The City is one of contrasts and contradictions. Of gleaming skyscrapers from where the Trusts control every aspect of commerce and politics and governance, whilst the majority of the populace reside in crumbling, concrete tower blocks or alleyway-ridden rookeries. Of buildings without end and no city limits, yet few rarely travel beyond the confines of their community. Of the advanced technology that only the rich and powerful have access to versus the rickety, often make do devices that the masses have—the rusting machinery they have to work with in the factories, mills, workshops, and mines, the guttering, reeking fish oil lamps and flickering electrics with which they light their homes, and the dim televisions and squawking talkboxes they have for entertainment. Of the cleanliness of the rich and the churches versus the squalor of the slums and the streets. Of the humanity to be found there versus the inhumanity of the petty bylaws enforced by the authorities and the nightmares that stalk the streets—killers such as the Ticktock Man and the Iron Lady and the Shifted, strange entities barely whispered of in the darkest of corners of pubs and speakeasies. The City is divided by massive series of concentric canals, crossed mainly by skiffs due to the lack bridges, the iron for them going into the railway which clanks and groans its way around The City, policed heavily and often heavy-handedly by the Transit Militia. The City is a Dickensian nightmare filtered through the films Brazil, Delicatessen, and Dark City, where life is mean and paltry, but there are those that will stand up to the narrow-mindedness of the authorities, of the avariciousness of the Trusts, the viciousness of the gangs, and worse. They do this not for themselves, but for their corner and their community, even if it means causing trouble. This is the setting for A|State.
A|State was originally published by Contested Ground Studios in 2004 as a traditional roleplaying game that presented a fascinating setting, but unfortunately no real idea what it was about or what the players and their characters were supposed to do. A|State, Second Edition returns to the setting of The City and provides a reason to explore its dystopian dimensions as well as shifting to a more modern set of roleplaying mechanics that emphasise both player agency and its consequences. A|State, Second Edition is published by Handiwork Games and it uses the Forged in the Dark rules, first seen in Blades in the Dark, published by Evil Hat Productions in 2017. In A|State, Second Edition, the Player Characters are Troublemakers, who have banded together to form an Alliance, which seeks to protect and improve the Corner and its surrounding community that they call home. In the process, they will travel across The City, further than any other members of their community, discover secrets, and more importantly, in returning to the Corner, bring usually unwanted attention upon themselves and their community, and accrue trouble. The Corner itself is not predefined, but created collectively during the roleplaying game’s set-up process and through play, the players and their Troublemakers can expand and upgrade its features in ways which grant them further benefits whilst also having to protect the newly added Claims.
A Troublemaker in A|State has three Attributes and twelve Actions. The three Attributes are Insight, Prowess, and Resolve. These represent a Troublemaker’s ability to resist bad consequences. Each Attribute has four Action Ratings associated with it. Examine, Find, Scrounge, and Tinker for Insight; Fight, Sneak, Touch, and Wreck for Prowess; and Care, Command, Charm, and Persuade for Resolve. Action Ratings vary in value between zero and four. The value for Attributes are equal to the number of associated Action Ratings which have points in them and not the number points in the Action Ratings. A Troublemaker has an Origin, an Upbringing, and Faith; one or more special abilities; an Escape, such as Faith or Gambling, as means of relieving stress, but which can also become a Vice; and potentially one or more Trusted Allies. This is with another member of the Alliance, another Troublemaker, and must be agreed between the two Troublemakers and their players.
Troublemaker creation begins by selecting a Playbook. A|State gives seven Playbooks. These are the Stalwart, who uses politics to improve the Corner; the Dinginsmith, who uses small computing devices called dingins and other advanced technology not readily accessible to the general populace of The City; the Ghostfighter, a warrior renowned for his stealth and skill with the preternaturally sharp ceramic knives they wield and the scars from wounds closed by adhesive; the Lostfinder, revered for his ability to find things; the Mapmaker, turned to whenever an intermediary or dealmaker is required; the Sneakthief, who avoids confrontation and steals from the wealthy and the cruel; and the Stringer, citizen-journalist who feeds the constantly turning over media machine of The City. Each Playbook provides base values into two Action Ratings and a player assigns another four points. Each Playbook suggests where to assign them, but the player is free to decide. The player also selects a Special Ability, notes his Troublemaker’s special equipment, and rolls for Backing Faction, a faction in The city which supports the Troublemaker. The player though does not have to choose the standard version of each Playback, for all seven provide three alternatives and what to choose to create them. Thus, the alternatives to the Dinginsmith are the Wiretapper, who accesses The City’s communications for information; the Fulgurator, a member of the Fulgurator’s Guild and works with The City’s railway network; and the Scientist, who examines the nature of The City. Once a player has chosen his Troublemaker’s playback, he also adds Troublemaker’s Origin, Upbringing, Faith, and Escape.
Hope Botchlethorpe – Lostfinder
INSIGHT 2Examine 0 Find 2 Scrounge 2 Tinker 0
PROWESS 0Fight 0 Sneak 0 Touch 0 Wreck 0
RESOLVE 3Care 1 Command 0 Charm 1 Persuade 1
Special AbilityAntiquarian
Special ItemInvestigation Kit
Origin: Lower middle class, medium-sized businessUpbringing: ApprenticedFaith: Third Church of God the ArchitectEscape: GamblingBacking Faction: Professor Pohler’s Historical Institute
Once the players have their Troublemakers and their Alliance, they work together to create the Corner their Troublemakers are protecting. This is done by choosing a spot on the map of The City and then the Crossroads, the central meeting point for the Alliance, such as the unstable waiting room of an abandoned railway station or the dusty attic of a tax records storage depot. This is placed on one of the really quite lovely local maps which will become unique to the Troublemakers’ Alliance as the game progresses. The players select a Reputation, such as Ambitious or Rough, assigns points to its own associated Action Ratings, sets its Morale and Resources values, and adds two Qualities like Bombed Out or Towering. Factions, which can be a Trust, Government, Enforcement, Media, or Criminal, and range in Tier 0 or known on the block to Tier VI or guides the whole city, and take an interest in the Corner to provide potential allies and enemies. This includes the initial Claims that the Troublemakers will want to add to their Corner. Each faction will have its Faction Record which tracks it actions and influence on the Corner as well as NPCs that the Troublemakers can have relationships with. In general, Troublemaker creation is easier than Corner creation, but together their set-up process will take a session for their own.
Mechanically, A|State is quite simple. To have a Troublemaker undertake an action, his player decides on the action’s goal and the Game Master sets its associated risk and reward. The player will roll a number of six-sided dice equal to an Action Rating. Extra dice can be added and rolled if a fellow Troublemaker helps in the action, for suffering either grief or pushing the Troublemaker, and from Special Items and Special Abilities. Pushing the Troublemaker will cause him to suffer stress, whilst grief is narrative consequence, such as collateral damage, losing an item, pushing a Trouble Clock onwards, and so on. Once the dice have been rolled, the player selects the highest value rolled. If this is a six, the action is successful; if four or five, it is successful, but either imperfect or with an added complication; and on a one to three, it fails. Essentially, the equivalent of ‘Yes’, ‘Yes, but…’, and ‘No’. Further, the players collaborate with the Game Master to determine what happens and before the roll is made have the opportunity to manipulate any reward or risk, whether due to a Special Ability, pushing the Troublemaker, or pushing the reward at a cost of a bigger risk. This has its own Risk/Reward Grid for use in play.
Primary Rewards take the form of ticks on the Progress Clock towards the Alliance’s objectives, increasing the quality of an item or tool, or altering the scale of the action. Risks typically add ticks to the Threat Clock, but other Consequences can add complications to a situation, lose opportunities, and even harm the Troublemaker. The latter is how combat works in A|State and when a Troublemaker does suffer harm, he can either block it via any armour worn (after which the armour must be repaired) or he can resist using the associated Attribute. This inflicts Stress and if the Troublemaker takes too much Stress, he can suffer a Stress Condition such as Obsessed, Reckless, or Vicious. The Stress will need to be relieved either via the Troublemaker’s Escape or his letting his guard down, but this can leave him open to further trouble. It should be noted that the use of firearms in any situation always increases the nature of the risk associated with an action.
What is not made immediately clear is that mechanically, A|State is a player-facing roleplaying game. This means that throughout, the Game Master does not roll any dice. Thus, the player will not just be rolling to see if his Troublemaker succeeds or fails, but in some cases, whether an NPC succeeds or fails.
A|State is played in three phases—downtime play, the mission phase, and mission fallout. Missions are intentionally broad, such as Broker, Confront, Deliver, or Evade, and the players will work together to determine the nature of the mission and what it requires, but only to an extent. The aim here is to get to the point where the mission becomes risky and what Troublemakers now do matters. The downtime play is a period when the Alliance can recover from a previous mission, make some coin, engage in a community project, build trust, and so on. It also allows time for personal projects or private jobs. A Troublemaker can also pursue Hidden Agendas which can come into play through the factions whose backing they enjoy, but can suffer consequences if they do not purse an assigned Hidden Agenda.
There is really very good advice for the players and the Game Master, but the advice for the players does feel slightly hidden in the rulebook. For the Game Master, the advice on running A|State is extensive, beginning with a look at using the clock to track progress in a number of different aspects of The City and the campaign. These include Goal Clocks, Threat Clocks, and more. In the long term, the Danger Clock will track new problems and difficulties that the Troublemakers will face as it generates new Troubles for them. These feed into their own Trouble Engine, which tracks how a Trouble, which might be a change in the mood at the Corner or the disappearance of a contact or friend, changes and escalates, and how the factions might react in the meantime, if the Troublemakers do nothing.
The last third of A|State is devoted to describing The City itself. It never eases up on its extremes and its brutality, such as the Deathdealers patrolling after cold snaps for the dead who have died from hypothermia or been killed because they want or have access to the cold or the mikefighters which flit and dogfight in the skies above the city, piloted by children because of their size. Short sections break down aspects of The City such as weather, travel, law and order, technology and industry, and more, all with advice on how to use each of the sections. There is a wealth of detail here for the Game Master to bring colour and flavour into her portrayal of The City and that is before a series of two-page spreads detail the numerous neighbourhoods to found across The City. These include notable powers in each neighbourhood, what everyone knows, transport links, locations, what might be known on a Corner there, and ‘Faces in the Crowd’, NPCs that the Game Master can quickly bring into play. For example, Mire End is a large crime-ridden neighbourhood actively denied help by the nearby Three Canals Authority, slowly mouldering into the ground, and known for its for dampness due to its ruined drainage system and the fact that most of the population has turned to the Hohler Gang for help and work. Its main point of access is via the ancient, creaking chain ferry from Folly Hills district and the Mire End Terminus is one of the major buildings in the district. Even the mission from the Third Church is run down and poorly funded by the bishopric, whilst some of the Hohler affiliated gangs get by like everyone else, some want to buck the situation and will do anything to do that. The ‘Faces in the Crowd’ are Dandy, Fritillery, and Hoop, a trio of urchins that the Troublemakers might run into, often found snooping about and exploring the neighbourhood, much to the despair of Father Herbert at their Third Church Children’s Home. As a consequence, they probably know more than most about what is going on in Mire End.
In addition to detailing the various neighbourhoods of The City, A|State describes its various factions, from Trusts such as Arclight which sells military technology and hires out security forces and mercenaries and governing powers like the Lay Reserves Martial of the Third Church and The Transit Militia to unions such as The Venerable Society of Lock Keepers and criminal gangs such as The Third Syndicate whose assemblies can be found almost anywhere controlling whole districts through violence. Some of the mysteries of The City are detailed too, starting with The Shift, an event which changed the city, yet no one can agree on what it was, but many are sure that enabled The Shifted, monsters liked Sixfingers and Rotting Billies, to creep into The City. Other mysteries include The Bombardment, Lost Palaces, and even The City’s Edge, but again no-one can agree on what these are and were… Instead, A|State hints at options and leaves it to the Game Master to decide, or perhaps even leave it up to the players and their Troublemakers to discover and determine—if they can or even want to… There are no stats for The Shifted as there might be in another roleplaying game, but mechanically the threat they represent is going to be more narratively based and drawn from the Risks incurred on failed dice rolls.

Physically, A|State is very well presented. The artwork throughout is excellent, always focusing on the neighbourhoods of The City and their inhabitants rather than The City as a whole. The maps for developing and marking up a Corner have an engaging architectural feel to them, whilst the adverts, such as the one for a shoe store specialising in the footwear of the recently deceased, add verisimilitude and help pull the Game Master into the world of The City. That said, it does feel as it could have been better organised for ease of use and the index is not quite as useful as it could be. What is missing is examples. There are examples throughout the roleplaying game, but it never feels as if there are enough and it never feels as if they provide enough detail to help the Game Master understand how A|State works with any ease.
The original A|State was a straightforward and easy to understand roleplaying game. A|State, Second Edition is not and from the start it is going to demand a lot from both the Game Master and her players in creating the Corner and engaging in Missions, whilst the Game Master has lot of tools and details and especially clocks to keep track of as play progresses. Forged in the Dark veterans will have no issue with either, but anyone new to it, will need a gentle ramp up into play. That said, the advice for both the Game Master and the players is very good and will definitely help the Game Master understand the game and how it is played. It is still not going to be easy though.
In shifting to the mechanics of Forged in the Dark, what A|State, Second Edition does is provide the tools and means for the players and their Troublemakers to not just explore the baroque, dystopian Dickensian contrasts of The City, but make a part it of their own and something to care about and invest in. It puts giving the players and their Troublemakers a stake in their part of The City and its future first and foremost, and provides the tools for the Game Master to help the players tell their Troublemakers’ stories and that of their Corner. A|State, Second Edition is a demanding return for a setting that showed promise, but with that return and the commitment it asks for, A|State, Second Edition brings The City to life like never before.

The majority of the roleplaying that we do involves heroes in fantastic and fantasy situations. A mighty warrior holding off a horde of orcs. A powerful wizard opening a portal to another world. A skilled star pilot threading his way through an asteroid field in pursuit of pirates. A wily thief sneaking into the headquarters of a bank to break into the vault. A priest forcing back the undead through the power of faith alone. A superspy confronting a supervillain in his volcano secret base. A telepath with two heads exploring the ruins of the long past in a post-apocalyptic future. All of these situations are familiar from our roleplaying. What though if we could roleplay heroes in situations that are fantastic, but grounded in reality rather than fantasy? What if we could roleplay heroes who help others and come to the rescue of those caught in situations beyond their ability to cope with, let alone survive? Fight fires before they spread? Search mountainsides for climbers and skiers caught in avalanches? Dig into earthquake zones to find the trapped? Range across flood zones to get to those still caught? Research outbreaks of deadly diseases before they can infect more? As we have seen on the screen—big and small—all of these situations can form the basis for exciting and dramatic storytelling where the protagonists rush into danger to save others, but curiously, not in roleplay.
First Responders presents the means to roleplay exciting situations in the contemporary world where highly skilled men and women deal with emergencies and disasters—fires, floods, volcanos, earthquakes, pandemics, and even nuclear disasters. The only other roleplaying game to deal with this is Deep7’s Disaster! 1PG, but that put the Player Characters at the heart of the disaster and has them survive it rather than deal with its consequences. In First Responders, the Player Characters are ordinary men and women, but they are trained as firefighters, medics, search and rescue specialists, scientists, HAZMAT specialists, counsellors, Incident Commanders, and more. They are literally the first to respond, and in the default setting, do so as members of Sovereign Agency of Veteran Emergency Responders—or SAVER—on an international scale. The players will take on multiple characters, troupe style, drawing from a rooster of Player Characters, each with different skills, abilities, and areas of expertise, in order to ensure that the right personnel are assigned to deal a particular situation. Alternatively, First Responders can be played as a series of one-shots, with different teams still tackling different situations, but the roleplaying experience providing a genre cleanser, a change from the more fantastical fare that a roleplaying group might roleplay. First Responders is published by Monte Cook Games and is a genre supplement for the Cypher System.
As a supplement, First Responders fairly zips along, racing through its rules and advice in smart order before providing multiple scenarios that deal with a range of threats and disasters in a good third of the book. It begins though, by explaining what the Player Characters do as first responders and giving advice to the Game Master on how to run a First Responders game effectively. This means eschewing realism, or rather eschewing too much realism, whether particular techniques or terminology used by first responders, or even scientific detail—note, not science itself, but overly encumbering play with it. Everyone, players and Game Master, need to set the mood by accepting that disaster scenarios invariably mean they the first responders are against the clock and they need to act urgently, and the first responder Player Characters work together to co-ordinate a plan and then execute it. Also discussed are the types of actions that the first responders can take, and whilst they are often very physical in nature and not combat actions per se, they still involve the first responders battling against a danger, such as a fire or rising waters. That danger is actually defined in the same way as creatures and monsters are in the Cypher System, but instead of Health the danger has Threat. Thus, a first responder can ‘Suppress’ a fire or flood, to reduce its Threat; he can ‘Quell’ it to temporarily subdue or stop its progress; Vent’ a flood or fire or alter the flow of larva, to redirect the danger and effectively hinder it; and ‘Contain’ a danger to stop its spread. Other actions include the more obvious ‘Detect’, ‘Rescue’, and ‘Heal’. What have here though, is an adjustment in terminology for many of the actions that the first responders will be undertaking, from the more standard actions that Player Characters would undertake in a more fantastical Cypher System setting. There is advice here also, on consent, on the dangerous and often deadly nature of the First Responders setting, and the use or not of gallows humour. It is all good, solid advice.
In terms of what a player roleplays, First Responders explains how to use the “I am an adjective noun who verbs” phrase to create Player Characters, noting how the more fantastical language of the many options in terms of Descriptors and Foci can be applied to a real-world setting like that of First Responders. For example, “I am Brash Warrior who Stands Like a Bastion” can be a firefighter or a rescuer and “I am a Careful Explorer who Runs Away”, a volcanologist or a nuclear scientist. This does take some adjustment and some interpretation upon the part of player and Game Master, but the results are no less exciting or heroic. Useful skills are listed, as are numerous roles, whilst the Responder is a character Type—like Warrior or Adept from the Cypher System core rules—specific to First Responders. The new Foci, such as ‘Battles the Blaze’, ‘Controls the Scene’, and ‘Shuts Death’s Door’ are also specific to First Responders, but could find their way into settings. The focus of the equipment section is mostly on protective gear, much of which will actually be part of the first responders’ role, so there is very much not the need to go looking for bigger and better equipment as play. There are also few weapons in the traditional sense, just the knife and fireman’s axe, whilst the backpack pump, the charged fire hose, and so on, are treated as weapons because they are used to fight or battle the elements of the emergencies.
For the Game Master there is excellent advice on the nature of a First Responders campaign and how to run one. Most notably, the Game Master is expected to proactive in telling her players what their first responders know, since after all, they are trained in their respective fields. Introduced here is the ‘Challenge System’ as a means to present the emergencies and disasters as obstacles to be overcome in both dealing with them and the dangers that they place NPCs and the first responders in. This will often require the putting together of an Amalgamated Goal, representing a number of objectives that need to be overcome in order achieve it. Some of the dangers can be unexpected and these can be handled through Game Master Intrusions, the means of presenting greater challenges to the Player Characters in the Cypher System. Game Master Intrusions are also used to drive the escalating nature of the emergencies, known as ‘Disaster Mode’. In standard play of the Cypher System, and initially in First Responders, a mandatory Game Master Intrusion occurs when a player rolls a one on the die. In ‘Disaster Mode’, when this occurs, not only does the Game Master make an Intrusion, the range under which a mandatory Game Master Intrusion can occur also increases. Initially at one, the first time it occurs, it rises to two, the second time, it rises to three, and so on. A list of Game Master Intrusions is given here, but there are also plenty throughout the book in its sidebars. First Responders also encourages something that runs counter to the age-old advice of ‘Never split the party’, but here it is necessary. The first responders will be facing multiple, often separate difficulties, which need to be dealt with simultaneously rather than sequentially. Lastly, it suggests bringing them back together to deal with mundane issues, such cleaning equipment or aiding a friend or helping an organisation. In this, it neatly models the epilogue of an episode of a television series, where the characters have a chance to relax and recover from the dangers that they faced in the field. It also points to the one of the origins for the supplement.
In terms of disasters, First Responders explores and categorises six—fires, floods, earthquakes, nuclear disasters, pandemics, and volcanos. In each it explores the danger they represent and gives samples of each model different danger levels. Thus, for fire, there is a Small Fire, a Standard Fire, a Demanding Fire, a Difficult Fire, a Challenging Fire, and an Intimidating Fire. Each is treated like a monster with a Task Difficulty which the player must roll against to affect it when it is his first responder’s turn to act and again when trying to avoid its effects, whether that is actual damage from the fire or being engulfed by flood waters. As mentioned before, a disaster like this will have Threat which must be reduced rather than Health, though not always, as for example, flood dangers have no threat at all. First Responders does this for six of its disaster types. It provides enough detail for the Game Master to use SAVER as an organisation for her campaign, and then suggestions to use each of the six disaster types in other genres. These are thumbnail descriptions only, designed to give the Game Master ideas. As well as giving sample NPCs, First Responders suggests new Cyphers that can be used in the genre in addition to those found in the Cypher System core book. These are all subtle Cyphers, like ‘Big Breath’ or ‘Dumb Luck’, all entirely in keeping with the non-fantastical nature of the genre.
Penultimately, the Scenarios chapter provides situations which both SAVER and the first responders can come to the rescue. These all have a challenge rating of four and vary from a Collapsed Motel for earthquakes to a crashed transport truck for nuclear disasters. All are nicely detailed, with details of their Amalgamated Goals, encounters, challenges, and Game Master Intrusions, and more. Any one of them could provide a solid single session’s worth of play and if used as part of a SAVER campaign provide episodes for that. Lastly, First Responders does include a glossary of emergency responders’ terms and some sample first responders reader for play.
Physically, First Responders is very presented. Both artwork and cartography are excellent and the writing is engaging, helping to bring exciting if mundane action to life and present as something that is playable.
Even if its mechanics would not work in other roleplaying games, the advice and the situations described is so good that it actually makes First Responders the key sourcebook to opening up the no less heroic world of emergency response teams to roleplaying in general. It also works as a sourcebook for running a television style series-style campaign based around hospitals and firefighting teams, perhaps with a little bit of Soap Opera thrown in! In whatever way it is used, First Responders provides everything the Game Master needs to run an exciting and challengingly heroic campaign in the world that they already know and see in the daily news broadcasts. With First Responders, you can be heroes and it does not have to involve magic.

The Phoenix Initiative is a scenario for Traveller. It takes place on the world of Wochiers in the Regina Subsector of the Spinward Marches Sector and involves the classic set-up of research facility not having been heard from in a while and the Player Characters being hired to investigate. It ideally requires the Player Characters to basic training in both weapons and vacc suit, and if they do possess a starship, that it should be capable of Jump-2. The scenario includes a set of eight pre-generated Player Characters, four of which between them have the skills necessary to operate a starship as well as one of them owning a an A2 Type Far Trader. Thus, if the Player Characters own their own starship, the minimum number of Player Characters is four, but there is greater flexibility if they do not. That said, the scenario does allow the Player Characters’ employer to loan them a starship if they do not have one and to prevent piracy only a few locations are programmed into the ship’s computer to use the Jump drive. Both the mechanics and the plot of The Phoenix Initiative are straightforward enough that running it using Traveller, Classic Traveller, or Cepheus Deluxe Enhanced Edition are all easy enough to do.

The Phoenix Initiative is written by Carl Terence Vandal and begins with the Player Characters on Regina in the Spinward Marches Sector and short of funds having paid their monthly mortgage payment on their starship. In need of work, they hear of an employment opportunity with Phoenix Enterprises LIC. The company is concerned about the loss of contact from one of its research facilities and will pay handsomely for the situation to be investigated and for the safe return of the staff at the facility. The facility is on Wochiers, a nearby world declared a TAS Amber Zone due to its inhospitable environment which requires enhanced vacc suits. Wochiers is primarily known as a source of crystals, the best of which are used to enhance the performance of both starship computers and starship lasers. As the Player Characters will discover, the Law Level on Wochiers is very high and access limited, done primarily via shuttlecraft rather than starships. So, the Player characters will have to dock at the high port, and then travel down to the surface, the journey involving an engaging recognition of local customs at either end.

The journey from Wochiers Landing to the research facility is relatively straightforward—a week’s drive across the planetary surface in specially adapted ATVs. The main problem on the journey will be the environment rather than planetary species, which are for the most part passive creatures unless provoked or a lone traveller is caught outside in his vacc suit. This all sets up a mystery for the Player Characters when they do reach the research facility. There are signs of a struggle almost everywhere, a mixture of gunfire and animal attacks. The question is, what happened here and are there any survivors? Was the gunfire the result of the animal attacks or is something else going on? The Player Characters will find out, but will also find themselves being stalked by something else in the facility… This may lead to a frantic firefight…

The research facility is described in some details with various skill checks thrown in to determine what happens and what happened from room to room. The floorplans of the facility and its illustrations are decent, and the scenario is supported by a set of good Library Data entries.

The author of The Phoenix Initiative commits one cardinal sin. He does explain to the Game Master what is going on in the scenario, but leaves it right until the very end for the NPCs to do it. Which leads to a very frustrating read for the Game Master as she wonders exactly what is going on and in effect, has to find out when the Player Characters do.

Physically, The Phoenix Initiative is disappointing. It needs a good edit, it is often unnecessarily repetitive, and the map of the subsector is bitmapped and there are no names or locations on the world map. So, the Player Characters will have no idea where their journey on planet starts or ends.

The set-up in The Phoenix Initiative is incredibly familiar. A distant research base. All contact lost with the research base. Itinerant trouble-shooters hired to solve the problem. The base is home to an alien (or not) stalking and slashing the survivors after an accident. Essentially this is Death Station from Traveller Double Adventure 3: Death Station/The Argon Gambit writ large. Well, not entirely. The primary plot for it is, but the secondary plot—which does not really become apparent until the epilogue—is more interesting as it involves Duke Norris and his family, and it sets up the sequels to this scenario, Manticore and The Mariposa Affair.

The Phoenix Initiative is not a bad scenario, but it is not a good one either. It requires development in terms of presentation overall and presentation of its information. Certainly, with the completion of the latter, it might avoid—or at least ameliorate—the Game Master reading through the scenario and getting the feeling of déjà vu. However, The Phoenix Initiative does show potential in terms of presentation and detail and once past the all too familiar plot, there is promise of something more interesting to come.

The Bone Alchemist is an adventure for Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition. Written and published by Gaz Bowerbank—one half of the podcast, What Would The Smart Party Do?—it is designed for use with First Level Player Characters and takes place in a pseudo-Arabian Nights setting. The author suggests two possible initial locations. One is the city of Calimport in the Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting, the other is the great port city of Pylas Maradal in Valenar in the Eberron setting, but if not, the scenario is easily adapted to a Swords & Sorcery-style setting of the Dungeon Master’s choice. Wherever the scenario is set, a king and royal family rules the city inviolate, kept both safe and isolated from city life and any of its unpleasantness by a mixture of the royal guard and secret police. This includes the young nine-year-old prince, Masoud, whose pet pseudodragon has died, and with him unprepared accept the situation, merely thinking the beast asleep, Zoya, his mother has sought a solution to the problem and is prepared to spend deeply from the king’s purse. Unfortunately, their isolated lives have left both Zoya and Masoud gullible and thus ready to accept the ‘help’ and ‘advice’ of any of the city’s charlatans, tricksters, and opportunists. As The Bone Alchemist begins, both prince and his mother are missing, and the Royal Guard is desperate to find them. Ideally before someone tells the king…

The Bone Alchemist begins with the Player Characters in the city, in a tavern, come to meet a contact who may be able to help them find work. The scenario provides adventure hooks by Player Character Background—Acolyte, Charlatan, Noble, Sage, Soldier, and so on—to suggest why they might be there and why they might want to make contact with Equitable Ehsan, one of the city’s many wheelers and dealers. They know to meet him in a cantina, Olidammara’s Rest, which is where they find themselves in the scenario’s opening scene. In true fantasy fashion, this develops into a brawl and as a consequence, the Player Characters are either pushed or pulled into the scenario’s plot. This takes them into the bazaar where they haggle with a merchant or two, one of whom is perhaps too helpful, but will provide the Player Characters with a device which will enable them to track Prince Masoud, his mother Zoya, and his bodyguard, Atul. The device first points down to the beach where the Player Characters can gain further help, but not before delving into the first of the scenario’s two dungeons, but a dungeon with a difference! This is inside the body of a giant kraken, which a local gang is plundering for its precious alchemical components. Descending into its foul and foetid depths is optional, but doing so is to the Player Characters’ advantage. It is a ripe and bilious experience, thankfully short, but engagingly described and utterly in contrast with the rest of the scenario.

The other locations for the scenario include atop a dragon turtle, which is a great scene for a fight, and lastly, the dungeon of the true villain at the heart of the scenario, the Bone Alchemist herself. This is more like a traditional dungeon, but enlivened by some excellent descriptions and an air of decay and disregard that lingers in each and every one of its caves. Ultimately, the scenario will end with some home-truths for prince Masoud, who may have to grow up just a little, and the Player Characters either heroes or in further trouble. Either way, the scenario is supported with several hooks for the Dungeon Master to develop sequels of her own.

There is no denying that The Bone Alchemist is full of fun and inventive scenes, whether it is the brawl between the Talons, the local gang, and the palace guard in a tavern with the Player Characters caught in the middle, having to delve into the insides of the corpse of a kraken, fighting atop a dragon turtle, or fighting an undead giant goat who has already bleated out a warning! There are also pleasing descriptions for each of the scenario’s NPCs, accompanied by some flavour text that imparts what they might and how they might say it, instantly granting the Dungeon Master a feel for the NPC. Further, the author gives every scene a table of random events that enhance the action in that scene. For example, in the opening scene in Olidammara’s Rest, there is a table of rumours to glean and a table of events to throw into the combat, such as “The barkeep smashes someone over the head with a bottle from behind. One Talon or guard drops to 0 hp.” and “Equitable Ehsan appears on hands and knees, trying to crawl his way out of the carnage.” Of course, these are clichés, swiped from any one of a number of films, but they help set the tone of the brawl and thus the scene, as well as adding an element of humour, almost winking knowingly at the players in their familiarity. The combat events and random events tables are in general inventive and more tailored to their particular locations.

Yet in places the writing could be stronger, for example, the location descriptions vary in quality and ease of use. For example, the opening scene in the cantina, Olidammara’s Rest is very much underwritten in comparison, for example, to the description given of the bazaar, which is rich in detail and flavour. The Dungeon Master may want to prepare some better descriptions—the equivalent of her own ‘purple prose’—to help set the scene for her players and their characters. To be clear, not every description suffers from this, the majority of them being expressive and great scene-setting. Similarly, the villainess of the scenario, the Bone Alchemist, is fiercely underwritten and really lacks motivation.

Physically, The Bone Alchemist is clean and tidy, and well laid out. The maps are decent and the artwork also good. Throughout there are notes for the Dungeon Master which add detail and flavour. Stats are provided only for two NPCs and monsters in the scenario. The Dungeon Master will need to provide the rest, but links in the PDF connect to DnDByeond.com and the right stats in each case.

The Bone Alchemist is straightforward and easy to prepare and run or even adapt to the retroclone of your choice. Similarly, it is easy to add to any Arabian Nights or Swords & Sorcery-style setting or campaign. Above all, The Bone Alchemist provides some entertaining set scenes backed up with evocative detail and description that will help the Dungeon Master set these scenes and then bring both their action and their NPCs to life.

The gaming magazine is dead. After all, when was the last time that you were able to purchase a gaming magazine at your nearest newsagent? Games Workshop’s White Dwarf is of course the exception, but it has been over a decade since Dragon appeared in print. However, in more recent times, the hobby has found other means to bring the magazine format to the market. Digitally, of course, but publishers have also created their own in-house titles and sold them direct or through distribution. Another vehicle has been Kickststarter.com, which has allowed amateurs to write, create, fund, and publish titles of their own, much like the fanzines of Kickstarter’s ZineQuest. The resulting titles are not fanzines though, being longer, tackling broader subject matters, and more professional in terms of their layout and design.

—oOo—
The first thing you notice about Dungeons & Dragons Adventurer Issue 3 is not the free gift that comes with the issue, but the price. It is almost double that of Dungeons & Dragons Adventurer Issue 2 and almost four times that of Dungeons & Dragons Adventurer Issue 1. This though is not unexpected. Published by Hachette Partworks Ltd., Dungeons & Dragons Adventurer is after all, a partwork. A partwork is an ongoing series of magazine-like issues that together form a completed set of a collection or a reference work. In the case of Dungeons & Dragons Adventurer, it is designed to introduce the reader to the world and the play of Dungeons & Dragons, specifically, Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition. With the tag line, ‘Learn – Play – Explore’, over the course of multiple issues the reader will learn about Dungeons & Dragons, how it is played and what options it offers, the worlds it opens up to explore, and support this with content that can be brought to the table and played. Over the course of eighty issues, it will create a complete reference work for Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition, provide scenarios and adventures that can be played, and support it with dice, miniatures, and more. The first issue of any partwork will always be inexpensive, the second issue more expensive, and the third and subsequent issues full price. The first issue, if not the second, is a loss leader, designed to pull the buyer in, and hopefully engage him enough to purchase further issues or even subscribe. So it is with Dungeons & Dragons Adventurer.

Dungeons & Dragons Adventurer Issue 3 does, of course, include a free gift. This is a set of character miniatures, essentially done in full colour on acrylic sheets. The four correspond to the four Player Characters given characters in Dungeons & Dragons Adventurer Issue 1. Thus they include a Human Rogue, a Hill Dwarf Cleric, a Wood Elf Fighter, and a Halfling Wizard. The tallest stands about twenty millimetres tall and each comes with a clear plastic base. They are easy to assemble and perfectly serviceable. It is a pity that there are no tokens included to represent any of the monsters that have appeared in each of the three issues of the partwork to date.
Issues of Dungeons & Dragons Adventurer contain sections dedicated to the seven gameplay elements—‘Sage Advice’, ‘Character Creation’, ‘The Dungeon Master’, ‘Spellcasting’, ‘Combat’, ‘Encounters’, and ‘Lore’—of Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition. Dungeons & Dragons Adventurer Issue 3 focuses on just three of these—‘Sage Advice’, ‘Character Creation’, and ‘Lore’, although it does also include an ‘Encounter’ which is exclusive to the partwork. The ‘Sage Advice’ looks at the one thing and explains how it works. Or rather several things and explains how they work. These are ‘Conditions’ which covers Blinded, Charmed, Frightened, Restrained, and more. These are clearly and simply explained.
‘Character Creation’ covers several background aspects to the process. ‘Introduction to Skills’ provides exactly that along with an explanation of skill proficiencies and it is accompanied by ‘Skills Explained’, which details each of the skills in Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition. Unlike in the previous issues where only the one is detailed; Dungeons & Dragons Adventurer Issue 3 describes two species. One is the ‘Elves’, the other is the ‘Halflings’. For the former, various Mythical Lineages are mentioned for Elves in Faerûn, such as winged Avariel and the shape changing Lythari, along with the Wood Elves, Sun Elves, Moon Elves, and Drow. Also given is some background to the arrival of the Elves in Faerûn and the cause of the Crown wars. Similar treatment is accorded to the latter, though the Halflings will feel much the same as in other fantasy settings.
The Wizard is the subject of much of the rest of the issue. ‘Wizard’ provides description of the Class, what Wizards do, their desire for knowledge, the importance of their spellbooks, the various schools of magic. Its companion piece is ‘Wizard Features’. Or rather, ‘Wizard Feature’, for whilst the Wizard cannot necessarily do quite as much as other Classes, this article looks at just the one, which is its spellcasting ability. Thus its looks at how the Spell Attack Bonus and the Spell Save DC works for the Wizard and then how a Wizard’s spellbook is used, how Arcane Recovery works, and what cantrips are. In comparison to the ‘Rogue Features’ article from Dungeons & Dragons Adventurer Issue 2, which just looked at the Backstab feature, ‘Wizard Features’ does not feel as one-note. For although it is covering the one feature, that is, spellcasting, there are several aspects to its subject, it is talking about more than the one thing. On the downside, it does feel more technical and of course, it is. Learning and casting spells is always going to be more technical than stabbing someone in the back. 
Penultimately, as is now traditional in the partwork, the ‘Lore’ section proves to the shortest section in Dungeons & Dragons Adventurer Issue 3. ‘The Red Wizards’ continues the issue’s theme of wizards by examining the primary wizarding threat of the Forgotten Realms. This includes a description of their towering plateau home of Thay with its volcanically ashen skies, their lich leader, Szass Tam, explains what a lich is, and notes how Thay interacts with other nations, and in particular, how Red Wizards explore the surrounding lands in search of power and influence. It is a solid overview that nicely prepares the Dungeon Master for the last part of the issue.
As has also become traditional, the last part of Dungeons & Dragons Adventurer Issue 3 includes an encounter that at six pages long, is the longest section in the issue. In keeping with the issue’s wizardly theme, the encounter, ‘Adventure 1 – 3 The Tower of Iron Will’, not only involves a wizard, it involves one of the infamous Red Wizards of Thay! As with other encounters in the partwork, it is set in and around the village of Phandalin, in the Forgotten Realms, more recently detailed in the campaign, Phendelver and Below: The Shattered Obelisk. The Player Characters are hired by Sister Garaele, an Elf Cleric of Tymora, who maintains a temple of luck and good fortune in the village. A few days ago, she sent a scout, Naivara Rothenel, to investigate an observatory in the mountains nearby where she knew a Red Wizard had taken up residence. She wanted to know if the Red Wizard posed a threat to Phandalin and the surrounding region. Unfortunately, Naivara Rothenel has not returned and now Sister Garaele wants to find out what has happened to her. The encounter proper begins outside the observatory. The building consists of just eight locations, all quite detailed and all quite eerie, dark, and gloomy as it appears to have been abandoned. There is a small mystery here to be solved and a fight or two to be had, and the tone of the encounter is creepy and weird, but quite constrained. Since Dungeons & Dragons Adventurer Issue 3 was published in October prior to Halloween, the ghostly nature of the encounter feels timely and appropriate.
Physically, Dungeons & Dragons Adventurer Issue 3 is very well presented, in full colour using the Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition trade dress and lots and lots of Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition artwork. So, the production values are high, colourful, and the writing is supported with lots of ‘Top Tip’ sections. The result is that Dungeons & Dragons Adventurer Issue 3 is as physically engaging as the first two issues, but the glued together spine and disparate nature of the contents highlight how the partwork is designed to be pulled apart and its pages slotted into the binders that will be available for Dungeons & Dragons Adventurer as a whole.
Now that Dungeons & Dragons Adventurer has reached its standard price, the question of whether it offers good value for money is difficult one to answer. Given their cheaper prices, the first two issues undoubtedly did, especially Dungeons & Dragons Adventurer Issue 1. Of course, price was always going to rise. This is how partworks work. So undoubtedly, Dungeons & Dragons Adventurer Issue 3 does not offer as much good value for money as either Dungeons & Dragons Adventurer Issue 1 or Dungeons & Dragons Adventurer Issue 2. Yet what it does offer is a reasonable set of plastic miniatures, some solid and useful information if you are new to Dungeons & Dragons, and an encounter that can be run in a couple of hours involving five people at a price less than that of a cinema ticket. In addition, it is strongly themed, from looking at Player Character Wizards and enemy Wizards to facing one of them in the issue’s encounter. And if the players have seen the film, Dungeons & Dragons: No Honour Among Thieves, they get the added bonus of facing a Red Wizard of Thay, so they get to be like the heroes they saw on screen. Further, the encounter, ‘Adventure 1 – 3 The Tower of Iron Will’ is exclusive to Dungeons & Dragons Adventurer and it does tie in with the campaign, Phendelver and Below: The Shattered Obelisk. So, there is value there if you look for it, and of course, it has to be remembered that Dungeons & Dragons Adventurer is not aimed at the veteran Dungeons & Dragons player or Dungeon Master, but those new to the roleplaying game and those wanting to learn at a gentler pace. For the veteran Dungeons & Dragons player or Dungeon Master, the extras like the miniatures in this issue and exclusivity of the encounter may well appeal to the collector.
Overall, Dungeons & Dragons Adventurer Issue 3 is better than you might think. It still feels expensive for what get, but for learning the world’s most popular roleplaying game at a stately pace with a gift thrown in, it is worth looking at.
Where Dungeons & Dragons Adventurer Issue 1 was undoubtedly great value for money, Dungeons & Dragons Adventurer Issue 2 does not represent as good value as that first issue did. Which is to be expected. This is how a partwork works. For the prospective Dungeon Master, the encounter, ‘Adventure 1 – 2 The Forgotten Vault’ is a decent enough continuation of ‘Adventure 1 – 1 King of the Hill’ from Dungeons & Dragons Adventurer Issue 1, especially if added to the Phandelver and Below – The Shattered Obelisk campaign. However it is used, the encounter at least offers a couple of hours’ worth of play. In fact, an experienced Dungeon Master could run both encounters in the space of an evening or afternoon. Overall, Dungeons & Dragons Adventurer Issue 2 is a good continuation of Dungeons & Dragons Adventurer Issue 1, but not as good as Dungeons & Dragons Adventurer Issue 1.

 October was my time to host the RPG Blog Carnival. This year my topic was Horrors, Gods, and Monsters. For this, I did a lot of postings about my Black Forest Mythos set of gods and monsters.

I did not get through all my Gods and Monsters so I am going to keep on going.

But there were others that participated as well.

The Ideocron of The Oracular Somnambulist had Spooky Scary Skeletons! with tables to make your skeletons more spooky and interesting.

Codex Anathema always has good stuff. Their entry covered "Horrors, Gods and Monsters" AND they helped me practice my Spanish. ¡Gracias!

Sea of Stars gave us a new monster, the Thornkin.  You know I love new monsters.

Seed of Worlds expands on their petty gods with d8 natures of this quasi-godlike entity. Tables for your OSR (or really any) game.

Stuffed Crocodile, one I have been lurking at for a bit for their Dark Eye content, gives us a new monster, Wiedergänger. This one will be a lot of fun to use!

Finally, we have V Donnut Valley. We get a monster and a god.  Not to mention that they are hosting the November Blog Carnival, Let’s Party! Festivals and ceremonies! I will certainly have to find something for my group of gods here.

I hope you enjoyed all these entries and the ones I did! Looking forward to participating again next year.

The party reaches Encounter Area #2 of this maze. They encounter a Purple Worm.

Note: One of my desires here is to have some "classic" Monster Manual monsters here. With some tweaks here and there.

Well...not so much of a hangover, really. Covid-19 still has me down (I tested positive again just a bit ago).

October Movie Challenge

Follow Timothy's board October Horror Movie Challenge on Pinterest.

Last year I said I'd hit over 500 by this year. Well...I was not expecting to get sick so I am seven short. Too bad really. It would have been nice to hit that 500-movie mark. 

RPG Blog Carnival

I'll get a wrap-up of this this week (or next). I am going to do more of these gods and get a recap of what others have posted as well.

 Opening the large iron doors from Level 10, the party walks through an open expanse. In front of them is a large stone archway flanked on either side by two large gargoyles (the mundane sort) with burning braziers at their feet. When the party gets close, the braziers alight. The gargoyles then recite the following:

In shadows deep, where bravery has led,Adventurers with hearts of courage bred,Before you lies a path of chilling dread,The Labyrinth of Terror, where fear's thread.

You've ventured far, your courage on display,With every step, you've faced the darkest fray,But now, heed well the words I must convey,For in this maze, only the strongest may.

The Vampire Queen, her power bound in night,Within these walls, she plots her vile delight,Turn back, dear souls, before the fading light,For wisdom now demands you take your flight.

The bravest, strongest, wisest shall endure,In this dread maze, where terrors still obscure,In unity, your fate you must secure,Or face the Queen, with darkness to ensure.

The party stands before the entrance to the Labyrinth of Terror.

The walls are made of a uniform gray stone that seems to move with distorted faces out of the corner of the eye. Looking at them directly though shows only gray stone. The hallways are 25 ft apart, the ceiling is 50ft high. The walls run from the floor to the ceiling. The walls can't be broken down. Any damage appears to repair itself once the party looks away.

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This month will the Labyrinth of Terror. Instead of a series of rooms there are marked encounter areas the party may or may not find. I'll detail each encounter area.

Here are the Encounter Areas.

Monsters are tied to their areas by magical compulsion. Suitable prey and food is teleported in from parts (and persons) unknown. They are under a curse so they never age.

And this is the correct path out.

 Still down with Covid. So, I only have about one movie left in me. Tonight's topic is "All Hallow's Eve" and there were a bunch of movies I wanted to watch. But in the end I landed on another one I had wanted to see for a bit. Thankfully it also takes place on Halloween.

Last Night in Soho

Matt Smith, Anya Taylor-Joy, and Thomasin McKenzie as the stars? Dianna Rigg and Terrance Stamp as special guest stars? Yeah, you can see why I wanted to see it.

Thomasin McKenzie plays Eloise "Ellie" Turner. A nice girl who wants to be a fashion designer. She lives with her grandmother, loves music and fashion from the 1960s, oh, and she sees the ghost of her dead mother ever so often.  Ellie gets accepted to the London College of Fashion in London and it is obvious that this little Cornish girl is not as sophisticated as her peers.  Uncomfortable with all the partying and her roommate bringing home guys she seeks out an apartment for rent from old Ms. Collins (Dianna Rigg).  

Soon Ellie starts having visions. Very, very detailed visions of the life of a girl her age in the 1960s, Sandie played by the always amazing Anya Taylor-Joy. Ellie meets Jack, played with fantastic creepiness by Matt Smith, who wants to help her achieve her dreams of singing on stage. 

Ellie wakes up and begins having trouble determining what is real and what isn't. She also starts seeing an older man (Terrance Stamp) everywhere who seems to know a lot about her. 

Soon Ellie's visions are getting more and more violent. Jack is not Sandie's manager but her pimp. Each vision is getting worse to the point where she she sees Sandie and Jack fighting in the same room she is now staying in. Ellie is convinced that Jack killed Sandie and goes looking in the archives for her. But she all she finds are more and more ghosts of her former Johns.  She tries to tell the police, but they think she is crazy.

She confronts the old man, who seems to have known Sandie and Ellie thinks is Jack. But after he is hit by a car we learn he had been a Vice Cop back in the 1960s. Ellie soon realizes that she had seen him, through Sandie's eyes.

Deciding she has had enough Ellie wants out of the apartment, she goes back and asks her friend John (Michael Ajao, as maybe one of the few decent people here) to wait for her while she gets her things.  Ms Collins is waiting for her and offers her a cup of tea. We learn that Ms Collins is in fact Sandie. She was killed, she was the one doing the killings and she hid all the bodies in the floorboards of her home.  The ghosts have been coming to Ellie to ask for help.

In the end we see Ellie has completed her designs and has a fashion show where her grandmother and John come. Sandie is doing better, but she is still seeing the ghost of her mother and now of Sandie as well.

Among other things this was a great little thriller and mystery.  It was Diana Rigg's last role.

The soundtrack is quite amazing.  A great spooky ghost story.

HAPPY HALLOWEEN!

October Horror Movie Challenge 2023
Viewed: 35
First Time Views: 23

 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

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

• One Man's God Special: Syncretism Part 3, the Roman-Norse Pantheon
• The Monsters
• My overview and rules for these postings
• Dökkálfar and Ljósálfar
• Alp
• Die Hüne
• Jötunar
• Hautveränderer
• Heuler
• Draugr
• The Gods
• Unser Vater, Father of the Gods
• Sisters of the Dawn, Liebhaberin and Ôstara
• The Mother Goddesses Herde Oberin, Mutter Natur, and Großmutter
• The Divine Twins
• Hüne Vater, Großvater, and Großmutter
• Ides, Demi-Goddess of Protection and War
• Helga, Goddess of Magic, Ghosts, and Witchcraft

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

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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.

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

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?

 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.

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.

 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.

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

I 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

• One Man's God Special: Syncretism Part 3, the Roman-Norse Pantheon
• The Monsters
• My overview and rules for these postings
• Dökkálfar and Ljósálfar
• Alp
• Die Hüne
• Jötunar
• Hautveränderer
• Heuler
• The Gods
• Unser Vater, Father of the Gods
• Sisters of the Dawn, Liebhaberin and Ôstara
• The Mother Goddesses Herde Oberin, Mutter Natur, and Großmutter
• The Divine Twins
• Hüne Vater, Großvater, and Großmutter
• Ides, Demi-Goddess of Protection and War
• Helga, Goddess of Magic, Ghosts, and Witchcraft

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

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

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

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

Features / October 30, 2023

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.

“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 see
There’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

“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 sanded
Steel shuddering shattering shoveling until the
Sabre 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 and
Roars and revs his mathematical rage
On 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 vomits
His computerized future is bright with security
Headshrinkers analyze the unknown
Meanwhile another tree dies of shame

—J.E. Anckorn

“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”
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

“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

“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 

“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”
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 

“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