Outsiders & Others

D&DGII The Black Forest Mythos: Hüter, Lord of the Dead

The Other Side -

 I didn't get as many of these done as I wanted, but that is okay, it can extend into November.  Today is Halloween so I thought the Lord of the Dead might be a good choice for today.

The Romans and the Germanic people had different views on their Lords of the Dead. The Roman Pluto was not exactly the same as the Greek Hades. In truth, the Greek Hades was not even the same over time. Pluto is more of a blending of Hades and the god of riches Ploûtos. Conflating things further in the Eleusinian Mysteries, Pluto, or Ploutōn, became the God in charge of the Earth that helped the seeds to grow.

Greeks, and to a degree Romans, would never say the name of Hades/Pluto. Fearing doing so would attract his attention. Contrast this with the Norse and Germanic myths. While there was Hel, the protector of the dead was Odin or Wotan. Odin was held in very high regard and his name (all of them) was used many times.  Somewhere Hüter, my Lord of the Dead, needs to strike this balance.  Balance here seems to be the key.

Hüter, Lord of the dead

Hüter

Hüter is the dispassionate Lord of the Dead. He is neither good nor is he evil. His role is to make sure the dead stay dead. Therefore undead are blasphemous to him. He controls the underground realm and thus all riches that come from the ground are his.

The Lord Underground does not cause death or control the dead but he does keep the souls of the dead under his care and protection. Prayers to Hüter are made in silence, not in fear of his name but in respect of his silent realm of Hölle. Here in this realm, he rules silently over a silent horde of the dead.  

HÜTER (God of the Dead and Riches)

Greater God

ARMOR CLASS: 1
MOVE: 24"
HIT POINTS: 380
NO. OF ATTACKS: 2
DAMAGE/ATTACK:  4-48
SPECIAL ATTACKS: Death Touch
SPECIAL DEFENSES: Aura of Silence 60'
MAGIC RESISTANCE: Special

SIZE: M (5' 10")
ALIGNMENT: Neutral
WORSHIPER'S ALIGN: All
SYMBOL: Raven
PLANE: Hölle

CLERIC/DRUID: 20th level Cleric
FIGHTER: 15th level Fighter
MAGIC-USER/ILLUSIONIST: 10th level Illusionist
THIEF/ASSASSIN: 15th level in each
MONK/BARD: 15th level Bard
WITCH/WARLOCK: Nil
PSIONIC ABILITY: II
S: 20 I: 23 W: 24 D: 18 C: 20 CH: 16

Hüter is the Lord of the Dead and Riches. He rules from his dark throne in the center of Hölle. Here he is surrounded by the dead and the riches of the land. He is the protector and guardian of the dead. The dead enter his realm never to leave. He is not their jailer, but their custodian and protector. He allows none to enter who do not belong and none may leave.

He has many names. The Silent One, The Rich One, the Lord of this World, the Last Confessor, the Whispered One, the Dread Lord, the Gray Lord, and many more. It is said that even the Gods themselves fear him. 

The Lord of the Dead prefers not to attack. Anyone who gets into his realm has already passed through Helga (who many believe is his daughter) and Heuler. If they have gotten this far it has been with his permission. If he does he has a sword of black steel that does 4-48 (4d12) hp per hit. He can command one creature per round to die.  Death in Hüter's realm is permanent and once dead they cannot be raised. On his command, he can also impose Silence 60' radius around him.

When communicating with his cleric the Dread Lord speaks in signs and portents that they must translate. Often these are in the form of his chosen animal the Raven. 

Animal: Ravens
Rainment: (Head) crown made of horns (Body) Rich garments of black. Robes of black
Color(s): Black
Holy Days: None
Sacrifices: All the dead are sacrifices to him
Place of Worship: Places of death.

Links

This is another post for my RPG Blog Carnival Horrors, Gods, and Monsters.
RPG Blog Carnival


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That is the final entry for this month for my RPG Blog Carnival.  I have more gods and monsters for these myths and that will continue.

Tubular Terrors: ‘The Norliss Tapes’

We Are the Mutants -

Reviews / October 31, 2023

The Norliss Tapes
Directed by Dan Curtis
NBC (1973)

On a pre-pandemic Halloween four years ago, my co-editors decided to bestow upon me the honor of reviewing famed made-for-TV movie The Night Stalker (1972). Even though I’d heard its praises sung far and wide, it was my first time watching Darren McGavin’s harried newspaper photog Carl Kolchak chasing a vampire through early-’70s Vegas. It was a triumph, and one I was a bit miffed that I’d long overlooked. This Halloween, I decided to give another of Kolchak producer Dan Curtis’s horror TV movies a try. The Norliss Tapes, which aired on NBC in February of 1973, features another favorite of genre sci-fi and horror TV, Roy Thinnes, in the lead role. Like McGavin, Thinnes would two decades later pop up as a guest star on The X-Files thanks to series creator Chris Carter’s love of his lead performance as David Vincent, lone crusader against a secret alien invasion in short-lived cult series The Invaders (1967-1968).

At the outset of The Norliss Tapes, we see Thinnes as David Norliss, in desperate emotional straits very reminiscent of David Vincent, in his richly-appointed study surrounded by the titular audio cassettes. On a phone call to his publisher Sanford T. Evans (Don Porter), Norliss sounds like a broken man, face contorted in exhaustion and terror, telling Evans his book on “debunking the supernatural” is late and the reasons why are on a series of tapes. “When you hear them,” Norliss croaks ominously to Evans, “you’ll understand.”

I made mention of the Nixon tapes in my review of The Night Stalker, seeing in Kolchak’s recounting of the details of his case into a tape recorder a prefiguring of the audio tapes that would roil the nation in a year’s time, and it’s interesting to see Curtis revisit this trope here just a few months before the Nixon White House taping system was revealed by Alexander Butterfield in front of the Watergate Committee in July 1973. Audio cassette technology was relatively new in ’73, developed for commercial use only a decade prior, but already it had begun to supplant the much more cumbersome reel-to-reel recorders. This increased availability made home recording possible for the everyday consumer, and gives The Norliss Tapes a sheen of high-tech to juxtapose with the ancient occult mysteries we’re about to see unfold.

Evans gets stood up by Norliss for a lunch date to discuss his book, and decides to visit Norliss’s home, where he sees an incomplete book introduction in the typewriter, along with a pile of audio tapes that contain the true tale of what has Norliss so shaken. For Kolchak, the tape recording is a mere dramatic coda, a testament made after we’ve accompanied him on his heroic journey through the nightside of Vegas. But in The Norliss Tapes, the recording itself becomes the medium by which we the audience are able to witness the drama in flashback. The telefeature was intended as a pilot for an episodic series much like the eventual 1974-75 Kolchak: The Night Stalker; and in that series, each new tape would present a new episode in Norliss’s sanity-draining wilderness year investigating the occult.

In his examination of surveillance in 1970s politics and media, The Seventies Now: Culture as Surveillance, poet and media scholar Stephen Paul Miller explores the decade by examining the seemingly omnipresent (self-)surveillance through recording devices in both the era’s fiction and in reality. Speaking in relation to 1971’s Klute and 1974’s The Conversation, both of which feature ominous audiotape recordings whose contents stalk the protagonists throughout the film, Miller states: “Terror lies in auditory feedback. In the early seventies, the feedback of auditory surveillance is ominously put into place.” In terms of self-surveillance and the role it played in the downfall of Nixon, the result of the presence of a documentary audio record is clear: “Perhaps it was unfortunate, perhaps it was not inevitable,” Miller opines, “but Nixon was our secret self. In an uncanny fashion, he came to represent America. He undid himself through self-surveillance. One might say he found himself to lose himself. In the same way and at the same time, the great American middle class gradually lost its New Deal tradition of social and economic progress in favor of stronger identifications with narrow self-definitions and interests.” This evocation of the narcissism, the hall of mirrors self-obsession of self-recording and its implications on identity and class, strikes an interesting light on the first case Norliss is asked to “debunk.”

That first case file throws him into the world of the wealthy and their forays into both creative art and dark ritual magic. Norliss receives a call from a widow, Ellen Cort (played gamely by future Police Woman Angie Dickinson), who says she’s had to deal with a prowler on her property who killed her loyal guard dog Raleigh. Ellen says she shot the trespasser point blank with a shotgun, but he still managed to get away. The further twist? Ellen is absolutely certain the intruder is apparently her own late husband, artist James Cort (reliable 1970s and ’80s action movie heavy Nick Dimitri). Norliss, a skeptic, investigates the world of artists, bohemians, and occultists swirling around the Corts, including mysterious antique dealer Madame Jeckiel (Blaxploitation star Vonetta McGee).

The McGuffin powering James Cort’s return from the grave is a mysterious ancient Egyptian ring dedicated to the god of death Osiris, which was sold to Cort by Jeckiel. In a bargain with the demon “Sargoth,” Cort seeks immortality by using his artistic skill to create a golem of clay for the god to inhabit. The clay sculpture appears out of nowhere in Cort’s old studio, while at the same time, in the wealthy Bay Area community surrounding the Corts’ property, exsanguinated corpses are turning up everywhere, causing local sheriff Tom Hartley (Night Stalker veteran and perennial ’70s TV lawman Claude Akins) to try to cover up the occult crimes to avoid a panic. Of course, the lurid murders are being committed by the undead Cort, as it’s discovered by Norliss at the opening of the third act that “the [statue’s] clay is 40 percent human blood.” Norliss and Ellen succeed in burning down the studio, destroying not only Cort’s unholy artistic creation but the undead artist himself.

The narrative thrust of The Norliss Tapes—an investigator seeking to debunk the paranormal—would be familiar to a broad cross-section of middle American TV audiences, and not just because it’s a bit of a retread of ratings success The Night Stalker. 1973 was also the year of famed psychic Uri Geller’s appearance on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, where fellow stage magician Carson (with the help of professional debunker James Randi), was able to scuttle Geller’s purported psychic ability to bend spoons and repair watches. Of course, in the world of The Norliss Tapes, debunking doesn’t come so easy. Over the course of the TV movie’s two hours, Norliss turns from a skeptic who seeks to put a stop to “the fake mediums, phony astrologers, the self-proclaimed seers and trick mystics… bilking millions of dollars each year out of their gullible victims,” to someone who takes the eerie advice and occult expertise of Madame Jeckiel seriously. His combination of dogged investigative work and willingness to believe Ellen Cort—that her assailant survived a point-blank shotgun blast—puts him on a collision course with dark powers.

Ultimately, all of these dark powers are put in service of the wealthy. Madame Jeckiel’s shop purveys artifacts for the delectation of the ruling class, just as James Cort’s art does. Cort’s art dealer, Charles Langdon (Hurd Hatfield), tries to do a little graverobbing to grab the valuable ring of Osiris from Cort’s interred body, and of course winds up as one of the zombie’s victims. Dan Curtis’s direction and cinematography does an amazing job at capturing both the lush interiors and stunning landscapes of the Bay Area; Norliss’s agent and publisher dine in a high-rise San Francisco restaurant with amazing window views. Curtis also treats the everyday schlubs out there in 1973 Television Land to high-angle location shots of Norliss driving his admittedly super-cool rust-orange convertible Corvette Stingray along the Pacific coast. Thinnes’s hardboiled voiceover on the audiotapes informs us, in case we weren’t aware, that “there’s no doubt this rugged peninsula country could give the French Riviera tough competition.” The catacombs under Cort’s palatial estate, built “in the 1920s… during Prohibition [to store] guns and liquor,” allow the zombie Cort to move around on the estate from his studio to the world beyond, preying on his victims to collect blood for his demonic ritual. Like Peter Falk’s contemporary series Columbo, the wealthy in The Norliss Tapes are venal and greedy: greedy for more trinkets, more luxury, more fame, and ultimately more life. In a way, Norliss has managed to do what he set out to do, but instead of stopping con men from bilking the innocent, he’s uncovered a world in which the rich can defy any authority—even death—with the help of their supernatural patrons.

In the implicit distance created by the narrative frame of (presumably quite wealthy) Sanford Evans listening to the titular Norliss Tapes, we again delve into the questions of economic class, memory, distance, and haunting. The Norliss Tapes may never have been picked up for a series—a failed pilot itself seems to me a fairly hauntological what-if—but as Evans is about to pop a second audiocassette into the cassette player, as the case of James Cort fades into the magnetic ether, I couldn’t help but think about Mark Fisher’s observation from his essay “The Slow Cancellation of the Future” from Ghosts of My Life:

[Hauntological artists] were preoccupied with the way in which technology materialised memory—hence a fascination with television, vinyl records, audiotape, and with the sounds of these technologies breaking down. This fixation on materialised memory led to what is perhaps the principal sonic signature of hauntology: the use of crackle, the surface noise made by vinyl. Crackle makes us aware that we are listening to a time that is out of joint; it won’t allow us to fall into the illusion of presence (emphasis mine).

Cort’s crimes against the innocent—and by extension the panoply of sanity-shattering cases presumably on Norliss’s remaining tapes—will never be heard, their greedy perpetrators never brought to earthly or cosmic justice. Just another mediocre TV series consigned to the dustbin of history? Perhaps. But I like to think of those audiocassettes as something more, as a kind of unrealized “18½-minute gap” in the early ’70s self-surveillance panopticon, a lost testament of crimes disallowed from entry into the permanent historical record. Haunted by occult secrets, we the viewers and listeners come to realize that some tapes will truly never be heard.

Michael Grasso

Memetic Madness

Reviews from R'lyeh -

Impossible Landscapes is a campaign like no other. It is a campaign of cosmic horror investigative roleplaying rather than Lovecraftian horror investigative roleplaying that forgoes much of what we expect to see in other campaigns for Call of Cthulhu or other Lovecraftian horror investigative roleplaying games. It does involve an uncaring threat to humanity, but this is not a threat whose presence on Earth can be merely forestalled until such times as the Stars are Right. This is a threat that seeps into our world, spreading like a meme before the concept was defined, infecting and altering reality over and over, changing our perceptions, making us vectors, its influence spiralling and twisting until everything we see is connected by it. Mankind cannot stop it. At best we can curtail it—temporarily, for it always finds other vectors. At the very least, we can survive it, but we will not be the same as before, for we will have seen the Yellow Sign. The threat is the Yellow King, whose influence spreads via The King in the Yellow, the story collection by Robert Chambers, from the ur-city that is Carcosa, standing on Lake Hali, out through the surrealist region that lies between Carcosa and our world and into our minds. It is in this surrealist region, this ‘Carcosa Country’ where much of the events of Impossible Landscapes take place.

Impossible Landscapes – A Pursuit of the Terrors of Carcosa and the King in Yellow is a campaign for Delta Green: The Role-Playing Game, published by Arc Dream Publishing. Its origins lie not just in Robert W. Chambers’ King in Yellow Mythos, but also in the writings of two Delta Green stalwarts. First in John Scott Tynes’ own attempts to write a campaign focused on the King in Yellow that would lead to both short stories and his lengthy exploration of ‘The Hastur Mythos’ in Delta Green: Countdown. Second, in Dennis Detwiller’s ‘Night Floors’, a highly regarded scenario for Call of Cthulhu, also found in Delta Green: Countdown in which the Agents investigate the disappearance of a tenant from the Macallistar Building in New York and discover how easy it is to get lost in the building and its new floors at night. It is ‘Night Floors’ that forms the basis of the opening part of Impossible Landscapes, greatly expanded and connected to the rest of the campaign. In terms of scope, Impossible Landscapes is both a small campaign, encompassing just New York and Boston as its key locations, and a huge campaign, taking in as it does, the whole of unreality.

The campaign opens in 1995 with the reiteration of ‘The Night Floors’. Abigail Wright has gone missing from her New York apartment in the Macallister Building. As part of Operation ALICE, the Agents are to assist the FBI in collecting evidence from her apartment connected to her disappearance and determine whether or not there is something unnatural behind it. Almost from the start, the collection of evidence will appear strange, a random assortment of oddities glued to the wall in layers, but the building itself is stranger still. The other residents are initially recalcitrant and self-absorbed, but they seem to change at night, as does the building itself. There are new floors to the building, which seems to go up and up, yet never changes from the outside. ‘The Night Floors’ lays the foundations for the campaign, showcasing a duality between night and day, between reality and unreality, between rationality and irrationality, all of which runs throughout the initial parts of the campaign until they all begin to blur into one another. ‘The Night Floors’ is creepy and weird—and whilst the rest of the campaign is also creepy and weird, here it seems constrained and containable. Of course, it is far from that, but it does not seem to sprawl as it does in the rest of the campaign. The scenario also shows the Agents for the first time, that survival is their best and only hope.

‘The Night Floors’ is likely to end without a sense of any real achievement. It is not intended to, but this is not helped by the radical shift as the campaign jumps forward two decades for the second part, ‘A Volume of Secret Faces’. The options here are the Agents to have been deactivated during the intervening twenty years or the Handler to run some cases set during that period. The jump in timeframe has another effect though. It enforces the sense of unreality as connections begin to be spotted between the encounters in the here and now of 2015 and the past investigation of 1995,and that the Agents are being called back to that sense of unreality, and for them, that it truly never went away. In the second part of the campaign, the Agents are asked to investigate Dorchester House, a Boston psychiatric facility dealing in trauma where other Delta Green agents have been committed and disappeared. What the Agents will discover is a similar, but worse duality to that of the Macallister Building that will draw them deeper into the Impossible Landscapes. Here the campaign seems to pulsate with its unreality, expanding out to some utterly bizarre and frightening encounters, before contracting again to focus solely on the corridors and rooms—and beyond—of Dorchester House. Ultimately, the Agents will find themselves trapped in Dorchester House and its duality, but they will be able to escape.

The third part, ‘Like a Map Made of Skin’ turns the Agents’ paranoia back on themselves and sees them hunted, any trust issues they have fully justified now. The Agents will find themselves pushed and pulled, and though there are chances to revisit previous locations, ultimately, they have one choice and one destination, from where they can push on through to the other side—perhaps in pursuit of answers or even Abigail Wright still. This location, the Hotel Broadalbin, is one of many places in the campaign where it possible to transition between times and places in the campaign itself. Many of these are optional, and may or may not be discovered by the Agents. Hotel Broadalbin is not. Transitioning here will enable the Agents to make the final crossing into the Impossible Landscapes in the campaign’s last part, ‘The End of the World of the End’, and onwards towards Carcosa itself. Here the Agents will find war and despair as they search for a way to attend the court of the King in Yellow.

In terms of what the players and their Agents will confront—or is it what will confront the players and their Agents?—it is primarily a sense of the ineffable, of uncertainty, of never knowing quite what is going on and who to trust. That lack of trust has always been present in Delta Green and in Delta Green, but here the author winds this up so that it is not just a case of the Agents barely being able to trust who they work for as operatives of Delta Green, but they can no longer trust reality. Once exposed to the influence of the Yellow King, the surrealism never lets up, the motifs of Carcosa and The King in Yellow seeping in everywhere. Nowhere does this show more than in the clues the Agents will discover and the cascade of connections between persons and places in the campaign that never once seems to let up. There is moment at the beginning of Masks of Nyarlathotep in which having confronted the killers of Jackson Elias, the Investigators are presented with a thick wodge of clues that connect from New York to the rest of the campaign and in its opening moments threatens to overwhelm the Investigators with too much information. Impossible Landscapes is like that moment, but it never seems to end.

As a consequence, Impossible Landscapes all too often actually feels impossible in terms of an investigation. Although the campaign is quite linear in structure, determining where and what to investigate, what clues to follow up, can be daunting for the players. At other times, the campaign funnels down to one choice, and whilst the Keeper is provided with suggestions and tools with which to push the players and their Agents forward, this does undermine the agency of the players. To an extent this fits the campaign and its intentional uncertainty, but at the same time, it feels as if the author is writing the Agents and their players into a labyrinth, thus getting them lost, and then having to force them out again via a deus ex machina and into the next…

The campaign is also deadly. There are scenes and moments where it is physically deadly, but these seem almost inconsequential to the way in which the various encounters, discoveries, and more importantly, the realisations about the connectivity of one clue or fact or encounter to another constantly threatens to scour away at each Agent’s Sanity. Actual Sanity losses are individually low throughout the bulk of the campaign, but they are ever present and they mount up over the course of the Agents’ investigation. In addition, the influence of the Yellow King and each Agent’s susceptibility is measured by a separate track—Corruption. As this increases, invariably through actions and decisions upon the part of the player and his Agent, each Agent has the chance to learn more and access other locations, thus encountering ever greater moments of surrealist uncertainty. There are moments—few and far between—when an Agent can regain Sanity and lose Corruption, but once gained, Corruption can never be truly lost. Any Agent who actually survives Impossible Landscapes will be both scarred and corrupted by his experiences in the Impossible Landscapes, but to be clear, when the Handler decides to run this campaign, there is no play beyond it.

Physically, it is clear that Impossible Landscapes is not just a roleplaying campaign or a roleplaying book. It is a tome in and of itself, subtly recursive as if trying to infect the Handler as she reads and prepares the campaign. Images are not placed in the book, they taped in place haphazardly with masking tape, as if some unknown Delta Green agent is attempting to put together a file on the investigation for the archives. The influence of the Yellow King seeps into the pages with every mention of him marked and appended with the question, “Have you seen it?” There are subtle changes throughout the volume that startle both Handler and reader, just further adding to its atmosphere and tone of uncertainty. Throughout, the book is annotated by different voices whose identities can only be guessed at, throwing in weird anagrams and comments that suggest further connections, and suggesting that somehow, these annotations have been made post publication to the copy in the Handler’s hands. And then there are the handouts. There have never been handouts like this before. They are used to enforce the campaign’s surrealist uncertainty for much like the campaign itself, they are layered, they cannot be taken at face value, and they hide their ‘true’ information. In essence, the handouts have to be investigated in themselves in order to become useful clues to the investigation. For all this, as well as the fantastically accessible, but layered graphic design and the excellent artwork, it is no wonder that Impossible Landscapes won the 2022 Gold ENnie Award for Best Graphic Design and Layout. (It is also a travesty that Impossible Landscapes only won the 2022 Gold ENnie Award for Best Graphic Design and Layout. It deserved more.)

As to the writing, Impossible Landscapes is well written and easy to grasp. This does not mean that the campaign is far from challenging to prepare and run, given the complexity of the connections that snake back and forth across its length—though there is good advice given to both ends. What it does mean is that the writing does not complicate the process of either preparing to run or actually running the campaign.

Impossible Landscapes – A Pursuit of the Terrors of Carcosa and the King in Yellow begins with surrealism and uncertainty and never lets up on either, let alone the tension. This is superb creation, one which supplants the very way in which the King in Yellow is presented as a threat in other scenarios—typically as an attempt to stage a performance of The King in Yellow, with or without the Investigators’ involvement, to pull them or others into Carcosa. Impossible Landscapes does that to an extent, but always seems to be skirting the performance, instead focusing on the reality destabilising/unreality enforcing that takes place somewhere between our world and that of Carcosa. This is not an experience that any Agent can win nor does it involve a threat that any Agent can defeat. Rather it is an experience to understand and survive, a threat to be avoided, knowing that its infectious, reality warping surrealism is never going to be stopped. As a result, Impossible Landscapes elevates the Yellow King and his influence into an existential contamination that unbinds, rebinds, and connects reality and truly delivers a superlative cosmic horror campaign and playing experience.
Tell me, have you seen the Impossible Landscapes?

#Dungeon23 Tomb of the Vampire Queen, Level 10, Room 31

The Other Side -

 This tomb ends in large ornate iron doors.

The doors are locked (open locks roll or Knock spell), and a combined strength of 35 is needed to open these doors.

Room 31

Once open the party sees a long set of stairs descending into the dark.

There are 300 steps down.  Every 100 steps, there is a set of spring traps that fire gouts of flame for 6d6 hp points of damage.  Save for half. The traps can be disabled with successful find and disable traps roll.

There are a set of similar doors at the bottom of the stairs to Level 11.

October Horror Movie Challenge: Destroy All Monsters (1968) & Godzilla: Final Wars (2004)

The Other Side -

 Tonight's movie choice is Remake Better than the Original. Well, I am sick and so is everyone else here I thought a comfort movie was in order. For that, my oldest and I hit the Godzilla channel on Pluto and caught Destroy All Monsters (1968) and followed it up with the "remake" Godzilla: Final Wars (2004) on DVD.  The remake is better than the original.

Destroy All Monsters (1968)Godzilla Final Wars (2004)

I have seen both movies dozens of times.  Interestingly enough both movies take place right around the same time. 1999 for DAM and 2004 for GFW.

Both movies cover similar ground. All the monsters are located in the same place and mostly under control until a group of aliens (Kilaaks and Xiliens) control all the monsters and get them to attack all the cities in the world. 

Only one monster can stop them and that is Godzillia. In DAM all monsters are under the control of the aliens but break free. King Ghidorah is then used to fight the remaining monsters.

In GFW all the monsters are under control of the Xiliens, including the "American" Godzilla from the horrible 1998 Godzilla movie which is a lot of fun and always makes my son and I laugh.

Of course Godzilla: Final Wars is just so over the top. American Don Frye as Captain Douglas Gordon is just pure cheese. "There's two things you don't know about the Earth kid." he says to the Xilien leader "There's me. And there's Godzillia."  Yeah, He put himself in the same breath as a radio active monster.

Speaking of which, the Xilien Leader, played by Kazuki Kitamura just chews up every scene he is in with such glee. You don't even need to speak Japanese or read the subtitles to know what he is all about. 

Both movies end mostly the same way. Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah. Godzilla's son is even in both.

Are they horror? Well...the franchise began that way, but by the time we hit these movies they are more sci-fi professional wrestling with special effects, and I am ok with that.

October Horror Movie Challenge 2023
Viewed: 34
First Time Views: 22

31 Days of Halloween Movie Challenge


Monstrous Mondays: D&DGII Draugr

The Other Side -

DraugrI am surprised I have not tried to stat these guys up before this. But this seems the perfect time to do it.  

Draugr

Draugr are powerful undead creatures of former warriors under a powerful curse. Typically, they are cursed to guard a large treasure or powerful tomb of a lord or king. However, it is said that the curse would not take hold if there was not already some evil in their hearts. 

The process of creating a draugr involves dark necromancy and the ritual sacrifice of warriors of at least 7th level of experience. 

They are sacrificed and their corpses are dumped into whatever burial pit or hole they are set to guard.

DRAUGR
FREQUENCY: Very Rare
NO. APPEARING: 1-3
ARMOR CLASS: 2
MOVE: 24" 
HIT DICE: 8+16 (52 hp)
% IN LAIR: 100%
TREASURE TYPE: B
NO. OF ATTACKS: 2 weapons or touch
DAMAGE/ATTACK: 1d8+3, 1d8+3
SPECIAL ATTACKS: Constitution Drain
SPECIAL DEFENSES: +2 or better weapon to hit
MAGIC RESISTANCE: Standard
INTELLIGENCE: Average
ALIGNMENT: Chaotic Evil
SIZE: M (6' at shoulder)
PSIONIC ABILITY: Nil

Draugr are undead warriors of exceptional ability and strength placed under a curse. They are set to guard some larger treasure of a powerful lord or chieftain.  Typically 1 to 3 draugr are found per tomb along with the treasures of their lord.  Disturbing the tomb will cause the draugr to attack. 

The creatures attack with a sword twice per round. They add +3 to each attack due to high strength. They can as an option, touch an opponent and drain one (1) point of Constitution per successful touch attack. Victims drained to 0 Constitution become wights under the control of the draugr that drained them. Lost Constitution points can be restored at the rate of 1 point per week of bed rest or via any magic that can restore lost levels. 

Draugr can only be hit by magic, +2 weapons, or better weapons. They turn as Vampires. They are harmed by holy water and cannot enter sanctified or holy ground save for where they were buried. They are not harmed 

If the draugr's treasure is taken and the draugr is not completely destroyed it will hunt down every piece of it down to the last copper piece. The only way to completely destroy a draugr is to burn its remains to ash.  


Links

This is another post for my RPG Blog Carnival Horrors, Gods, and Monsters.
RPG Blog Carnival

Miskatonic Monday #242: Debutantes & Dagon

Reviews from R'lyeh -

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

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

—oOo—
Name: Debutantes & Dagon: Inspiration for Short, Improvised Scenarios Starring Badass Regency Pulp LadiesPublisher: Chaosium, Inc.
Author: Evan Perlman

Setting: Regency-eraProduct: Supplement for Regency Cthulhu: Dark Designs in Jane Austen’s England and Pulp Cthulhu: Two-fisted Action and Adventure Against the MythosWhat You Get: Twenty-seven page, 963.27 KB Full Colour PDF
Elevator Pitch: Demure, but secretly ACTION!!! debutantes!Plot Hook: Create dangerous, clever, and capable young ladies of eliminating all kinds of horrifying mythos threats.Plot Support: Three tables and guidance for Investigator creation and four tables and guidance for villain and scenario creation, plus eleven Mythos and non-Mythos monsters and scenario hooks.Production Values: Okay
Pros# Combines Regency Cthulhu: Dark Designs in Jane Austen’s England and Pulp Cthulhu: Two-fisted Action and Adventure Against the Mythos# Intended for low-preparation games for Investigators and scenarios# Plenty of scenario hooks# Definitely Pride and Prejudice and ZombiesMythos# Gynophobia
Cons# Combines Regency Cthulhu: Dark Designs in Jane Austen’s England and Pulp Cthulhu: Two-fisted Action and Adventure Against the Mythos# Definitely Pride and Prejudice and ZombiesMythos# Just a bit silly
Conclusion# Definitely more Pride and Prejudice and ZombiesMythos than Pride and Prejudice# Not entirely serious, but go with it for crinoline kick-ass fun

Miskatonic Monday #241: Trouble in Pinewood

Reviews from R'lyeh -

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

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

—oOo—
Name: Trouble in PinewoodPublisher: Chaosium, Inc.
Author: Tineke Bolleman

Setting: Jazz Age Massachusetts Product: Scenario
What You Get: Fourteen page, 14.42 MB Full Colour PDF
Elevator Pitch: What hunts the night on Cape Cod? Bigfoot?Plot Hook: When two men are abducted in bloody circumstances, someone has to investigate.
Plot Support: Staging advice, two NPCs, one map, and one Mythos creature.Production Values: Adequate
Pros# Short, introductory scenario# Easy to adapt to other time periods and places# Suitable for a small number of Investigators# Solid discussion of the possible outcomes and their ramifications# Leaves room for development in places# Speluncaphobia# Teraphobia# Carnaphobia
Cons# Needs a stronger hook to get the Investigators there and involved# No map of Pinewood given# No map of the caves given# Leaves room for development in places# More physical than investigative
Conclusion# Involves combat and physical investigation rather than traditional newspapers and wills # Very straightforward, likeable, easy-to-prepare introductory scenario

Miskatonic Monday #240: Beyond the Veil of Dreams: Susupti

Reviews from R'lyeh -

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

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

—oOo—
Name: Beyond the Veil of Dreams: SusuptiPublisher: Chaosium, Inc.
Author: Byron the Bard

Setting: 1980s ArkhamProduct: Scenario
What You Get: Fifty-nine page, 1.79 MB Full Colour PDF
Elevator Pitch: Sometimes the missing disappear for a reasonPlot Hook: A missing persons case leads into strange research and encounters with desperate people
Plot Support: Eighteen handouts, eight maps, ten NPCs, one Mythos artefact, and one Mythos creature.Production Values: Plain
Pros# Modern Lovecraft Country scenario# Very detailed investigation# Very detailed backstory# Would work as a ‘Night at the Opera’# Oneirophobia# Somniphobia# Antlophobia
Cons# Never actually defines the nature of the threat# Needs an edit# Very detailed backstory
Conclusion# Highly detailed investigation that threatens to overwhelm the Keeper with information whilst leaving the real threat undefined# Potentially interesting combination of Indian mysticism and the Mythos

You Weren’t Supposed to Be Spooky: Non-Halloween Songs for Halloween

We Are the Mutants -

Features / October 30, 2023

Screen Shot 2023-09-30 at 13.22.02

Photo: Teesside Gazette

Ever tried carving a turnip? Attempting to prise out chunks of the cold, iron-hard flesh is about as gratifying as it sounds, and yet, pumpkins still being an outré foreign exoticism in the crepuscular 1970s, turnips were what they gave us kids of the UK, when they gave us anything at all. The best you could hope for in terms of results was the kind of thing seen above in the hands of the kids posing in 1976 with Willie Maddren, football deity of the English North-East, and resembling prehistoric fetishes: frightening, certainly, but more in a literal than a playful way, which was more or less true of Halloween itself. The drab austerity of our Halloweens past is so axiomatic that it’s now cliché to hear boomers and Gen Xers incongruously united in bemoaning the fact that the nation’s youth no longer appreciate the joys of a day where nothing at all happened except whatever self-inflicted fear you could muster up to torment yourself with. The adulthood-defying Bacchanalia of the North American Halloween industry being denied us, we had to get our eerie thrills where we could, and that was as true of music as it was of non-root vegetable Jack-o’-lanterns and sexy nurse costumes. So read on to discover the ten songs that, despite having no actual connection to the 31st of October, yet produce a frisson of seasonal alarm in the paranormally persecuted inhabitants of Mutant Mansions.

25-greatest-classic-rock-and-roll-songs“Dear Diary”
By The Moody Blues
Deram, 1969

I think we all know who’s actually responsible for the children of Olde Englande historically not getting to enjoy the full throttle commercially-propelled joys of the 31st of October: the dickhead known as Charles Dickens, that’s who. By setting the Western world’s second favorite supernatural story at Christmas, he basically ensured that, until the twin forces of untrammeled kid-targeting capitalism and untrammeled middle-aged narcissism prevailed, the nation’s ghost industry was doomed to gravitate around the 25th of December, with sundry worthy M.R. James adaptations the order of the day. Until around the time Tony Blair managed to liberate the City of London of its pesky banking regulations, Halloween in England (other parts of the UK have their own traditions) was left to be just a vaguely worrying oddity where, though you could make a witch out of a plastic lemon if you liked, you were also guaranteed a depressing dearth of seasonal plastic tat and traumatizing TV programming.

But fear not, Britain’s Most Haunted Band (catchier than “band where all the songwriters seem deeply depressed”) The Moody Blues were on hand to provide eerie prog-rock-folk dirges year round that lent themselves to unnerving interpretation. “Dear Diary” is one of those dirges. It might have been all the Herbert van Thal anthologies I’d been mainlining since infancy, but somehow, perhaps due to an idiosyncratic interpretation of the line “For goodness sake, what’s happening to me?” or what I perceived as Lovecraftian undertones, I mistook the song’s existential critique of straight society for an eerie and beguiling ode to monstrous difference, an error that cast its lackadaisical groove, Ray Thomas’s melancholy flute, and the gurgling, vaguely amphibian effect on Justin Hayward’s vocals in a more sinister light. That

If they weren’t so blind, then surely they’d seeThere’s a much better way for them to be

sounded less like a call to arms for the Brummie hippie lifestyle and more like an invitation to radical and frightening mutation. Listened to in autumn twilight, it still sounds like the final jottings of someone journaling their drift away from the human race.

Richard McKenna

7319768_image_0-8ef7809ad93ff0ee69fe9811c3bcddce“The Tale of the Giant Stone Eater”
By The Sensational Alex Harvey Band
Vertigo, 1975

A song doesn’t have to be about vampires, pumpkins or ghosts to inspire a spot of seasonal terror (nothing rhymes with vampires or pumpkins anyway, and “roasts” seldom inspires terror, unless you burn the Yorkshires). The swift and total devastation of the pristine and ancient in favor of the cheap thrills of modern convenience is a terrifying concept, but when I first heard “The Tale of the Giant Stone Eater“ by The Sensational Alex Harvey Band, I was five years old and the message went over my head. Nevertheless, the song terrified me profoundly.

It wasn’t the only sinister musical narrative with a cultish theme of death that I obsessed over as a child, but it was certainly the most chilling. I didn’t even like to look at the album cover (conceived as a parody of prog album artwork of the time), with its spiky earth movers and snarling but doomed dinosaurs. The lurid colors had the menace of classic horror comics, and rifling through my dad’s record collection to have another look at the starship on ELO’s Out Of The Blue meant risking touching the cursed album by mistake. I didn’t want the song to be aware of me, or perhaps to fly on to the record player by malign magic, and start playing itself. We were forbidden to touch the record player, and thus I would have been helpless to listen, and I was very determined to do that as little as possible.

If my dad put the album on (Tomorrow Belongs To Me), my brother and I would flee the room, often in tears. The song is written in the style of a fairytale, and so it felt somehow personal, as though the narrator was addressing me directly.

Gather round boys and girls and listen,To the tale of the giant stone eater.

The opening piano notes were sly and insinuating. You could tell something terrible was about to go down, and sure enough the piano swiftly gave way to the inexorable pounding of heavy guitar chords, and the alliterative aggression of the lyrics:

Sudden savage shining soiled solid sandedSteel shuddering shattering shoveling until theSabre toothed rooter roots the earth

It was heavy stuff. Definitely not in the league of the Beatrix Potter cassette we’d recorded rude words over. 

Our dad is a terrifying geologist from Arbroath, so we ought to have been hardened to the psychic effect of Scotsmen ranting about rock stratas, but in hindsight perhaps that was part of the terror. For us, the song was a cross between an incomprehensible ghost story and getting bollocked by dad for failing to show sufficient interest in igneous rock on a family holiday. Sometimes you just wanted an ice cream and a go on the arcade machines, and in the context of the song, that made me Part Of The Problem. 

The eater eats his fill and is not satisfied andRoars and revs his mathematical rageOn the footprints of Vikings.

My brother and I definitely belonged to the camp of “Plastic space agents, selling candy floss contracts.” Perhaps Alex Harvey believed, like my dad, that candy floss would make a mess of the car. On the other hand, Harvey was inspired to write the song after seeing a bulldozer clearing ancient Scottish countryside to build a new motorway, so maybe he’d have appreciated the despoilment of our Ford station wagon via tiny sticky handprints, a constellation of careening concurrent calorific cavepainter complaint.

As a young fan of musical theater, I was drawn in by the storybook narrative and complex lyrics, as well as by the way the music constantly switched between lyrical, harsh, faux jaunty, and bombastic, the lulls and the peaks feeling like a tease and a threat. I usually tapped out about the time Alex Harvey repeats “TEN MILLION YEARS OLD!” in an increasingly unhinged bellow, but occasionally I’d be able to force myself to listen to the whole song. My fascination with it made it scarier to me, which I think is the case with all good horror. It stuck in my mind, and I’d find myself pondering the lyrics, which I took very literally. I concluded that as I was not made of stone, the stone eater would not want to eat me (even during the great stone shortage!), but it was possible it could chew up the land our house was on, reducing me and my family—and more importantly the dog and my My Little Ponies—to a pulp of shattered soil and human viscera.

On the whole, I preferred the mellow space swoop of ELO.

Of course, given today’s increasingly bleak environmental outlook and the rise of AI devastating the human component of various industries and arts, the lyrics are unsettling in a different way.

The eater eats again retches roars and vomitsHis computerized future is bright with securityHeadshrinkers analyze the unknownMeanwhile another tree dies of shame

J.E. Anckorn

s-l1600sas“Enigma”
By Amanda Lear
Ariola/Polydor, 1978

Italian kids of the late 1970s didn’t have Halloween. They only had a vague idea that it existed in America because of the “Grande cocomero” (the “big watermelon,” a.k.a. the Great Pumpkin) in Charles M. Schultz’s Peanuts strips, which had been translated into Italian since the ’60s by semiotician, writer, and cultural critic Umberto Eco. Eco was also responsible for the creation of the term “toffoletta” to describe a marshmallow to Italian readers who obviously had no idea what it could possibly be. When I saw Snoopy and friends roasting them on the campfire, I presumed “toffolette” must be delicious cubes of cheese.

So, no Halloween in the ’70s—but we did have (limited) access to a lot of spooky stuff all year round. We had those lurid giallo movie posters that plastered the walls of every Italian city, we had Dario Argento, we had Mario Bava’s horror films and Ruggero Deodato’s cannibal epics. Granted, most of us kids could only dream of actually watching them, but we were free to fantasize endlessly about their goriness. (I was 15 when I finally saw 1975’s Profondo Rosso, and it didn’t live up to my wild fantasies. I only learned to appreciate it much later.)

The most precious spooky thing we had was something American kids our age could only dream of: a sorcery-themed late night variety show called “Stryx” aired by the second channel of the Italian state TV from October 15 to November 19, 1978. Stryx was a sexy, all-singing, all-dancing extravaganza that in its brief life hosted witchcraft-inspired performances from international disco queen Grace Jones, Indian actress and singer-songwriter Asha Puthli, and Brazilian superstar Gal Costa. Eight-year-old me was allowed to stay up late to watch it even though the performers were half naked and the provocative dance numbers were not exactly kid-friendly. But Stryx was fun for the whole family and perfect Halloween viewing, even though there was no such thing as Halloween.

Actress, model, Dalí’s muse, Roxy Music cover girl, and international maid of mischief Amanda Lear was of course a family favorite and Stryx’s brightest star. She spoke fluent Italian and because of her deep, throaty voice, many Italians (encouraged by the “stampa rosa” gossip tabloids) were titillated by the idea she might be a trans woman. Lear was popular enough that in 1980 she appeared in a TV commercial for an Italian sparkling wine sold in individual aperitif bottles so small that the product was sold as “Nano ghiacciato,” which roughly translates as “dwarf on the rocks,” political correctness not being a priority in the Italian advertisement ecosystem at the time.

My favorite Amanda moment in Stryx was her performance of the song “Enigma.” Lear was led to the stage by a leash held by the ringmaster—actor, singer, and former ‘60s heartthrob Tony Renis. Her body shrouded in a black cloak, she looked like a witch being dragged to the gallows—yet enjoying every second of it. She soon disrobed, though, revealing a red sequined catsuit that was surely on Madonna’s mind when she was preparing her costumes for her Confessions on a Dance Floor Tour.

The song was naughty fun even if you didn’t speak English: “Give a bit of mmh to me and I’ll give a bit of mmh to you” she purred, while stroking three (terrified) black kittens on an inflatable plastic mattress intended to look futuristic and Barbarella-like, surrounded by half naked space odalisques and alien creatures unleashed from the Mos Eisley Cantina.

“Enigma” was a top ten hit in Italy and, more surprisingly, in Belgium.

Daniele Cassandro

“We’re Gonna Change the World”maxresdefault
By Matt Monro
Capitol Records, 1970

It’s the stuff that catches you off guard in what you thought was a safe and secure environment that’s always the creepiest. Playing at home when I was young, my mum would invariably have the cheery, anodyne burble of BBC Radio 2 soundtracking her housework. Yet to my infant ears, there was often something a bit “off” about the songs it played, from themes of abandonment (i.e. John Denver’s “Leaving On A Jet Plane” and Middle Of The Road’s “Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep” with its “Woke up this morning and my mama was gone”), to old men apparently preying on younger women (i.e. Ringo Starr’s “You’re Sixteen” and Charlie Rich’s “The Most Beautiful Girl”).

But the song that disturbed me the most was Matt Monro’s “We’re Gonna Change The World.” Listening now, it’s a brilliantly sung and arranged piece of “adult pop,” with an intriguing and multi-layered lyric about women’s lib. But at the time, all I heard was its eerily jaunty call for revolution: “Come with us, run with us! / We’re gonna change the world / You’ll be amazed, so full of praise / When we’ve rearranged your world / We’re gonna change your world!” With its groovy threats to overthrow the everyday, it felt more than a little terrifying—at the age of 6, I really didn’t want my world to be rearranged. It conjured visions in my head of hordes of protestors charging down the street with a gleam of madness in their eyes.

Kids are often portrayed as little anarchists in waiting, reveling in chaos and disorder. But this kid for one was pretty disturbed by the thought of everything suddenly changing overnight, the velvety tones of Monro’s voice and the tune’s upbeat penny whistle melody somehow only adding to the sense of dread it imprinted on my conservative soul.

Joe Banks

17031329“Heartache Avenue”
By The Maisonettes
Ready Steady Go, 1982

You might think that by age 11 a child would be mature enough to not be actually frightened by something as innocuous as the jaunty blue-eyed-soul of The Maisonettes “Heartache Avenue,” but that’s a stereotype I wish to smash. I claim my right to make myself constantly anxious with anything that comes to hand.

Never one for coping well with ambiguity or mixed messages, young me immediately took fright when the band first appeared on Top of the Pops. Perhaps it was the jacket and polo-neck combos, half enigmatic Mastermind miscreant, half provincial perv. Perhaps the strangely mechanical way lead singer and songwriter Lol Mason moved, as though obeying some obscure rite. Perhaps that his stylings vaguely evoked both the Yorkshire Ripper and Mr. Mann, the foot fetishist chiropodist doing cheap cash-in-hand home visits out of hours who for months had spent Tuesday evenings in our front room caressing my poor mum’s tormented feet (and, over a couple of weeks, slowly and agonizingly slicing a verruca out of one of mine) before departing under a cloud after his qualifications or intentions were called into question. Perhaps it was the ominous, oddly processed voices of the backing singers, or the downward synth slide that evoked a nauseating feeling of time slowing down. Perhaps the doomy cover photo on the single, half Last Year at Marienbad, half moment-before-nuclear-impact. I wasn’t even mad about avenues full stop, to be honest, the only one near my house being home to the caravan site where I’d been attacked by a scary Alsatian called Terry.

So as much as I liked the song, I couldn’t help feeling that it was in some way freighted with horror, Heartache Avenue no simple metaphor for lost love but an actual suburban nightmare zone where one might be trapped, like Doctor Who in Castrovalva. Given the appalled reaction my NHS glasses, Adric haircut, and fucked up teeth (it can’t have been my deeply irritating personality) provoked in any girl I spoke to, was I also doomed to inhabit this cursed liminal space? An awful feeling of dread that it might actually be my destiny flooded my brain every time I heard the brass section kick in at the start of the song.

I never saw The Maisonettes when they appeared on French TV, which feels like a stroke of luck, as the “Lions Club grandee trapped inside a video game set in a mountaintop cult sacrifice complex” would only have added yet another layer to the vague unease that “Heartache Avenue” triggers in me even now.

Richard McKenna

A-292542-1645000922-9625“Eve of Destruction”
By Barry McGuire
Dunhill/RCA Victor, 1965

In 1983 and 1984, I feel as though every night I went to bed singularly petrified of nuclear war. This, of course, was the era of The Day After, Testament, Red Dawn, WarGames, Ronald Reagan callously and dangerously joking around about starting the bombing in a matter of minutes, appearing before Evangelicals and calling the Soviet Union the Evil Empire. I wondered nearly every night if I’d wake up the next morning or simply be vaporized in my sleep—or, worse yet, maybe I would survive a nuclear exchange and be forced to watch as my family slowly perished from radiation poisoning. (Yeah, Testament really did do a fucking number on me.)

It was also right around this time that I really started becoming conscious of pop music, my own musical tastes, and my young self as an attentive, active, and appreciative listener of music. Sure, before I turned 8 there had been music on in the background, on pop and oldies radio in the family station wagon, but it was the coming of cable TV and MTV to our house that really kickstarted my awareness of the past 25 or so years of rock and roll and what was considered cool by millions of American teens a little older than me. My dad took me to local New England record stores like Strawberries and bought me 45s of Toto, Michael Jackson, Thomas Dolby. The family hi-fi was all mine; my folks, much to the dismay of my future-self-as-music-nut, were never really into putting together a record collection.

It’s this combination of new music and oldies radio that led me to two strikingly different anthems that tapped into my childhood nuclear war neuroses (the next one I’ll get to a little later in this feature). Barry McGuire’s 1965 Billboard number one hit (!)—despite numerous radio bans for its “subversive” lyrical content (!!)—protest anthem “Eve of Destruction” had to have been something I heard on oldies radio as a kid. I remember being transfixed by the song’s vaguely threatening aura, a mix of thoroughly pessimistic meditations on the Cold War, Vietnam, and domestic racial unrest. It was the second verse that put the chill down my spine: “If the button is pushed, there’s no runnin’ away / There’ll be no one to save with the world in a grave / Take a look around you, boy, it’s bound to scare you, boy.” And on some very conscious level at the time, I was aware this was an old song! One that was a hit when my parents were only a little older than I was! How long had this fear about instantaneous global nuclear war been going on, I asked myself! This was the kind of historical perspective that truly impactful music hits all of us with occasionally: an intergenerational connection that conveys the collective weight of history. I remember calling into the selfsame oldies station to request that they play the song. What the DJ in 1983 thought of an 8-year-old kid calling in with his mom’s help to hear a hoary ’60s protest song, I will likely never know. But man, am I curious.

Michael Grasso 

maxresdefaultdaf“Angie Baby”
By Helen Reddy
Capitol Records, 1974

By the time the ’80s rolled around, Britain had grudgingly accepted certain aspects of Halloween. We would sometimes sing spooky songs in school assembly, or color in a skeleton, but this wasn’t really any more attention than was paid to something like Harvest Festival (and I suspect horror fans would be more interested in the time we were taught how to make a corn dolly than anything we did for the 31st of October). 

Pushback from the church led to rival “All-Saints” events where kids were encouraged to dress as saints instead, and which inevitably saw lines of girls dressed as St Trinians filing into church halls across the land in mini skirts and ripped fishnets. Parents in general weren’t especially worried about Satan, but there was still the lingering concern that sending your kids to demand sweeties with menaces from the neighbors might be considered bad manners.

All of this meant that I didn’t really have a Halloween tradition of child-friendly spooks to engage with, and I developed a range of slightly odd fears in their place, like the test card flying out of the TV into my face, or the red lines painted at the bottom of our local pool, which I thought were a grate with a shark behind it. That said, my spooky song was more connected to my creeping dread of approaching adulthood than those more visceral childhood terrors. 

I first heard “Angie Baby” in the early ’90s on a compilation of ’70s number 1s my parents brought from a petrol station. The story is essentially about a weird kid negotiating her relationship with the opposite sex, and as an 11-year-old already dealing with the imposition of puberty, I kind of related. Trapping the souls of men inside your radio and letting them out occasionally to dance around your bedroom was less familiar to me, but you have to take representation where you can find it. 

Back then, the involvement of the radio seemed like an intriguingly modern take on a ghost story (I had decided that Angie’s suitors must have become ghosts in order to fit inside), while their sorry plight and Angie’s isolation, confined to her room for some vague mental disorder variously described as being “insane” and “touched,” added all the poignancy of a good Victorian haunting. I misheard the line “All alone once more, Angie baby,” when her father knocks on the door, dispelling the spirits, as “Oh-oh once more, Angie baby,” the plaintive cry of a ghostly dance partner begging for one more turn around the room before being banished back to his portable prison. In my mind, the boys were like the mournful spirits of drowned sailors, and Angie was a more sex-positive Miss Havisham.

Angie gets the opportunity to put her magical radio into effect when a neighbor boy “with evil on his mind” sneaks into her room and offers to dance with her. I didn’t really understand at the time what sort of evil he was considering, and thought that probably he was going to bully her for dancing by herself, or perhaps he would pretend to take her seriously and then do a really silly dance and ruin it all. Part of me quite liked the idea of trapping boys inside a radio. Anything to do with growing up, in fact—bras, periods—they could all go in. And then I would simply slip the radio inside a storm drain and skip off into the sunset.

On the other hand, maybe Angie had also noticed that boys tended to be nicer if you talked to them one on one. Maybe she was just using her radio to get them away from their friends for a minute so she could find out what kind of person they were without them shouting or kicking footballs in her face. I could kind of see that. It had perhaps also occurred to me that having a sad ghost boyfriend would be pretty sweet.

Ultimately, though, I didn’t really approve of Angie’s methods, even if the neighbor boy was planning to ruin her romantic evening by doing a silly dance. Honoring Habeas Corpus is surely the bedrock of any relationship, and do you really deserve your sad ghost boyfriend if it was you that made him sad? I certainly had some thoughts about Angie Baby, but the secrets of interacting with boys remained as opaque and as terrifying as ever.

Amy Mugglestone

“Walking in Your Footsteps”1_BcI4crCqM7jeLgwVW00zyw
By The Police
A&M Records, 1983

As I mentioned above, my parents didn’t have a huge record collection, but my grandmother was a completely different story. She was always ahead of her time, thinking differently, whether by her reading of purveyors of popular occultism and spiritualism such as Edgar Cayce in the bland American ’50s, her committed anti-war protesting as a middle-aged housewife during Vietnam, or her musical tastes, which eschewed the fusty big band and “beautiful music” sounds of her own Greatest Generation and found her grooving instead to Boomer rock and New Wave artists like Billy Joel, Elton John, and the Police.

My grandmother is the one who first put a copy of the Police’s 1983 international blockbuster hit LP Synchronicity into my hands. I remember listening to the whole album on her hi-fi in our family’s in-law apartment and being spooked by the tales of suburban middle-class dread (and lake cryptids!) in “Synchronicity II,” identifying far too much for an 8-year-old kid with the narrator of “King of Pain,” and having absolutely no clue about Sting’s pseud-y literary references to Carl Jung and Paul Bowles in “Synchronicity I” and “Tea in the Sahara,” respectively. (These days, in my dotage, forty years distant from the affectations of Gordon Sumner’s lyrics, I do admit I wonder how much of the album cover art’s veiled references to Jungian theory, surrealism, and psychic research laid the groundwork for later grown-up obsessions with same.)

It was track A2, “Walking In Your Footsteps,” that really got the hooks in me. Anchored by a “tribal” rhythm and melody, the synths and sequencer evoking pan pipes and hollow log percussion, Sting sings a paean to the vanished “brontosaurus,” wondering if his blind march to extinction has a lesson for us. I mean, come on: I was a kid of the ’80s, I loved dinosaurs and, if you mentioned them, I was definitely paying attention. But the twist came in the final verse, where I learned that we humans could easily follow in the friendly yet dimwitted dinos’ giant footsteps: “If we explode the atom bomb / Would they say that we were dumb?” I understood the irony and humor here in comparing us clever apes to the pea-brained dinosaurs, but did I fully understand how our intelligence could equally consign us to a Darwinian ash-heap? Again, thanks to previous exposure to media like Carl Sagan’s Cosmos, it was made clear to me “over and over and over again” (to reprise Barry McGuire’s haunting chorus) that technological intelligence was no guarantee of the survival of our species, and that in fact, it might be a detriment. “Walking In Your Footsteps” was the self-aware, wry, ironic dialectical counterpart to Barry McGuire’s defeated dirge of resignation, and I think on some level both of those songs contributed to my psychological attraction/repulsion complex with the idea of nuclear annihilation.

Michael Grasso 

Keith_colour_5“Excerpt from ‘A Teenage Opera’”
By Keith West
Parlophone, 1967

Halloween in the North-East of England in the late ’70s was a less garishly sexy festival than the one we’ve now grown accustomed to, and probably best characterized by the lingering odor of burnt turnip in drizzle. In truth, many of us were biding our time for November the Fifth, with its glamorous fireworks and massive municipal bonfires. Festive fact: it was actually illegal not to celebrate Bonfire Night in the UK for over 250 years, though how the men from the ministry enforced this remains mysterious. Anyway, whether cheerfully acknowledging the spirit world while dressed in a bin-bag, or gazing wistfully as the effigy of a Catholic conspirator was therapeutically consumed by the cleansing fires of The State, Samhain week contained two fun-sized opportunities for youngsters to contemplate Death. This locus of jocular creepiness is also inhabited by “Excerpt from ‘A Teenage Opera’,” which, it bears saying before we even get started, could easily be the most annoyingly punctuated song title of all time.

Originally released in 1967, I first heard it played in heavy rotation on ’70s radio request shows like Junior Choice, hosted by the avuncular Ed “Stewpot” Stewart, and one hosted by the considerably less wholesome Jimmy Savile. Written and performed by producer Mark Wirtz and fronted by Keith West (of psychedelic practitioners, Tomorrow), the single was conceived as being part of a larger body of work, the ‘Teenage Opera’ of the title. Apparently to be set in a turn-of-the-century village, each song was to tell the story of one of its inhabitants. Despite harboring the giddy potential of song titles like “Cellophane Mary-Jane” and “The Paranoiac Woodcutter,” the project was not initially completed.

Only the first single was a hit, and such was its ubiquity that it became more simply known as “Grocer Jack.” Though failing to make the US Hot 100, it was massive in the UK and Europe, especially in Germany, Belgium, and the Netherlands. And as masterful as the composition no doubt is (getting the thumbs-up from the likes of Paul McCartney and Pete Townsend), the real hook is the undeniably cute and catchy children’s chorus, as performed by some West London school-of-performing-arts-type kids.

The song begins with Mr. West describing how Grocer Jack, though 82 and suffering some kind of heart failure, is tortured by his sense of duty to deliver food to the village. The chorus, first time around, seems to be from Jack’s perspective as he’s dying on the floor: “Grocer Jack, get off your back / Go into town, don’t let them down.” As Jack correctly suspects, his value to the townsfolk is entirely contingent on his function as a retailer, and they are annoyed at his non-appearance: “Mothers send their children out / To Jack’s house to scream and shout.” This time the children sing the grocer-torturing chorus, exhorting the dying man to “get off his back.” Slacker.

After a pastoral interlude, it appears that Jack has definitively croaked. The townsfolk feel some pangs of conscience, and the children are baffled as to where their beloved grocer has now gone: “Grocer Jack, Grocer Jack / Is it true what mummy says / You won’t come back, oh no no,” and we’re left with the children of the town attempting to process the realities of death.

And so to my cozy late-’70s living room, where as the radio played I found myself also starting to wrestle with notions of mortality, and getting my first real tastes of The Fear, the surface cuteness of the chorus having served as a means to smuggle in much darker materials. Listening to this song was like turning over a stone to find something hideous underneath, but its morbidly sentimental aspects, creepy enough in their own way, were not the only reason I found it so terrifying. There was another, absurd as it now seems, which nevertheless scared the bejaysus out of eight-year-old me. Having recently been allowed to stay up late at my Nan’s, I’d watched the horror anthology film Tales from the Crypt (1972). One of the stories, “Poetic Justice,” starred Peter Cushing as Arthur Grimsdyke, an elderly dustman persecuted and eventually driven to suicide by his heartless neighbors. In a scene watched between terrified fingers, Grimsdyke returns from the grave exactly one year later to exact his revenge.

With the poor treatment of an elderly man who only meant well, some connection was made between Grimsdyke and Grocer Jack, as I wondered:

What if it isn’t true what mummy says?

Oh no no.

Christopher Ashton

“Revolution 9”
By The Beatles
Apple, 1968

The only “song” that ever scared me was “Revolution 9” from the Beatles’ White Album. A few of us were over at a friend’s house in the very early ‘80s and, this being the very early ‘80s, his parents were nowhere to be found. Naturally, we ransacked the place, ate an entire box of Ding Dongs, and eventually descended upon the record collection. Boy of the house Tom (not his real name) pulled out all of the Beatles records and regaled us with a short but succinctly gruesome version of the “Paul is Dead” urban legend: here was Paul, he said, pointing to the cover of 1969’s Abbey Road. He’s the guy with the cigarette. Notice Paul’s feet? Well, he has no shoes, and John, the guy in all white, he’s leading them all to Paul’s grave. “The other Beatles killed Paul, man.” 

Now, I knew next to nothing about the Beatles at the time. I would have recognized a few songs from the radio, but, unlike Tom’s parents, mine were not ex-hippies—the closest thing we had to a Beatles record in my house was Chuck Mangione or Neil Diamond. To me, all of the Fab Four looked like fucking Charles Manson, and I knew they were British—a people whose accent and mannerisms I had early on pegged as supernaturally evil (possibly because of Peter Cushing’s Grand Moff Tarkin). So when Tom showed us the White Album and told us about this “weird song” that proved Paul was murdered, I was not only fully ensconced in the rabbit hole—I was sure that I, like Mr. McCartney, would remain buried there forever.   

“You have to make the song go backwards,” Tom said. “Bullshit,” we said. “I’m serious,” Tom said. For all the kids out there, you have to understand that making a record play backwards was a manual process: you had to physically turn the record counterclockwise with your fingers, and you had to do it evenly and at a speed that came close to the 33 and 1/3 revolutions per minute a record spun when the machine was playing the right way. And we knew backwards was the wrong way, partly because of the increasingly disgruntled Evangelical Christian movement: these fine folks described rock ‘n’ roll as “a force accommodating demonic possession,” and claimed that subliminal “satanic messages” were deliberately being put in songs to control and pervert the minds of young people. Also, let’s not forget the still-lingering terrors of The Exorcist, where Linda Blair’s head spins around like a fucking record, and Father Karras figures out a demon is possessing poor Regan by recording her and playing the tape backwards. (I talk about the Beatles, Manson, The Exorcist, and how the Christian Right invented “satanic backmasking” here.) Basically, we were damned before the music even started. 

“Revolution 9” is an avant-garde concoction of sound effects, dialogue snippets, and tape loops that Lennon described as “painting in sound a picture of revolution.” What do you think it sounds like in reverse? Yes, drugged-out bloody murder. When the words “revolution nine” are played backwards, you’re supposed to hear the secret message: “Turn me on, dead man. Turn me on, dead man. Turn me on, dead man.” What we heard was something a little different, a little more sinister: “Let me on, dead man. Let me on, dead man. Let me on, dead man.” Death was a train, we deduced, and the garbled screeches and haunted marching band and manic laughter were soundtracking a descent into hell. Or better yet, the train was chugging upwards, forwards, back to the light. But who was talking? Paul? The other Beatles? Or was it us, from the future, a warning from beyond the grave?  

After that, Tom showed us the inner sleeve of the Eagles’ Hotel California, where, he said, you can see the devil himself peeking through a second story window. Fucking Tom, man. Miss him, miss him, miss him

K.E. Roberts

Miskatonic Monday #239: Lucie’s Dispensation

Reviews from R'lyeh -

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

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

—oOo—
Name: Lucie’s DispensationPublisher: Chaosium, Inc.
Author: John Dyer

Setting: Post-World War I FranceProduct: Scenario
What You Get: Fifty page, 13.94 MB Full Colour PDF
Elevator Pitch: Which is worse? The trauma or the covering up of the trauma?Plot Hook: Why would the Germans attack a village they already occupied so late in the war?
Plot Support: Staging advice, seven handouts, four maps, five NPCs, one Mythos tome, eight Mythos spells, and two (and more) Mythos creatures.Production Values: Reasonable
Pros# Interesting period for a Lovecraftian investigative horror scenario# Detailed scenario and investigation# Teutophobia# Rhabdophobia# Traumatophobia
Cons# No, the Keeper doesn’t know or why else would she be reading the scenario background?# Who are the Investigators meant to be given the recent Armistice?# Why refuse to give the villain a motivation?# No historical background for the period# Frustratingly overwritten in places# No Sanity rewards
Conclusion# Sometimes oddly written, often overwritten scenario hides a solid plot and investigation into collective trauma and delusion# Interesting period left unexplored

Miskatonic Monday #238: The Stench of an Open Grave

Reviews from R'lyeh -

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

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

—oOo—
Name: The Stench of an Open GravePublisher: Chaosium, Inc.
Author: Marcus D. Bone

Setting: Dark Ages WessexProduct: Scenario
What You Get: Forty-seven page, 2.86 MB Full Colour PDF
Elevator Pitch: An introductory Cthulhu Dark Ages investigationPlot Hook: A hunt for a missing monk reveals dark doings in the hills.
Plot Support: Staging advice, three pre-generated investigators, no handouts, one map, eleven NPCs, and one Mythos creature.Production Values: Decent
Pros# Scenario for Cthulhu Dark Ages# Classic isolated village horror Straightforward investigation suitable as an introduction to the setting# Suitable for two to three Investigators# Plenty of historical and regional background# Dysmorphobia# Hemophobia# Traumatophobia
Cons# Needs a slight edit# Sanity losses light in places# Classic isolated village horror
Conclusion# Solid, straightforward introductory investigative scenario for Cthulhu Dark Ages# Combines a missing monk, an isolated village, and strange beliefs in well done classic isolated village horror scenario

#Dungeon23 Tomb of the Vampire Queen, Level 10, Room 30

The Other Side -

 Past the mummies this tomb continues on. There is a double door ahead made of iron. A thief can unlock it but will require three separate open locks rolls. The locks can also be opened with a knock spell on each one.

If a thief does open all three locks there is a spring trap. If it is not discovered it will trip and cause a 1d4+2 hp of damage. No poison though, that it not the danger of this trap.

Beyond the doors lie in wait the Vampire Queen's honor guard.

Room 30

There are five total vampires but the number ready to attack will depend on the amount of hp lost by the trap. One vampire will awaken for each point of hp lost. So a minimum of 3 and maximum of 5.  Any not awake the first round will awaken the second round.

These vampires have been in slumber since the Vampire Queen constructed this tomb from the former dwarven kingdom. They are fiercely loyal and ravenously hungry.

Two have 7 HD, two have 8 HD, and their leader has 9 HD.  All have plate mail +2 and carry long swords +2. They have standard vampire abilities. Due to their hunger, they attack at an additional +1, and their AC has a penalty of -1 to AC. Total mods are +3 bonus to hit and +1 bonus to AC. 

They are not spellcasters and even if they were they are far too hungry here to use spells.

These vampires will not talk to the characters but they will communicate with each other in their own language (not a "vampire" language, but what they spoke before turned).

The vampires have twice the normal amount of treasure. 

The leader has a large iron key for a door at the end of this tomb.

October Horror Movie Challenge: Witch Hunt: A Century of Murder (2015)

The Other Side -

 A Century of Murder (2015) I always do some sort of documentary every October Challenge. This year, I picked one that has been on my list for bit.  This one is not only covers my documentary criteria but also today's theme of Man is the Worst Monster.

Witch Hunt: A Century of Murder (2015)

Part 1 covers the start of the Witch craze (1600) in the British Isles with King James VI and Bailiff David Seaton. 

The torture of Gillis Duncan, Seaton's maid, which set off the witch hunting in Scottland was bad enough but it was a domino effect that killed 100s of innocents. This includes Agnes Sampson who is often considered to be the "witch" that convinced King James VI of Scotland (Later King James I of England) that witches were a threat.

There is some good coverage of the Malleus Maleficarum, but mostly it focuses on the more "local" Demonologie by King James.

Presented by Suzannah Lipscomb a professor emerita of history.  Reading over her CV I am pretty impressed to be honest. 

This one also spends some time on the Pendle Hill witches, a particularly dark time of the English witch trials.  

Part 2 large focuses on Mathew Hopkins, the Witchfinder General. We are now in the reign of King Charles I and the British Civil War. The conditions were right to bring about the likes of Hopkins. There is a level of cruelty here that I can scarcely believe. Scratch that. I can believe it. I have been reading this stuff for years. Humans suck.

A direct line is drawn between King James to Hopkins to as far away as the Salem Witch Trails.

By my count this accounts for few hundred murdered. 

Far worse horrors than any horror movie I watched so far.


October Horror Movie Challenge 2023
Viewed: 32
First Time Views: 22

31 Days of Halloween Movie Challenge


Miskatonic Monday #237: Trutz Blanke Hans

Reviews from R'lyeh -

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

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

—oOo—
Name: Trutz Blanke HansPublisher: Chaosium, Inc.
Author: Florian Krates

Setting: German North Sea CoastProduct: Scenario
What You Get: Sixteen page, 1.87 MB Full Colour PDF
Elevator Pitch: Dunwich-am MeerPlot Hook: An invitation to a séance turns decidedly strange
Plot Support: One handout, four maps, one NPC, one Mythos artefact, and two Mythos creatures.Production Values: Adequate
Pros# Unexpected time travel trip against the clock# Nice sense of growing urgency# Plenty of historical and regional background# Chronophobia# Thalassophobia# Antlophobia
Cons# German equivalent of ‘An Amaranthine Desire’ from Nameless Horrors: Six Reasons to Fear the Unknown# Easy to adapt to other time periods# Needs a hook to get the Investigators involved# No map of Rungholt# What if the Investigators act against the instigator of the scenario’s plot?
Conclusion# Decent enough race against the environment with undeveloped set-up and conclusion # Needs work to provide a motivation for the Investigators

#Dungeon23 Tomb of the Vampire Queen, Level 10, Room 28

The Other Side -

 Moving across this expanse the party finds another large cave mouth. But before they can get to it there is a guardian in the way.

Room 28

Standing guard at the cave mouth is an undead dragon. It does not speak, or cast spells but still has all the other abilities of a blue dragon.

This was the personal steed of the Vampire Queen. He was killed during the third war of the Dwarves and the Vampire Queen so she left him here to guard her tomb. These details can be discovered on a plinth erected in his honor. This is where his treasure horde is as well and used to keep him here even after death. He has twice the normal amount.


October Horror Movie Challenge: Fear Street (2021)

The Other Side -

 1994Man. Covid-19 sucks. I lack the brain power to properly review these, but I am going to try.

Fear Street is a trilogy of movies released to much hype on Netflix back in 2021. All three are set in the twin towns of Sunnyvale and Shadyside, and the curse of Sarah Fier the local witch, back in 1666. 

The three movies take place in three different times: 1994, 1978, and 1966.  All focus on serial killers attacking and killing Shadysiders every few years, giving it the nickname the Murder Capital of USA. While Shadysiders go crazy and kill each every few years, Sunnyvale has remained crime-free since it's inception.

Fear Street Part One: 1994

We get some background on the Sunnyvale/Shadyside history in the opener and go right into the first murder/killing.  Sadly it is Heather Watkins, played by Maya Hawke. I was looking forward to seeing more of her in this. We shift focus to Shadysider Denna (Kiana Madeira), who is in the midst of a break-up with "Sam." We don't know who Sam is yet, but Deena has some strong feelings, and her friends don't want to run interference for her anymore. There is a memorial for Heather, a Shadysider, and when learn (largely from Deena's brother Josh (Benjamin "Lil' P-Nut" Flores Jr.) that it is only Shadysiders that get killed.  The Shadysiders are there (high school mascot The Witches) and only the Sunnyvale (high school mascot The Devils), but a fight breaks out.  We also learn that Sam is short for Samantha. Sam has stayed in the closet (a much bigger deal in 1994) and moved to Sunnyvale.

While driving back in their bus the Shadysiders are harassed by some Sunnyvalers, with Peter, Sam's new boyfriend, driving. Deena decides to throw out the ice from their cooler, but a spontaneous bloody nose (that she and Sam both get) causes her to drop the cooler and Peter wrecks his car. Sam gets hurt and falls out and bleeds into Sarah's hidden grave.

Now Sarah's curse is in full force and former, previously dead, killers begin to hunt down Denna and her friends, but in truth just Sam. 

While trying to fight the monsters after them they discover more about Sarah Fier and how there was one survivor who saw the witch, C. Berman, from the Camp Nightwing Massacre, in 1978. However, they discover she survived because she had technically died and the killings stopped.  So all they have to do is kill Sam, stop the witch, and bring her back.  They manage to do that and the sheriff, Nick Goode, decides to put the blame on Deena's friends Simon and Kate, since they were known drug dealers. It is obvious Nick knows a lot more than he lets on. 

Later Deena and Sam, reconciled, are back at Deena's but Sam is possessed by Sarah Fier. They subdue her when they get a phone call from C. Berman. 

 1978Fear Street Part Two: 1978

This one starts where Part One left off. We now meet C. Christine Berman. She was the only survivor of the Camp Nightwing killing in 1978. 

In 1978, Christine, then called "Ziggy" (and played by Sadie Sink) is a Shadysider fighting with her sister Cindy (played by Emily Rudd) and has a mild crush on Sunnyvaller Nick Goode. That is until Cindy's boyfriend, Tommy, starts killing everyone. 

At first, the camp nurse tries to kill Tommy saying that one way or another he will die. Ziggy finds a book the nurse had kept detailing locations of where Sarah Fier had been buried with notes on what these places are in 1978. Also notes from when her own daughter had been the Shadyside killer years ago.

Using the nurse's map, Cindy discovers an ancient ritual area they believe to have belonged to Sarah Fier, and she even discovers Sarah's hand. They come up with the plan to reunite Sarah's hand with her body and hope that stops the supernatural killings. Ziggy and Cindy, racing against all the killers run to the hanging tree where Sarah was hung and then buried (but we know she isn't there) they bury the hand and then...nothing. They are both killed by the killers who then disappear. Nick Goode runs up and manages to save Ziggy and bring her back. 

Back in 1994, with this new news, Deena and Josh go to the mall (where the hanging tree is) dig up the hand, and rush it out to where the car cashed in the first movie. Deena touches the body of Sarah Fier and suddenly is transported to 1666.

 1666Fear Street Part Three: 1666

Back in 1666 and Sarah Fier is living in the town of Union. We are seeing her as if she were Deena, but her reflection is still Sarah's. The townsfolk of Union (the township before it split into Sunnyvale and Shadyside) are a mix of actors from the previous two movies.  Sarah and the other girls in town know of "the old widow" and think she is a witch. They investigate her home hoping to find some herbs for their late-night party. Here Sarah discovers a book of black magic. The witch catches them, and sends them running.

At the party that night we learn that Sarah is also in love with Hannah Miller, the pastor's daughter. While at the party they sneak off to make-out. If this was a social problem in 1994, in 1666 it was enough to get them accused of evil practices...which is exactly what happens here.

The next day Pastor Miller locks all the children in the church, when Solomon Goode breaks in he discovers that Miller has killed all of the children, plucked out all their eyes including his own and left them in a pile on the floor. The townspeople discover it and think that Sarah and Hannah have placed a curse on them as "witches."

They capture Hannah and plan to hang her in the morning. Sarah decides if they are going to hang her as a witch she might as well be a witch, so she goes out to the widow's hoping to get her book on black magic only to find her murdered and the book gone.  She discovers that Solomon Goode has it and had used it to summon devils to do his bidding. 

Sarah, now captured by Solomon, is accused of witchcraft. She will be hung. She promises Solomon that she will haunt him and his offspring until her innocence is proven. She exonerates Hannah so she won't hang, but is hung herself.  After she is dead, her friends come and dig her up and rebury her elsewhere in secret. 

Fear Street Part One: 1994, Part 2

The last part of this movie takes us back to 1994. Deena, now back to herself, knows everything. It was never Sarah Fier that had cursed the twin towns of Sunnyvale and Shadyside but the Goode family's deal with the Devils to be prosperous with the sacrifice of Shadysiders. They learn that they need to kill Sherif Goode.  Break the line and break the curse. The trouble is Goode has figured out they know.

They lure Goode and the resurrected killers out to the mall with more of Sam's blood. 

Not spoil more than I have; Deena gets to the Satanic altar and is caught by Sherrif Goode. They fight, and Goode falls into the pile of collected (and still living) organs. He begins to hallucinate about all the killers. While distracted, Deena kills him. With the Sherrif dead, the curse is broken. Sam is freed and suddenly crime begins happening in Suunyvale.

Sam comes out to her mother, and Josh finally meets the girl he had talking to online and everyone lives happily ever after.  That is until someone steals the satanic tome.

So this trilogy has pretty much everything this month's Challenge is looking for. First Time Watch, Summer Camp, Slasher, New Movie, We Are Weirdos, Teen Angst, Horror Comedy, Best Soundtrack (seriously 1994 and 1978 were both great), and Man is the Real Monster. So yeah. 

Plus they were all really good flicks, a lot of fun and each one captured their time periods and their genre's perfectly. 

The actors were all great, and I kinda hope we get to see Fear Street, Part 4 and more (there are like 100 of the Fear Street books by R. L. Stein).


October Horror Movie Challenge 2023
Viewed: 31
First Time Views: 21

31 Days of Halloween Movie Challenge



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