philosophy of radical escapism, decrying an oppressive society controlled by “brain police” and calling for immediate off-world evacuation. Similarly, saxophonist and singer Nik Turner expresses a desire not to “turn android” and recommends flight in “Brainstorm,” while “Master Of The Universe” finds the alien demi-god of the title sorely disappointed by the affairs of man: “If you call this living, I must be blind.”
By the time that Hawkwind played the shows that would be recorded for Space Ritual in late 1972, they were by far the biggest band in the UK’s underground scene, performing to thousands of fans every night—in fact, with the unexpected success earlier in the year of their single “Silver Machine,” which got to number three in the charts and would go on to sell a million copies worldwide, Hawkwind were in danger of becoming a mainstream rock act. But if their science fiction associations enamored them to their fanatical following, who were more than happy to buy into their mythos, it both bemused and intimidated the music press, who continually wrote them off as, at best, a “people’s band,” at worst, a joke.
While rock culture itself still liked to adopt an “outsider” stance, even as it transformed into a multi-million dollar industry, science fiction remained a proper outsider culture in the ‘70s (pre-Star Wars), and was for the most part looked down on by the critical establishment. Yet for a lot of young people, rock and SF shared similar characteristics and attractions—as well as both being escapist mediums, they were also forward moving and excited by the idea of the future, a disruptive threat to straight society’s status quo. While both could be garish and naïve, they were also capable of smuggling new ideas and perspectives into consumers’ heads. And books such as Tolkien’s Lord Of The Rings (first published in paperback in 1965), Heinlein’s Stranger In A Strange Land (1961), and Herbert’s Dune (1965) had been foundational texts of the original psychedelic counterculture, depicting battles between old and new worlds, and anticipating the coming of revolutionary messiahs.
From the late ‘60s onwards, during Britain’s progressive rock era, there were plenty of bands who included songs with science fictional themes in their repertoire: Pink Floyd’s “Let There Be More Light,” Van Der Graaf Generator’s “Pioneers Over C,” Black Sabbath’s “Into The Void,” Genesis’s “Watcher of The Skies,” etc. And some of the cover art of the time suggested an engagement with the fantastical, Roger Dean’s sleeves for Yes in particular, plus the covers to ELP’s Tarkus and Brain Salad Surgery (the latter illustrated by Alien designer H.R. Giger). David Bowie was also adept at sneaking SF-related themes into his work—“Space Oddity,” “Starman,” “1984,” etc.—and took the lead role in Nic Roeg’s cerebral SF flick The Man Who Fell To Earth (Hawkwind appeared in Robert Fuest’s adaptation of Moorcock’s The Final Programme, but literally for the blink of an eye). And both avant-jazz pioneer Sun Ra and French art proggers Magma drew inspiration from the idea of leaving Earth and setting up home on a new world.
But it was only Hawkwind who specifically defined themselves via numerous SF tropes, who sounded like the roaring of a mighty spacecraft, whose visual imagery was full of galactic heraldry and pulp magazine homages, and who actually had a series of post-apocalyptic SF novels written about them, where they effectively save the world. It’s what makes them the ultimate science fiction band, adding a cosmic spin to the turbulent “no future” culture of 1970s Britain.
Once I’d fully digested Space Ritual, and recognized it for the towering work of outsider genius that it clearly was, I needed more Hawkwind in my life. And as luck would have it, the next item I bought was a “twofer” cassette of the band’s late ‘70s albums, Quark, Strangeness And Charm (1977) and PXR5 (1979). Having achieved some kind of space rock singularity on Space Ritual, Hawkwind’s music became (relatively) more nuanced through the middle part of the decade and veered into fantasy territory (see Warrior)—but when Robert Calvert re-joined them as full-time singer and conceptualist, the band’s profile as sci-fi provocateurs par excellence was boosted once more.
Quark and PXR5 are full of songs animated by Calvert’s quicksilver imagination, one which had moved on from early Hawkwind’s millenarian space chants to embrace SF as the New Wave had intended, as a way of interrogating the modern world and unravelling the technocratic, sometimes psychopathic, forces that increasingly ruled it. “Spirit Of The Age” is the band’s defining song from this era, a vision of the future where bored astronauts light years from home make love to android replicas of their long dead girlfriends, only to complain, “When she comes, she moans another’s name.” It’s also a paean to the plight of the clone, where individuality is unattainable: “Oh for the wings of any bird / Other than a battery hen.”
On saying that, “Uncle Sam’s On Mars” pushes it close, Calvert’s angry take-down of (as he saw it) America’s colonialist approach to space exploration, including pops at its fast food culture and consumerist worldview. He also presciently makes reference to global warming—“Layers of smoke in the atmosphere / Have made the earth too hot to bear”—and suggests that the money and technology involved in putting a man on Mars would be better used repairing our own planet. This was also the period of Hawkwind when the titles of classic sci-fi novels would be co-opted by Calvert as a springboard for his lyrics—in the case of “Damnation Alley” and “Jack Of Shadows” (both Roger Zelazny books), this resulted in reasonably faithful interpretations of the stories, whereas for “High Rise,” just the title of Ballard’s novel was taken. A personal favorite of mine is “Robot,” which references Asimov’s Three Laws, but riffs on the idea of the white collar suburban worker as a slave machine to capitalism.
The Atomhenge tour, 1976
Calvert left Hawkwind in 1979, and, in truth, the band would never subsequently pull off the rock + science fiction equation as inventively and authentically as when he was on board. But in the wider scheme of things, it didn’t particularly hinder the band’s progress, so strong was their brand with the people that mattered—their fans. In fact, the clutch of albums they released after Calvert’s departure all charted higher than Quark or PXR5—while both are now rightly regarded as highlights of the band’s back catalog, it’s possible that at the time they were just too literary in places, Calvert’s clever wordsmithing obstructing the flow of Hawkwind’s sonic attack.
And that takes us now to me sitting in my bedroom with that twofer in my hand, wondering what to listen to next. So I checked out what they were currently doing, and that meant 1982’s double-headed offering of Church Of Hawkwind and Choose Your Masques. The former is more electronically-inclined, while the latter is almost cosmic industrial, but they still contained those sci-fi rock essentials of engine room rhythms, distress call synth, robot vocals, future-themed lyrics, and all recorded the day after tomorrow. And Choose Your Masques in particular had a very cool sleeve. These albums might have lacked the finesse and sophistication of the Calvert era, but Hawkwind still sounded like no other band.
And that’s surely why they’ve continued to this day. They’ve certainly stretched the space rock template along the course of their journey, absorbing techno and ambient influences, especially during the ‘90s, but they’ve consistently traded in science fictional imagery and themes without ever having to resort to trad rock subject matter or the need to be more commercial, contemporary, or “edgy.” They’ve had their wilderness years, but the last decade has seen a significant revival of their fortunes, with perhaps the stand-out release from this period being The Machine Stops (2016), a concept album based on E.M. Forster’s story of civilization living inside a vast mechanical hive—its citizens are electronically connected, but they live alone in their cells.
Michael Moorcock once said that science fiction and rock ‘n’ roll were the two great despised art forms of the 20th century. It’s no wonder then that Hawkwind, in which the combination of the two reached its apotheosis, have come in for so much grief throughout their existence. But as my teenage self would have told the haters, you’re entitled to your opinion, but you’re missing out on something really quite special.
Hawkwind: Days Of The Underground – Radical Escapism In The Age Of Paranoia by Joe Banks is published by Strange Attractor.
Joe Banks is a London-based music writer whose work has appeared in various publications, including The Guardian, MOJO, Prog, Shindig!, Electronic Sound, and The Quietus. Hawkwind: Days Of The Underground is his first book. For endless Hawkwind trivia, follow him on Twitter: https://twitter.com/JoeBanksWriter.
The cold damp drilled into Sergeant
Roquet Alexsndr's bones. He shivered, he was always shivering
these days, and tried to draw himself further into his overcoat, a
useless enterprise lying prone in pre-dawn dew. He hardly
noticed the pain from his ankles, the ache of his feet, or the
grumble of a stomach unfed for two days, no, these discomforts hid
behind the refrigerated mists of late fall in Mantissippii.
He lifted his head, peering left and right to check that Wylum and Ahris were properly camouflaged and alert. They were. Then carefully, using his rifle, he slowly parted the bloody maroon leaves of the brush before his face to look down on to the road. In the gloom of that misty morning it was more like a creek of blue gray mud than a place to associate with walking or driving, and the close thick bush of fireweed, brambleberry, goat roses, and reedy birch dripping with dew gave the place a sinister aspect, not improved by the reek of wet sweat-stewed wool and old canvas from his gear. Nothing moved on that grim trail so far as he could see, which was good.
The Sergeant was the sharp end of the spear
for the Second Polyester Freestate's effort to help it's
semi-autonomous Mantissippi province push back the incursion of
Ethnic Slobbians from beyond the border. Sadly, it was a very small
and reedy spear. A century of world peace since the Silver Wars, and
a cheery, quiet prosperity had left the Freestate with only a single
infantry regiment, Roquet’s unit, the Anneglug Chasseurs. And to
support it; the Brubberband Artillery, though much of that regiment
wasn’t in this theater, being occupied with coastal defense on both
shores of the nation. In fact, the Artillery only had one battery here; and the Chasseurs only had one battalion
on the ground, it’s other was still training and equipping in
the snug barracks of Ft. Grubbit, outside Anneglug. So there were
barely 50 men to hold off all the Slobbians and protect the rich farms of
the Mantissippian planters. A very thin pink and brown wall between
the Mammoth herding barbarians and the city of Poxneedle a few hours
in the rear. But it was a Polyestrine wall, and that counted for something.The Sergeant startled, he heard the leathery scuff of boots kicking the sloppy leaf litter somewhere behind him. He rolled over a little, wincing at the chill, and snorted in relief, it was Garlomin, back from a detail, he was struggling with a steaming can that smelled heavenly of chocolotl. Stomachs rumbled in anticipation to the left and right, easily audible over the dripping leaves. A whispered “well done!” and “Scholar and Gentleman” broke out of the tired squad. They rattled and jangled and brought down a cascade of drippy leaves trying to free their tin cups for a sweet hot drink. Garlomin knelt low, portioning out the thin hot stuff into metal cups, cursing quietly and sucking on burned fingers. Soon the squad was silent again, bellies to the ground and senses keen for movement along the road.
It came around noon, the smell was first, strongly fecal with notes of fire smoke and wet dog. Then the breaking and crunching of vegetation, along with hushed barks from a mahout. The gray watery sun did not improve the look of the road track below, but the muddy stuff was no impediment to the creature that slowly hove into view around the bend. It was frighteningly enormous, with a grayish yellow woolly coat decorated with sticks and leaves, mud and massive tufts of shed undercoat. On it’s back, a wooden platform walled with sandbags and from which four dimly seen figures projected the business end of long rifles. The figures were very short, colorful, with red fez hats, Slobbian hats.
The Mammoth’s tusks swept the road before it, the tough trunk picking at spots and occasionally lifting some morsel or other to it’s mouth. Words came unbidden to the sergeant's mind; Awe, Majesty, Fear. It took him an effort to pull his vision back and concentrate on signaling his section with silent gestures. They would let the front of the column go by, open fire on the last animal, and with some luck, the sergeants flare would be seen by the Artillery, which would then drop a freight train of destruction on the road, while his team pulled back out of the kill zone. Simple as plans go.
The first animal passed them, dropping a great pile of dung in the road on it’s passing. “That’s Consideration right there, you Slobbian bastard.” thought Roquet. Then the next animal appeared, this one, smaller, fewer tree branches entangled in it’s heavy coat, and from it’s howdah platform of split logs and sandbags rose a small brass bedpost in office of a flagpole with a banner; a bedsheet of blue stripes with a cross fitchee painted rudely in some reddish blackish stuff that Roquet sure hoped was paint, or food...but knew probably wasn’t.
Finally, the last animal appeared. It was by far the largest. An Enormous monster, shaggy and matted, it’s trunk bare in places, burned on it’s legs, scarred all over, one ear seemed as if it had been torn off long ago. It’s howdah was not wood, or rather was, but was fitted with plates of iron, probably pulled from a steam engine, and nestled in it’s sandbags was the deadly muzzle of a machine gun. Three Slobbians rode this land kraken, whose shuffling steps came to a quick stop right in front of the fire team.
It paused, unsure, as if it could sense the ambush about to close in on it. It swayed a bit, passing it’s weight from one foot to the other, it’s mahout leaned over to the good ear a moment, patted it lovingly, then turned around to speak to the men in the low walled bunker behind him. Roquet knew things were starting to go wrong, so he did the only thing he could, he fired his flare.
To the right and left the popping of rifles were simultaneous with the clacking clatter of the Machine gun from the four legged bunker before them. Then the monster turned with amazing speed, it’s armored trunk reached Ahris first, and broke him instantly. Roquet put a bullet into the mahout, who screamed out and fell into the muddy road, probably still alive, but the sergeant had no time to be sure, he was already signaling a withdrawal, and trying to back out of range of the titanic, angry wall of hair before him. The Machine gun’s barking was dropping limbs and leaves everywhere,
In the chaos of bullets, spraying mud, falling bark, whipping limbs, the trunks of birch were splintering before massive pillar legs, and Wylum died; split by bullets and splintered tree-trunk. Garlomin fared no better, his last act was to fling the empty Chocolotl tin at the beast, the three grenades inside it going off under it’s belly just as the first big whumping shell of the great guns behind them made a muddy volcano on the road below.
Then something strange happened to Roquet, a sensation of distance, of dizzy darkness clamping down on him, a bewildering sensation of being locked inside his own body as a great curtain of unconsciousness came down over the stage of his mind.
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Work continues on Basic Bestiary, playing around with a few ideas. Here is one I have been working off and on with over the last year. Most off, since I notice it has been a year since I looked at it last.
Nøkk
Medium/Large Fey (Water)
Frequency: Rare
Number Appearing: 1 (1)
Alignment: Neutral (True Neutral)
Movement: 180' (60') [18"]
Swim: 240' (80') [24"]
Armor Class: 4 [15]
Hit Dice: 6d8+12* (39 hp)
Attacks: 1 fist or 1 hoof or 1 weapon
Damage: 1d6+1 or 1d8+1 or by weapon
Special: Song (Charm), Spell-like abilities
Size: Medium or Large
Save: Monster 6
Morale: 10
Treasure Hoard Class: None
XP: 650 (B/X, OSE) 680 (LL)
The Nøkk, also Neck, Näcken, and Nokken, is a type of fey creature that lives in temperate to arctic waters. They can appear as a man playing a lyre, flute, or violin, or as a large horse made partially of water. They are related to the nixie and other water-based faerie creatures. Some scholars debate if they are in truth water spirits of water elementals. They are not unduly affected by cold-iron as other fey are.
The nøkk is content to spend his days sitting on rocks near the shore and playing his instrument and singing. They avoid combat when they can preferring to use their song of charm to ward off possible attacks. If a character approaches the nøkk with respect he may teach them a song. For bards, this equates to a once in a lifetime gift of 500 XP. For spellcasters such as magic-users, druids, or witches they learn to cast a Charm Person spell once without the need to memorize the spell.
Nøkk also have the following spell-like abilities they can use once per day (x1 day), Animal Friendship, Charm Animal, Cure Light Wounds, Predict Weather, and cast Water Breathing on up to six others. A nøkk can breathe air or water as it chooses.
Much like the Miskatonic Repository for Call of Cthulhu, Seventh Edition, the Jonstown Compendium is a curated platform for user-made content, but for material set in Greg Stafford’s mythic universe of Glorantha. It enables creators to sell their own original content for RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha, 13th Age Glorantha, and HeroQuest Glorantha (Questworlds). This can include original scenarios, background material, cults, mythology, details of NPCs and monsters, and so on, but none of this content should be considered to be ‘canon’, but rather fall under ‘Your Glorantha Will Vary’. This means that there is still scope for the authors to create interesting and useful content that others can bring to their Glorantha-set campaigns.
—oOo—
What is it?
The careers of Delta Green agents tend not to go well—they dabble in the secrets of the Unnatural or they become so obsessed with a mystery or a case that they lose perspective, threaten their very sanity, and even the secrecy of the conspiracy itself. This is certainly the case in scenarios such as Delta Green: Need to Know and Delta Green: Kali Ghati, so it is with Delta Green: Music From a Darkened Room. Also available in the anthology, A Night at the Opera: Six Terrifying Operations for Delta Green: The Role-Playing, this is essentially a haunted house scenario, but done in the style of Delta Green rather than another horror roleplaying game, such as Call of Cthulhu, Seventh Edition.Delta Green: Music From a Darkened Room, published by Arc Dream Publishing, takes place in the small town of Meadowbrook, New Jersey. The Agents are directed to investigate and determine the cause of the death of FBI Special Agent Arthur Donnelly who was found dead at 1206 Spooner Avenue, his throat and his blood sprayed around the room where he was found dead. Although his death has been ruled as a suicide, Delta Green suspects that there is more to it because the previous owner was also found dead under the exact same circumstances. Although the FBI considers the matter closed, Delta Green does not, and that will both drive and possibly hamper the Agent’s investigative efforts. The Agents are tasked with determining whether or not the house is tied to the deaths—and if so, how, and then if the house remains a threat to the public at large.
Effectively, what this means is that Delta Green: Music From a Darkened Room is divided into two halves—much like its precedent, ‘The Haunting’ for Call of Cthulhu. In the first half, the Agents investigate the history of the house, its occupants, the reasons for their selling up, and in all too many cases, the terrible things which happened whilst they were in 1206 Spooner Avenue. The Agents will have to work hard to dig into the history of the house, and even harder to avoid arousing the suspicions of the proper authorities, but there is a richness of clues for the Agents to uncover. Beginning with a couple of local contacts as well as a local Green Box—a repository of equipment, clues, records, and leftovers from previous other investigations, the trail of clues leads through the records of the ownership of the house, death certificates, surviving past occupants, and more. As well as warning the Agents not to alert the authorities, Delta Green also notably warns the Agents that they should take extreme care in investigating the house, suggesting that it may have had an influence upon the deaths which took place within its walls. Hopefully, this will be strong enough of a warning for the Agents to do their due diligence, rather than rushing off to physically examine the house (though there is nothing to stop them from doing so if they wish).
In the second half of the scenario, hopefully forewarned by discoveries made during their investigations in and around Meadowbrook, the Agents enter the house and explore its confines. The descriptions of individual rooms and what is in them feel quite lightly drawn—the Handler may well want to add a little more detail here, whereas the descriptions of what might happen in each of the house’s rooms and when, is highly detailed by comparison. The encounters and experiences to be had from room to room in the house play are a major factor in the scenario’s second half, many involving flashbacks and pleasing in places, all five senses, and the investigation of the actual house, the majority of them varying according to the Agents’ Will Power stat. This enables the Handler to tailor the encounters and experiences to the players’ Agents, enabling her to start with a sense of unease during the first few scenes in the house and then build up through creepy to weird and then outright bloody confrontations. Although this needs to be handled with some care lest it be overplayed, there are some entertaining shocks to throw at the Agents and their players. The Handler may want to pick and choose which of these to use lest the horror becomes too sudden, too often.
Although there one or two nods in Delta Green: Music From a Darkened Room to its forebear, ‘The Haunting’ for Call of Cthulhu, most notably the two act structure of the investigation and the inclusion of a family from Quebec, Delta Green: Music From a Darkened Room is very different. Not just its modern milieu, but also because it is creepier, the whole house seemingly haunted and potentially a source of scares and threats to the Agents. The secrets of the house and its past occupants are also not as obviously found, and the Agents will have to work increasingly hard to discover a great many, if not all, of the scenario’s clues. If the scenario’s investigative process is also challenging—more so if the Agents are trying to conceal their interest in the house, let alone their investigations, then determining and potentially applying a possible solution that will solve the mystery is extremely difficult. In fact, so difficult that some players may even come to see Delta Green: Music From a Darkened Room as a no-win scenario.
Physically, Delta Green: Music From a Darkened Room is a well-presented scenario. It is well written, but the Handler will need to read it carefully as there is a lot of information that she will potentially have to impart to her players and their Agents. The single set of floorplans is clear, but perhaps a little plain and could have done with a few internal details added to help the Handler describe each room. The few handouts could also have been collected at the end of the book for easy use by the Handler. Given the wealth of clues to be found in the scenario, the players should be prepared to take a lot of notes for their Agents.
Delta Green: Music From a Darkened Room is a dark foreboding scenario, one with a strong sense of claustrophobia, both within of the walls of 1206 Spooner Avenue and in the town itself—especially if the Agents’ activities come to the notice of the townsfolk of Meadowbrook and they begin to gossip and take an interest in them. The Agents’ investigative efforts also have potentially disastrous consequences if they are not careful. Overall, Delta Green: Music From a Darkened Room is an enjoyable mix of challenging, but rich investigation and spine-chillingly unpleasant, often macabre atmosphere and encounters in a haunted house.
At first sight, Warlock! looks like just another Old School Renaissance Retroclone—and it is, but not the sort you might be thinking of. Published by Fire Ruby Designs—previously best known for Golgotha, the Science Fiction retroclone of far future dungeon scavenging in shattered battleships—Warlock! quickly makes its inspirations known with the strap line, “A Game Inspired By The Early Days Of British Tabletop Gaming”. As much as Warlock! is a fantasy roleplaying game replete with Dwarves, Elves, and Halflings, warriors and wizards, and so on, it only draws upon Dungeons & Dragons as far as that, and no more—just as inspirations for Warlock! did. Instead, Warlock! has Careers—Careers such as Agitator, Boatman, Grave Robber, and Rat Catcher; it has two attributes, one of which is Luck; and it has a Warlock! running around an unnamed, humancentric kingdom causing mayhem. The inspiration for Warlock! is thus Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay and Maelstrom as well as the Fighting Fantasy solo adventure books which began with The Warlock of Firetop Mountain. However, Warlock! is very much lighter than Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, at least mechanically, though mechanically more complex than Fighting Fantasy. In tone though, Warlock! is intended to be grim and gritty, a world of adventure and peril, but with mud aplenty—or worse—underfoot and a certain, sardonic sense of humour.Warlock! is a Career and Skills driven game rather than a Class and Level game. A Player Character has two attributes—Stamina and Luck, as well as a Community. This can either be Human, Halfling, Elf, or Dwarf. These grant societal benefits rather than mechanical ones. He also has thirty-two base skills, ranging from Appraise, Athletics, and Bargain to Survival, Swimming, and Throw, and all of which range in value from one to twenty. To create a character, a player rolls dice for the two attributes, selects a Community, and sets ten skills at a base level of six and another ten at level five. The rest are set at a base level of four. The player then rolls four six-sided dice. These generate the four choices he will have in terms of Basic Career for his character. Once selected, a Career provides four things. First a quintet of skills which can be increased during play whilst the Player Character remains in that Career and a maximum level to which they can be improved, either ten or twelve. For example, the Pedlar receives Ostler 10, Streetwise 10, Appraise 12, Bargain 12, and Repair 12. The player divides ten points between these skills up to their maximum given values. Second, it provides a sixth skill, named after the Career itself, the level for this Career skill being the average of the other skills the Career grants. Third, it provides some standard equipment, and fourth it gives a pair of background elements specific to the Player Character’s time in that Career, both of which are generated randomly. For example, a Pedlar’s two die rolls would determine what he sold and where he has been. Lastly, a player picks three personality traits for character.
Name: Gottschalk Einstein
Community: Human
Career: Raconteur
Past Careers:
STAMINA: 17 LUCK: 13
ADVENTURING SKILLS
Appraise 07 (12), Athletics 05, Bargain 06, Blunt 05, Bow 04, Brawling 06, Command 04, Crossbow 04, Diplomacy 05, Disguise 04, Dodge 09 (10), Endurance 06, History 07 (10), Incantation 04, Intimidate 04, Language 06, Large Blade 04, Lie 08 (12), Medicine 04, Navigation 05, Ostler 05, Persuasion 06, Pole Arm 04, Repair 05, Sleight of Hand 04, Small Blade 05, Spot 06, Stealth 05, Streetwise 06 (12), Survival 05, Swimming 06, Thrown 04
Career SKILLS
Raconteur 7
POSSESSIONS
6 silver coins, backpack, three days’ foods, waterskin, eating knife, jaunty clothes, and boots.
A bottle or two of something strong and a few ‘relics’ of your past exploits, impressive but worthless.
WEAPONS
Arming sword
TRAITS
Charming, Enthusiastic, Lazy
SPELLS
None
NOTES
What tales do you tell? – The latest tales from the capital.
Where have you been? – Here and there. Buy me a drink?
Character generation is for the most part straightforward, as is character progression. A Player Character should receive one, two, or three advances per session. Each advance will increase one of a Player Character’s Career skill by one level, up to the maximum allowed by the Career. As a Player Character’s Career skills rise, so will his Stamina, representing him becoming tougher and more experienced. When a Player Character reaches the maximum skill level, he can change Careers—this will cost him a total of five advances. Whilst this grants him access to other skills, it will not increase the cap on the ones he already has. For that, he needs to enter an Advanced Career, such as Assassin, Bravo, Merchant, or Wizard. This raises the maximum skill levels to fourteen and sixteen rather than ten and twelve for Basic Careers. There are sixteen Advanced Careers in Warlock! and twenty-four Basic Careers. In general, a Player Character will be undertaking two or three Basic Careers before entering an Advanced Career—probably ten or fifteen sessions of play or so, before a Player Character is in a position to do that.
Mechanically, Warlock! is simple. To undertake an action, a player rolls a twenty-sided die, adds the value for appropriate skill or Career and aims to roll twenty or higher. More difficult tasks may levy a penalty of two or four upon the roll. Opposed rolls are a matter of rolling higher to beat an opponent. Luck is also treated as a skill for purposes of rolling, and rolled when a character finds himself in a dire or perilous situation where the circumstances go in his favour or against him. Combat is equally simple, consisting of opposed attack rolls—melee attacks versus melee attacks and ranged attacked versus the target’s Dodge skill. Damage is rolled on one or two six-sided dice depending upon the weapon, whilst mighty strikes, which inflict double damage, are possible if an attacker rolls three times higher than the defender. Armour reduces damage taken by a random amount.
Damage is deducted from a defendant’s Stamina. When this is reduced to zero, the defendant suffers a critical hit, necessitating a roll on a Critical Hit table. Warlock! has five, for slashing, piercing, crushing, and blast damage. Of course, roleplaying games like Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay had more, and more entries on them, but for a stripped back game like Warlock!, they are enough—and they are brutal. Damage below a defendant’s Stamina acts as a modifier to the roll on the table, so once dice are rolled on the critical damage tables, combat takes a nasty turn.
For example, Gottschalk Einstein is heading to his lodgings after a night on the town when he is attacked by a couple of thugs—Wilmar and Bruna, thinking that the worse for wear gentleman will be an easy mark. Both have clubs, 14 Stamina, and a Blunt skill of 3. The Game Master states that in his inebriated state, Gottschalk will be surprised. This means that the thugs can act first and have a +5 bonus to their rolls. Gottschalk’s player will roll normally, but will be using his Dodge skill of 9. Against Wilmar’s roll of 10, Gottschalk’s player’s roll 13 is good enough—the raconteur sees the attack coming and just steps out of the way. Bruna is more successful though, as the Game Master rolls a total of twenty against Gottschalk’s 15. The Game Master rolls 1d6-1 for her club and inflicts four points of Stamina damage, which Gottschalk suffers because he is not wearing armour—a poor way to impress the ladies! On the next round, the Game Master has everyone roll for initiative, a simple roll of a six-sided die. Gottschalk’s four beats the thug’s two, and drawing his arming sword, he swings at the nearest thug, which is Bruna. Unfortunately, Gottschalk is slightly drunk and the Game Master levies a -2 penalty to his Large Blade skill—reducing it to two (who said Gottschalk was a fighter?). His player rolls a total of 12 versus Bruna’s 8, and so hits. Gottschalk slashes at his assailant and inflicts nine damage on her, reduced by one for her padded jerkin. Bruna now has six Stamina. Wilmar attempts a second attack, and whilst Gottschalk is at a penalty on his Dodge roll, his player rolls 16, three times Wilmar’s roll of 1 which means not only that he misses, the Game Master rules that he falls flat on his face!
On round two, Gottschalk continues slashing at Bruna, his player rolling a total of 21. The Game Master rolls 18, which is not good enough and his drunken swings are enough to inflict another eight points his blade slashes open her padded jerkin. This reduces Bruna’s Stamina to -2, necessitating a roll on the Slashing Critical table. Gottschalk rolls two six-sided dice and adds two to the result for an average result of seven—which means that he has sliced at least one of her fingers off! She drops her club and clutches her hand in pain. She thinks better of her action and dashes for the alley. Meanwhile, her cohort, Wilmar manages to get to his feet and hefting his club suddenly realises he is facing a drunk with a bloodied sword in hand and his cohort has scarpered! Wilmar has a moment to think about his current Career choice…
Magic in Warlock! can be cast by either priests or wizards, but both use Incantation skill to cast, have to be cast from scrolls, and require the expenditure of Stamina to power. Spells can thus be cast so long as the caster has Stamina. However, a caster will suffer ‘Wrath of the Otherworld’ should his player roll a one, followed by a second failed Incantation test. This results on a roll on the Miscast table, leading to results such as the caster’s skin being bleached white or their face frozen in a grimace for several days. It is even possible for non-priests or non-wizards to cast spells, that is, read them off the scrolls. However, the likelihood of such spells being successfully cast is relatively low given that every Player Character will have a four in his Incantation skill… Some thirty-six or so spells are listed, from Alarm and Banish to Swarm and Unseen. Magic items in Warlock! essentially model the effects of spells, either without the need for an Incantation check, or with the Incantation check, but without the Stamina cost.
Warlock!’s bestiary includes all of the usual suspects, from Chimera, Dire Wolves, and Demon to Wight, Wraith, and Wyvern. Advice for the Game Master highlights the deadliness of the combat, the low power of the magic and its potential accessibility by everyone, and whilst the monsters are not necessarily evil, they may act as such. It also states that the way to become powerful in terms of magic is to specialise, but there are no rules for that. The major piece of advice for the Game Master is that Warlock! is designed to be hackable, and given how light the mechanics are, that is certainly the case. There is advice too, on handling the expectations that the players have in coming to a scenario and building an adventure around those. However, there is no scenario included which would showcase what the designer expects to see, and this is not helped by the lack of background to Warlock!. What there is, is very lightly sketched out. There is a marauding Warlock! of course, and the gods, such as the beloved Thrice Blessed, the bloody Red King, and the reviled Dragon, but nothing beyond that...
Warlock! is a buff little book, starkly laid out and illustrated in a suitably rough style which feels suitably in keeping with the period inspiration. It is very handy and especially combined with the lightness of its mechanics, makes it easy to reference and to run from the book.
The danger of being inspired by Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay and Fighting Fantasy is that Warlock! could have been fairly complex, but in taking concepts and structures from both—the Careers in particular of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay and the simplicity of Fighting Fantasy, the result is something that is leaner, faster, but still as brutal and as grim. Plus it is light enough for the Game Master to easily develop her own content. Overall, Warlock! is easy to pick up and play, presenting a quick and dirty fantasy roleplaying game that will tick many gamer’s sense of nostalgia.
I figured it was time to formally merge to features. Today is my usual (semi-usual) #FollowFriday post, but I have also wanted to do a TBBYANR post.
In case you forgot (it has been a while) TBBYANR stands for "The Best Blog You Are Not Reading" and is was a great feature in the early days of the blogging scene. Since then communications have become more fractionalized with people on Facebook, Discord and other mediums. It is hard to know how well others know about other blogs. Plus so many blogs also have their own Facebook and/or Twitter outlets.
So in my merging of these two features or more accurately #FollowFriday assuming the role that TBBYANR once held I figure I'll post some blogs I have been enjoying and how you can interact with them on social media.
Chuck Thorin's "They Might Be Gazebos!" is a good classic OSR blog. He does some reviews and retrospectives and is usually focused on Swords & Wizardry and Dungeon Crawl Classics. He does the occasional character write-up as well.
One of my favorite features of his is his OSR Retrospective where he looks at the games of the Old-School Renaissance.
Chuck is also the author of "Gary vs. The Monsters" the cinematic, campy horror monster-fighting old-school RPG.
Again, I am not sure how many of you know about this site, but they are worth checking out.
Links
Theodric Ælfwinesson has been running MR for a bit now. While the focus is Old School there is still new content (like Pathfinder) but viewed from an Old-School lens.
Some of my favorite topics are on monsters and world-building.
Definitely check it out, there is an absolute ton of material there.
Links
Swords & Stitchery is very likely a blog you all do know about. Eric has been posting his thoughts on old-school games and his own campaigns for a long time now. At a couple of posts per day he is constantly supplying new material. I have to pause often to just catch up to his output. His OSR Commentary might be the best feature, and his coverage of Astonishing Swordsmen & Sorcerers of Hyperborea keeps me coming back time and time again.
Recently he has been discussing NIGHT SHIFT and I am very excited to see what he does with it.
Links
That's good for now!
At the Mountains of Madness is horror author H.P. Lovecraft’s longest and one of his most famous stories. It takes the form of a series of letters, written by Doctor William Dyer, a geologist from Miskatonic University, who in late 1930 led an expedition to the Antarctic which would end in disaster, madness, and death following the discovery of the remains of prehistoric lifeforms unknown to science, buried in the permafrost and the remains of a cyclopean city behind a mountain range the height of the Himalayas—previously never seen before, the city long abandoned for terrible reasons which are ultimately revealed at the denouement of the story. Specifically, Doctor Dyer’s letters have been written in an effort to prevent a second, and much more important and widely publicised expedition which is being mounted to the Antarctic from following in the same path. The story has a strong sense of atmosphere and environment—the ice and snow, and extreme low temperatures play a major role in the narrative, serving as a starkly frigid backdrop against which its events take place and its equally stark revelations as to the horrid and horrifying events in the past and their dark influences upon the origins of mankind.Originally serialised in the February, March, and April 1936 issues of Astounding Stories, At the Mountains of Madness has been published many times since and in more recent years adapted into songs, musicals, graphic novels, radio serials, and more. The very latest adaptation is none of these, but an illustrated version of the novel. At the Mountains of Madness is published by Free League Publishing, a publisher best known for roleplaying games such as Mutant: Year Zero – Roleplaying at the End of Days and Forbidden Lands – Raiders & Rogues in a Cursed World, this is not the publisher’s first such title. That would be The Call of Cthulhu, the classic of American horror literature and the short story that is arguably H.P. Lovecraft’s most well-known. As with that classic, the Free League Publishing edition of At the Mountains of Madness is fully illustrated by French artist François Baranger and presented in a large 10½ by 14 inches folio format.
However, this is only At the Mountains of Madness Volume I. Running to just sixty-four pages, the text of the story only takes the protagonists as far as the upper reaches of the Elder Thing city, it closing at the point where the protagonists are preparing to enter the city’s subterranean depths. Fortunately, the fact that the reader will need to wait for the second part to see more of Baranger’s gorgeous artwork is the first volume’s only downside (all right, to be fair, the large format of the book makes it difficult to place on almost any book shelf). This though should not persuade the reader from perusing the gorgeous pages of At the Mountains of Madness Volume I, for Baranger illustrates every page, brilliantly realising many of the novella’s many scenes. These begin in the dusty halls of Miskatonic University, quiet and contemplative, Doctor Dyer putting pen to paper to warn the upcoming expedition, before leaping into the joy and hope of his own expedition as it sets sail from Boston for the South Pole. There, the large folio format grants space to capture the sense of scale to the expedition’s task, to the southernmost continent itself, and ultimately the city of the Elder Things itself, with wide, glorious vistas of the Antarctic and later the shattered, alien city—all bare, starkly white and icy. A later piece inverts this, depicting Dyer and his colleague, Danforth’s flight through the city with a dizzying sense of depth as it threads its way between colossal ruins.
Contrasting this is the closeness of the expedition, working and discussing the discoveries made, almost huddling together for warmth and to maintain a human connection. Here the colours are darker and use muddier tones as the expedition discovers the remains of the Elder Things in the caverns below the ice and later perform autopsies upon them. There is a nod to The Thing in these scenes, dripping menace and mystery as the weird corpses thaw and strange fluids fall to the floor, drop by drop. Baranger’s final illustration is subtly ominous, the stonework of the wall around the entrance to the tunnel below the Elder Thing city casting a skull…
At the Mountains of Madness Volume I is a stunning book. The likelihood is that the reader of this book will have read H.P. Lovecraft’s story before, probably more than once, but François Baranger brings the story to life in rich, gorgeous colour that captures both the grandeur and scale of the expedition’s discoveries as well as the dread claustrophobia of its mysteries and realisations. At the Mountains of Madness Volume I is a glorious way for new readers to discover H.P. Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness and for veteran readers to revisit its mystery and madness anew.
Stephen Canner / December 17, 2020
This is a revision of a piece that was originally published at Mediated Signals.
A curious ad appeared in the August 1955 issue of Ray Palmer’s Mystic Magazine. It announced the release of an LP that would allow readers the opportunity to hear the voice of someone called Yada Di Shi’ite. It went on to say that the record contained “a true aural picture of a typical lecture given by the teachers of the Inner Circle through Mark Probert.” As puzzling as this may sound to us today, regular readers of Mystic would have been very familiar with both Yada and Probert. What is not obvious from the information given is that this might well be the earliest example of a commercially released vinyl record related to the UFO phenomenon. Unfortunately, no copies of the record are known to exist, and to my knowledge very few collectors are even aware of it. But how this record came to be made and its relationship to early UFO culture is something of a tale.
On October 14, 1946, The Los Angeles Daily News reported that a number of people in San Diego believed that “a space ship from another planet” had attempted to make contact with Earth during the previous week’s meteor shower, an event caused by the passing of the Giacobini-Zinner comet. Although local authorities received no reports of anything out of the ordinary, at least a dozen people told the paper that on October 9 they had witnessed a “large and weird object” in the sky over the city. One witness was quoted as saying, “It was shaped like a bullet and left this vapor trail behind it.” Another observed that it had “something that looked like wings.” The article curiously went on to say that local occult publisher Meade Layne was “putting a medium to work on the supposed sighting.” That medium was Mark Probert.
According to the brief autobiography published in the 1963 edition of his book The Magic Bag, Mark Probert was born in Bayonne, New Jersey, in 1907. As a teenager he joined the Merchant Marine. But after only two years at sea, he disembarked at San Diego and decided to stay. There he worked briefly as a jockey and a bellhop, before moving into vaudeville as a “song and dance man.” By the 1930s, vaudeville was dying, so in 1939 he took a job as a graphic artist with the Visual Education Department of the San Diego public school system. It was there he met his wife Irene.
Not long after they were married, Irene made a casual remark that would change the course of their lives. She told Mark that he often talked in his sleep. The odd thing was that when this happened, it sounded as if he were speaking a foreign language. Soon the couple met Meade Layne, a former university professor who had left academia to devote his life to the study of psychic phenomena. As Probert put it, “he had considerable interest and knowledge in the fields of metaphysical and occult laws.” It was Layne who convinced Probert that his nocturnal mumblings could be evidence that he was in fact a trance medium.
The idea that Probert was perhaps channeling entities from beyond was put to the test during an experimental séance. Recounting his experience years later, Probert recalled that after being instructed to relax, he soon found himself in a state of euphoria so intense that he lost all awareness of the world around him. When he regained consciousness, he was told that he had been in a trance for some 45 minutes and had spoken in a voice not his own. The voice introduced itself as Martin Latamore Lingford, a New York showman who had lived earlier in the century. Lingford explained that he and a group of other entities from the “inner planes” had spent years preparing Probert for his role as channel. Soon, the voice promised, these other “controls” would also come forward and make themselves known.
During a number of séances over the next three years, the other controls—collectively known as the Inner Circle—did indeed appear, and began to reveal their plan for Probert’s life. They explained that it was they who had chosen Irene to be not only his wife, but also “their personal guide and assistant in the work.” They emphasized that this work was to be “almost entirely of an educational nature” and not to “expect much in the way of personal matters.” On the surface this may seem a minor point. But this statement could be read as a conscious attempt by Probert to separate his work from earlier trance mediums of the spiritualist movement, who would often help the bereaved by contacting their “dear departed loved ones.” It seems that something more important was happening here.
In early 1945, Meade Layne began publishing a newsletter called The Round Robin. The first issue was sent out, somewhat experimentally, to some 15 to 20 people. Over time it grew, and after a name change to The Journal of Borderland Research, it endured into the current century. In the October 1946 issue, Layne explained that the mysterious object reported by the newspapers that month first came to his attention when he received a telephone call from Mark Probert, who told Layne that he had been watching the meteor shower from the top floor of a building when he sighted it. He described it as a luminous craft, “about the size of an extremely large plane,” with two reddish lights, moving very fast. He then added a surprising detail: “the flapping of its wings was plainly visible.”
The next day, Layne received a number of calls from other witnesses who agreed on some points of Probert’s description and disagreed on others. Why these witnesses would call Layne, and not the authorities, to report their sightings is not explained. In a footnote he adds that, “The record of such strange craft, objects, appearances in the sky has greatly increased since Charles Fort began his astonishing memo, and still grows.” This is an interesting comment given that it suggests that the era of the UFO dates to Charles Fort’s early work, the first volume of his “astonishing memo” being his Book of the Damned, published in 1919. What is more remarkable is that this statement was made a full eight months before public knowledge of UFOs was widespread, at least as any sort of organized concept. But early readers of Charles Fort were always a bit ahead of the curve in this respect.
Mark Probert soon went into a trance (he now seemed to be able to do this at will) so that his controls could be asked about the object. From them he learned that it was called “the Kareeta.” (Elsewhere its name is given as “Careeta” and even “Corrida.”) In somewhat poetic language, the controls chimed in with their opinions about the craft. One said it came from a planet “many thousands” of miles away and that it was made of “balsam wood [sic] coated with a thin layer of alloy.” Another claimed that it came from “west of the moon” and that its pilots “want you to get a group of scientists who will meet them at some isolated spot.” At this point there is no indication that what was being described was anything other than a concrete object being piloted by physical beings.
In late May 1949, responding to Walter Winchell’s claim that UFOs were actually “experimental guided missiles from Russia,” Layne told a newspaper reporter that the saucers in fact originated from a place called Etheria. This was not a place that was part of our own physical reality, but a “material world, with objects and people and a great civilization, and it lies all about us, though invisible and untouchable.” Based on what he learned from Probert’s controls, Layne had been developing this idea throughout 1947, in the pages of The Round Robin. This is a very early version of the Interdimensional Hypothesis, an idea that would become well known in UFO circles some two decades later. According to the hypothesis conceived by Layne, the saucers did not come from outer space as we know it. Neither did they come from “the astral plane,” but from what was effectively a parallel universe. He was to formalize this idea in 1950, with the publication of a mimeographed booklet called The Ether Ship Mystery and Its Solution.
In late 1953, Ray Palmer, already well known for his success with Amazing Stories and Fate, launched a new magazine called Mystic. In his chatty editorials, Palmer expressed a vision for the new publication that sounded almost as if he were attempting to create a new genre of literature, one that was somehow simultaneously both fact and fiction. This new enterprise served as something of a bridge between the fantastic fiction of Amazing Stories and the fantastic “fact” of Fate. In the third issue in March 1954, Palmer printed Roger Graham’s detailed account of how Probert, through his controls, successfully identified and diagnosed a number of Graham’s medical problems, diagnoses that were later confirmed by medical professionals. (This intersection of spiritualism and healing already had a long history by the early 1950s. In the US, Edgar Cayce was providing clairvoyant diagnoses as early as the turn of the century. Harry Edwards, Britain’s most famous spiritual healer, began his career in the 1930s.) This article signaled the beginning of what would become something of a fascination with Probert on Ray Palmer’s part. This may have been partly due to the number of letters the magazine received about Probert’s alleged abilities, both supportive and scoffing. Palmer was never one to let a good controversy go unexploited.
The cover of the August 1954 issue of Mystic featured paintings by Probert of three of his more talkative controls. These were Ramon Natalli, an astronomer who lived at the time of Galileo; Doctor Alfred Luntz, a 19th-century Anglo-German “clergyman for the High Episcopal Church of England”; and Yada Di Shi’ite, a 500,000 year old priest from a lost Himalayan city. Elsewhere Probert wrote that these controls, along with two others, appeared to him in visible form one night in 1947, insisting that he paint their portraits. He did not explain why disembodied entities from the inner planes who had lived in a number of different physical bodies over the millennia would want portraits of themselves, but some of these paintings were later used as illustrations in Probert’s book The Magic Bag.
Mark Probert, 1950s
The feature article in the August issue of Mystic was the transcription of a séance held by Probert, attended by Irene and a man identified only as “RGM.” The two were to present a set of questions to the controls that had been provided to them by Ray Palmer. The first of the Inner Circle to emerge was Dr. Luntz. The question posed to him concerned the extent of the U.S. government’s knowledge of the true nature of flying saucers. For a Victorian vicar, Luntz seemed to be quite knowledgeable on the subject. His answer was that the government did indeed know more about the phenomenon than was publicly admitted, but that there was no sinister motive behind it. The intent was simply to shield the public from the panic that would surely result from any revelation. He then went on to suggest, somewhat incongruously, that arch-debunker Donald Menzel’s recent book—Flying Saucers, published by Harvard University Press in 1953—was the result of an intentional conspiracy to suppress the reality of the saucers.
Renaissance astronomer Ramon Natalli then made a brief appearance, presenting his theory that all reality is driven by consciousness. With the opening acts out of the way, it was time for Probert’s star turn. Yada Di Shi’ite manifested, speaking his own impenetrable ancient language of Yuga: introducing Yada’s arrival with a barrage of gibberish would soon become something of a set piece for Probert. Undoubtedly this was a device intended to add drama to Yada’s arrival and to increase audience anticipation. Switching to English, Yada provided the basic outline of his autobiography. He said he had lived a half million years ago in the city of Kaoti, in a civilization called Yu. There he was a Ka-Ta, or priest. Once he completed the “33rd degree in the order called Shi’ite,” he was given the title Yada. Since that first life in the Himalayas, he had been reincarnated many times, the last being in China 500 years ago. In this description, Yada presented himself as something between a bodhisattva and a Scottish Rite Mason. He said that he had not experienced any “breaks in consciousness” since his original incarnation on Earth, and that anyone could achieve this. He then explained that reality is illusory but that mankind can rise out of this illusion by degrees. He closed with the revelation that no single path leads to enlightenment, but that “all of man’s experiences are to be classified as initiations into higher and to more complete states of awareness.”
Over the next year it was a rare copy of Mystic that did not feature Probert somewhere in its pages. An interesting letter from an anonymous correspondent who claimed to work in the mental health industry appeared in the August 1955 issue. He wrote that after seeing Probert in person he was “very disillusioned.” Among his complaints was that the messages the controls delivered were unoriginal, and seemed to have been gleaned from the library. Also unconvincing was the fact that the various voices that emerged from Probert—whether early modern Italian, Victorian English, or ancient Himalayan—always spoke in the same accent. “I think these trance states would not have become necessary had he not found himself a teacher with no students, a philosopher with no audience,” anonymous wrote, “consciously or unconsciously I believe that he is using the occult to put his own ideas across.”
The August 1955 issue also featured an advertisement for a long playing album, announcing that the public could now hear the voice of Yada Di Shi’ite at home. The ad copy was written in a tone that assumed the reader knew full well who both Probert and Yada were. It explained that the record had been made from an unedited, hour-long tape of a séance held before a live audience. Yada would begin the session by speaking in his ancient native tongue, before switching to English. The Himalayan priest would then give his opinions on such topics as reincarnation and the purpose of life, before taking questions from the audience. All this could be in the reader’s mailbox by sending only $4.98 to Inner Circle Records in Ojai, California.
As mentioned, to my knowledge, no copy of this record has ever turned up. Why? The first and most likely answer is that it was only ever pressed in an extremely limited quantity, never sold well, and any remaining stock was eventually disposed of. This has been the unfortunate fate of so many ephemeral recordings over the years. Another possibility is that it never existed. If that is the case, then the ad for the record was likely an attempt to secure orders before actually pressing and shipping the disc. This model was definitely in use at the time for self-published saucer and occult books, although in those cases buyers were usually told that they were placing an advance order.
The offices of Mystic were in Evanston, Illinois, and Mark Probert was based in San Diego. Why then is the address given in the ad in Ojai, California, a tiny town more than 200 miles away from Probert’s home? The obvious answer is that the company producing the record was located there—which would make sense, given’s Ojai’s historical connection to Theosophy and the esoteric tradition. It does not appear that Inner Circle Records actually existed outside of this release, however. In all likelihood, it is simply the label name Probert chose to use when arranging its manufacture with a custom pressing outfit. And in a town as small as Ojai, it would seem that the company should be fairly easy to identify.
At first sight, a tantalizing possibility is that the record may be a very early release by the legendary Two: Dot Records. This label was run by husband-and-wife team Dean and JoAnne Thompson from their home on the outskirts of town. They began doing run-of-the-mill custom work in the 1950s before tapping into the regional rock scene in the late 1960s. Examples of the label’s 1970s output by bands like Hendrickson Road House or The Mystic Zephyrs 4 sometimes sell for as high as four figures.
However, there was also another label operating out of Ojai in the 1950s. Educo Records was founded in 1953, releasing classical recordings to be used for music appreciation classes in schools and colleges. The company operated out of Ojai during its first few years of existence, and later relocated to nearby Ventura. Given that the PO Box address in the Mystic ad was that used by Educo while in Ojai, it is reasonable to conclude that this was the company contracted by Probert to manufacture the LP. So far, no other custom releases by Educo have been identified. But like other small labels of the era, it is likely that Educo accepted custom contracts to increase revenue, the finished product bearing no evidence of the manufacturer so as not to confuse private releases with the company’s main brand in the minds of consumers.
It is not known whether Probert’s LP contained any references to the flying saucer phenomenon. By 1956, however, Yada was giving audiences his opinion on the reality and nature of UFOs, still promoting the idea that they were not from other planets but from another dimension. In early 1957, Probert was a guest on Long John Nebel’s radio show in New York, a regular stop for saucer celebrities. In 1960, he appeared at the Giant Rock Spacecraft Convention—the most famous and one of the largest of the early UFO conventions—where he channeled Yada for an audience, with Irene acting as master of ceremonies. Here, as usual, Yada first emerged speaking Yuga before switching to English.
A cynical observer might point out that Probert, by his own admission, was an ex-vaudevillian, and that this standard performance—repeated ad infinitum—was beginning to have something of the feel of a tired old vaudeville turn. The couple continued touring the country performing séances throughout the 1960s, and after Irene’s death in 1966, Probert continued his work alone.
Probert’s last known major public appearance was at the Northern California Space Convention in October 1968. At this point he was telling audiences that he was not a medium, but a “telegnostic.” This term not only served to further distance him from the stereotype of the medium left over from the days of spiritualism, but implied something deeper. The term suggested that he was not just contacting spirits, but was somehow transmitting gnosis from some distant location. It also served to position him not simply as a fortune teller or mentalist, but as something much more serious: a gnostic. Mark Probert died a few months later, in early 1969.
It is easy in our rationalist era to cast Mark Probert as one in a long line of spiritualists who were either delusional or blatantly fraudulent. But this point of view ignores the content of his message. What is remarkable about the séance published in the August 1954 issue of Mystic, is that in a single, short session Probert—or, if you prefer, his controls—was able to seamlessly guide the conversation from possible conspiracies around the existence of UFOs, to ideas about reality being a by-product of consciousness, ending with hints of a grand Buddho-Masonic theory of release from the cycle of reincarnation, resulting in something resembling Buddhahood. In doing so, he provided a tantalizing suggestion that these things might somehow all be related. It is also striking that the questions raised by Natalli and Yada during the séance are still those that concern serious modern students of anomalous phenomena, mysticism, and even physics. In effect, Probert seemed to be telling audiences to move away from the obvious conclusions they were making not only about saucers, but about existence itself.
As far back as 1947, when most people were just hearing the term “flying saucers” for the first time, Mark Probert had already rejected myopic materialism, and was telling the world that perhaps the very fabric of reality was quite different than our model of it. And though wrapped in a presentation that borrowed heavily from theosophy, spiritualism, and the vaudeville stage, Probert’s ideas foreshadowed an important direction that one school of thought was to take in the future. This move away from the idea of UFOs as a nuts and bolts phenomenon, and towards a more blended view involving theories of consciousness, human cognition, and quantum theories of time and space is one that is fast gaining momentum today.
Many myths and legends center around something lost, an object or a bit of knowledge; its very absence imbues the missing thing with meaning, even importance. It is likely, however, that the idea of a lost recording of the voice of Yada Di Shi’ite is much more interesting than the actual reality, were a copy ever to surface. But puzzles like the one surrounding this album are what keep researchers moving forward, and in the process uncovering the next riddle to be solved. The UFO phenomenon itself is more koan than puzzle. It is also both an ontological and an epistemological mystery, so it should come as no surprise that a study of recordings related to it would begin with its own discographical mystery.
Stephen Canner is an archivist, musician (The Victor Mourning), and historian of artifacts that emerge from the margins of culture. He blogs at Mediated Signals.
I have been playing around with a Sea Witch Tradition. The Sea Witch is a powerful archetype and one that has featured in myths and legends since humankind looked out into the sea.
Witches brewing a storm in ScottlandAmong the media, mythological and literary examples are Circe from myth, Calypso from The Odyssey, Sycorax in Shakespeare's The Tempest, the Sea Hag from Popeye, Ursula from The Little Mermaid (and from the original Hans Christian Andersen), Tia Dalma in Pirates of the Caribbean, comics, and a story I recall reading as a kid that I have not been able to remember properly.
The Sea witch has power over wind, weather, waves, and various creatures of the sea and coast. This would include the obvious fish and marine mammals, but also birds associated with the sea.
Sea Witch TraditionWitches of the Sea Witch Tradition are members of a very ancient tradition related to the Classical tradition but also the Pagan traditions and Chthonic traditions. Witches of this tradition honor the sea in both it's capacity the cradle of life and in its capacity to destroy.
Role: Witches of this tradition often serve gods, goddesses, and other ancient powerful beings as their patrons. Many will often refer to the Sea as a Goddess in and of herself and other Gods of the seas are merely Her extensions and proxies.
Joining this Tradition: Sea witches join this tradition typically very early in life. They will claim they have sea-water in their veins and the sea in their soul. They feel drawn to the sea and will typically live near the sea if they are land-dwelling, or in it. They will often grow up in families where many of the members are sailors or fisherfolk. Some even are related by blood to creatures like selkies, mermaids, or even swanmays or nymphs.
Unlike most Hags that are part of the Faerie tradition, Sea Hags are part of this Sea Witch tradition.
Leaving this Tradition: Witches rarely if ever leave this tradition. Even when they are physically distant from the sea they still "feel the call of the sea."
Occult Powers
Minor, 1st Level: Familiar. The Seas witch gains a familiar related to the sea.
Lesser, 7th Level: Breathing. The sea witch gains the ability to breathe underwater if they normally breathe air, or the ability to breathe on land if they normally breathe water. This is a persistent power.
Medial, 13th Level: Shape Change. The Sean witch may shape change as per the Druid ability Wild Shape or Polymorph Self. This may be done once per day at the 13th level. The witch may only change shape to a natural sea animal that is within one size category of her normal size. So a Medium-sized witch may only change to a Small, Medium, or Large animal.
The number of times the witch may do this per day increases with every other level. So 2 times per day at 15th, 3 times per day at 17th, and 4 times per day at 19th. The witch may opt to sacrifice one of these times to go outside of her normal range of sizes. So a 17th level Amazon witch could shift to Huge or Tiny once and her normal sizes the other two (total of 4 shapeshifts per day).
Greater, 19th Level: Raise Storm. Considered by many to be the ultimate form of the Sea Witch's power, the Sea Witch can affect the weather as per the magic-user and druids spells Control Weather and Control Winds.
Major, 25th Level: Longevity. The witch stops aging. Her appearance will continue to age but her body and mind will stay the same age she was when she reached this level. She is also no longer affected by magical aging. She can still be killed by normal means.
Superior, 31st Level: Apotheosis. The witch becomes something else. This new form and powers are dependent on the Patron she serves. For sea witches, her form becomes that of a sea creature. She becomes something akin to a Triton, a Cecelia, or even odder combinations.
Special Benefits and Restrictions: The sea witch will honor a god or goddess of the sea. The vow never to willing move further and a mile away from any body of water. Most prefer to be much closer. Seas witches with a familiar can communicate with marine life and even other creatures that leave near the sea.
Equipment: The tool of this tradition is the cauldron. Like the sea, the cauldron holds all possibilities.
Preferred/Barred Covens: Sea Witches are typically solitaries, but they will often meet up every few years with others. Sea witches also tend to be very territorial, so only one will typically be found in any one natural locale, such as a bay, cove, or other inlets.
Relationship to the Goddess/Patron: The sea witch views the Goddess as the Sea itself. "Human" manifestations of Her are but limited projections into the human understanding of what the Sea and the Goddess actually is.
This relationship with the sea also makes the Sea Witch a unique figure among sailors. Many sailors are very superstitious and among those superstitions and fears are ones regarding having women on ships. Many feel it is bad luck, others feel that a woman on a ship will cause the crew to mutiny. The witch is exempt from these notions. She is both a welcome and feared member of a crew.
Male sea witches are a welcome addition to most crews even if they are just as feared and respected.
Source/Views of Magic: Like most witches, the Sea Witch views her magic as a manifestation of the Goddess who is the Sea. The source of her magic is the endless ocean, the unfathomable depths, the irresistible urge of the sea.
Archetypes: Most Faerie Witches see little use in the Good vs. Evil axis. The sea is both and neither, so why should they choose? Most tend towards neutral if a little chaotic.
Other: Sea Witches tend not to hoard much wealth, but they do appreciate treasure. Especially treasure found in the sea or on it, such as a pirate's chest of gold, or something rare and beautiful from a faraway land. Pearls are valued over other gems and gold more so than silver or platinum.
The Sea Witch Other Traditions
I am going over my options for the big New Year, New Character Challenge coming up next month. Seeing where I have some gaps and what other characters I need to do.
Surprisingly the one I don't have a lot of is D&D 3rd Edition. So I thought I might dust off my 3.5 books and see if I can still do this. Plus it is conspicuous by it's absence in my write-ups of Skylla.
A recap. Skylla is an NPC "magic-user" introduced to us in the LJN Advanced Dungeons & Dragons toy line and given more background in module XL1 Quest for the Heartstone and AC1 The Shady Dragon Inn. I have adapted her as a witch for various D&D-like game settings and systems.
She has become something of a reoccurring villainess in my games. I admit to borrowing heavily from Master's of the Universe Evil-Lyn for her characterization. I figure I can do worse than that.
For this version of Skylla for D&D 3.5 I am going to use the sample custom witch class from the Dungeon Master's Guide.
The DMG witch class is a bit anemic really, it is just a reskinned Sorcerer. But the goal for it was not to develop a full-blown witch class as I have done, but rather show how the classes can be altered for your own needs. Given how 3.x did the Sorcerer class this one should be fairly close to the BECMI roots of the character.
Skylla by ePic Character GeneratorSkyllaAbilities
Strength: 9 (-1)
Dexterity: 11 (0)
Constitution: 10 (0)
Intelligence: 11 (0)
Wisdom: 12 (+1)
Charisma: 15 (+2)
Saving Throws
Fortitude: +2
Reflex: +2
Will: +6
AC: 7
HP: 22
BAB: +3
Initiative: +0
Speed: 30
Skills
Bluff +2, Climb -1, Concentration +10, Diplomacy +2, Disguise +3, Gather Information +4, Heal +1, Intimidate +2, Jump -1, Listen +1, Search +!, Sense Motive +1, Speak Language +1 (Draconic), Spellcraft +10, Spot +1, Survival +1, Swim -1
Feats
Brew Potion, Chaotic Mind, Craft Wondrous Item, Simple Weapon Proficiency, Toughness
Special Abilities - Familiar
Familiar - Raven (level 1, 11 HP, 18 AC Attack +5)
+3 to Appraise Checks while Familiar is within 1 mile
Deliver Touch spells through familiar
Empathic Link (Su)
Speak with Animals (Ex)
Speak with Familiar (Ex)
Spells
Spell DC 12 + Spell level
Cantrips: Arcane Mark, Daze, Detect Magic, Light, Mage Hand, Mending, Read Magic
1st level: Charm Person, Floating Disk, Hold Portal, Identify, Magic Missle
2nd level: Alter Self, Detect Thoughts, Invisibility
3rd level: Hold Person, Magic Circle Against Good
Not a bad build really. She compares well to her base stats and to the Pathfinder 1st Edition version. I will have to try a Pathfinder 2nd Edition version sometime.
I also pleased with how her ePic Character came out.
Michael Grasso / December 15, 2020
The Circle of the Snake: Nostalgia and Utopia in the Age of Big TechI’m sure many members of Generation X have taken a moment to look around the pop culture landscape over the past decade and a half and had a sudden moment of realization: there are certainly a whole lot of people trying to sell me things using the media of my youth. Ultimately, this is nothing new. I remember when every pop culture moment, from sitcoms to TV commercials, seemed to be using the Baby Boomers’ favorite songs to sell them cars and sneakers. But in 2020, the dominance of these re-treaded properties is even more nakedly cynical, whether its the endless sequels of the Star Wars and Marvel cinematic universes, or the easy-to-consume, signifier-filled pastiches of the worlds of Stranger Things and Ready Player One. The cultural marketplace, as dominated by bloated media and tech empires, no longer sees any need to admit the novel, the fresh, the unusual.
Both the “why” and the “how” of this cultural and technological tendency are explored by author Grafton Tanner in his new book, The Circle of the Snake: Nostalgia and Utopia in the Age of Big Tech. (Disclosure: Tanner is an occasional contributor to We Are The Mutants.) Tanner explores not only the pop culture properties that utilize nostalgia in an effort to assuage the anxieties of contemporary life in the aftermath of the 2008 financial rupture; he also explains how tech companies use the feedback from algorithmic analysis to keep consumers locked into a never-ending cycle—an ouroboros—of digital satisfaction of their subconscious desires for an older, more secure time. This nostalgic digital utopia, in turn, keeps consumers constantly “on,” working through endless “quests” that approximate proactivity but in the end keep people locked into pointless and unproductive cycles of feedback, emotional satisfaction, and control. “Recommender systems and predictive analytics—the very tools that allow our contemporary media to function—zero in on quick reactions, such as a flash of anger or a swell of nostalgia,” says Tanner in his Introduction. “These reactions are noted by algorithms, which then make recommendations based on them… The result is a nostalgic feedback loop wherein old ideas travel round.”
Tanner examines how the Big Tech tendency towards technolibertarianism and monopoly over the past 20 years has created the material conditions for this self-reinforcing system of psychic feedback. With an increasing belief in culture as disposable and “just for fun,” the material and political implications of this system of control are obfuscated. The way that these cultural narratives award Big Tech further and deeper power over all of us is merely part of the game. And we are enlisted as active players, not merely passive viewers, as in the era of television’s height. The online world, Tanner notes, demands a keen eye for analysis and a deep capacity for paying attention. The technolibertarian and neoliberal alike view our tech-suffused world—everyone is plugged in, 24/7—as a kind of utopia-in-waiting, or indeed a permanent utopia, where the idealized past can be endlessly revisited and basked in, while the present never changes from its current state of cultural and political stasis. This virtual plaza of commerce, emotional satisfaction, the illusion of proactivity, and control and surveillance describe the boundaries of Big Tech’s dominance of both our material and psychic space at the beginning of the 2020s.
The interview below was conducted in November and December 2020 via email and has been lightly edited for clarity.
***GRASSO: Given the topic of your first book for Zero, Babbling Corpse: Vaporwave and the Commodification of Ghosts, the topic for The Circle of the Snake seems like a natural outgrowth. But from reading the book it also seems like there were a lot of specific events and observations about the world of Online and Big Tech over the past few years that led to the book’s development. What are the origins of The Circle of the Snake, and what kinds of specific cultural developments led you to propose and write the book?
TANNER: I can pinpoint the exact moment I knew I was going to write a book on Big Tech. I was living in a kind of exile in 2016, in this small town in Georgia, trying to piece my life back together after a series of false starts after college. I was sitting in a Barnes & Noble reading the 2016 Tech Issue of The Atlantic, and there was a story by Bianca Bosker about former Google employee Tristan Harris, who left the Valley and started an advocacy group called Time Well Spent because he thought Big Tech was eroding mental health. He was on a mission to fix Big Tech by making it work for us, not against us. But the piece didn’t make me feel better about tech. In fact, it was terrifying: here is an ex-Valley technocrat, mournful that he had invented habit-forming technology with severe public side effects, asking us to not only forgive him, but believe in him to create newer, better tech. I was incensed.
Shortly thereafter, we learned that Cambridge Analytica sharpened their psychographic modeling techniques by harvesting Facebook data from millions of users without their permission, all to aid in the election of Donald Trump. There was suddenly this huge backlash against Big Tech. I was supportive of it, but I also understood it came a little too late. Tech critics had been sounding the alarm for years and years. It took the election of a fascist for the left to wake up to the tech nightmare, only to realize the ones promising to end the nightmare were former technocrats themselves.
And yet, as many were loudly critiquing Big Tech for its role in throwing elections, spreading fascism, and worsening mental health, the culture industry was churning out politically retrograde nostalgia-bait. Was it really that the techlash had made everyone even more nostalgic for the pre-digital past? Or was there some kind of connection between nostalgia and Big Tech? These were the questions I had in mind when I started writing.
GRASSO: I think one of the things I like best about the book is your fusion of theory, philosophy, and epistemology with the material and economic realities of 21st century Big Tech and Big Media. Throughout the book you explore concepts such as surveillance, sublimity, nostalgia (of course), and virtuality with concrete examples from the online plaza. Essentially, if I’m not mistaken, you’re saying that the people who created the feedback loops that keep us hooked on technology and the internet and mine our data for still more ways to sell to us have themselves studied their philosophy, economic history, and techniques of mass psychology and persuasion with great attention?
TANNER: Persuasion techniques, yes, but I wouldn’t go so far as to say the technocrats have studied much else beyond their limited worldview, which is scientistic. Yes, technocrats like James Williams and Tristan Harris like to cite philosophers, but they usually do it to support their self-help solutions to the attention economy. Wake up with a little philosophy, they say, because reading Socrates is better for the mind than scrolling through Twitter. It’s a very neckbeard way of thinking about cultural consumption.
Make no mistake: these technocrats are uninterested in anything other than making a lot of money. If that means learning psychological techniques of persuasion with Stanford psychologist B.J. Fogg, then so be it. They weren’t and aren’t trying to make the world a better place or something. Like the banks before the Great Recession, the technocrats are out to make a quick buck by any means necessary, and they would have kept on doing what they were doing if the bubble hadn’t burst. People were disgruntled with Facebook for years before Cambridge Analytica, and tech critique was already a robust genre by 2016. But it took a kind of implosion, a Great Recession-style reckoning with Big Tech, to change the public opinion. Honestly, the technocrats would probably benefit from studying a little history and philosophy, instead of cloistering themselves in the ideological fortress of STEM.
GRASSO: I think one of the “oh shit” moments in the text for me was finding out that the Black Mirror special choose-your-own-adventure episode “Bandersnatch,” which I quite liked mostly for its material and inspirational signifiers (early ’80s computing, references to Philip K. Dick) was also used to mine viewers’ data in a delightfully dark real-life Dickean stroke. It’s not merely that nostalgia offers us a safe place from the dangerous present, but that those who create these nostalgic visions are working hand-in-hand with the very media empires that make us crave the past: another ouroboros.
TANNER: “Bandersnatch” not only exploits viewers’ nostalgia for its own gain, but it further normalizes the feeling of being controlled. Everyone today knows we’re being controlled from afar: by Twitter, Instagram, Amazon, insurance companies, think tanks, banks, and so forth. We are part of this giant social experiment called consumer capitalism. The purpose is to find out what we’ll buy. But we aren’t being controlled by future gamers or, as much as Elon Musk would like to believe, programmers in this computer simulation we call life. “Bandersnatch” is a work of fiction masquerading a horrible fact—that Netflix is the one controlling us, that we are not as in control as we think. The irony, of course, is that we relinquish our control via the technology we use every day, but we ultimately have very little choice in the matter. Students use devices at school, and jobs often require employees to have smartphones. We aren’t puppets, but we’re by no means totally free either.
Scene from “Bandersnatch,” in front of the No. 1 Croydon Building, South London.
GRASSO: So that leads me to asking you about your critique of specific media franchises: Stranger Things and the endless array of sequels and especially reboots we’ve seen since the end of the aughts. You very cannily explore Stranger Things‘ reliance on physical signifiers of commodities and objects that are no longer extant but remind us of the shackles of our technology-laden present (the old landline telephone, the shopping mall) as a key to its appeal to both Gen-Xers who were there and Zoomers who weren’t. Likewise the cinematic reboot is a way to cheaply create product and content that will connect with multiple generations. This element of “spot the Easter egg, aren’t you smart?” for older generations melds with the offer of a trip to a now-alien time for younger generations. These franchises seem to simultaneously reward passive immersion in nostalgia with an illusion of proactivity.
TANNER: Well, the spot-the-Easter-egg activities are very often nostalgic exercises themselves. Viewers are invited to find the nostalgic signifiers, even if they don’t know what they are. That’s the brilliance of Easter egg marketing for advertisers: you might not know what the hidden clue means, but you know it’s a clue and so you make note of it. Of course, the “real” fans will be able to cite all the references, but regular viewers can sometimes recognize a clue, like a corded phone or a VCR or a reference to an older movie, when they see it.
Easter egg marketing is the advertising tactic of choice in the prosumer age. It turns watching into a game. And it’s very heuristic. The films with the most Easter eggs inspire the most “count them all” YouTube videos or Buzzfeed listicles. The problem here isn’t that movies and series reference a bunch of older media; the problem is that Easter eggs reference certain things and leave others out, thus establishing these unnecessary pop culture canons. I don’t care that the Halloween franchise makes reference to itself. It’s an extended universe at this point—of course it’s going to do that. What I find questionable is its constant updating in an attempt to recapture the magic of the original film. I’m always signaling my love of Halloween III: Season of the Witch, but that film is too wacky to be included in the Halloween universe, because the franchise is desperately trying to give us the original again, as if it were the first time, without all the messy parts of the sequels. The Halloween filmmakers want to keep the bloodline of the first film pure, which means anything standing in the way must be excised.
GRASSO: You mark the period between 9/11 and the financial crisis of 2008 (and its aftermath) as the final foreclosure of any alternative to our current future and one of the dividing lines between an idealized past depicted in our nostalgic media and the forever Now. Unsurprisingly, so many of the elements of online life we now recognize as irredeemably toxic (social media, ranking and rating apps, tentpole cinematic universes full of identical sequels) began around the end of the Bush years as well.
TANNER: One of these days, I’m going to write a history-critique of the 2000s. I find the decade fascinating. It was probably the nadir of contemporary culture. Mark Fisher called it “the worst period for (popular) culture since the 1950s.”
It’s true: there was no breaking point at which contemporary nostalgia ramped up. It was a gradual shift between 9/11 and the Great Recession. Directly after 9/11, the U.S. was reeling from shock. Before nostalgia set in later in the decade, there was a feeling of futurelessness, as Robert Jay Lifton wrote—a feeling that there can be no future after 9/11, that the fear of another terrorist attack foreclosed the future altogether, that if people could fly planes into buildings on a regular weekday morning, then anything horrific is possible. During these years, we saw the birth of cinematic universes with the Star Wars prequels and the first megabudget superhero films. Of course, there were Batman, Superman, and Star Wars films before the twenty-first century, but it was after 9/11 that we saw the avalanche of these movies, several of which could not have been made without post-9/11 Pentagon support, with its bloated influence and near-endless supply of capital. You cannot downplay the reach these films have. They’re seen all over the world. And they aren’t just pro-military propaganda, they are engines of nostalgia.
After the Great Recession, nostalgia calcified. People were moving back in with their parents, revisiting old memories to soothe the anxiety of joblessness. Financial recessions are progressive only for the bankers, if they’re bailed out. For workers, they’re regressive. They set people back and invite the sufferers to hide away from it all. There is nothing wrong with this reaction. We cannot blame people who were hit by the Recession for their nostalgia. But we can blame the ones who caused it. And austerity measures only increase the desire to escape into nostalgic feelings. In short, financial meltdowns are crises that affect the future because they erase the plausibility of surviving the present.
GRASSO: You state that nostalgia is not only an emotion used to track us and to trigger specific emotional responses (which themselves are often assuaged by consumption), but also, possibly most importantly, to control us. And that control is not only physical/material but also social/aesthetic, limiting our options to wander away from the digital plaza. How do nostalgia and nostalgic media help this attempt by the market to quantify, objectify, and commodify us, the consumer?
TANNER: Content creators—a sickening term that reduces art and culture to commodities—understand the value of nostalgia. Consumer scientists have known for years that nostalgia sells. If anger draws your attention to the screen, then nostalgia triggers you to buy what will soothe the anger. That’s the cycle we’re dealing with in the present century.
And the worse things get, the more that nostalgia will naturally rise to the surface for many people. It’s not that media companies force-feed nostalgia to us. Many people are already feeling the emotion. It’s inescapable because nostalgia is a modern condition. Corporations merely go the extra mile by locking nostalgia into these feedback loops. The more you feed nostalgia into the cultural industry, the more of it you will consume because entire companies depend on you to want it. We live in a world of disruption, and every modern displacement is accompanied by nostalgia. Corporate capital knows this and depends on it.
GRASSO: Two of the specific technologies you talk about, Instagram and virtual reality, have undergone mutations in their appeals to our desire to escape the modern world. Instagram started off as a fairly disposable nostalgic evocation of the Polaroid camera aesthetic and has become a playground for big-money influencers and exhibitionists; virtual reality has evolved into just another facet of the internet’s control apparatus, despite its conceptual origins in early ’80s cyberpunk and its promised potential to give people the ability to create their own worlds. Why do these technologies seem to always mutate in the direction of greater commercialization and/or control, despite their initial apparent harmlessness or revolutionary promise?
TANNER: In the case of Instagram, its nostalgia factor was mainly due to the horrible photo quality of early smartphone cameras. With some Wi-Fi, a phone, and an app, you could take photos anywhere and upload them on the spot, which was enticing enough for many people to do just that, but you couldn’t deny the photo quality was very poor. So one way to deal with this poor quality was to saturate photos in a kind of analog haze, which could be done by applying one of several different stock filters. I can’t emphasize this enough: so much of our nostalgic appetite in the early 2010s was whetted by the inability to take and post a decent looking digital photo.
Whether it’s Instagram or virtual reality, digital technology is never totally harmless. It’s like when Tristan Harris and the Center for Humane Tech guys tell us we can have our digital cake and eat it too. You can’t have “humane tech” because tech is driven by the profit motive, which itself is often powered by another force: the military. Have you seen this new recruiting ad for the Marine Corps? It’s basically telling young people that joining the military will be an escape from the overwhelming anxieties of the digital age. The scariest thing about the ad is that it conceals the long relationship between tech and the military. Which is to say, the “tech” presented in the ad couldn’t exist without the military-industrial complex. At this point, any new, possibly revolutionary digital technology will either be bought out by a Big Tech monopoly or put to use on the battlefield.
GRASSO: As far as solutions and escapes from this predicament go, you talk a little bit about the ineffectual attempts of former technocrats to try to ameliorate our enslavement to the internet and social media with apps that limit time on websites or “safety labels,” and find them all wholly wanting. Likewise, you mention attempts to make nostalgia something constructive, playful, reflective (in the schema of Svetlana Boym). And yet the very structure of the internet and Big Media as it stands now denies all alternatives to the current control stasis. What does a constructivist nostalgia look like? Where could it exist in the cracks of the current marketplace? Is there a place for nostalgia as a political instrument of the left outside of the usual avenue of Left Melancholy?
TANNER: I’m currently writing a history of nostalgia, out fall 2021 with Repeater Books, called The Hours Have Lost Their Clock: A Recent History of Nostalgia. In it, I put forth a theory of radical nostalgia, drawing on the work of Alastair Bonnett and Svetlana Boym. Radical nostalgia is the third “R” beyond reflective and restorative nostalgia, which Boym coined. She was right about nostalgia, but over the first two decades of the present century, restorative nostalgia ballooned while the reflective strains were edged to the margins. But there needs to be this third form, radical nostalgia, because the melancholic disposition of reflective nostalgia just hasn’t been working for the left and the restorative tint has proven to be destructive.
Radical nostalgia is the act of looking back to those moments when collective action stood up to capital. It yearns for the social movements of the past. It aches for them. It isn’t interested in “getting back there,” in restoring what’s been lost, but in learning from those who came before: the struggle for indigenous rights, the staunch anti-capitalism of Martin Luther King Jr., Stonewall, the Battle of Seattle. When Richard Branson signals his support for LGBTQ+ communities, that isn’t radical nostalgia. There’s nothing radical about it; it’s mere nostalgia. Radical nostalgia looks to these and other movements to continue the fight for a more egalitarian future. It is inherently anti-fascist.
Radical nostalgia takes the action step of restorative and the aching heart of reflective nostalgia and fuses them together. It knows that the past isn’t perfect, which means what we yearn for shouldn’t be either. Restorative nostalgia is too clean, too high-definition. Reflective nostalgia kicks the can around, although reflectors might recognize the problems of the past long before the restorers do. But radical nostalgia knows that everything is imbued with horror, the past especially. Many revolutionary movements of the past suffered from machismo and intolerance, even in their own collectives. Radical nostalgia knows this and endeavors to leave it in the past. Some things must remain buried.
And radical nostalgia is one perspective we can take to resist the utopian thinking of tech. At this point, Big Tech is about the only entity that circulates visions of the future, but those visions are falling out of favor thanks to the techlash. Get ready, because they will absolutely be replaced with a different utopian vision: the humane tech movement. We’re going to be dealing with the technocrats for years. It’s going to seem like we should trust Tristan Harris and the Center for Humane Tech guys. They’re going to be pushing their vision of the future for years to come. But they are the new boss, same as the old. Only collective action, informed by the decolonial and anti-fascist movements of history, can resist what’s coming in the next decade and beyond.
