The national currency of Oppressorbad is the

Flaschenverschluss, or Bottlecap.   5 Bottlecaps equal 1 Zloty.

We’re now nearly halfway through December, 10 days away from the winter solstice, and 20 days away from the end of the Gregorian calendar year. We’re also two days away from the next Triffid Ranch Weekend Carnivorous Plant Tour, starting … Continue reading →

Of all of the mammals, the bats are the most egalitarian when it comes to their government. Dogs are too tempted by autocrats. Cats are too averse to leaders. The elephants live so long that they constantly second-guess longterm plans, … Continue reading →

No. I am not talking about one of the most fantastic albums ever released (though I should probably spill some virtual ink on that someday).   I am talking about the number of options afforded to us in streaming entertainment.  

In this time of Covid-19 we are supposed to stay at home and avoid interaction with others. That is fine, but it means we are spending a lot more time at home.  So I have been enjoying a lot of what streaming services like Netflix, Hulu, Disney+, Amazon, HBO, and CBS All Access are really trying to get our attention with more programming.  Since I am also saving a small fortune by not having to drive into work anymore I am enjoying all of them.

Not a real show, but I wish.

Since I have been spending my week categorizing over 350 different demons for my demon book I don't have much RPG content to share right now.  So what's good on streaming?

CBS All Access

Or the all Star Trek all the Time Channel. Star Trek Discovery Season 3 has been fantastic this year.  The crew jumped 900+ years into the future (3188 to be exact) to save a sentient AI from falling into the wrong hands.  It doesn't quite have the emotional connection that Season 2 (the search for..well...Spock) did BUT for a Trek fan like me it has been great on the fan service and easter eggs.  This is essentially Season 1 of the new 32nd Century Star Trek.   This gives the creative team so much more freedom to do the special effects they obviously wanted to do anyway but also gives them some good storytelling freedom away from the established Trek canon.  This is amusing because this season has had the most callbacks to previous versions of Trek outside of Season 2's TOS homages. 

Additionally, we are getting new episodes of Picard, Lower Decks (maybe and second season is coming I have not heard), and new shows like Strange New Worlds (Pike's Enterprise) and Section 31, Starfleet's Gray Ops group.  For a Trek fan this is fantastic!  

Amazon Prime

My October Horror Movie Challenge would not have been possible without Prime.  We have been watching a lot of Vikings lately.  Don't confuse it for actual history (even though it was on the History Channel) it has been fun and has given me some ideas. 

The Second Age Middle Earth series is underway.  Casting has been announced, but I don't think filming has started yet. 

Hulu

Have not taken as much advantage of this one as I should.  But the really fun Helstrom was here (and not Disney+ for some reason) and it shows that when Marvel does Horror, it can do a great job of it.

In many ways, Helstrom and Satana (Ana in the series) was Marvel's answer to DC's Constantine even though Hellstrom (2 "L"s) premiered a decade before.  Hellstrom, Satana, Doctor Strange, Blade and Dracula were all part of the Marvel Horror universe that I loved as a kid.  The changes from the comic to series were needed and very welcome to me really.  It is still full of Marvel AngstTM, but it is also a lot of fun. 

HBO Max (or + or Go or whatever it is called now)

HBO has been around forever. It and Showtime were two of the very, very first "movie channels" out there.  But today HBO is better known for its series.  True Blood (which for some reason is getting a reboot) and Game of Thrones are two notable ones.  This past year I have been watching Lovecraft Country (which is fantastic!) and His Dark Materials, which is getting better in Season 2.  We also got the DC shows, Harley Quinn, Titans, Doom Patrol, and soon we will be able to see Wonder Woman 84 and the Synder Cut of Justice League.

I don't care. I am such a DC fanboy that I am excited about this.

Netflix

The Champion of the Streaming Channels, but it has had some serious competition from Disney+.  Let's see what they have been offering me.  Netflix will be forever fixed in Geek Heaven for Stranger Things.  We will be getting the 4th season of that soon; filming is underway.  Enola Holmes, based on the YA books was also a hit, even if it didn't exactly conform to the established Holmes canon. We also got The Witcher based on the video game and now R. Talsorian Games RPG of the same name.

Speaking of Season 4, we are getting the LAST installment of the Chilling Adventure of Sabrina near the end of the month. It looks like they are taking it where the comic also went, into dealing with Cthulhu and other Lovecraftian horrors.  It looks like it should be great.

I was a little disappointed in ChAoS when they killed off Dorcas played by the lovely Abigail Cowen. while it may have been part of the plot, she was quickly scooped up it seems by another Netflix production, Fate.  I saw the trailer for it today and thought it looked cool, THEN I saw what it was at the end.

Fate: A Winx Saga. Whaaat? Winx Club as a comic and then a kids Nickelodeon animated series.  I thought it was a poor rip-off of Disney's W.I.T.C.H. so did Disney in fact.  Turns out Winx Club was published and in production a full year before the W.I.T.C.H. comics came out.  This is by the same people and is supposed to be darker and more adult.  I happy to see Abby Cowen is something where she is the star, I thought she had great potential on ChAoS and this should be fun too.

Oh. If you have not seen The Queen's Gambit it is fantastic.

Disney+

What can you say about Disney+? I mean even before they acquired Lucasfilm and Marvel they had one of the deepest wells of titles and characters.  Honestly just between the Disney, Pixar, and ABC material they own they could have been fine as a streaming service.  But let's be honest, as great as Pixar is no one dropped the cash for Disney+ for that alone.  Disney+ has been moving along famously in the last year or so thanks to The Baby Yoda Show The Mandalorian.  It has been a fantastic show and Season 2 has been delivering an action-packed episode all season long AND with great storytelling AND with characters I never thought in 40 years I'd see on TV.  While I am a Star Trek fan deep in my DNA, I do love Star Wars.  The adventures of Not Boba Fett and Space Pikachu has been some of the best Star Wars I have seen.  Disney+ could honestly do a victory lap now, but that was until yesterday when they made their 2021 announcements.

I have no idea how many new shows and movies are coming out for Marvel and Star Wars now. Lots. More than I ever thought one studio would try to do.  Instead of trying to recap them all (lots of other sites are doing that) let me just focus on the ones that interest me. 

WandaVison

I have a love/hate relationship with Scarlet Witch in Marvel.  First, she was never really a witch so I often felt "lied" too, except the times she was a witch. And a mutant. She was a villain, she was a hero, she was depowered, she was overpowered. As a character, she was all over the place. And sometimes she was just that, all over the place. She suffered from bouts of insanity, deep depression, and loss.  

I will give the movies credit on a couple of things.  Divorced from her "mutant" background it gave her character more definition. Also for the first time, I bought into her's and Vision's love for each other.

The new series WandaVision looks like it takes the background of the comic's characters and really makes a good series out of it.

Seriously, this could be Wanda going mad and her powers acting out creating new realities or something else. Or both. Given the character, it is likely both. Elizabeth Olsen is also a great actress and she can pull this off.  Frankly, the riffs on "Bewitched" are enough to get me to watch it. 

Watching this new trailer really puts a different spin on the first trailer released.  

There certainly something else going on here. I am looking forward to it.

Marvel: What If...?

One of my favorite Marvel Titles was "What If...?" The comic would break off into different sorts of stories all under the "What If" question.  What if Spider-man joined the Fantastic Four? Was the first one. "What if Gwen Stacy had lived? was an interesting one as well.  The best may have been the introduction of May "Mayday" Parker as "Spider-Girl" and the Gwen Stacy arc eventually planted the seeds to give us "Spider Gwen".  If Barry Allen/The Flash is the center point of DC's multiverse, then certainly Spider-man is the center of Marvel's.  It seems a little odd to me then that Spider-man doesn't feature at all in the trailer of Disney+'s "Marvel: What If...?" series.

I am sure it is more shenanigans with Sony.  Though the rumor is now that Alfred Molina will return as Doctor Octopus in the third Spider-man movie. Additionally, we could get past Peter Parkers as well now that Disney owns what was 20th Century Fox and Into the Spider-verse was a huge success. 

Here we are.  Our geek cups run over and there is more to fill even more cups.

Never would I have suspected that we would have so much genre entertainment at our fingertips.  Which is good since we really should not be going anywhere.

Ok Prof. Dolby, play us out.

Published in 1980, S3 Expedition to the Barrier Peaks has long been regarded as a classic adventure for Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, First Edition, even so far as being ranked at number five in Dungeon magazine’s ‘The 30 Greatest D&D Adventures of All Time’, published to mark the thirtieth anniversary of the publication of Dungeons & Dragons. Set in the World of Greyhawk, it did something that no other module did at that time, and that was to crash—quite literally—the Science Fiction genre into the Fantasy genre, when the Player Characters, hired by the Grand Duke of Geoff to investigate the origins of creatures spewing forth from a cave in the Barrier Peaks and attacking the surrounding regions, discover nothing no less and no more weird than a crashed space ship. Of course, the Player Characters are quite unlikely to view it as that, but their players will certainly realise it as their characters encounter strange creatures and artefacts that are beyond magic. Over the years, this memorable adventure has been reprinted more than once, first by TSR, Inc. in S1-4: Realm of Horrors in 1987 and then in S1-4: Dungeons of Dread in 2013 by Wizards of the Coast. More recently, in 2019, it has been reprinted and updated for Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition by Goodman Games with Original Adventures Reincarnated #3: Expedition to the Barrier Peaks, part of the ‘Original Adventures Reprinted’ series which began with Original Adventures Reincarnated #1: Into the Borderlands.

Now, S3 Expedition to the Barrier Peaks has its own rock album. When it comes to roleplaying music has long been seen as something to add to the experience, to build the atmosphere, but rarely, the other way, the single by Sabbat, Blood For The Blood God, inspired by Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, which appeared in White Dwarf #95, the Traveller concept album by the band, The Lord Weird Slough Feg, and the work of the band, Gygax, being clearly inspired by Dungeons & Dragons, all being the odd exceptions. Doubtless, there are others. The Barrier Peaks Songbook is a ten-track concept album from Loot the Body. It describes itself as a psychedelic rock album, though it feels more Prog Rock than psychedelic rock, but to be fair, just as The Barrier Peaks Songbook is an exception in being a rock album inspired by roleplaying, Reviews from R’lyeh reviewing a rock album—or indeed, any music, is also an exception.

The album opens with ‘Expedition to the Barrier Peaks’, a crash of drums and guitar rhythms, and a sense of hope and inspiration as fifteen elves, halflings, dwarves, and men, “…brimming with the confidence that we’d soon be home again” cry of their quest, before plunging beyond the strange door in the mountain and cave and confronting the genuinely fantastical and for the Player Characters, utterly weird. The second track, ‘The Labyrinth of Evermore’ promises “Sights and sounds I’ve never known before”, something that in combination, module S3 Expedition to the Barrier Peaks and album The Barrier Peaks Songbook, undoubtedly do. None more so with encounters with the weird Vegepygmies, a variation upon the Mushroom Men so beloved of the Old School Renaissance, the song writer neatly playing with their concept with the lines, “And we’re legion, Because we’re made from, The same mold” in ‘We’re the Vegepygmies’, and the infamously benign ‘Wolf-In-Sheep’s-Clothing’ encounter or ‘The Cute Little Bunnyoid on the Stump’ that turns into a nasty surprise for the Player Characters. Its accompanying track, ‘Bunny on a Stump’, highlights this almost idyllic addition to the encounters in the crash-landed spaceship, one very much at odds with the dangerous nature of exploring the metal dungeon. This culminates in the harder-edged and batrachian-themed ‘Froghemoth’, which ties into one of the most dangerous encounters in S3 Expedition to the Barrier Peaks. This adds a pleasing hint of cosmic horror and drowning despair to the encounter that was probably never envisioned by E. Gary Gygax when he wrote S3 Expedition to the Barrier Peaks, but which forty years on, Loot the Body reinterprets and emphasises from an adventurer’s perspective.

Of course, S3 Expedition to the Barrier Peaks is renowned for its clash of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and if there is an issue with The Barrier Peaks Songbook, it is that it could have emphasised the  contrast between fantasy and technology further. There is a sense of Future Shock, of being faced with too much change, far too soon or far too quickly, in tracks such as ‘The Doctor’, but there no sense of the adventurers in this songbook picking up items of technology, experimenting with them, suffering mishaps, and so on until they work out how to operate them and what they do. Perhaps this is taking the confluence between module and album too literally, but it is, and always was, a significant aspect of S3 Expedition to the Barrier Peaks. Perhaps the most direct confrontation between the two is in ‘Robot Police’, a more direct indication for the adventurers that they are interlopers in the spaceship. The song has contemporary resonances, the direct manner and horridly brutal methods of these law enforcement androids applying to the events of 2020 as much as it does a spaceship from another dimension in a roleplaying scenario from the past. The Barrier Peaks Songbook ends on a psychedelic, even psychic note, as the adventurers have one last weird encounter, although this one is of a benign, rather than malign nature, in ‘Shedu Liberation’.

The Barrier Peaks Songbook is not an album to be played whilst playing through S3 Expedition to the Barrier Peaks, or indeed, Original Adventures Reincarnated #3: Expedition to the Barrier Peaks. Instead, its songs could work as chapter breaks, played between significant encounters, most obviously ‘Bunny on a Stump’ and ‘Froghemoth’ after their respective encounters. It also works as inspiration for the Dungeon Master in preparing to run S3 Expedition to the Barrier Peaks and as nostalgia for anyone who has either played or run it. However it is listened to, The Barrier Peaks Songbook is a thoroughly enjoyable album, adding voice and sound to the weirdness and the contrast of genres at the heart of S3 Expedition to the Barrier Peaks. No doubt there are other Dungeons & Dragons campaigns or scenarios deserving of such concept albums, so perhaps we shall hear more of them from Loot the Body.

 The Polyester Freestate's Currency is the Zloty.  We mint them in Testorton and Pactraplant.  They are backed by the Polyesterine State Bank.  Admire it!

 The Report has been finished, but the final page holds clear problems for the Freestate; our production of critical brown supplies is far below the need.  Clearly, to support our military establishment, as is, let alone grow it to war time needs we MUST produce far more food, paper, fabrics, fibers, and other dry goods.  Our force is also facing clear manpower shortages in the future.  My only suggestion is to find a way to increase the military eligability.  encourage military preparedness programs to increase the reserve, and push our citizens to procreate to build a population able to man the needed forces.  Another option is to reduce the establishment to single battalion regiments, leaving only a training company in depot, which would allow us to form roughly 121 regiments, in 60 brigades, 30 corps, 15 divisions, which would allow us to form approximately 7 Army Corps.  This means our forces could field some 3-5 full Armies for service.  I'm worried.  I need more intelligence of the adversarial nations army establishments. 

Considering that 2020 for so many people has been less about “I wish I’d lived in a cave all this time” than “that nuclear waste dump is seeping into my perfectly pristine prehistoric cavern and poisoning all of my dinosaurs,” … Continue reading →

Noah Berlatsky / December 9, 2020

Ursula K. Le Guin is generally thought of as a progressive, even as a radical, on the strength of her utopian novels. Her 1974 classic The Dispossessed imagines a functioning anarchist society; 1969’s The Left Hand of Darkness is set on a planet where everyone is a hermaphrodite, which means it is a world without patriarchy. Yet Le Guin was always ambivalent about revolution, and especially about revolutionary violence. 

The clearest statement of her counter-revolutionary side is the 1971 novel The Lathe of Heaven. It’s a book that is generally discussed primarily as a tribute to Philip K. Dick, and it certainly picks up that author’s obsession with the construction and breakdown of reality, and with the distinction between sanity and insanity. But less discussed, and just as important, is Le Guin’s debt to anticommunist dystopian imaginings—books like George Orwell’s 1984 and Ira Levin’s This Perfect Day, in which the utopian strivings lead to regimented, life-crushing dystopias. Like those novels, The Lathe of Heaven warns that even dreaming of a better future can result in nightmare. In doing so, it shows how Le Guin’s most famous fictions were inspired by the Cold War, and how they were constrained by it.

The Lathe of Heaven is set in Portland, Oregon in a future dystopia of 2002. The world is overpopulated and impoverished; life is grimy, run-down, and hemmed in. The protagonist, George Orr, is an inconsequential draftsman. At the beginning of the novel he is arrested for borrowing another’s rations of drugs in an effort to keep himself from dreaming. He is assigned to mandatory therapy with psychiatrist and sleep researcher William Haber.

George explains to Haber that he wants to stop dreaming because his dreams can alter reality; when he dreams an “effective” dream, George alleges, he remakes the world. Haber doesn’t believe him at first, but after hypnotizing George he gets him to use his dreams to change a picture on Haber’s wall. Usually no one but George remembers the previous reality, but being present at the instant of dreaming allows Haber to see and retain the change. He quickly decides he can use George to transform the world for the better.

But George’s dreams are an imperfect tool, and whenever Haber hypnotically suggests a dream, that dream goes awry. When he tells George to reduce overpopulation, George dreams a plague that kills billions. A request for peace between humans results in a devastating alien attack, which unites the world against the invaders. A command for racial harmony leads to a world of grey people, who unleash their aggression in ritualized, bloody sports events, rather than through prejudice.

Even so, Haber is unconvinced. He is a determined, remorseless do-gooder, asking Orr: “Isn’t that man’s very purpose on earth to do things, change things, run things, make a better world?” His gusty, bearish good humor metastasizes into a kind of ominous mechanical benevolence. At first he really wants to help George overcome his fear of dreams. But as he gains power to do good, means and ends become tangled until it’s impossible to separate the quest for power to do good from the quest for power. Each time Haber changes reality he gives himself more status and influence—a bigger office, more influence with the government—until he is one of the most important men in the world. And in his relationship with George, he becomes increasingly aggressive and sadistic. “To dominate [George], to patronize him was so easy as to be almost irresistible,” Haber thinks.

Haber’s research eventually allows him to simulate George’s effective dreaming so that he can do it himself. “There will be none of this tension between your will to nihilism and my will to progress, your Nirvana wishes and my conscious, careful planning for the good of all,” he exults. But when he tries to dream a better world, the result is nightmarish chaos. Existence melts and changes; buildings turn to jelly. The revolution undoes organic connections, and everything loses form and meaning. “It was the presence of absence: an unquantifiable entity without qualities, into which all things fell and from which nothing came forth. It was horrible, and it was nothing. It was the wrong way,” Le Guin writes. Or, to quote another reactionary vision of a hollowed-out modernity that has discarded the past: 

A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water.

If changing the world inevitably unmakes and destroys the world, the only alternative is quietism—and George is in fact a kind of inaction hero. “I don’t want to change things!” he tells Haber early on. “Who am I to meddle with the way things go?” Haber views George’s refusal of responsibility and action as a flaw; in his eyes George is a “meek, characterless man.” But Heather, a lawyer who becomes George’s wife in some realities, sees him differently: “he was the strongest person she had ever known, because he could not be moved away from the center.” The dreamer who can change the world is strong because of his Buddhist-like commitment to not change the world. George won’t meddle with karma. 

Refusing to change the world doesn’t just mean that George doesn’t want to implement grand revolutions. He balks even at minor acts of personal kindness. When Haber asks George if he would help a woman bitten by a snake by giving her antivenom, George hesitates. “If reincarnation is a fact, you might be keeping her from a better life and condemning her to live out a wretched one. Perhaps you cure her and she goes home and murders six people in the village.” A fear of inorganic revolution slides helplessly into a reactionary taboo on lifting a finger to help a neighbor in immediate need. George might as well be a Republican official denouncing the socialism of mask mandates.

George’s weasily ethics-professor excuse for leaving a woman to die seems strikingly at odds with, say, passages in The Dispossessed about the exploitation of the poor, or the anti-slavery commitments of Le Guin’s 1995 Five Ways to Forgiveness. But it’s notable that throughout her work Le Guin very rarely puts herself or the reader in the perspective of an actual revolutionary. Even the anarchist Shevek, in The Dispossessed, who makes political speeches to mass rallies, does so only after traveling to a neighboring planet, where he is an outsider. He parachutes into a Cold War-like conflict between a capitalist and a totalitarian Communist nation to offer a third, non-binary option for peace via technological deus ex machina. Similarly, in Five Ways to Forgiveness the most vivid scenes of revolution are presented from the perspective of Le Guin’s beloved Star Trek-Federation-like Hainish interplanetary ambassadors and observers.  They are people who have a distance from the oppressions and injustice they are describing. They’re people who don’t have to take sides.

The contrast with Le Guin’s contemporary Joanna Russ is striking. Russ criticized Le Guin for mostly choosing to use male protagonists. Russ herself always wrote from the perspective of women—not least because she wanted to describe patriarchal oppression at ground level, as it is felt by those who experience it. Where Le Guin’s protagonists observe, and regret, and avoid violence, Russ’s revel in it. In novels like The Female Man (1975), We Who Are About To… (1977), and The Two of Them (1978), women turn to revolutionary violence not as a last resort or a regrettable necessity, but as a fierce joy in itself—an assertion of power, of revenge, of relief. When a wise man says, Orr-like, in Russ’s The Two of Them, “I am beginning to wonder about the wisdom of remaking culture, or even people’s lives,” the female hero considers his words carefully, then shoots him and liberates her sister.

That’s not to say that Russ is right and Le Guin is wrong. The latter is hardly a mindless counter-revolutionary, even in her most counter-revolutionary novel. George returns to the story about the snakebite victim and recognizes that the analogy—and his own arguments—were “false.” “You have to help another person,” he thinks. “But it’s not right to play God with the masses.” And even there, in extremis, sometimes playing God is in fact the right thing to do. The world George grew up in ended in a nuclear holocaust. He dreamed the overpopulated world into existence at the last moment before his death, creating not a good world, but a slightly better one.

Haber also is not, notably, just a stand in for communists and radicals. Most of his political commitments—antiwar, antiracism—are recognizably left. But his motivations are rooted in good old American exceptionalism, white saviorism, and pulp. “I frequently daydream heroics. I am the hero,” he tells George with gusto. “I’m saving a girl, or a fellow astronaut, or a besieged city, or a whole damn planet. Messiah dreams, do-gooder dreams. Haber saves the world! They’re a hell of a lot of fun—so long as I keep ’em where they belong.” 

Those Messiah dreams really have caused harm; Hitler’s piles of corpses and Stalin’s piles of corpses and (closer to home for Le Guin) Lyndon Johnson’s smaller but still horrific piles of corpses all lay in mute testimony to the potential dangers of Haberism, and the deadly imposition of happy endings. 

Still, it’s striking to see a dreamer write a tract against dreams, and a utopian thinker write a novel warning against utopians. You could see it as a sign of Le Guin’s depth and ambiguity, her ability to see every side. George, Haber reports, is “so sane as to be an anomaly,” his psych profile in the exact middle of extroversion/introversion, dominance/submissiveness—“a peculiar state of poise, of self-harmony.” Le Guin is clearly drawn to that centrist anti-extremist view from nowhere. The Cold War demanded side taking. Her writing shaped by that imperative, Le Guin in The Lathe of Heaven searches for a perspective with neither sides nor violence. She could only find it in dreams.

Noah Berlatsky is the author of Wonder Woman: Bondage and Feminism in the Marston/Peter Comics.

Margaret Brundage is another artist you may not know by name but certainly by her art.  I will go out on a limb and say she was one of the most recognizable artists of the Pulp Era.

Margaret Brundage, born Margaret Hedda Johnson was born December 9, 1900, in Chicago, a place she would call home till her death in 1976.  

She was looking for work when she found  Farnsworth Wright editor of "Oriental Tales" and then "Weird Tales" Brundage would paint covers for both magazines and sign them "M. Brundage" so no one knew it was a woman doing all this art of scantily clad or nude women in peril. 

Her artwork became part of the image of Weird Tales in the 1930s with some authors, Seabury Quinn notably, not only requesting her work but working in scenes of her art into the story.  Others like Clark Ashton Smith and H.P. Lovecraft were less pleased with her work.  But there is no doubt that her covers sold magazines.

Often her covers also had to be toned down for publication.  Her other works were even more risque.

She would go on to do 66 covers for Wierd Tales. Some have gone on to become classics.

Links

• Illustration History, Margaret Brundage
• Chicagology
• Deep Cuts in a Lovecraftian Vein, The Alluring Art of Margaret Brundage
• Pulp Artist, Brundage

Right now, the greater Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex is in our default December weather system: generally sunny and mild, with temperatures at dawn flirting with freezing and temps at dusk considerably higher, with very good chances for surprise frost, snow, and … Continue reading →

Mark Taormino has done it again (8 times the charm!) and I got my new adventure in the mail today.

Maximum Mayhem Dungeons #7 Dread Swamp of the Banshee came in the mail today.  I have had the PDF for a little bit now and I am really looking forward to running this one!

If you enjoyed the previous adventures in this series, like I have, then you know what to expect here. 

If you love the old-school style modules but want something that is just "a little more" then I highly recommend these.

One day my plan is to run these all with some flavor of B/X since the adventures top out at 14th level.  Though the adventures are very much in the 1st Ed D&D vein and not really "Basic", it's what I want to do with them. 

Maybe when the Advanced books for Old-School Essentials come in I'll revisit this idea.

It’s been months in the making. (The original plan was to announce it in mid-March, at the beginning of show season, but we know how that turned out.) It’s been delayed by developments and put off due to priorities, but … Continue reading →

Another monster I have been playing around with for a while. This one goes all the way back to my AD&D years, though under a different name.  I have always liked the idea that Lichdom is never an assured thing for evil wizards and a lot can go wrong.  Here is one of those times.

Dybbuk
Medium Undead (Incorporeal)
Frequency: Very Rare
Number Appearing: 1 (1)
Alignment: Chaotic (Chaotic Evil)
Movement: 180' (60') [18"]
Armor Class: 4 [15]
Hit Dice: 12d8+36*** (90 hp)
Attacks: 1 touch or by spells
Damage: 1d6+3 cold damage, or by spell (see below)
Special: Ethereal, incorporeal, harmed only by magic, possession, animate dead, undead
Size: Medium
Save: Magic-user 12
Morale: 10
Treasure Hoard Class: Special (dybbuk box)
XP: 3,500 (B/X, OSE) 3,600 (LL)

The process of becoming a lich is filled with peril and risk. Thankfully, for the forces of good, few learn the secret and fewer still meet with success.   While most of the failed attempts to become a lich end with the permanent death of many evil mages, sometimes the process fails, the body is destroyed but the evil spirit lives on.  These failed attempts at lichdom as known as a Dybbuk.

The dybbuk is the disembodied spirit of an evil magic-user who attempted to become a lich but whose body was destroyed before the final process was complete.  The spirit remains tied to the mortal realms, unable to complete its transformation to a lich or move on to whatever plane it was due to move on too in the afterlife.  The creature is evil and has a hatred for all living things.

A dybbuk is an incorporeal creature inhabiting the ethereal plane.  It is invisible and can only be hit by magical weapons that can attack ethereal creatures.  The creature will appear like a spectre and can be mistaken for one.  When it chooses to attack a creature it will reenter the material world and become visible to all.  

The most feared attack of the dybbuk is its ability to possess others.  They will seek out magic-users and their pride demands that they seek out only the ones of the highest levels to possess.  The victim must make a saving throw vs. spells (Lawful victims have a +1 to saves, Chaotic victims have a -1 to saves) or become possessed by the dybbuk.  If possessed the victim gets another save every 24 hours.  However, there is a progressive -1 each day to the save. Additionally, the victim will lose 1 point of constitution each day.  When they reach 0 they are dead and cannot be resurrected as the dybbuk has destroyed their body and soul. If a victim makes the save the dybbuk cannot make another attempt for 24 hours.

Once in the body of a magic-user, the dybbuk will use any spells their host body knows. Typically they will attack anyone and everyone nearby, such is their hate for all living things. Those that can see ethereal creatures will see the dybbuk “riding” on the back of the possessed victim.  A dybbuk also has the ability to animate 3d6 HD worth of skeletons and/or zombies. The bodies must be readily available, but a dybbuk will make sure plenty are on hand near it’s lair.  These undead creatures follow the orders of the dybbuk til they are destroyed.

The dybbuk can be turned by a cleric as if it were a lich. Once in a victim though only an Exocism, Holy Word, Cleanse or similar spells will be effective in driving the evil spirit out. When the dybbuk is forced out it will spend the next 24 hours in its Dybbuk Box, or where its soul now resides.  To fully destroy a dybbuk this housing for their soul must be destroyed.

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

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


—oOo—


Name: The Room with No Doors

Publisher: Chaosium, Inc.
Author: M. T. Black

Setting: Classic Jazz Age Arkham
Product: Scenario
What You Get: Twenty-eight page, 6.5 MB Full Colour PDF
Elevator Pitch: What would drive a housewife to a murderous mania?
Plot Hook: A landlord hires the Investigators to look into the truth of her new property being haunted.Plot Support: Detailed background, a decent floorplan, nine handouts, and a single monster.Production Values: Clean and tidy, well organised, clear map, and nicely done handouts.
Pros
# Classic Call of Cthulhu haunted house scenario
# Potential convention scenario
# Potential one-shot# Superb handouts
# Easily adapted to other periods# Investigation path clearly laid out
# Mythos light# Nice ties to Arkham# Possible first encounter with the Mythos?

Cons
# Classic Call of Cthulhu haunted house scenario
# Mythos light# Too obvious a title# Too close to ‘The Haunting’ from the Call of Cthulhu, Seventh Edition Quick-Start Rules
Conclusion
# Great production values
# Classic Call of Cthulhu haunted house scenario# Too obvious a title and set-up for experienced players

I have recently acquired the original superheroes that Timmee turned into fantasy figures after they gave up their liscense with Marvel.  Their was only one run of the superheroes and each figure came in just one color.  All of the Hulk, Green Goblin, Doctor Octupus and Namor figures are green.  All of the Red Skull, Spiderman, Ironman and Human Torch figures are red.  All of the Captain America, Thor, Dr. Doom and Falcon figures are blue.  

I do not believe I have seen any pictures of them side by side before.  So, just for fun . . . . regular and color ehanced versions.  

Forbidden Lands: Crypt of the Mellified Mage is an anthology of four adventure sites for use with Forbidden Lands – Raiders & Rogues in a Cursed World, the ‘Retro Open-World Survival Fantasy RPG’ published by Free League Publishing, following from the earlier The Spire of Quetzel. Like The Spire of Quetzel, it provides the Game Master with four more locales she can slot into her Forbidden Lands campaign—whether her own or Raven’s Purge, the roleplaying game’s epic eight-part campaign with an open structure built around eight locations and a finale at a ninth location—or possibly run as one-shots. They reflect the open play style of Forbidden Lands, in which the players and their characters are explorers, travelling across territories which have been cut off for centuries and of which they know little except legends. Such legends serve as hooks, pushing the characters to visit the setting’s adventure sites—villages, castles, and dungeons—and pulling them into the region’s history and secrets, often revealing the dark truths of lands that have been under a blood mist and demon-infested for centuries. Whether delving into the honeyed tomb of an undead apiarist-mage, making a rescue attempt for missing villagers in the caves of a blood-potter, taking advantage of internal politics to defeat the Monkey King and banish his pagoda temple complex which has drilled its way up into the Forbidden Lands, or exploring the weird mind cloud of a long dead wizard, just as with The Spire of Quetzel, what really marks these scenarios as being different is their authors.

All four scenarios in Crypt of the Mellified Mage are written by some of the leading writers in the Old School Renaissance. They include Fiona Maeve Geist, one of the designers of MOTHERSHIP Sci-Fi Horror RPG; David McGrogan, the creator of Yoon-Suin, the Purple Land; Zedeck Siew, author of Lorn Song of the Bachelor and A Thousand, Thousand Island setting; and Adam Kobel, the designer of Dungeon World. The quartet consists of three dungeon and one village adventure sites, and in each case will require a degree of preparation if the Game Master wants to include them in her campaign. Sometimes this is actually creating a location for a dungeon to be found under, but mostly they are foreshadowing during early parts of the campaign to be effective parts of the ongoing story of the adventurers’ explorations.

Crypt of the Mellified Mage opens with Fiona Maeve Geist’s eponymous ‘Crypt of the Mellified Mage’, a dungeon which lies beneath a village which the Game Master will need to create or develop. It is actually the tomb of the sorcerer Pagoag, whose cruel skill and hedonistic experimentation into medical matters is said to have led him down some dark paths including the mellifiying of flesh using honey into a candy which when consumed is said to prolong the consumer’s life. Pagoag, being a sorcerer, also sought life after death and the result of his experiments can be found throughout his tomb—apiaries built from bones, skeletons home to bee swarms, and undead bee swarms! If the legends are true, then perhaps the mollified flesh may be found and collected, perhaps to consume to heal a Player Character’s illness, that of their patron (if they have one), or simply sold to the highest bidder. There is a sense of sickly-sweet revulsion to the tomb and Pagoag himself is a vile monster. The crypt is, of course, not a pyramid, but it has the feel of an Egyptian tomb, although one infused with the musky scents of spices and honey and an apiarist theme running throughout. It is nicely designed, with a pervading sense of creepy unease and multiple entrances and approaches to the tomb itself so that unlike other crypts, there is no linear play to its exploration which funnels the Player Characters and limits their actions. However, one big problem with the scenario is that as attractive as the three-dimensional map is, its design does not always match the text and vice versa. So what this is means that the Game Master will need to put more effort into the scenario to ensure that she understands the layout of the tomb and certainly the connections between rooms.

David McGrogan’s ‘The Firing Pit of Llao-Yutuy’ is a smaller, more focused dungeon, a cavern complex where the eponymous Llao-Yutuy breaks his captured captives and infuses their blood into the bowls, pottery, and even golems he makes and fires. Despite being a much smaller adventure site and less complex than the others, it is no less creepy with its cruel atmosphere and unnerving automata which appear here and there. The potter’s servants and shockingly poorly treated apprentices are unlikely to present much of a threat to the Player Characters, whereas the aforementioned automata, Llao-Yutuy himself, and his vilely shrewish wife will do. There are some intriguing treasures to be found, which might be the reason for the Player Characters’ visit, or they might be employed to rescue some the captives currently held by Llao-Yutuy and his servants. In some ways this is the easiest of the four adventure sites in Crypt of the Mellified Mage for the Game Master to use—it is relatively easy to set up and prepare, and the site is small. However, it suffers from the same cartographic issues as ‘Crypt of the Mellified Mage’, and again will need careful preparation upon the part of the Game Master to ensure that there is no confusion between map and text.

Zedeck Siew’s ‘Temple of the Six-Limbed Lord’ literally invades the Forbidden Lands with monkey magic! Intended for more seasoned players and characters, technically, a village site, it is a temple complex consisting of several pagodas which have drilled their way up into the Forbidden Lands in an attempt to invade heaven. Of course, the Six-Limbed Lord wants to spread his worship, and that includes the Forbidden Lands, visiting nearby towns and occupying them, capturing friendly NPCs, even menacing strongholds held by the Player Characters. The Player Characters might encounter Monkey Soldiers on an impromptu pub-crawl, caravans beset by cloud riders sparking lightning, one of the Priests of the Six-Limbed Lord sat in a gilded throne borne by a Macaque Swarm, or even Nyanyetnya, Seventh Priest of the Six-Limbed Lord, who wants to serve them tea. Of course, she wants more than this, having been expelled from the temple—and she wants back in! To that end, she will engage the Player Characters who if they decide to help her will have to negotiate the petty politics of the other priests and their cohorts. This is the most sophisticated of the adventure sites, and the one to involve the most roleplaying as the Player Characters play the factions in the temple off against each other.

However, ‘Temple of the Six-Limbed Lord’ not only invades the Forbidden Lands literally, it invades the Western fantasy genre of Forbidden Lands – Raiders & Rogues in a Cursed World as well. What this means is that for some Game Masters, this adventure site might be at odds with their campaign and the genre. It is well done, despite suffering from the same cartographic issues as the earlier adventure sites and really adds something memorably different to a campaign, almost leaving Game Master and players alike to wonder quite what a Forbidden Lands-style campaign would be like in the setting beyond the walls of the Temple of the Six-Limbed Lord.

The last scenario in Crypt of the Mellified Mage is Adam Koebel’s ‘The Dream-Cloud of E’lok Thir’, and again is a very different dungeon—even radically different. What it does is turn the mind or dreams of a long dead wizard into a dungeon, one consisting of locations inspired by his fragmented doubts, elations, fears, and joys and as they explore each of these rooms, the Player Characters will encounter reflections of both E’lok Thir’s emotions and their own. There is no map to the dungeon, but rather the Game Master generates the life of the deceased mage and develops descriptions of rooms such as ‘Regret Made Manifest’ and ‘The Hidden Self’ based on what was rolled. The Game Master is free to connect these however she wants and without the need to adhere to the laws of physics, since this is, after all, a ‘Dream-Cloud’. Consequently, there is an otherworldly etherealness to ‘The Dream-Cloud of E’lok Thir’ and because the Game Master will need to know her player’s characters very well, there is an introspectiveness to it as well. Whilst it is the most open of the four scenarios in the anthology, it is also the most challenging to run. Further, it is not the easiest of scenarios to provide motivations for Player Character involvement. The Dream-Cloud can be reached via ritual, even as a consequence of a failed ritual, so the Player Characters might be forced to explore it following a magical mishap. The likelihood is that they will be wanting to enter the Dream-Cloud for a reason, either to obtain an object or treasure, or even information, and each of the location descriptions includes details of what treasures might be found there. Overall, ‘The Dream-Cloud of E’lok Thir’ is more a tool kit than a finalised adventure site ready to play, but its format does mean that it could be played through more than once, and each time it would be different enough.

Physically, Forbidden Lands: Crypt of the Mellified Mage is a lovely little book, that unfortunately let down by the disconnect between text and maps. Work around that though, and it is a pleasing hardback, nicely illustrated with maps done in the same style as other Forbidden Lands books. Each scenario follows the same format as those other books—Background, Legend, Getting Here, Locations, Monsters and NPCs, and Events. Despite the fact that the maps could have been better described, they are lovely to look at and the artwork throughout the book is exquisite. It would have been nice if some of the NPCs in the book had been illustrated, especially the various monkey priests in ‘Temple of the Six-Limbed Lord’ where they play such a pivotal role.

The disappointing side to the four adventure sites in Forbidden Lands: Crypt of the Mellified Mage is that each requires more preparation than they really should, especially to work them into a campaign, let alone coming to understand the map locations and their descriptions, and so none of the four are quite ready to play as they could be. If she is happy to make those preparations and develop them in readiness for inclusion in her campaign, Forbidden Lands: Crypt of the Mellified Mage provides the Game Master with some delightfully different adventure sites, each in their own way, creepy, weird, and wonderful. 

Strange Stars: Game Setting Book is a systemless Science Fiction setting book published by the Hydra Cooperative, a publisher best known for its point-crawl fantasy scenarios such as Slumbering Ursine Dunes and What Ho, Frog Demons! – Further Adventures in Greater Marlinko Canton. It is very much written to appeal to the Old School Renaissance, being inspired by the televisual Science Fiction of the seventies and eighties, the works of authors such as E.C. Tubb and Jack Vance, and TSR, Inc.’s first Science Fiction roleplaying game, Star Frontiers, in particular. So, it is generally fairly light in its treatment of the genre. However, it includes more modern elements of the genre, most notably Transhumanism, including authors such as Peter Hamilton and Alistair Reynolds. Being systemless, it would work with Stars Without Number—and there is a rules companion for the Strange Stars setting using Stars Without Number, Savage Worlds, or Fate Core, but this is not as such a complete setting. Instead it details—although not in too much detail—elements of the far future setting, such as peoples, places, and technologies. There is no grand overview and as such is designed as a compendium of ideas and elements that evoke the period feel of its genre. So, there is no grand overview by design, leaving the Game Master and her with the space to fill in the details as necessary. Which means that it is not going to appeal to some gamers, whereas it will others.

It quickly dives into a very short history of the future of humanity. The Radiant Polity has arisen to claim stewardship of paleo-humanity and hyperspace travel following a Dark Age into which the mysterious Zurr crept across planet after planet, and the research-sadists known as Faceless Ones appeared, each of whom would replace their face with a powerful sensory apparatus. The Dark Age is said to have lasted a millennium or more, and to have come about after The Great Collapse of the Archaic Oikumene, a technologically advanced empire which conducted planetary-scale engineering, built floating, crystalline cities, and constructed the hyperspace network. The Archaic Oikumene may or may not have arisen in the cradle of humanity, but true knowledge of the Archaic Oikumene and Old Earth have been lost.

It also introduces three categories of ‘sophonts’—Biologics, Moravecs, and Infosophonts. Biologics, from Paleo-Humanity to Star Folk bioships, include the descendants of organisms—either from Old Earth originally or another world, designed organisms, and bioroids, or biologic androids. Moravecs, named for an Old Earth scientist-prophet, like the warrior-poets of Eridanus or Telosian Moravec-supremacists are self-replicating, sapient robots, whilst the Wanderers, the Wise Minds of Interzone, and the like, are Infosophonts, digital minds independent of physical form.

Interstellar travel is achieved via hyperspace gates which connect star systems—and these routes and their various travel times/speeds are marked on the polity maps throughout the book. No routes are given between these polities, so the Game Master can connect them in any fashion that she wants. What is interesting is that none of the states newly arisen in the wake The Dark Age have knowledge of how to construct starships—certainly not their star drives, which need to be salvaged from ships of the past. 

Six of the polities are given tw0-page spreads each—The Outer Rim, The Alliance, The Instrumentality, the Coreward Reach, The Vokun Empire, and The Zuran Expanse. Each is given a brief description, details of a native inhabitant, and more detailed writeups of its planets or major sophonts. So the Outer Rim, located on the frontiers of space, is dominated by an isolated trio of worlds—Boreas, an ice-covered ocean moon whose native, intelligent coral life have weaponised microbiota that can reanimate the dead to fight back against an invading sophonts, the blue-skinned humanoids known as Uldra; the Fortuna system is a gambler’s paradise and is home to The Wheel, a roulette wheel-shaped space station and Solitaire, a diamond planet; and Gogmagog, where giant robots inexplicably fight each other, the defeated machines scavenged by bot breaker teams for the advanced technology they can sell off world, before von Neumann scuttle out to make repairs! The individual detailed is Yeran Gar, a Djägga—a vaguely feline humanoid—who makes his living as a bounty hunter.

Of the other polities, The Alliance was formed in response to the lawlessness of The Zuran Expanse and religious strife of Radiant Polity, and consists of seven member sophonts, such as the Gnomee, a small hive-like sophonts who mine asteroids, the winged, angel-like Deva dedicated to repairing the ten moon-sized worlds in their home system, and the Neshekk, banking and investment clans who are intensely private. The Instrumentality of Aom is a theocracy home to the Circus, a ring world which is the largest habitat in known space. The Coreward Reach, currently threatened by the Locusts, space borne alien von Neumann machines which devour habitats, was once a major centre of human civilisation, but now lies on the very frontier, and whose worlds include Gaea, a mystery copy of Old Earth and Rune, a medieval world whose sorcerers use magic (or psionic powers) to fight dragons. The Vokun Empire was once fiercely expansionist, but its increasingly corpulent leaders, once great conquerors have turned inward and become obsessed with petty politics, but are still able to field their feared Kuath shock soldiers, each sheathed in a two-and-a-half meter tall bio-suit and use Voidgliders, vacuum-adapted humanoids to sniff out lost hyperspace nodes. Lastly, The Zuran Expanse is a ramshackle, lawless collection of worlds, thought to be the site of Old Earth and is home to the Library of Atoz-Theln and Deshret, a desert world slipping back into what it once was before being terraformed and is worked over by Sandminers sifting for fragments of code and lost artefacts.

Other organisations or groups are not ignored either, whether that is Nomads like the Kosmoniks, traders and occasional pirates who live aboard rune-inscribed spaceships who communicate via sign-language or translators, or the S’ta Zoku, star folk who travel between worlds where they declare great festivals of music, sensory experiences, and more. Threats include pirates, criminals, and hostile sophonts. The pirates include the Zao Corsairs, who operate out of a rogue asteroid and are notorious for capturing and looting ships, holding their passengers to ransom or selling them into slavery—even selling the bodies of the captured passengers separate to their uploaded minds! The criminals include the Pharesmid Syndicate whose members are all bio-clones or mind copies of its founder, terrorist Ulm Pharesm, along with a list of most wanted, whilst the Ksaa and the Ssraad are sophonts inimical to galactic society at large. The Ssraad claim The Zuran Expanse and come in three colours—the Green who launch raids against other sophonts from their orbital stations and whose extending tongues can deliver a paralysing venom, the vicious Red employed as shock troops by the Green and mercenaries for the Blue, and the Blue, who steal ships and technology, and then force captives to remodel before killing them. Lastly, Strange Stars covers psionics—though only in a basic way, gives a pronunciation guide, and suggests some one-line adventure ideas.

Throughout, there is a wealth of tiny details which add to the Strange Stars setting and suggest adventure ideas. For example, the owner of Solitaire organises races run via remote operation and psionic control for the patrons of The Wheel, leases mining rights on the diamond planet, and is rumoured to harbour a data vault deep underground. Opportunities to gamble, race, and even hunt for and break into the data vault all lend themselves to adventure ideas. Similarly, under the description of starships and travel, that the holy grail of any salvager is one of the ancient battleships the size of a city and possessing a sophont mind. There were twelve of these, but some are known to have been destroyed, the others lost.

Where perhaps the Strange Stars: Game Setting Book is lacking is the corporate elements of the setting—there are no corporations in this future. A few scenario more developed hooks would have been nice too and as much as starship travel figures in the setting, you never get a feel for what the ships themselves look like.

Physically, the Strange Stars: Game Setting Book is stunning. The artwork evokes the sources that it draws from, whether that is Stella Starlight, starship captain of the Motherless Child, who all flairs, platform heels, and high collars, looks like she stepped out of a Blaxploitation Sci-Fi film, or Sianna Elizond, Special Operative for The Instrumentality, whose weapon echoes that of Princess Leia Organa from Star Wars, whilst her look is that of Jessica 6, from the film Logan’s Run. The Ssaad are reminiscent of the Slaad of Dungeons & Dragons, whilst the exceptional back cover artwork manages to give nods to the trading cards, electronic game cartridges, and the ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ books, all of the late seventies and early eighties. The book itself is well written and engaging, and with everything in full colour, it looks stunning.

At first, it is a little difficult to know quite what to make of Strange Stars: Game Setting Book, in the main because it is a book of parts that connect, but remain separate. So initially, it feels as if there should be a whole setting here, complete with histories and grand maps, but for which, thirty-two pages were not enough. That though, is not the point of it being that book of parts and because it is a book of parts,  Strange Stars: Game Setting Book works on two levels. First, as a whole setting, one in which the Game Master can freely inject content of her because there is so much space—figuratively and narratively—to work in. Second, as a source of ideas and elements that she can plunder or be inspired by to add to her own game, and this is made all the easier because the content is compartmentalised throughout—not just in the writing, but in the layout too. Overall, Strange Stars: Game Setting Book is a Space Opera setting rich with ideas ready for the Game Master to develop or source for a setting of her own design. All it needs is the rules set of the Game Master’s choice.

 TOE of the oldest Regiment in Polyestrine Service, the Anneglug Chasseurs.