So, I have a lot of models backed up that I intend to make lead castings of to fill out my various wargame armies.  So have been spending time with silicone and cornstarch working up the casting molds.  Tanks, infantry, comic book flats, a fuel truck and officer staff car...  a gulash cannon, heavy guns, and armored cars to fight the wars of Ornria...  so. many. molds.

Let's start off the week with a game that is brand new.  How new? It was only two months ago that I was interviewing the author and designer, Christopher Grey, for the Kickstarter.

Last week or so I go my physical copy in the mail and codes for my DriveThruRPG downloads.  That was fast.  So such a speedy response deserves a review. 

The Great American Witch
by Christopher Grey

For this review, I am considering the hardcover, letter-sized book, and the PDF.  On DriveThruRPG you get two different layouts of the core book (1 and 2 page spreads), and several ancillary files for the covens and the crafts.  I was a Kickstart backer and got my products via that. Both the hardcover and the pdfs are available at DriveThruRPG.

The Great American Witch is 162 pages, all full color, with full color covers.  The art is by Minerva Fox and Tithi Luadthong. There are also some photos that I recognize from various stock art services, some I have even used myself.  This is not a criticism of the book; the art, all the art, is used effectively and sets the tone and mood of the book well.

The rule system is a Based on the Apocalypse World Engine variant.  Over the last couple of years I have had mixed, to mostly negative feelings about the Apocalypse World Engine.  Nothing to do with the system itself, but mainly due to how many designers have been using it.  I am happy to report that the version being used in TGAW is a stripped-down version that works better for me.

It is also published by Gallant Knight Games, who has a solid reputation.  So out of the gate and barely cracking open the book it has a lot of things going for it.

The Great American Witch is a cooperative, story-telling game of witches fighting against perceived injustices in the world.  I say "perceived" because of what injustices the witches fight against is going to largely depend on the witches (and the players) themselves. The framework of the game is built on Grey's earlier work, The Great American Novel.  TGAW is expanded from the earlier game.

Like many modern games, TGAW has a Session 0, for everyone to come together and talk about what the game should be about, what the social interaction rules are, and what the characters are.  The older I get the more of a fan of Session 0 I become. As a Game Master, I want to make sure everyone is invested in the game, I want to be sure everyone is going to have a good time. So yes. Session 0 all the way.  The first few pages detail what should be part of your Session 0.  It's actually pretty good material that can be adapted to other games. 

The game also wears its politics on its sleeve. Frankly, I rather like this. It helps that I also happen to agree with the author and game here. But besides that, there is something else here.  This game takes the idea, or even the realities and the mythologies of the witch persecutions and "Burning Times" and revisions them into the modern age.  It is not a bridge to far to see how the forces of the Patriarchy and anti-women legislation, politics, and religion of the 16th to 17th centuries can be recreated in the 21st century. After all, isn't "The Handmaids Tale" one of the most popular and awarded television programs right now? There is obviously something to this.

The main narrative of the game comes from the players themselves.  The Guide (GM) plays a lesser role here than in other games; often as one running the various injustices, NPCs, or other factions the players/characters/witches will run up against.  The system actually makes it easy for all players to have a character and rotate the guide duties as needed.

True to its roots games are broken down into"Stories" and  "Chapters" and who has the narrative control will depend on the type of chapter.  A "Story" is a game start to finish. Be that a one-shot or several different chapters over a long period of time.  A "Montage" chapter is controlled by the players. A "Menace" chapter is controlled by the Guide. A "Mundane" chapter is usually controlled by the player and the details of that chapter are for that character alone.  "Meeting" chapters involve the characters all together and are controlled by them. "Mission" chapters are the main plot focus that move the story forward. "Milestones" are what they sound like. This is where the witch would "level up."

The game uses three d6s for the rare dice resolution. Most times players use a 2d6 and try to roll a 7 or better. "Weal" and "Woe" conditions can augment this roll. The author makes it clear that you should roll only when the outcome is in doubt.  There are a lot of factors that can modify the rolls and the conflicts faced.  It is assumed that most conflicts will NOT be dealt with with a simple roll of 7 or better. The author has made it clear in the book and elsewhere that more times than average a conflict is not just going to go away like defeating a monster in D&D.  Conflicts are akin to running uphill, that can be accomplished, but they will take work and they will not be the only ones.

Once gameplay is covered we move into creating the player character witches. The book gives the player questions that should be answered or at least considered when creating a witch character. Character creation is a group effort, so the first thing you create is your group's Coven.  This also helps in determining the type of game this will be as different covens have different agendas.  There are nine different types of Covens; the Divine, Hearth, Inverted, Oracle, the Storm, Sleepers, the Town, the Veil, and Whispers. Each coven has different specialties and aspects. Also, each Coven has a worksheet to develop its own unique features, so one Coven of the Storm is not exactly the same as another Coven of the Storm from another city or even part of the city.  These are not the Traditions of Mage, the Covenants of the WitchCraftRPG, or even the Traditions of my witch books.  These are all very local and should be unique to themselves.  Once the coven is chosen then other details can be added. This includes things like how much resources does the coven have? Where does it get its money from? Legal status and so on. 

If Covens cover the group of witches, then each witch within the coven has their own Craft.  These are built of of archetypes of the Great Goddess.  They are Aje, the Hag (Calilleach), Hekate, Lilith, Mary (or Isis), Spider Grandmother, and Tara.  These are the Seven Crafts and they are the "sanctioned" and most widespread crafts, but there are others.  Each Craft, as you can imagine, gives certain bonuses and penalties to various aspects of the witch and her magic. Aje for example is not a good one if you want a high value in Mercy, but great if you want a high number in Severity and mixed on Wisdom.   All crafts are also subdivided into Maiden, Mother, and Crone aspects of the witch's life.   

Character creation is rather robust and by the end, you have a really good idea who your witch is and what they want.

The Game Master's, or Guide's, section covers how to run the game. Among other details, there is a section on threats. While there are a lot of potential threats the ones covered in the book are things like demons, vampires, other witches, the fey, the Illuminati, ghosts and other dead spirits, old gods and good old-fashioned mundane humans. 

The end of the book covers the worksheets for the various Covens and Crafts.  You use the appropriate Craft Sheets for a character.

The PDF version of the book makes printing these out very easy.  It would be good for every player to have the same Coven sheet, or a photocopy of the completed one, and then a Craft sheet for their witch.

While the game could be played with as little two players, a larger group is better, especially if means a variety of crafts can be represented.  Here the crafts can strengthen the coven, but also provide some inter-party conflict. Not in-fighting exactly, but differences on how to complete a Mission or deal with a threat.  After all, no one wants to watch a movie where the Avengers all agree on a course of action from the start and the plans go as though up and there are no complications.  That's not drama, that is a normal day at work.  These witches get together to change the world or their corner of it, but sometimes, oftentimes, the plans go sideways.  This game supports that type of play.

The Great American Witch works or fails based on the efforts of the players.  While the role of the GM/Guide may be reduced, the role and responsibilities of the players are increased.  It is also helpful to have players that are invested into their characters and have a bit of background knowledge on what they want their witch to be like.  To this end the questions at the start of the book are helpful.

That right group is the key. With it this is a fantastic game and one that would provide an endless amount of stories to tell.  I am very pleased I back this one.

Plays Well With Others, War of the Witch Queens and my Traveller Envy

I just can't leave well enough alone.  I have to take a perfectly good game and then figure out things to do with it above and beyond and outside of it's intended purposes.  SO from here on out any "shortcomings", I find are NOT of this game, but rather my obsessive desire to pound a square peg into a round hole.

Part 1: Plays Well With Others

The Great American Witch provides a fantastic framework to be not just a Session 0 to many of the games I already play, but also a means of providing more characterization to my characters of those games.

Whether my "base" game is WitchCraftRPG or Witch: Fated Souls, The Great American Witch could provide me with far more detail.  In particular, the character creation questions from The Great American Witch and Witch: Fated Souls could be combined for a more robust description of the character. 

Taking the example from WitchCraft, my character could be a Gifted Wicce.  Even in the WitchCraft rules there is a TON of variety implicit and implied in the Wicce.  Adding on a "layer" of TGAW gives my Wicce a lot more variety and helps focus their purpose.  While reading TGAW I thought about my last big WitchCraft game "Vacation in Vancouver."  Members of the supernatural community were going missing, the Cast had to go find out why.  The game was heavy on adult themes (there was an underground sex trafficking ring that catered to the supernatural community) and required a LOT of participation and cooperation to by the player to make it work. It was intense. At one point my witch character was slapped in an S&M parlor and I swear I felt it! But this is also the same sort of game that could be played with TGAW. Granted, today I WAY tone down the adult elements, but that was the game everyone then agreed to play.  The same rules in TGAW that allow for "safe play" also allow for this.  The only difference is that those rules are spelled out ahead of time in TGAW. 

Jumping back and forth between the systems, with the same characters and players, and a lot of agreement on what constitutes advancement across the systems would be a great experience.  

I could see a situation where I could even add in some ideas from Basic Witches from Drowning Moon Studios.  

Part 2: Traveller Envy

This plays well into my Traveller Envy, though this time these are all RPGs.  Expanding on the ideas above I could take a character, let's say for argument sake my iconic witch Larina, and see how she manifests in each game.  Each game giving me something different and a part of the whole.

Larina "Nix" Nichols
CJ Carrella's WitchCraft RPG: Gifted Wicce
Mage: The Ascension: Verbena
Mage: The Awakening: Path Acanthus, Order Mysterium
Witch: Fated Souls: Heks
NIGHT SHIFT: Witch
The Great American Witch: The Craft of Lilith OR The Craft of Isis.*

There is no "one to one" correspondence, nor would I wish there to be. In fact, some aspects of one Path/Order/Tradition/Fate/Craft will contradict another.  "The Craft of Lilith" in GAW is a good analog to WitchCraft's "Twilight Order" and the "Lich" in Witchcraft: Fated Souls.  But for my view of my character, this is how to best describe her. 

* Here I am already trying to break the system by coming up with a "Craft of Astarte" which would be the intersection of Lilith and Isis.  Don't try this one at home kids, I am what you call a professional.  

Part 3: War of the Witch Queens

Every 13 years the witch queens gather at the Tredecim to discuss what will be done over the next thirteen years for all witches. Here they elect a new Witch High Queen.

One of the building blocks of my War of the Witch Queens is to take in as much detail as I can from all the games I can.  This is going to be a magnum opus, a multiverse spanning campaign.

What then can the Great American Witch do for me here?  That is easy.  Using the coven creation rules I am planning to create the "coven" of the five main witch queen NPCs.  While the coven creation rules are player-focused, these will be hidden from the players since the witches are all NPCs.  They are based on existing characters, so I do have some external insight into what is going on with each one, but the choices will be mine alone really. 

Looking at these witches and the covens in TGAW they fit the Coven of the Hearth the best.

Coven of the Hearth, also known as the Witches' Tea Circle (tea is very important to witches).  
Five members, representing the most powerful witches in each of the worlds the Witch Queens operate in.
Oath: To work within witchcraft to provide widespread (multiverse!) protection for witches
Holy Day: Autumnal Equinox. Day of Atonement: Sumer Solstice. Which was their day of formal formation as well.
Hearth: A secured build in an Urban setting.
Sanctuary: Lots of great stuff here, and all of it fits well.
Connections & Resources: Organization charged with finding those in need.

Going to the Coven Worksheet:

Resources: Wealthy coven (they are Queens)
Makes money? A shop.  Let's say that the "Home, Heart & Hearth" stores from my own Pumpkin Spice Witch book are the means to keep this operation funded.
Distribution: Distributed based on need.
Status: Mainstream.  They ARE the mainstream.
Importance? Witches need to come together.
Mundanes? Mundanes are important. but not for the reasons listed. Mundanes are the greatest threat.
Influence: Extraordinary.
Members: Five or six local, but millions in the multiverse.
Authority: Through legacy and reputation

Wow. That worked great, to be honest.

Here's hoping for something really big to come from this.

I am still reviewing 5e Witch classes, but now I am expanding my reviews to the OGL-based publications and not DMsGuild ones.  I am going to still follow the rules I have set up for this month of reviews, though I can also be a little more critical of these publications since I am also expecting a higher caliber of production value.

Up first is the Complete Witch from Mage Hand Press.  

Complete Witch
from Mage Hand Press

This book is 41 pages (cover, table of contents, credits, OGL, for 37 pages of content).  

This PDF sells for $5.99, but currently is $4.99 for the Halloween sales.  Given that the art is more expensive for an OGL book than a DMsGuild book I am not sure if my 10 cents per page rule of thumb is appropriate anymore.  In any case, this one is very close to that.

If my expectations were for better art, design and production then Mage Hand has met those expectations and surpassed them.  The layout is extremely clean and readable.  The art is fantastic and liberally used.  The cover in particular is very dynamic.  This is a product that grabs your attention.

The witch class itself is a full 20 level caster with spells to the 9th level.  The witch has a number of cantrips known and a maximum number of spells known.  This witch also gets something called “Hexes” at the first level and these progress.  The witch has 1d8 HD. She is a charisma based spell caster and can cast ritual spells.  Ok so far every box has been checked.  

Each witch also has a curse. Now this is a nice touch and I really like it.  I am not going to detail the curses here, you should really buy it to see, but I am very, very fond of the Burned, Hideous and Hallow.  But the coolest is Visions.  As a DM I’d use that one to my advantage.

As the witch progresses she gains other powers.  Most notably the Hexes. These are roughly equal to the Hexes of the Pathfinder Witch or even of the Occult Powers of my witches. There are a good number of them, including Grand Hexes.

The Archetypes of this Witch are the Witch’s Crafts.  I would call these Traditions and others call them Covens.  But regardless of the names, they work really well.   Each craft gains a list of additional spells and choices of Hexes unique to that craft. There are 14 different Crafts.  I would have gone for 13 myself, but hey I am not going to complain here.  Special shout out for the Tea Magic Witches. 

IF that was all that this publication gave us, then frankly I would call myself happy and been good.  But that is only half the book.

Up next we get a Chapter (yes a proper chapter) on Familiars. There are many new ones introduced here too. There are 17 here including the very inspired Pet Rock (I am nor joking! I love it!) 

Chapter 3 covers spells.  This is the witches' spell list AND new spells. There are 18 new spells here.  For a D&D 5 book that is a lot.   But again, that is not everything we also get some new Dark Rituals. There are 11 of these and they remind me a lot, in form and function, of the Ritual Spells I also give my witches.  They are very well done. 

We get a new god/monster/elder thing.

We end with an Appendix on Epic Boons! (This is a first!)

At 41 pages, this one packs a huge punch. 

I can’t find a single issue with this product save for a couple of nit-picky layout issues.  It is really, really good. 

I had very high expectations and this product met and surpassed them all. 

So this one has been on my list for some time now.  I have hesitated because of all the really negative reviews I have read about it.  But I figure I need to get to it sooner or later and today is that day.

Truth be told I loved the original Blair Witch Project. Such a fun film really. This one had some promise; well...at least promise in my mind.  Mix a goth girl and a Wiccan in the Blair Witch mix? That should have been a hit for me.  And there is the seed of a good movie here, but it got lost somewhere.

Many of the actors are not great, but thankfully many of them got better. Jeffrey Donovan for example moved on to much bigger and better things. 

The beginning starts promisingly enough and then the middle drags a bit.  Again, there are all the elements of a good movie here, just not put together well.  Like getting some furniture from Ikea, but not having the instructions. 

I kinda like the mystery, reminds me of the first movie in that respect, but none of the claustrophobia. 

While it didn't live up to its predecessor it was not as bad as I was lead to believe. Oh it was bad, just not awful. 

NIGHT SHIFT and Old-school Content:  So the Blair Witch Project, in any form, is great for a Modern Supernatural game. An ancient witch coming back to haunt people? That is great stuff.

The memory blackout is a good plot point and easy to do in a game, even if it can be a bit cliched. 

Watched: 49
New: 33

Reviews / October 27, 2020

 

The House That Bled to Death
Directed by Tom Clegg 
Hammer Films (1980)

Apologies in advance to any fellow child of the UK who might be reading this, because for a Brit of my generation, choosing The House That Bled to Death as exemplar of British TV horror is a bit like announcing that your favorite novel is Moby Dick or your favorite food is pizza: so totally obvious that it looks like either laziness or ignorance. But the rest of the world needs to know about semis. No, not those semis.

Semi-detached houses—the two-family domestic Rorschach tests that made up almost half of all properties built in the United Kingdom from the end of the war until the mid-1960s—occupy an important if strangely unacknowledged place in the country’s collective psyche. I say strangely unacknowledged because the place is rotten with them. Semis can be working-class, like the majority of British council housing, or very posh, generally tending towards a square, cozy middle class (British middle-class, mostly with much less disposable income than their US counterparts) averageness that’s very much of its time and place. In 2018, 60% of the UK’s population lived in one. The British haunted house is usually represented in popular culture by some crumbling mansion or middle-class pile with a turret, but from a statistical standpoint, the sheer number of semis makes them far more likely sites for supernatural manifestation, and a series of poltergeists and serial killers of the post-war period did eventually give the semi claim to the paranormal and unpleasant. There’s something implicitly strange about the structure’s floorplan, something that echoes the organic symmetries of lungs or lobes and evokes doubles and distorted mirror-image versions. Perhaps it’s because it hints at something deep in the British—or more properly in this case, English—psyche, some feeling of only half-inhabiting reality, of only being half of a life. Yet despite all this, it remains something of a marginal presence in British popular culture, so ubiquitous that it’s invisible. The House that Bled to Death is an exception, a fact that confers upon it an odd power.

The House that Bled to Death was the fifth of the 13 episodes that made up Hammer House of Horror, a television anthology series produced by Hammer Films in association with Cinema Arts International and ITC Entertainment in the hope of breaking into the TV market. Houses were very much on the country’s mind on Saturday the 11th of October 1980, when The House that Bled to Death was broadcast, because the previous week the Conservative government led by Margaret Thatcher had introduced the Housing Act. Around a third of the country’s population lived in public housing, and the Housing Act allowed five million of them to buy those houses at discounted prices, but at the same time eliminated vast swathes of the stock of (often poor quality) public housing. It was a hugely divisive move that, while undoubtedly giving a lot of families a financial leg-up, kicked off the Conservative Party’s dismantling of social cohesion and, by placing vast numbers of cheap homes in the hands of private landlords, also helped kindle the vicious housing market the UK enjoys today. In 1980, the average annual salary in the UK was probably somewhere between £5,000 and £7,000, and the average price of a house £20,000, meaning three or four years’ wages. As things stand today, the average price is almost £240,000 and the average salary around £30,000. Consequently, owning a home is nowadays at least twice as hard—and impossible for a lot of people. And in the meantime, private landlords have become ever more greedy and unscrupulous. But anyway.

Perhaps taking its lead from the previous year’s The Amityville Horror, The House that Bled to Death tells the story of young couple William and Emma Peters who, in their desperation to get onto the property ladder, move with their daughter Sophie into the semi-detached house where an awful crime was committed involving a pair of incongruous machetes (weirdly referred to repeatedly as “swords”) that the former tenant kept mounted over the fire, only to find themselves under paranormal attack. A pervasively ominous mood of doom envelops the proceedings, but The House That Bled to Death is mainly remembered for containing the shabby British suburbs’ riposte to the crew’s celebratory meal in Alien–-a scene where a pipe detaches itself from the ceiling and starts belching out blood, drenching a group of children assembled around the dining table to celebrate little Sophie’s birthday.

As is often the case with this kind of thing, it’s the echoes of childhood impressions that trigger unease as much as the “horror”: the perennially overcast weather, the pebbledash, “liver for supper,” nobody wearing seatbelts, the constant rumble of traffic, people carrying plastic bags, how empty rooms were back in the days before full materialism, the mercurial pervery of the great Brian Croucher (even more uncomfortable here than he was as Travis in Blake’s 7) as the Peters’ neighbor. And in this age of spectacularized everything, it’s incredible how much more strange and alien the unaffected voices of the child actors here sound compared to the supposedly unnerving music box melody that plays every time something nasty’s about to happen to poor little Sophie—one of The House That Bled to Death‘s more witless and hackneyed attempts at putting the frighteners on.

I’m not going to try and spin some revisionary interpretation that The House that Bled to Death‘s twist ending is actually a veiled comment on the effects of Thatcher’s housing policy, though to be honest, it would sort of fit. That writer David Lloyd was the same ex-tennis professional David Lloyd who founded that other symbol of those hedonistic times—a chain of private sports facilities—in the early ’80s seems unlikely, which is a shame, as it would provide a gratifyingly neat Hammer-esque twist in the tail. Watching it today, with the country in the final throes of pretending that it knew what it was doing when it took out a high-interest mortgage on the damp-ridden haunted semi that is Brexit Towers, it does seem oddly timely, what with the Peters’ refusal to look reality in the face and their hysterically taking against their neighbors for trying to point out that self-eviscerating cats and severed hands in the fridge might mean there are issues that need dealing with.

Brexit was never really about leaving the EU; it was about leaving behind concepts like equal opportunities and social care and moving the country to the right. And in fact, as we learn at the end of The House that Bled to Death, the terrifying events the Peters have been subjected to were never real—they were just a way of using other people’s credulity and fears to whip up a payday. The House that Bled to Death concludes with them living off their ill-gotten gains in a bungalow with swimming pool that’s nominally in California, despite being so clearly outside High Wycombe that all that’s missing is a sign for Bekonscot Model Village.

Who knows if Britain’s children will one day revenge themselves upon their self-obsessed parents for the trauma they’ve been put through the way little Sophia revenges herself on hers. 

Snowbeast
Directed by Herb Wallerstein 
NBC (1977)

The reason I was allowed to hurtle through the 9:00 bedtime threshold and watch The House that Bled to Death in the first place was because when it was shown I was staying in Wales with my mum’s auntie, who in broken English insisted on my parents letting me traumatize myself because I was “on holiday.” In fact, until I was able to access a VCR (we never got one), my exposure to horror was pretty much exclusively thanks to elderly relatives either nodding off in front of the telly or brushing away parental concerns. And the beautiful traumatizing of that long evening of Saturday the 11th of October 1980 hadn’t even started at 9:15, when The House that Bled to Death was broadcast—it had started an hour and three quarters earlier when another of the Caravaggios in the Uffizi of TV terror had begun. Yes, I’m talking about Snowbeast with Bo Svenson.

Snowbeast—which, predictably, is Jaws with Bigfoot as the shark—has it all. The perennially underused Yvette Mimieux, the reassuringly enormous and idiotic visages of Bo Svenson and Clint Walker, The Wilderness Family‘s Robert Logan (who can barely keep a straight face), the great Sylvia Sidney as the avaricious ski resort owner who refuses to close things down, and a monster design almost as alarming-looking as the sasquatch from the previous year’s Six Million Dollar Man story The Secret of Bigfoot, which was presumably at least partly the movie’s inspiration. No rationale is given for the Snowbeast’s frenzied hatred of humankind, though it does genuinely seem to detest skis and skiing—which makes at least some sense in the end, as the instrument of its death isn’t a rifle or a revolver but a Bo Svenson-wielded ski pole. 

Both The House that Bled to Death and Snowbeast are great, but I’m going to risk opprobrium in my homeland by admitting that though the first doesn’t frighten me anymore, for some reason, Snowbeast, which in many ways is far more ludicrous, still does. The sheer surreal irrationality of the whole thing, its risibly shoddy monster, its obsessive revisiting of the same locales, the terrifying snowbeast POV shots and freeze-frame fade-to-red snowbeast attacks (though as I approach 50, the most frightening scene in the film might be the one where a fleeing Sylvia Sidney is knocked to the ground and bangs her hip), the endless boring scenes of skiing: they all combine into something nightmarish, and watching it I’m immediately transported back to a little Welsh house with only wild countryside thrashing away in the wind outside the window and the awareness gradually sinking in that, as bedtime inevitably approaches, I’ve bitten off way more terror than I can realistically chew.

—Richard McKenna

I am going to do some reviews of some non-D&D witch books this week as well.  I am going to talk about what I plan to get out of each game and if they help contribute to more of my "Traveller Envy" (spoilers, they do).

For all these reviews I am going to review the PDFs and the physical books.

I'll spend some time reviewing the game on their own merits and then also looking at what I am planning to do with them.  Keep in mind that my plans might extend beyond the design goals of the various authors and designers and any short-comings they have at that point are not due to the design or the game itself, merely my implementation of them.

The games are:

Kids on Brooms: Core Rulebook

The Great American Witch

Charm Roleplaying Game

and one add on for D&D 5e, Witch+Craft, a 5e crafting supplemental

Looking forward to them all!

And so, almost exactly six months after they started, the Sunday morning Triffid Ranch carnivorous plant porch sales come to an end. What started out as an experiment to fill time newly opened due to the implosion of 2020 scheduled … Continue reading →

Doctor Dissemble’s Museum of Malicious Mashups had fallen on hard times. Like most of the popup enterprises of the Late Social Media Era, the idea was simple: quick and catchy attractions intended to draw in audiences seeking something, anything that … Continue reading →

Michael Grasso / October 26, 2020

The English Heretic Collection: Ritual Histories, Magickal Geography
By Andy Sharp
Repeater Books, 2020

Disclosure: The editors of We Are the Mutants are currently writing a book for Repeater Books. Featured image courtesy Andy Sharp.

At this time two years ago I was in the thick of writing my capstone project for my Master’s degree in Museum Studies. As I researched how fragmentary memories of childhood museum visits could be used in their later promotion and preservation, I also delved deeply into the larger cultural uses (and misuses) of remembrance, commemoration, and “heritage” in the US and UK. In the schema of nostalgia theorist Svetlana Boym, top-down cultural commemoration often reaches for a “restorative” impulse of wanting to enshrine a golden era of the past, while personal memories and interpretations, playfully reassembled and remixed, offer a “reflective” method of accessing nostalgia.

I found myself thinking about my abortive career in museums when I read the foreword and preface to English author, musician, and artist Andy Sharp‘s catalog of the weird and lost in the English landscape, The English Heretic Collection: Ritual Histories, Magickal Geography. Using as its inspiration English Heritage, who preserve the very bones and sinews of English feudal hierarchy in the form of the nation’s stately homes and historical sites, Sharp’s English Heretic project seeks to détourne these edifices of authority, playfully bringing forth the dark and forgotten occult secrets in the English landscape. In his foreword, Dean Kenning cites Sharp’s mining of “mythology… generated not from on high, but from somewhere subterranean and demotic.” The connections that Sharp makes between places, persons, themes, and concepts in the mystical English imaginarium deliberately echo the “ludic” tendency of children’s constructivist play at historic sites: “Children,” Sharp says in his Preface, “see these locations as stages for some imaginary film—a natural tendency to play with the backdrops of history.” Sharp’s “black plaques” are a reminder that there is a moonstruck dark side to the English landscape, one that’s often ignored in favor of sunny evocations of the perceived doughtiness in the English character and the too-quaint yeoman ruralism of a romanticized countryside: “The comfort and nostalgia for rurality and animism is a weekend retreat from all the small shocks we endure in the maze,” Sharp says in his closing chapter. “But inevitably they become photo opportunities to report back our coordinates to the social laboratory.”

The English Heretic Collection consists of a series of essays that themselves meander across time and space, using individual people and places as launching points for apophenic explorations. Through the lenses of film directors, in the pages of novelists, and in the grimoires of ceremonial magicians, Sharp perceives and explains the occult patterns that echo down the ages in England’s green and pleasant land. Like his fellow seers Nigel Kneale and Alan Garner, he turns the leaves of the land to demonstrate that the past isn’t ever truly dead, and that its mysteries recur in attenuated, mutated forms throughout both English artists’ and occultists’ sense of the uncanny.

Speaking of those occultists, Aleister Crowley, that giant of early 20th century English occultism, haunts many of the chapters of the Collection, but so does somewhat lesser-known (at least on this side of the Atlantic) Thelemic magician Kenneth Grant, whose syncretic approach to magic integrates elements of the Lovecraft mythos, kabbalism, and Surrealism, among much else. Sharp reminds us that the three books in Grant’s first “Typhonian” trilogy were released between 1973 and 1975. At the same time, of course, mystics and magicians with similarly spiritually syncretic impulses were working those same fields in America. But Grant’s output continued to grow throughout the next three decades, absorbing new and further elements as it went. “Grant’s later works are grimoires,” Sharp notes. “By the time he reaches the final volume of his third ‘Typhonian’ trilogy, Grant’s universe is a self-replicating, self-referencing, semi-autonomous ouroboros.” Sharp takes Grant’s embrace of Salvador Dalí’s art—Grant calls Dalí the “foremost magician of the twentieth century”—seriously, and sees Grant’s obsession with the feral animal dreamscapes and visions of Dalí and Max Ernst as a link between Grant and J.G. Ballard’s surrealist visions of a late-20th century psychosphere scarred by war, suffering, and technology.

That mention of Dali evokes the next noteworthy theme in the Collection: for all the very English settings and personalities, Sharp is acutely aware that the gradual assemblage of a 20th-century English Weird aesthetic owes much to interlocutors in Europe and America. The archetypal English hamlet was not exempted from being swallowed up by McLuhan’s “global village” in the postwar era. What has come down to us in the 21st century as the aesthetic of “folk horror“—foundational films such as Witchfinder General (1968) and The Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971)— demonstrate how the motion picture camera lens fused the uniqueness of English myth, history, and landscape with the American hunger for on-screen sensation and blood. Every now and again the name of an American who seems to innately understand and plumb the Weird such as Lovecraft, Philip K. Dick, even Charles Manson, floats through the Collection. Furthermore, Sharp is especially astute when analyzing the intrusions of the American metaphysic on the land- and psycho-scape of Britain. Whether it is the ghost of Joe Kennedy Jr. enshrined with a black plaque commemorating his efforts (and death) as part of a top-secret early remote drone program during World War II, or the UFO sightings at Rendlesham Forest in 1980 (which, Sharp reminds us, are believed by many to be a test of psychotronic mind control technology and not a UFO landing), the incongruous sight of a McDonald’s opposite a centuries-old gibbet, the broadcast intrusions that parrot the ufological/New Age consensus on both sides of the Atlantic, and of course the very American cultural phantasms conjured by J.G. Ballard’s works in the 1970s—Elizabeth Taylor, Jackie Kennedy, Ronald Reagan—are all signs of the havoc wreaked by a Cold War American empire reaching out with its tendrils to wrap its “allies” in its black embrace.

Unsurprisingly, the spectre of war also hovers over the Collection. The psychic and physical scars of World War II and “phantom” invasions abound. Sharp’s linkage of a childhood fear of the closing credits to British sitcom institution Dad’s Army to the possibility that German soldiers actually did set foot on England at the “Battle of Shingle Street” is especially spooky. Even after the conclusion of WWII, the melding of black magick and the Cold War military-industrial complex cut England’s body and soul to the bone. In an exploration of the post-Cold War ruins of an abandoned defense installation, Bawdsey Missile Base, Sharp explores the psychogeographic ramifications of these colossal ruins:

These rockets were stored in what look like giant concrete squash courts, or more to the point, like the bloody ball courts of Mesoamerica. As one walks through these ominous precincts, devoid of their munitions, the vacated architecture appears to reveal its primal purpose, its ritual origin. This is a palace of solar worship, a site under a regime in the age of a thousand suns, embodying all the paranoid manipulations of protecting king and salvational psychopath.

Here, English Heretic most darkly echoes its daytime counterpart at English Heritage. The ancient castles gawked at by holidaymakers are centuries-old picturesque ruins now, but at the time of their building and use were no less potent displays of naked political and military prowess. (Sharp takes a smart detour in one of his essays to talk about “nuclear semiotics,” the practice of providing warnings for buried nuclear waste for human beings tens of thousands of years hence, and the idea of an eventual “atomic priesthood” that would warn people away from radioactive ruins.) The profane geometries left behind on the English landscape by both castle and missile base are a literal evocation of the kabbalistic concept of the qlippoth, the empty husks or shells left behind after the light of creation filled up the universe. “At last we have the ordnance map for [the qlippoth],” Sharp muses, “abandoned military bases, WWII bunkers, nuclear bunkers, melting power stations, the dead shells of all that technology ‘concentrated on the production of nothing,’ a black nirvana.” One of Sharp’s most intriguing essays concerns Winston Churchill’s outsized archetypal shadow which still haunts Britain; Sharp finds him a dark reflection of the mythic savior of the British Isles, Merlin, thanks to Churchill’s real-life membership in a druidical circle and his repeated mentions of the “black dog” of his depression, recalling English myths such as the Gabriel Hounds—let alone Churchill’s penchant for human sacrifice.

And that brings us to what I found the most interesting of all of Sharp’s explorations: his implicit location of blame for this landscape on the people who sold Cold War necromancy to the English (and Western public). Absolutely the makers and deployers of these bombs and jet fighter bases deserve to be counted among the poisonous cabal practicing black magick upon the physical landscape, but so does the late-modernist “expert class.” Sharp notes at the outset of his essay titled “Anti-Heroes” that he felt that an archetypal member of this class needed to be represented among his black plaques. Sharp sought to “commemorate a fictional psychopath. The perfect vehicle for such an exploration, I felt, would be Dr Robert Vaughan, the hoodlum scientist of J.G. Ballard’s visionary forensic Crash.” Vaughan is an avatar of modernism’s black underbelly, a fictional concatenation of the physical scars of World War II; the ancient blood in the leylines of England as exemplified by their modernist successor, the motorway cloverleaf; and the rise of a postwar expert class ineluctably linked to the military-industrial-entertainment complex: Ballard’s uber-technocrat, who is also a celebrity. Recall that before he was the leader of a de facto cult of car-crash fetishists, Vaughan from Crash was a “one-time computer specialist” as well as a television host: “one of the first of the new-style TV scientists,” Ballard tells us, “driving about from laboratory to television centre on a high-powered motorcycle.” Sharp notes that one of Ballard’s real-life inspirations for Vaughan, Dr. Christopher Evans, was the scientific consultant for thoroughly glam-hauntological 1970s children’s sci-fi series The Tomorrow People.

These echoes of science, media, and old hauntings reverberate throughout the varied weird television British series of the 1970s that married the countryside gothic with hypertechnology, from Doctor Who to Children of the Stones. Throughout Crash, “Ballard” the narrator’s obsession with Vaughan, his physical body and its scars and secretions, and Vaughan’s own hieratic dedication to the global spectacle of media, celebrity, and technology weaves its own black spell on narrator and reader both. That spell’s incantation is the technically-overspecific language of the automobile as machine, of car crash tests, and the mystery cults of celebrity that grow around the media spectacle of car crashes both anonymous and famed: Vaughan is Ballard’s “undead guardian angel,” in Sharp’s words, much like the American bombers and missiles perched on English soil.

The traumas that war, conspiracy, and black magick leave on the landscape tend to scab over and leave interesting scars. All the while, official history is told by organizations like English Heritage: sanitized tales from the parapets of the mighty redoubts of English castles, of derring-do during the World Wars, of Churchill’s fighting spirit. Sharp channels the dreaming subconscious of that much-invaded land, the rituals of the priest caste that controls the weapons of war, and the secret currents of folk magick that have always existed alongside. The folk horror aesthetic was never just about hobby horses, Morris dancers, and wicker men; nor was the hauntological aesthetic ever merely about library music-tracked public information films on warped, crackling celluloid, or high-tech radomes on hills overlooking ancient stone circles. They were more fundamentally about the very intrusion of modernism, of global industry and media, and of the waging of wars, both secret and overt, on a landscape itself cyclically scarred by conflict and a history of apocalyptic change. Despite this semiotic pollution and these alien temples to human sacrifice, England prevails, in all its horror and splendor.

Michael Grasso is a Senior Editor at We Are the Mutants. He is a Bostonian, a museum professional, and a podcaster. Follow him on Twitter at @MutantsMichael.

Another one I have been playing around with for a bit.  The final product was not what I was going for originally, but I like what I came up with.  Doing research on the demonic offspring of witches. I played around with Aludemons, Alrunes, even Agrat Bat Mahlat.  

My research will come up with something closer to what I was looking for, but until then here is a nice low-level monster for you to use.

Art by Karen Nadine
Alraune
Medium Humanoid (Demonic)
Frequency: Very Rare
Number Appearing: 1 (1)
Alignment: Chaotic [Chaotic Evil]
Movement: 120' (40') [12"]
Armor Class: 9 [10]
Hit Dice: 3d8+3* (64 hp)
Attacks: NA
Damage: NA, or by spell
Special: Charm x3, Witch spells (3rd level), damaged by holy weapons
Size: Medium
Save: Witch 3
Morale: 8 
Treasure Hoard Class: None
XP: 75

The Alraune is born of the unnatural union of a witch and a specially procured and enchanted mandrake root. 

The witch must find the place where a murderer was hung to death.  It is believed that the "final power" of the hanged man would fall to the ground below him.  The witch must come by night and there dig up up the mandrake root that has grown from this final power.  If she can do this by the new moon then all the better.

The witch then takes the mandrake and applying certain alchemical elements and demonic rituals, he will make a lover for herself in the shape of the dead man.  The man/mandrake will then impregnate her his demonic seed. The mandrake creature is mindless and serves only one purpose.  By the light of the morning sun, he will wither and die.

What is born then after the normal amount of time is the Alraune.  The child, who is always a girl, will grow quickly (three days) into young adulthood.  The witch will then set her new demonic daughter loose to wreck chaos.  

The Alraune is always beautiful and smells of sweet flowers. She has a natural charm ability that she can use 3 times per day as if she were a witch of the 3rd level. The creature has no soul, nor any sense of morality.  She will seduce faithful husbands to destroy their marriages, disrupt any village she is left in, inspire envy and jealousy in all that see her.  She will avoid anyone she perceives as stronger or more powerful than herself. If the tide of the village goes against her she will attempt to escape. Most often they end up sharing the fates of their mothers; on the stake and pyre.

The Alraune does not attack with physical attacks or weapons. She will instead rely on her natural charm ability. If pressed she can use witch spells as a 3rd level witch of the Mara or Demonic traditions. Alraunes take double damage from holy or blessed items. Holy water does 1d4 hp of damage to them and burns like acid on their skin.

Alraunes, by custom, are often named after flowers.

Special: Once in a great while a witch will birth two alraunes at once, twin girls.  When this occurs one will be exceptionally evil and the other, while not good exactly, is not dedicated to evil. The witch will not know which is which until they become older.  It is believed that if the evil twin is killed the "good" twin will be free and even gain a soul. 

This is the last week on my DMsGuuild Witch Project Reviews. I am going to focus on some of the larger PDFs now. Also, all of these are full witch classes.

I am going to still follow my own rules and guidelines to make sure I am giving these a fair review. 

Wonders of the Witch
by Ryan Van Natter & Matthew Emerson

This PDF is 50 pages (front and back covers, legal, 47 pages of content) and runs for $9.99. It is light on art (save for a great cover) but high on design.  It is a very attractive book to look at and super easy to read.
I have not talked about PDF bookmarks so far because there has never been a need; all the other pdfs have been small enough to not really need them.  This PDF is larger and uses them. So another plus in their favor.
We open with a fiction section with Baba Yaga instructing a young Igwilv (sic) on the nature of magic and witchcraft.  Seriously are you guys just flirting with me now?  As someone that has spent a lot of time with both characters in my games, this one feels right.  Canon accepted.  Hell that cover could double as the young Iggwilv/Tasha really. 
We start out with witch-related background details. There is the Dedicate, the Disciple, the Healer, the Hidden One, the Malefactor, and the Temptress (or Tempter). Each with associated Traits, Ideals, Bonds, and Flaws.   Eight pages of this and I want to figure out a witch for each one. 
Next is the Witch class proper. It is a full 20 levels with powers at many levels.  The archetypes/subtypes/subclasses for this are known as Covens and they are Hag, Grey, Elemental, and White.  Spellcasting ability is Charisma.   This witch has spell slots like all casters, and a max number of spells known.  Witches are Ritual casters and use arcane spell foci.  So yeah, everything I want to see in a witch really.
Witches gain a power at 2nd level (Beguile) and then a "Witch Craft" at levels 3, 10 and 17.  These function a bit like Hexes (Pathfinder) or Occult Powers (mine).  There is a list to choose from and these are independent of coven.
The covens are nicely detailed. They are all written in a manner that immediately makes you realize that the authors could add any number of extra covens as their imagination sees fit. This is yet another positive aspect of this class. The covens also feel different enough and cover a wide variety of witchy archetypes. 
Spell lists follow with the expected spells. There are also NEW SPELLS. This is the real gem of this book.   There are 27 new spells here. They are truly new spells. There are some that will feel familiar, but many that are new.
For clerics there is a new "Black Magic" Domain. 
We also get some new named covens.  There is the Daughters of Twilight, dedicated to Shar (and a new spell).  The Vistani get the Stravaneska Tasque, and a new spell. The Secret Shards dedicated to Selûne (and a new spell).  The Sun Sisters, dedicated to the Goddess of the Sun. The Blood of the Green, witches of the forests.  The Red Witches of Thay, a Lawful Good sect of witches in Thay!  So six more new spells.
There are some Tools fo the Trade which covers many new magic items. 50 plot hooks for witch adventures. 
A bit on the Mother Goddess in the Realms, or bringing the Witch Goddess to the Toril. 
Finally a bestiary of witch related creatures.  These are the: Brownie, Gallows Hag, Rune Hag, Weeping Hag, Gilt Hag, Severed Hag, Daughter of Darkness (!) Witch, and Witch High Priestess.  They are organized by CR.
This really is a quality product. One of the best of the DMsGuidl Witches to be honest. 

1974 is an important year for the gaming hobby. It is the year that Dungeons & Dragons was introduced, the original RPG from which all other RPGs would ultimately be derived and the original RPG from which so many computer games would draw for their inspiration. It is fitting that the current owner of the game, Wizards of the Coast, released the new version, Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition, in the year of the game’s fortieth anniversary. To celebrate this, Reviews from R’lyeh will be running a series of reviews from the hobby’s anniversary years, thus there will be reviews from 1974, from 1984, from 1994, and from 2004—the thirtieth, twentieth, and tenth anniversaries of the titles. These will be retrospectives, in each case an opportunity to re-appraise interesting titles and true classics decades on from the year of their original release.

—oOo—

Designed by the late Lenard Lakofka, as the first part of a trilogy, L1 The Secret of Bone Hill is a scenario for Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, First Edition. Published in 1981, it presented something a little bit different for the world’s preeminent roleplaying game at the time—a sandbox, a town in which the adventurers could base themselves and explore from, locations to explore not just outside of town, but within its confines too, and an absence of plot. Or least an absence of a plot which would ordinarily drive or pull the Player Characters to explore the locations of keyed adventure module, for example, U1 The Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh. In essence, L1 The Secret of Bone Hill is really a setting source book rather than a traditional roleplaying scenario, one that would lay the foundations for the two scenarios which would follow, L2 The Assassin’s Knot, and eventually, L3 Deep Dwarven Delve, and would together form the ‘L’ series or the Lendore Isle trilogy.

The full history of L1 The Secret of Bone Hill, as well as the option to purchase a reprint are available here, but of course, the original came in the classic format for TSR, Inc. scenarios for Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, First Edition and Basic Dungeons & Dragons, a simple black and white booklet inside a separate card cover, inside of which were printed the scenario’s maps. The scenario introduces the town of Restenford and Isle of Lendore, part of the Spindrift Chain, far to the south in the World of Greyhawk setting. It recommends that the module is designed for novice and intermediate players, preferably between two and eight, using Second Level to Fourth Level characters. Then it begins not with a description of the town of Restenford or the Isle of Lendore, but wilderness tables and rumour tables, before going on to describe various wilderness locations around Restenford. These are located on the various around and overlooking Restenford, and include a temple where worship to the God of Chance takes the form of gambling, a den thieves, various campsites for travellers—and potential hirelings, and more.

The key location described here is the eponymous Bone Hill, atop which stands a partially ruined castle, around which there are signs of it having been under siege some time in the past. There is an odd atmosphere to place, occupied as it is during the day by a small tribe of Bugbears, and a small horde of the Undead during the night. There are some odd monsters too, such as the Ghoulstirge, a type of Stirge which not only feeds on your blood as standard Stirges do, but also paralyses its victims. Encounters above ground are relatively safe, but below ground they get nasty—more Undead, including a Wraith, a tough fight for adventurers of any Level, and they get weird, and even a little wondrous. Above ground there is a potions workshop where the concoctions are combinations of standard potions, such as a Potion of Longevity with a Potion of Speed, thus actually making use of the Potion Miscibility Table from the Dungeon Master’s Guide (!), but below there is a mirror which pulls the viewer in and forces him to fight himself, some not-Beholders (!) with treasure to guard and treasure to share, and afternoon tea with a surprisingly pleasant skeleton!

More than half of L1 The Secret of Bone Hill is devoted to detailing the town of Restenford, its keep, and their inhabitants. Besides the keep and its inhabitants, this description includes the town’s inn and tavern, homes of individuals such as Pelltar the sorcerer, Felix the mercenary, and a bait shop—Restenford being a fishing port. Notably, it includes a Burnt Guard Station, the shell of a guard station which has fallen into ruin, an actual adventuring location within the town itself. Throughout, there is a wealth of information given all of these locations, both in town and out, so if the Dungeon Master needs to know about animals, encounter probabilities, and what an NPC is equipped with, then she is well served by the module. However, what L1 The Secret of Bone Hill does not do is give support in terms of NPC motivation. Few of their descriptions include suggestions as what they want, and certainly no reason why they might hire the Player Characters. For example, there is a spy in the town from a rival duchy, a mentally ill abbot with designs on the daughter of the Baron of Restenford—though the Dungeon Master is advised to keep this a secret until she runs L2 The Assassin’s Knot, and a merchant whose nephew is interested in learning magic.

Rounding out L1 The Secret of Bone Hill is a short bestiary of new creatures in addition to several monsters given earlier, like the Ghoulstirge. These include the Spectator, a Beholder-like creature which readily guards treasure hoards, and the Stone Guardian, a new type of golem. This is followed by ten sample Player Characters, ranging from Second Level to Fourth Level. Most of them have at least one magical item.

Physically, L1 The Secret of Bone Hill is what you would expect from a TSR, Inc. module for Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, First Edition. The layout is clean and tidy, it is easy to read, and the artwork varies in quality—the back cover seems particularly poorly handled. Some of it, is actually very good. Overall, the maps are very good, but perhaps could have been better organised. However, the organisation of the module—rumour and wilderness tables first, then the adventuring locations, including Bone Hill, and lastly the description of Restenford—feel almost backward, but are more higgledy-piggledy than helpful.

—oOo—

Initial reviews of L1 The Secret of Bone Hill were less than positive. For Anders Swenson, writing in Different Worlds Issue 16 (November 1981), the issue was one of scale and randomness, stating that, “There are problems with the material as a scenario - a lot of the encounters seem to be random in nature, not closely related at all to any of the other groups of NPCs and monsters on the map. Given that the Baron of Restenford has a handy military force, why are these nests of monsters within a day’s march of his castle? How can the farmers gather their crops if the random outdoor encounter table is as dangerous as it is? And so forth.” In Ares Nr. 12 (January 1982), Robert Kern said, “The good news is that TSR is publishing a new module for low level characters. The bad news is that it might require a more experienced DM to overcome it omissions and shotgun method of presenting information.” Although he praised the functionality and description of the Restenford given in the module, he was far from positive in considering the motives for the players and their characters in exploring the region around the town.

Conversely, Jim Bambra, reviewing L1 The Secret of Bone Hill in Open Box in White Dwarf No. 35 (November 1982), were more positive. He wrote that the descriptions of both town and wilderness were “particularly colourful.”, such that “A good feel of the area is given and the whole module provides an excellent background for a campaign.”, before lamenting that, “Unfortuately [sic], it provides little more than this on a long term basis. L1 primarily sets a scene, with adventures along the way. Parts of L1 are not needed until the arrival of L2 and so trying to run this module on its own could prove to be a frustrating experience as the designer has given little indication of what L2 will contain or how many more modules there are likely to be.” However, he suggested that with the publication of its sequel, L2 The Assassin’s Knot, the module would be enjoyable and awarded the module a score of eight out of ten.

—oOo—

L1 The Secret of Bone Hill is regarded as a classic, but as a classic, it is a problematic one and it would have been a problematic one at the time of its publication. Geographically, the compact and dangerous nature of the region around Restenford with its cluster of threats and busy encounter tables, does feel just a little too forced, but neither of these is insurmountable, and it is possible to suspend any sense of disbelief that this might give rise to. However, the real problems are that as a module, L1 The Secret of Bone Hill is not ready to play and it does not have a plot—or at least a hook to play and adventure there. Indeed, the nearest it gets to plot is the blurb on the cover: “Danger lurks in the Lendore Isles. Bands of evil creatures prowl the hills overlooking the town of Restenford, seeking unwary victims. Now you have come to this sleepy little village looking for adventure and excitement. You seek to fathom the unexplored reaches of Bone Hill and unlock the mysteries of Restenford.”

Obviously, L1 The Secret of Bone Hill is not designed as a plotted adventure, but as a sandbox, but as a consequence of the lack of plots and hooks, it needs to be taken apart and be prepared as a playing environment, rather than as a straightforward plotted adventure. Reasons need to be developed for the Player Characters to come to the Lendore Isle, let alone go exploring and adventuring there. After all, the minimum Level for the Player Characters is Second rather than First Level, so they will have had some previous adventures. The inclusion of the extensive rumour tables support this, but nevertheless, the Dungeon Master still has to pull them out and link them to locations described elsewhere in the scenario, to create hooks which will pull her Player Characters into the setting and the plots that the rumours hint at, but are left undeveloped and unexplored. This process is not really helped by the lack of motivations for the many NPCs to be found in the module—the villains in particular, and it is not helped by the scattershot organisation which presents the adventuring locations first rather than the starting point for the Player Characters that is the town of Restenford.

There is a lot of gaming potential in L1 The Secret of Bone Hill, but as one of the first sandbox adventures, its design—which is almost like a sandbox itself in its organisation—does not match its potential. It needs a lot of effort upon the part of Dungeon Master to even begin to work well, who will have to pull it apart and rebuild it around plots and hooks that she will have to develop. Fortunately, there is a wealth of detail in its pages for the Dungeon Master looking to develop L1 The Secret of Bone Hill into a more fully rounded adventuring environment. Far from being a plotted adventure, L1 The Secret of Bone Hill is more of a sourcebook and a toolkit awaiting the input of an experienced Dungeon Master.

—oOo—

For further information about L1 The Secret of Bone Hill and its author, Lenard Lakfoka, the Grognardia blog posted an interview with him in 2009. The first in three part series can be found here and is well worth taking the time to read.

We are in the last week of October. I am sad to see it go.  But we still have the whole week and I am going to watch as much as I can.  I had some movies still on BluRay so I thought I'd make a theme weekend of it. 

Inquisition (1976)

Another Mondo Macabro purchase.  This is Paul Naschy's first directorial effort. The Blu Ray is quite nice, you could almost believe it was originally filmed in HD. The transfer is very good. Naschy is his best leering self and chews up scenery like no one's business. 

It's the 16th century and witches, warlocks and the devil is everywhere.  At least that is what Benard de Fossey thinks.  One by one all the beautiful women in the village are accused of witchcraft and find themselves at the mercy of de Fossey. 

It is largely an excuse to have a bunch of naked women getting tortured. Even so a lot of effort went into this one. There is the witchhunter's manual that is as nicely illustrated as any Monster Manual.  I'd love to get some art like that for a monster book. 

There is a witch, of sorts, and she recruits our star, Catherine (Daniela Giordano).  The scenes of the witches' sabbat are trippy and Naschy pulls double duty as Satan.  Triple duty really since he also plays the Grim Reaper. 

The ending is not entirely unexpected but still, there is a nice twist ar the end. 

The Demons (1973)

Jess Franco is as notorious as Paul Naschy.  But in some ways I like Franco better. It's nothing I can put my finger on, I have just seemed to like his movies a little more. This movie though is a touch sleazier than his others.  This one also reunites Britt Nichols and Anne Libert with Jess Franco. Their last outing together was La fille de Dracula in 1972. Though this time Brit Nichols and Anne Libert play sisters and not cousins. 

This one begins with the trial and burning of a suspected witch.  She curses all who are there, by saying her daughters will avenge her. 

We switch to a convent where two orphans have been raise. One Margaret (Carmen Yazalde appearing as Britt Nichols) is good and pure, but Kathleen (Anne Libert) daydreams (a sure sign of sin) and moans and writhes in her sleep at night.  So she is obviously possessed by the devil.  Sure enough, these two girls are the daughters of the witch.  We are treated with not one, but two scenes of Katheleen being "seduced" by the devil.  

Lady de Winter (Karin Field), an eyewitness to the execution of the witch arrives at the convent. We discover that Kathleen, unlike her good sister, is no longer a virgin.   She is taken, strung up on a wrack, and tortured.  Lady De Winter seems to get off on the torture. While Lord De Winter pities the poor girl.  She is found guilty of witchcraft, of course, and sentenced to be burned.  But Lord De Winter sets her free in the night.  She finds the home of a painter where she stays. 

While that is happening Margaret is back at the coven praying when she is visited by the ghost of her mother and then by a servant of Satan to "initiate" her.  And no Margaret, putting your cross between your legs won't help.  Now a full bride of Satan Margaret starts in on the convent. First by seducing another nun and then getting her to commit suicide.  She soon finds Kiru "Satan's Favorite Wife."

Kathleen is recaptured, but her captor falls in love with her and wants to escape to England with her. But she manages to escape again and is recaptured.

Margaret finds her way to Lady De Winter's home where she seduces her.  But now she has the cool power of being able to kill anyone she has sex with.  I guess we see that again in American Horror Story Coven. 

Margaret and Kathleen escape, but when Margaret uses her sex magic on Kathleen's lover (who had hunted their mother) she turns Margaret in.

On the pyre, Margret requests a last kiss from the Lord Justice and she kills him.  She laughs while she burns.  In the end, Kathleen finds Kiru.

Not a bad flick, but a little all over the place. The BluRay has a couple of nice features, but not a lot. 

Britt Nichols and Anne Lipert would also later go on to be in A Virgin Among the Living Dead (1973), another Franco movie.  Between 1972 and 1973 they would appear in six movies together. They stopped filming with Franco also at the same time that Lina Romay started.  I am going to try not to read too much into that.

Mark of the Devil (1970)

Also known as "Hexen bis aufs Blut gequält", or "Witches Tortured till They Bleed."

Bleed is appropriate here since this movie is overflowing with blood.   

This features a young Udo Kier as a magistrate over the European Witch Trials in Austria. Naturally, he falls in love with a woman accused of witchcraft.   There is some goings on with the local witch-finder and his gang and church appointed witchfinder.  But honestly, it is just an excuse to make a torture-porn movie. 

The torture is vivid and done well with the effects of the time, but after an hour or so it gets routine.  Starting off the movie with the rape of some nuns sets the desensitizing dial pretty high, everything after is just more brutality.  Or maybe since this is the third movie of roughly the same subject I am getting burned out.

I guess the film was fairly notorious back in the day. I have seen copies of this go for really ridiculous amounts. Not as much "sexploitation" in this as "tortureploitation" as some of the other movies about this time. 

The highlight of this one is Udo Kier, who even then, showed a great talent for acting. 

I looked for "Mark of the Devil Part II" since it featured Erika Blanc, but all I found was a really terrible copy on YouTube.

NIGHT SHIFT and Old-school Content:  A few notes.

A tortured innocent will say many names, but a real witch will never reveal who her sisters are. 
I also need more prophetic dreams for my witches.

Lady De Winter looks like she could be part of the Winters family of witches. She enjoys the torture of the other witches a little too much. But the deviousness with the blonde hair and blue eyes almost makes her a family member by defualt.

Margaret's death by sex is a cool Occult power (for one of my Old-School witches) but it has limited utility in a game.

Nuns and witch covens have a lot in common. 

I also need more witch hunts in my games.  Something for my witches to act against. Especially skeezy ones like from Mark of the Devil.

Watched: 48
New: 32

Mutant Crawl Classics #10: Seeking the Post-Humans is the tenth release for Mutant Crawl Classics Roleplaying Game – Triumph & Technology Won by Mutants & Magic, the spiritual successor to Gamma World published by Goodman Games. It is the third scenario designed for Zero Level player characters, what this means is that Mutant Crawl Classics #10: Seeking the Post-Humans is a Character Funnel, one of the signature features of both the Mutant Crawl Classics Roleplaying Game and the Dungeon Crawl Classics Role Playing Game it is mechanically based upon—in which initially, a player is expected to roll up three or four Level Zero characters and have them play through a generally nasty, deadly adventure, which surviving will prove a challenge. Those that do survive receive enough Experience Points to advance to First Level and gain all of the advantages of their Class. In terms of the setting, known as Terra A.D., or ‘Terra After Disaster’, this is a ‘Rite of Passage’ and in Mutants, Manimals, and Plantients, the stress of it will trigger ‘Metagenesis’, their DNA expressing itself and their mutations blossoming forth.

So whilst Mutant Crawl Classics #10: Seeking the Post-Humans is a Character Funnel in the classic sense of the Dungeon Crawl Classics Roleplaying Game and the Mutant Crawl Classics Roleplaying Game it is very different to any other Mutant Crawl Classics Roleplaying Game scenario before it—and for three reasons. First, it includes a plot which will drive both the Player Characters to act and events forward. Now this is in comparison to the majority of the other scenarios for Mutant Crawl Classics Roleplaying Game which are reactive in nature, that is, the Player Characters typically reacting to a danger that threatens their home and sees them going out to deal with the threat. Now this is not to say that there is not an external threat involved in Mutant Crawl Classics #10: Seeking the Post-Humans, but rather that it is better used to drive the plot. Second, it moves the setting of the Mutant Crawl Classics Roleplaying Game—as much as there is one—forward, and third, explores more of the genre in ways that previous adventures for Mutant Crawl Classics Roleplaying Game have assiduously avoided.

The set-up focuses on Canyon City, a settlement atop an isolated and difficult to climb mesa which divides a canyon where the inhabitants have found peace and solitude from the dangers of the world beyond.The rich soil atop the mesa means that the inhabitants of Canyon City have had time to grow and learn, and actually advance from the Stone Age into the Bronze Age and so when the Player Characters enter into the wider world, they are not only better equipped, but also have an understanding of the basics of the technology they might find out there. For example, they know how power cells work and they know how to replace them. This will give the Player Characters a slight advantage in play and means that in the play, they will not be quite so clueless about the devices they might find. However, as a tribe, they do not practise the Rite of Passage common to other tribes, or indeed other Character Funnels for the Mutant Crawl Classics Roleplaying Game, and so will be at a disadvantage when facing the rigours and dangers of the wilderness beyond the mesa. (That said, the scenario does not really present the Player Characters with a lot of opportunity to find loot and so exercise their ‘advanced’ technological knowledge.)

Unfortunately for the Player Characters and their home of Canyon City, the region suffers what appears to be an incident of wondrous weather. Under dark clouds, radical rainbow-hued rainfall falls on the mesa, forming a black gloop which adheres to everything—inhabitants, crops, livestock, and more—and suffocates all it encases. As the tribe sees its future threatened by this strange incident, one the Elders comes forward and declares that in order to survive, the tribe must conduct a Rite of Passage, and since the Player Characters are of the right age, they are the ones to go forth and seek a solution to the tribe’s problem.

Mutant Crawl Classics #10: Seeking the Post-Humans is divided into three acts. In the first, they must make their escape down the mesa, either by taking a steep route down its side or negotiating passage to the ground below. It is on the way down that they are contacted—supposedly by a god—which promises to help the Player Characters in their quest, but only if they help him with a task. (And they really should, since the scenario is not really going anywhere if they decline.) There is the chance here for the Judge to ham up the portrayal of the god when roleplaying him, and even create the object of the god’s quest.

The second act is much more tradiational in its play, the Player Characters needing to explore a ruin from the time of the Ancients which will be familiar to the players. Act three is where Mutant Crawl Classics #10: Seeking the Post-Humans takes a radical turn. Here they are literally scooped up and brought to the future—or is it the past? At their destination, the Player Characters have a chance to fulfil their second quest, whether through persuasion or intimidation, and so lead to their original problem being addressed.

Mutant Crawl Classics #10: Seeking the Post-Humans is quite a short adventure, just sixteen pages in length, and likely to offer no more than a couple of sessions’ worth of play. It offers a mix of exploration and confrontation, as well as an odd puzzle to solve, and that is traditional enough in a Mutant Crawl Classics Roleplaying Game scenario, but where Mutant Crawl Classics #10: Seeking the Post-Humans departs from the norm is that it has the Player Characters encounter the remnants of the Ancients and for a little while, interact with them. Ideally, it should suggest to the Player Characters that there is more to the world than ruins and that there are greater forces at work—none of which have been hinted at before.

In comparison to previous scenarios for Mutant Crawl Classics Roleplaying Game, this one is very light in terms of artefacts to be found and other rewards. That though, is not really a problem for as short a scenario as this and given that this is a Character Funnel, the real reward is survival and enough Experience Points to gain First Level. Which in fact, unlike other Character Funnels can occur during the play of the scenario rather than than at the end of it. Which would greatly increase the chance of a Player Character surviving should he attain First Level. The other reward in the scenario is ways to find the Patron AIs from which the Shaman Class is granted its spells or wetware programs. This is not something that is particularly addressed in the roleplaying game and it is a pity that the process of how a Shaman goes about making contact with the Patron AI has not been explored.

Physically, Mutant Crawl Classics #10: Seeking the Post-Humans is neatly and tidily presented. The cover is eye-catchingly pulpy in its style, whilst the internal illustrations are all good. The maps though are very nicely done and very easy to use.

Mutant Crawl Classics #10: Seeking the Post-Humans is the most different, the most radical scenario so far for the Mutant Crawl Classics Roleplaying Game. The fact that it advances the Player Characters’ technology base and exposes them to aspects of the genre not really explored in the game to date, means that the Judge’s game world is going to be changed by Mutant Crawl Classics #10: Seeking the Post-Humans. The fact that it comes with a plot also makes Mutant Crawl Classics #10: Seeking the Post-Humans a refreshing change as well as a radical one. Hopefully if there are more scenarios for Mutant Crawl Classics Roleplaying Game, they will explore more of the world hinted at in Mutant Crawl Classics #10: Seeking the Post-Humans and more them will come with plot. In the meantime, Mutant Crawl Classics #10: Seeking the Post-Humans is an engaging and enjoyable scenario, a fun Character Funnel which works as a campaign starter or a convention scenario.

Redfield Valley is so utterly bucolic and idyllic that there is almost no reason for anyone to go there. Unless of course, you grew up there or you have recently come into property there or you are returning the ashes of a friend to his home there or a fugitive you are hunting for is said to have taken refuge there or you are investigating rumours that the valley might actually be full of treasure or… Or whatever the reason, you and your fellow Player Characters are visiting Redfield Valley, best known for its rich, red soil, Vakefort—the dullest outpost in the Imperial Army, and that is it. Redfield Valley really is nothing to write home about. Oh perhaps after visiting the villages of Crownhill and Appleton, the inhabitants might come to you with some help dealing with some Goblins who have kidnapped several of the locals, but that is about as much excitement as you would expect to find in Redfield Valley…

And then KABOOM! And fazacck! And fire and really sharp, eye-stinging glitter (not kidding) and… the sky falls on Redfield Valley.

Now, the green, bucolic landscape of Redfield Valley has been turned into a blood red mud churned hellhole, littered with debris that crackles with strange energy from a city, whilst the Old Tusk promontory to the south is a steaming caldera, towers lie on their side, cracked and open, roads in the sky appear to climb to nowhere, and a dungeon appears to spiral into the sky. None of this was there before the fall… What has happened in Redfield Valley? Who unleashed the devastation and what secrets will it reveal?

This is the set-up for Shards of the Broken Sky, a campaign for 13th Age, the roleplaying game from Pelgrane Press which combines the best elements of both Dungeons & Dragons, Third Edition and Dungeons & Dragons, Fourth Edition to give high action combat, strong narrative ties, and exciting play. Designed to take Player Characters from First Level to Seventh Level, it is a sandbox campaign set in 13th Age’s Dragon Empire. It supports different motivations and play styles, is designed to support Player Character relationships to the setting, and which really could be played more than once—though with different Player Characters—and each time their motivations would make the campaign very different in tone and flavour. It is also both brilliant and broken.

What is going on in Shards of the Broken Sky—and this explanation is clearer and more straightforward than any given in the book, and something that the authors should have led with, but failed to do so—is that Redfield Valley hides an incredible secret. It is actually the cover for an ancient prison and repository for all of the ancient secrets and dangers that Dragon Empire—and in particular the Emperor and the Archmage do not want anyone to know about or to get hold of. In Ages past, the Archmage hid these secrets behind wards which prevented access to them and built Vantage, a flying city-fortress-prison, to monitor, control, and protect the wards. Neither the wards, Vantage, or the roads that led up to it could be seen from the ground unless you had permission and knew the way. Now, something or someone has caused Vantage to come crashing down to earth, depositing an apocalypse upon Redfield Valley, causing death and devastation, weakening the wards it was built to maintain, and over the course of Shards of the Broken Sky, failing and so unleashing and revealing all of the secrets and threats Vantage was intended to hide.

Over the course of the campaign, the Player Characters will constantly find themselves delving into dungeons that are not dungeons and dungeons that are not dungeons which play with perspective and geometry and time. They are almost bookended by a pair of tombs, one full of traps inspired by Grimtooth’s Book of Traps, the other full of the deadliest of traps that the Old School Renaissance has to offer, and which would ordinarily never ever otherwise appear in an adventure for 13th Age, but also include an Area 51-like bunker which served as a repository of magic; the Shattered Spine, a wizard’s tower fallen and broken on its side; a valley of dinosaurs, all ready for the Orcs to raid and die in order to grab the gargantuan beasts as mounts; Magaheim, a golden city suspended over a volcano inhabited by demons and Dwarfs and their offspring, where the Game Master can play all of the noir storylines amongst its corruption and bureaucracy; the Winding Gyre, a floating maze which spirals into the sky and will see the Player Characters leaping up and down from one lump of rubble to ruin, again and again; and a living dungeon where the Oozes which may not be what they seem.

There are amongst them some incredibly inventive scenes. They include the Corpse of Kroon, dead and falling, but frozen in time, which the Player Characters can scale again and again in order to steal the magical items he implanted in his body; a wizard’s sanctum frozen at the moment of its destruction, its fixtures and features flung into the air around which the Player Characters must manoeuvre to fight; and a warded and party-frozen battlefield with the feel of the trenches of the Great War. All of this is fantastic and it is where Shards of the Broken Sky shines—and shines brilliantly. Not just because of these scenes and the inventiveness of these dungeons, but also because the campaign can be played in different ways. It is a mystery in which the Player Characters investigate dungeon after dungeon to determine who attacked Vantage and brought it down on Redfield Valley? Is it a heroic rescue mission in the Player Characters work to save the inhabitants of Redfield Valley and prevent the dangers warded by Vantage being unleashed upon the wider Dragon Empire? It is a campaign of survival horror, in which the Player Characters must survive and fight the dangers unleashed by the fall of Vantage? Is it a classic heist, in which the Player Characters raid the aftermath of the fall of Vantage for loot and glory? Is the new landscape of Redfield Valley simply somewhere to explore and delve into its newly revealed secrets? Shards of the Broken Sky can be played as any one of those or even combined.

However, to get to this brilliance, it takes a lot of effort upon the part of the Game Master—and that is where Shards of the Broken Sky is broken. And intentionally so. As a campaign, it is not just a sandbox, but a toolkit which the Game Master has to take the parts of and put together, taking dungeon after dungeon and encounter after encounter, and plugging them into the character Levels which the Player Characters are at. Shards of the Broken Sky provides numerous dungeons and encounters with which to do that. The Game Master also needs to work hard in order to bring Player Character motivations into play. This will primarily be done through their relationships with the thirteen Icons of the Dragon Empire—the Archmage, the Crusader, the Diabolist, the Dwarf King, the Elf Queen, the Emperor, the Great Gold Wyrm, the High Druid, the Lich King, the Orc Lord, the Priestess, the Prince of Shadows, and the ancient evil Dragons known as the Three—each of which has their own reasons for taking an interesting in Redfield Valley and the fall of Vantage. To support that, Shards of the Broken Sky provides adversary group after adversary group for the various factions and Icons with an interest in the remnants of Vantage, which the Game Master can plug into the campaign depending upon which the Icons the Player Characters have relationships with and which may or may not have been responsible for what has happened. Primarily these will appear as random encounters which the Game Master will work into the dungeons throughout the campaign, with the forces of the various Icons often appearing and working against the efforts of the Player Characters. These random encounters are in addition to the various monsters and encounters given for each location, as well as the Tension tables for each dungeon which ramp up the pressure on the Player Characters as they delve deeper—or even sometimes higher—into the dungeon.

As well as providing numerous adversary groups, Shards of the Broken Sky includes new monsters, new Icon-specific monster abilities to customise agents of the Prince of Shadows, new treasures, and new optional Player Character Races. The latter includes the Lava Dwarves, who can deliver a blistering heat at attack once per battle; Oozefolk, whose melee attacks do acidic damage when they are Staggered and whose touch might be acidic—an interesting defence if swallowed; and the Ophidians, legless, four-armed serpent folk with poison fangs. All make an appearance in the campaign as NPCs, and could then appear as replacement Player Characters or in the ongoing campaign once Shards of the Broken Sky has been completed. The new magical items include fading items whose power drain away from one scene to the next and various items derived from the crystals that were built into the walls of Vantage, whilst the monsters range from Pie Mimics and Kroon’s Foot Lice to Wicker Golems and Rainbow Puddings!

To fully run Shards of the Broken Sky, will need more than a few books. Not just the core 13th Age rules and 13 True Ways, but also the 13th Age Bestiary and 13th Age Bestiary 2 and the Book of Loot and Book of Loot 2. Other books, such as The Crown Commands, Fire and Faith, and High Magic & Low Cunning will be useful, but are likely optional. The excellent Book of Ages may be useful as a reference in certain dungeons of the campaign.

Physically, is in general well-presented. It needs an edit in places, and whilst relatively lightly illustrated, there is some great artwork throughout. However, of the maps that there are, many are too dark to read with ease, whilst others are comprised of icons that indicate the relationship and links between various locations. These are not often easy to read. Enjoyably throughout though are the authors’ advice and playtest feedback which provide a commentary throughout. That said, the authors could have been more upfront about the plot to the campaign and what is going on, rather than leaving it for the Game Master to discover as she reads through the book. Lastly, Shards of the Broken Sky is not actually an easy read, but that is due to it being written as a toolkit rather than as a linear dungeon which would be the case with almost any other mega-dungeon or campaign for the fantasy roleplaying game of your choice.

Anyone going into Shards of the Broken Sky expecting a more traditional, even linear campaign, even as a sandbox, is likely to be disappointed. It is simply not built that way, and in comparison to such a campaign, Shards of the Broken Sky is broken. However, Shards of the Broken Sky is designed in that way by intent because it is a toolkit, a book of parts—each of which could be extracted from the book and used on their own in a Game Master’s own campaign—that are designed to be used by the Game Master to build around her Player Characters and their Icon relationships to create her own version of the campaign. Which of course does more work upon the part of the Game Master, but if done right will make the campaign more personal to the Player Characters. Neither the Game Master nor her players are going to be able to put the Shards of the Broken Sky back together, but they are going to be able to take its brilliant brokenness and build a great campaign together.

We’re down to the line now, folks: one last Sunday morning Porch Sale for the year on October 25, with one last outdoor show on Halloween Day, and then the Venus flytraps, temperate sundews, and North American pitcher plants all … Continue reading →

There is no denying the continued and growing popularity of Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition, with it having appeared on the television series Stranger Things and the YouTube series, Critical Role, it no longer being seen as a hobby solely the preserve of typically male, nerdy teenagers and young adults. Yet as acceptable a hobby as roleplaying and in particular, playing Dungeons & Dragons has become, getting into the hobby is still a daunting prospect. Imagine if you will, being faced with making your first character for your first game of Dungeons & Dragons? Then what monsters will face? What adventures will you have? For nearly all of us, answering these questions are not all that far from being a challenge, for all started somewhere and we all had to make that first step—making our first character, entering our first dungeon, and encountering our first monster. As well written as both Dungeons & Dragons Starter Set and the Player’s Handbook are, both still present the prospective reader and player with a lot of choices, but without really answering these questions in an easy to read and reference fashion.

Step forward the ‘Dungeons & Dragons Young Adventurer’s Guides Series’ published by Ten Speed Press. This is a series of introductory guides to Dungeons & Dragons, designed as primers to various aspects of the world’s leading roleplaying game. Each in the series is profusely illustrated, no page consisting entirely of text. The artwork is all drawn from and matches the style of Dungeon & Dragons, Fifth Edition, so as much as it provides an introduction to the different aspects of the roleplaying game covered in each book in the series, it provides an introduction to the look of the roleplaying game, so providing continuity between the other books in the ‘Dungeons & Dragons Young Adventurer’s Guides Series’ and the Dungeons & Dragons Starter Set and the core rulebooks. This use of art and the digest size of the book means that from the start, every entry in the ‘Dungeons & Dragons Young Adventurer’s Guides Series’ is an attractive little package.

The first in the series, Warriors & Weapons provided an introduction to the various Races of Dungeons & Dragons, the martial character Classes, and the equipment they use. Second is not Wizards & Spells, the companion to Warriors & Weapons which covers Clerics, Sorcerers, and Wizards—and more, or indeed any of the other spellcasting character types in Dungeons & Dragons. Instead the second book in the series is Monsters & Creatures. As the title suggests, this presents an introduction to the monsters, creatures, and animals that the prospective player may well have his character encounter on his adventures, many of them—like the Beholder, the Mind Flayer, the Owl Bear, and more—iconic to Dungeons & Dragons. Equally, the third in the series is not the eagerly anticipated Wizards & Spells, but Dungeons & Tombs, a guide to the dungeons, tombs, castles, crypts, cave networks, and other complexes which populate the many fantasy words of Dungeons & Dragons. However, the resulting book is disappointing, overly specific in terms of its treatment of the roleplaying game’s infamous tombs and dungeons.

So, it is with some pleasure—and no little wait—to finally have a copy of the much-promised second in the series, Wizards & Spells, to review. It is even more pleasurable to discover that what turns out to be the fourth book series is a return to form after the disappointment of Dungeons & Tombs. Like the previous entries in the series, it is written as an illustrated introduction to the magic of Dungeons & Dragons—spellcasters of all stripes, notable examples of each stripe, an examination of spells of all Levels, and a plethora of magical items. It is very much a companion to  the first book in the series, Warriors & Weapons, focusing on the spellcasting character Classes of Dungeons & Dragons and the spells they can cast instead of the martial character Classes of Dungeons & Dragons and the weapons they can wield.

As with Warriors & Weapons, this mystical-centred entry into the ‘Dungeons & Dragons Young Adventurer’s Guides Series’ is divided into three sections. The first section examines six of the character Classes at the heart of Dungeons & Dragons. These are bard, Cleric, Druid, Sorcerer, Warlock, and Wizard. Each is accorded a full, double spread which explores what each Class can do. Prefaced by a handful of questions, each highlights the Class’ features, gives a broad description of the Class, and lists the Equipment and Attributes key to the Class. So for example, of the Cleric, it asks if the character has a purpose, seeks to inspire others, and wants to serve a higher power? All, of course, pointing to the possibility that the character wants to be a Cleric. The Cleric’s six Divine Domains are explained and then their role in society is important because the gods are real and can bestow blessings and power upon their faithful, which of course, includes the humble Cleric. The description notes how a Cleric’s magic is defined by the god he worships, and that a Cleric will often answer his god’s call to go off on adventures and undertake various tasks for him. The Equipment and Attributes explains what arms and armour a Cleric wields and wears, the importance of his Holy Symbol, how he channels Divinity from his god to cast his magic, and that the Cleric is a scourge of the undead.

Thus, in just a couple of pages, Wizards & Spells provides a quick, easily accessible description of the Cleric Class and what it does. The it does the same for each of the other five spellcasting Classes, looking at, for example, the Bardic Colleges for the Bard, the Druidic Circles for the Druid, Draconic Bloodlines for the Sorcerer, the Pact Boon for the Warlock, and the importance of the Spellbook to the Wizard. Each is followed up by an exemplar of that Class, drawn from Dungeons & Dragons canon. Thus, for the Wizard, the mighty Mordenkainen of Greyhawk fame, is described, including his history and background, personality, and more. Three of many spells are also described, such as Mordenkainen’s Magnificent Mansion, Mordenkainen’s Magnificent Faithful Hound, and Mordenkainen’s Sword. Elsewhere, the writeup of the Gnome Warlock, Zanizyre Clockguard, whose patron is the dread Tiamat, Queen of Evil Dragons, includes a description of his Dominate Dragon spell, and the reputation of Florizan Blank, as a ‘Dandy Duellist’ who combines dance moves and swordsmanship, whilst also employing the Blank Mask, a pink carnival mask which when worn, enables him to appear as any person he likes—fictional or real life.

Rounding off the section is a flowchart, which if followed, a prospective player can quickly decide what Class that he might like to play. It is quick and easy to follow, and a player soon knows which Class he wants to look at in more detail. It would however, seem more appropriate for the flowchart to come before the description for six Classes, so that the reader can progress forward from the flowchart rather than flipping back…

‘Types of Magic’, the second section, covers everything from the eight schools of magic—ranging from Abjuration and Conjuration to Necromancy and Transmutation, the differences between using rituals and scrolls, and how spells are cast. None of it is covered in any great detail, but this is still more than enough information for a prospective player to grasp the basics of how spellcasting works. The bulk of the second section, however, is devoted to spells—in fact, over a third of Wizards & Spells is devoted to them, from Cantrips such as Message and Prestidigitation all the up to the Meteor Swarm and Shapechange of Ninth Level. Every spell is given a description and a number of tips on its usage. Thus for Web, it states that the spellcaster should have points or surfaces upon which to anchor the webbing, that they are flammable, and that in addition to be commonly used as an offensive spell to capture and hold the caster’s enemies, it could also be used as a cushion to soften someone’s fall or to detect someone or something that is invisible in the webbing! The section covers an array of spells from the eight schools, and that includes Necromantic spells like Speak with Dead and Create Undead, along with healing spells such as Cure Wounds. Notably throughout, what Wizards & Spells does not do is divide the spells depending whether they are divine or arcane in nature, or indeed, by Class. Perhaps here the ‘Types of Magic’ might have benefited from such a distinction, if only to give a greater indication of what sort of spells a player might like his character to be able to cast and thus what Class he wants to play. However, the descriptions are entertaining and the tips fun.

Rounding out Wizards & Spells is a description of numerous magical items—weapons, staves, wands, magic armour, potions, rings, cloaks, and more. Included along with are wondrous items, such as The Sunsword of Ravenloft fame, and the Staff of the Magi, the Wand of Wonder, both of which are given a double-page spread, whilst lesser wondrous items, like the Bag of Holding and Boots of Speed, are given shorter descriptions. All of these are accompanied by full colour illustrations that support the descriptions.

Physically, Wizards & Spells is an attractive little hardback, just like the other three titles in the series. It is bright, it is breezy, and it shows a prospective player what he can play, both in the art and the writing. Further, the art shows lots of adventuring scenes which can only spur the prospective player’s imagination.

One advantage of Wizards & Spells being released last is that it means that the ‘Dungeons & Dragons Young Adventurer’s Guides Series’ ends on a high note rather than the disappointment that is Dungeons & Tombs. However, Wizards & Spells is as good as Warriors & Weapons, to which it is a companion, showcasing Dungeons & Dragons and introducing the prospective player to what he can roleplay. Together—and really, they work together, and they should be together, because as a pair they cover all of the Classes in Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition, and a little of the types of adventures such characters can have. Further, as with Warriors & Weapons and Monsters & Creatures, Wizards & Spells can sit on the table during play as a reference work, not necessarily as something that a player would know, but as something that his character might know.

Overall, Wizards & Spells is a decent little book, which nicely rounds off the ‘Dungeons & Dragons Young Adventurer’s Guides Series’. It serves as a solid introduction to magic for Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition, and serves as a solid companion to Warriors & Weapons as well as gift to the young prospective player of a mystical character.

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So it’s been promised since August. A simple renovation of the gallery to increase the amount of display space and install a series of more efficient shelves. Not an issue, right? It’ll be easy, right? No need to seal the … Continue reading →

By now, the regular updates on the Porch Sales are like Dallas weather reports in August. “Hot and sunny today, hot and sunny tomorrow, oh, and 80 percent chance of snow flurries and subzero temperatures on Friday, just to see … Continue reading →