Outsiders & Others
Happy Canada Day
BECMI: Immortals Set Review
And here we are. June is drawing to a close and we are here in the last week of BECMI month. Fitting too that the last week, as short as it is, is dedicated to the oddest set of rules in the set. The Immortal rules set. We see some major changes here and in TSR as well. So. Let's jump right in.
D&D Immortals Set (1986)
I am reviewing both my rather beat up and water damaged version of the Immortal set (I only have the books, not the box) and the PDFs from DriveThruRPG.
A couple of notes. The set now lists Frank Mentzer as Author. No mention of Dave Arneson nor Gary Gygax here. The year is 1986 and Gygax had been removed from TSR the previous October. Frank had been very closely allied with Gary so his time at TSR was also going to come to an end soon. The Immortals rules and the module The Immortal Storm would be his last books for the company. This had two rather obvious impacts on these rule books. First, the art that had been getting more sparse with each set now hits an all-time low. No in quality mind you! But in terms of amount. There is just not that much art in these books. Secondly, it also meant that the company focused more on its perceived cash cow, the AD&D line. Gary had been talking about the AD&D 2nd Edition game, but now that project was turned over to Dave "Zeb" Cook of the B/X Expert Set rules. Others have played the conjecture game of what might have been, so I will not go into that here. What I will say though is it left Frank and the BECMI line alone for the Immortals set to go into some very weird directions.
If BECMI is the ultimate update of the OD&D rules, then the Immortals rules cover part of what Eldritch Wizardry and Gods, Demi-gods & Heroes.
Players' Guide to Immortals32 pages, color covers, black & white art.Your character, now 36th level and has pretty much done everything from dungeons to the planes hears the call to become an Immortal! Certainly, this was the goal of those quests and battles. Immortality. But now the game, both actually and metaphorically, has changed. Just like when you moved from Jr. High/Middle school or Grade school to High School you go from being the most powerful of mortal kind, to the least powerful of the immortals.This book covers how your character now becomes an Immortal. There are five spheres, four of which characters can access, detailed here. These are the same spheres that have been hinted at since the Companion set and introduced in the Masters set; Matter, Energy, Though, Time, and Entropy. characters choose one of the first four usually corresponding to the class they had in life; Fighter, Magic-User, Thief, and Cleric respectively.Experience points gained will alive now become PowerPoints on a 10k to 1 basis. We get our first hints at a proto-point buy system in D&D here since PowerPoints can be spent. Now the Initiate Immortal can begin to do some Immortal things. PowerPoints are used for a lot of things, but mostly for magical or spell-like effects. Your sphere will determine which ones you can do easily and which ones are harder.There are a lot of interesting rule changes along the way. AC is now Ascending for Immortals; so Immortal AC 20 is the same as mortal AC of -20. AC 0 is the same. Ability scores can be raised. First to a max of 25 (the AD&D max of the time) but also all the way to 100! In a lot of ways the PP mechanic is similar to what we see in other Point Buy systems used for super heroes. It makes sense really. Though for all of it's detail there is very little information on what an Immortal should do. Right now they seem, at best, super-powered mortal characters. There is some implicit ideas, but nothing spelled out yet.
DM's Guide to Immortals64 pages, color covers, black & white art.The DM's book spends some time covering the planes of existence. While a lot on specific planes is left vague, there is a lot of details on how planes are designed. The artwork and some of the notes appear as if the author and artists were checking on what the AD&D team was doing "down the hall" there is a unique feel to the BECMI multi-verse. A lot of emphasis is given on "doing it yourself" including room for the DM to pencil in their own % for monsters occurring.There is a bit more here about the planes, in particular the Prime plane. We learn that the Known World doesn't just look like Earth from 150 Million Years ago, it IS Earth from then. This explains the map a bit better. We also learn that this Earth is the predecessor to our lands. Though, in the spirit of everything else in the book, this can be changed. The Solar system is the same, save for a few notable differences. Mercury and Pluto are not in their orbits yet and between Mars and Jupiter where the asteroid belt is there is a planet called Damocles. Fitting named for a doomed planet but doesn't fit with the names of the Roman Olympians. Damocles will be destroyed and the two largest pieces will fly off to become Mercury and Pluto. Imaginative to be sure! But Mercury is only 35 million miles and Pluto is closer to 3 billion miles from the sun. The asteroid belt is roughly 300 million miles from the sun. So Damocles is not really in the middle of that. No big deal, this is D&D not Astronomy. I DO however love the idea of a doomed planet in the current or future asteroid belt. Maybe a MiGo outpost or something like that. I want to talk more about the Known World/Earth a little more in just a bit. Plus there is one more bit of information I want to collect.It would be interesting to compare and contrast the multiplanuar mechanics and rules here with the various Manual of the Planes.This is followed by the Immortal Campaign. Or, what do Immortals do? There are some ideas given but for the number of rules on immortal characters and planes you would expect some more to be honest. Our "Monsters" section is now called "Creatures" since they "cannot be adequately called monsters." All these monsters...creatures now have expanded stat blocks to cover their immortal statuses. One of the first things I noticed were the inclusion of demons to roster of D&D BECMI monsters. I am not sure why this surprised me since these are the same demons from Eldritch Wizardry. Well...same in name but these demons got a serious upgrade. Let's compare. A Succubus in AD&D is a 6+6 HD creature (average hp 33), her physical attacks are not great, but her kiss drains 2 life energy levels. In BECMI a Whispering Demon has 15* HD and 70 hp! Oh and her AC is -6. Orcus and Demogorgon have 39 and 40 HD with 620 and 660 hp respectively! Yikes! We do get some art of them.
In addition to being able to summon other demons Orcus and Demogorgon can summon Gargantua.
We get more inhabitants of the nightmare dimension like the Diabolus which are...checking the description...well they basically tieflings. And they can take any human class. So all the Grognards out there complaining about "monster races" have no ground to stand on. Here are the rules from 1986. The Dragon Rulers are updated to Immortal stats and so are some of the elemental rulers. There is the Megalith and it is ... WHAT??? More on that in a bit!A few more creatures and some, ok a lot, of tables on magic.
Crisis on Infinite UrtsSo there are a couple of new-to-me bombshells in the Immortal rules. First, the world of the PCs, aka the Known World is Earth of 150 mya. Secondly, this Earth is in actuality a creature known as a Megalith ("big rock") and it is known to the Immortals as "Urt."It's tucked away in two different places, but this is a revelation really. The Known World as living planet known as Urt. Imagine what the "Mystara" line might have been about had this thought continued? No Hollow World to be sure. Frank Mentzer pretty left TSR soon after this and the Immortal Storm were complete, so we never really got to see what his ultimate vision was. We do know that Gygax considered his Oerth and later Aerth for his Dangerous Journeys to all be alternates of Earth. Aerth was a little more on the nose about it. Frank was set to design parts of Oerth a few years back, but that project fell through. It might have been the closest we would have seen to a fleshed-out Urt. At some point between 1986 and 1991 (the publication of the D&D Rules Cyclopedia) the world of Urt became Mystara.
So here at the end of all things what can I say about the Immortals rules? It is an inconsistent set of rules to be sure. There are a lot of really interesting ideas connected together with bits of fluff that may, or may not, work well. The concepts of Immortals is a compelling one and D&D would come back to it in big ways at least two more times with Wrath of the Immortals and Dungeons & Dragons Fourth Edition where Immortally was the goal after 30th level.
Still. One can be impressed with the scope of the rules and how it caps off a set of rules that began in 1983 but has roots going back to 1977 and to the dawn of D&D. For that reason, it gets a few points more than it might have gotten on its own.
Back in the day, I had only two characters gain immortality via a route similar to this. More like my DM read these rules and figured his own way of doing it. One would be my character Johan Werper the Cleric and bane of the Undead.
Monstrous Monday: Demon Lord, Ahrimanes (BECMI)
Let's start off Immortals week with a new version of the Demon from my home games. Presented here in BECMI Immortal format.
Lord Ahrimanes (Immortal)Sphere: EntropyStatus: EternalPower Points: 7,500Anti-Magic: 90%Armor Class: -5Hit Dice: 35**Hitpoints: 555Move: 120' (40') Flying: 180' (60')Attacks: 2 clawsDamage: 2d8+5, 2d8+5No. Appearing: 1 (Unique)Save As: Eternal 3Morale: SpecialCall Other: See belowTreasure Type: B, H, IAlignment: ChaoticXP Value: 6,405,000 (640 pp)
Lord Ahrimanes was once a servant of Law and Good (Thought) until he chose Chaos and Evil (Entropy). Believed to be one of the most powerful of the forces of evil, his own disgust for nearly all others leaves him alone and without allies. Even demons that would normally despise one another would join forces to defeat or thwart the plans of Ahrimanes. There is a particular hatred between Lord Ahrimanes and Duke ʾIblīs.
He is a great admirer of science and knows all the natural sciences. When he writes his writing always appears upside-down. Some scholars point to the Demon Abraxas and note that he is master of all the magical arts and his writing always appears backward as a sign of the relationship between the two.His realm is known as Ahriman-abad and it is said to lie “between the stars.”
He can appear as a handsome man with a high domed forehead, inquisitive eyes, and thoughtful demeanor. He will appear garbed as a scholar or philosopher of an earlier age but yet his physique is athletic. When he is enraged, which happens easily and at the barest slight, his demonic form is revealed. He stands 10’ tall with dark red skin covered in patches of thick, coarse black hair and scales. His face becomes twisted in rage and seven horns grow from his head which now has numerous heads, eyes, and mouths. His hands, which had previously looked like the hand of a scribe, now twist into giant claws.
Lord Ahrimanes attacks with claws, usually too enraged to consider using a weapon. Due to his nature all magic has a 90% of failing when around him. Any magic that does get past his anti-magic shield is still subject to a saving throw. He cannot use magic himself. Additionally, Lord Ahrimanes has all the resistances and vulnerabilities of all demons.
Lord Ahrimanes is so despised that he cannot summon other demons except for his seven “sons” which appear as Howling Demons / Type III / Glabrezu of the largest size and maximum hp.
--
Not too bad. A bit powerful for an AD&D or OSR game, but certainly great for a BECMI game.
Enclosures: “The Doors of Durin” (2020)
100 Years of Ray Harryhausen
Miskatonic Monday #41: A Wealth of Knowledge
The Miskatonic University Library Association brand is no more, alas, but what we have in its stead is the Miskatonic Repository, based on the same format as the DM’s Guild for Dungeons & Dragons. It is thus, “...a new way for creators to publish and distribute their own original Call of Cthulhu content including scenarios, settings, spells and more…” To support the endeavours of their creators, Chaosium has provided templates and art packs, both free to use, so that the resulting releases can look and feel as professional as possible. To support the efforts of these contributors, Miskatonic Monday is an occasional series of reviews which will in turn examine an item drawn from the depths of the Miskatonic Repository.
—oOo—
Name: A Wealth of Knowledge
Publisher: Chaosium, Inc.
Author: Leith Brownlee
Setting: 1930s Miskatonic University
Product: Scenario
What You Get: 1.22 MB eighteen-page, full-colour PDF
Elevator Pitch: Somethings have a greater thirst for knowledge than you do.
Plot Hook: When your need to find a book to pass an exam is greater then worrying about missing students and academia, are your priorities straight?Plot Development: An impending examination, a better stocked new library, missing friends, an all too friendly librarian, and a deadly book depository.Plot Support: A tight plot and a new Old One.
Pros
# Easy to adapt to other periods
# Easy to set in Lovecraft Country
# Easy to add to a Miskatonic University campaign
# Straightforward plot
# Forewarns the danger of reading too much
Cons# Linear plot
# Needs a better edit
# No maps
# No illustrations
# No NPC write-ups
# Underdeveloped plot
Conclusion
# Easy to adapt to other settings
# Possible addition to a Miskatonic University campaign# Underdeveloped and linear
Your Loop Starter
Specifically, Tales from the Loop is set on Mälaröarna, the islands of Lake Mälaren, which lies to the west of Stockholm. This is the site of the Facility for Research in High Energy Physics—or ‘The Loop’—the world’s largest particle accelerator, constructed and run by the government agency, Riksenergi. In addition, the Iwasaka corporation of Japan has perfected self-balancing machines, leading to the deployment of robots in the military, security, industrial, and civilian sectors and these robots are employed throughout the Loop and its surrounds. Meanwhile, the skies are filled with ‘magnetrine vessels’, freighters and slow liners whose engines repel against the Earth’s magnetic field, an effect only possible in northern latitudes. There are notes detailing the particulars of life in Sweden in the 1980s, but the culture is radically different—especially in terms of its (almost Socialist) government—to that of the USA and so Tales from the Loop includes an American counterpart to The Loop, this time located under Boulder City in the Mojave Desert in Nevada, near the Hoover Dam. Here the particle accelerator is operated by the Department of Advanced Research into Technology and there is an extensive exchange programme in terms of personnel and knowledge between the staff of both ‘loops’. Similarly, the description of Boulder City and its Loop include plenty of notes on life in the 1980s and as much as the two cultures are different, there are plenty of similarities between the two.
Since its publication in 2017, Tales from the Loop – Roleplaying in the ’80s That Never Was has won many awards and Tales from the Loop itself has been developed into a television series to view on Amazon Prime . The Tales from the Loop Starter Set is released in time to coincide with the release of the television series and is designed introduce roleplayers to the world of the roleplaying game—whether they have watched the television series and want to try Tales from the Loop or are experienced roleplayers wanting to try something different. It comes with everything necessary for the Game Master to present—and both Game Master and players alike—to roleplay a mystery within the Loop over the course of an evening or two.
The Tales from the Loop Starter Set comes in a surprisingly sturdy box. Open up and the first thing you see is a set of Tales from the Loop dice—some ten in all, with the number six on each of them replaced with the symbol for Riksenergi, the Swedish government agency which built and ran the Facility for Research in High Energy Physics or ‘The Loop’. Underneath that is a double-sided map of the region around the Loop. Roughly A3 in size, this depicted the region of Mälaröarna, the islands of Lake Mälaren on the main side, whilst on the other is marked the area around Boulder City, Nevada. The map is full colour and printed on thick paper. Below that there are five sheets, one for each of the five pre-generated player characters. Marked ‘Kid 1’ through ‘Kid 5’, they are again double-sided and include a Popular Kid, a Weirdo, a Jock, a Computer Geek, and a Bookworm. All five are part of the same gang and have connected relationships, and they have background and illustration on the front and the stats on the back. Like Tales from the Loop, they give suggestions which pertain to both the Swedish and the American Loops. Here this consists of names, so the player character Frederik is given the name Chad when playing in the American setting.
Lastly, there are two books in the Tales from the Loop Starter Set. These are the ‘Rules’ and ‘The Recycled Boy’ booklets. The former presents the game’s rules and explains how Tales from the Loop is played, and is marked, ‘Read This First’. The latter contains the scenario and is marked ‘For The Gamemaster Only’. The ‘Rules’ covers everything in four chapters—‘Welcome to the Loop’, ‘The Age of the Loop’, ‘The Kids’, and ‘Trouble’. The first of these, ‘Welcome to the Loop’, introduces the setting of Tales from the Loop and explains what roleplaying is. It does decent job and is backed up in the examples of play throughout the book. It also gives and explains the ‘Principles of the Loop’, essentially the six fundamental elements of the setting which set it apart from other roleplaying games. These are that ‘Your home town is full of strange and fantastic things’, ‘Everyday life is dull and unforgiving’, ‘Adults are out of reach and out of touch’, ‘The Land of the dangerous, but kids will not die’, ‘The game is played scene by scene’, and ‘The world is described collaboratively’. These nicely sum up the world of the Loop, that Kids will explore a world just outside their homes which is full of scientific marvels and mysteries, one that the Adults are unlikely to really appreciate, being wrapped up in their problems and dramas—problems and dramas which are likely to have an impact on the Kids on an ongoing basis. Although dangerous—the Kids can be robbed, beaten up, mocked, and so on, they cannot be killed (though they can be forced to leave the game due to trauma). The collaborative element of play means that not only can the Game Master set scenes, she can ask her players to do so too, and she can also ask the players to describe and add elements to the setting too. What this means is that Tales from the Loop is a game in which the story is played out together, some of the setting elements are worked out together as well.
‘The Age of the Loop’ describes the setting for the Swedish and the American Loops. As such, anyone familiar with the contents of Tales from the Loop will recognise the much shorter descriptions given here. Here though it sets the scene for the scenario to come rather than the full game, so is done in broader strokes. For anyone new to roleplaying or new to Tales from the Loop, perhaps what is interesting here are the cultural and political differences between Sweden and the U.S.A. Of the two, the Swedish Loop is the more interesting because it is different, the outlook and attitudes of its inhabitants presenting more of a roleplaying challenge because of the differences. Essentially, despite the presence of the Loop making many things different, the American Loop still feels too familiar from film and television, so too easy to fall into clichés.
The shortest chapter is ‘The Kids’. This describes what the various elements on the character sheets are—age, attributes, skills, Luck points, items, Drives, Problems, Pride, Relationships, and Conditions—and how they affect game play. Each Kid has four attributes—Body, Tech, Heart, and Mind—and each of these has three associated skills. Both are rated between one and five. Luck points are used to reroll dice and younger Kids have more Luck points than older Kids as they are simply luckier. Items can dice if appropriate to the situation, a Drive pushes a Kid to act and to investigate mysteries, a Problem is a personal thing related to a Kid’s home life and will get him into Trouble, Pride is what a Kid values and can get a Kid into Trouble as well as help him, and Relationships are between the other Kids in the gang as well as another NPC. So Dave or Isak might have the Drive of ‘I am fascinated by self-balancing machines, I’ve always wanted a robot of my own’, the Problem of ‘My parents are getting a divorce, but my dad hasn’t moved out yet’, and the Pride of ‘I know how that works’. Dave’s item might be an electronics toolkit. All of the various elements of a Kid are clearly explained and easy to understand.
Lastly, almost a third of the ‘Rules’ is devoted to the last chapter—‘Troubles’. This explains how the dice work and the dice pool mechanics in both Tales from the Loop and Tales from the Loop Starter Set. Known as the ‘Year Zero’ mechanics, dice pools are formed from a combination of a Kid’s attribute and appropriate skill, or just the latter if no skill applies. The player rolls the Tales from the Loop dice and if a six—or a Riksenergi symbol—comes up, the Kid succeeds. Failures can complicate situations or impose a Condition upon a Kid, like Upset or Exhausted, but a player can push a roll and get a reroll, though this is not without its consequences. Typically, only one Riksenergi symbol is needed for a Kid to succeed, but more challenging Trouble may require more. Sometimes extra successes can be used to add further narrative elements to play, such as to find out more information about a machine and its maker, not only beat a bully, but upset him, and so forth. Lastly, the ‘Troubles’ explains how the game’s skills work and give some bonus effects for those extra Successes.
‘The Recycled Boy’ is half the length of ‘Rules’ and contains the scenario of the same name. It presents a four or five scene mystery which can be played out in a session or two. Written to be run in either the Swedish or the American Loop, it concerns a fellow student at the pre-generated characters’ school who has begun acting oddly. Its plot feels suitably eighties, being too dissimilar to films of the period, though perhaps the title of the scenario might be a bit knowing. Either way, it is a good first scenario for Tales from the Loop, presenting a problem which can be best solved through roleplaying rather than other means and it would be easy for a Game Master to add it to her campaign.
Physically, the Tales from the Loop Starter Set is well presented. Notably both books are presented on glossy paper rather than the matt paper of the Tales of the Loop core rulebook. The package as a whole does need a slight edit in places, but throughout, is illustrated with Simon Stålenhag’s fantastic artwork. Everything is of a high quality and presents an attractive product, especially if you have not looked at a roleplaying book before.
However, there is a problem with the Tales from the Loop Starter Set and it is very simple. There is just the one scenario. What this means is that there is not the easy, next step to take after playing ‘The Recycled Boy’. Now of course, there is the Tales of the Loop core rulebook and Our Friends the Machines & Other Mysteries, but another scenario would support the continued interest of the Game Master and her players more immediately rather than forcing them to cast around for their next scenario. As good as the scenario is in Tales from the Loop Starter Set, it is difficult not to compare it with other recent starter or beginner boxed sets and be somewhat disappointed because they offer more value for money. Similarly, if a gaming group already plays Tales from the Loop, then the Tales from the Loop Starter Set only provides the one scenario—though one which is only available in the Tales from the Loop Starter Set—and so does not offer as much value for money as it could. That said, it comes with another set of dice for the game and good maps of each Loops, as well as the scenario.
Yet the Tales from the Loop Starter Set is a solid, well-presented package. As an introduction to the alternate, fantastic world of Simon Stålenhag’s artwork and the roleplaying game based on it, the Tales from the Loop Starter Set is enjoyably accessible and attractive, presenting a good first step into an eighties that never were.
Flash Sale: June 21, 2020
More BECMI Print on Demand
Up first? GAZ13 The Shadow ElvesI have something special planned for this one, so $18 for print and PDF I couldn't say no.
It looks fantastic really. I might wait till July to do this one some more.
And I picked up the last X module I need. X5 Temple of Death.
I already had a beat-up old copy of X4 Master of the Desert Nomads.
It is out in PDF but not POD. If I need the maps from X5, I'll just print them out.
1978: G3 Hall of the Giant King
—oOo—
Over the years, Dungeons & Dragons has returned again and again to face its tallest foe—the giants! Most recently Wizards of the Coast pitted adventurers against them in 2016’s Storm King’s Thunder, the sixth campaign for Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition, but their first appearance was in a trilogy of scenarios which began with G1 Steading of the Hill Giant Chief and continued with G2 Glacial Rift of the Frost Giant Jarl, before concluding with G3 Hall of the Fire Giant King. The three would subsequently be collected as G1-2-3 Against the Giants, which itself would form the first three parts of the campaign that would be collected in 1986 as GDQ1–7 Queen of the Spiders. In 1999, these three modules would be reprinted as part of the Dungeons & Dragons Silver Anniversary Collector’s Edition boxed set and more properly revisited in Against the Giants: The Liberation of Geoff. It would be followed in 2009 by Revenge of the Giants, the first ‘mega-adventure’ for Dungeons & Dragons, Fourth Edition, and then of course, in 2016 with Wizards of the Coast’s Storm King’s Thunder. For anyone interested in reading or running the series for themselves, G1-3 Against the Giants is available as a surprisingly inexpensive reprint.
Much of this history as well as critical response to both the individual dungeons and the collected G1-2-3 Against the Giants is detailed on Wikipedia. This is worth taking the time to read, so Reviews from R’lyeh recommends doing so before returning to this series of reviews. The ‘Giants Review’ series began with G1 Steading of the Hill Giant Chief, continued with G2 Glacial Rift of the Frost Giant Jarl, and brings the original trilogy to a close with G3 Hall of the Fire Giant King.
G3 Hall of the Fire Giant King is a direct sequel to G1 Steading of the Hill Giant Chief and G2 Glacial Rift of the Frost Giant Jarl. In G1 Steading of the Hill Giant Chief, the Player Characters were directed to investigate the recent attacks upon the lands of the humans—nominally in the World of Greyhawk—by attacks by giants of various types. Against this unheard of occurrence the rulers of these lands hired the Player Characters to deal a lesson to the Hill Giants. In the course of the adventure, the party carried out a strike—and ‘strike’ is the right term—on the Hill Giant steading, because G1 Steading of the Hill Giant Chief is nothing more than a commando raid upon a ‘military’ base. As well as discovering the presence of other giants at a feast held in their honour, what the Player Characters also discover is the scenario’s singular link to G2 Glacial Rift of the Frost Giant Jarl. It is both figuratively and actually a link, capable of transporting the party to the Glacial Rift of said second scenario. At the end of G2 Glacial Rift of the Frost Giant Jarl, the players characters find a similar link which gets them to Muspelheim, in front of the great obsidian valve-like doors of King Snurre’s halls which make up G3 Hall of the Fire Giant King.
From the outset, G3 Hall of the Fire Giant King is very different in terms of tone and presentation. The scenario is longer—at sixteen pages, double the length of G1 Steading of the Hill Giant Chief and G2 Glacial Rift of the Frost Giant Jarl—and presents three levels rather than two. It is also wrapped in a triple-gatefold cover than the double one of the previous two scenarios. Where G2 Glacial Rift of the Frost Giant Jarl was fog and ice over bare rock, G3 Hall of the Fire Giant King consists of a three hundred foot tall, smoking slag heap, its halls and rooms of black and brown worked rock, its special rooms of obsidian and black marble, all lit with torches, braziers, jets of natural gas, and even pools of molten lava. The inhabitants, predominately the Fire Giants, are warier and cannier, better reacting to intruders—more so if the player characters make multiple sorties into the halls. Notably though, unlike in the first parts of the trilogy where the big bosses are placed at the end of the scenario, the likelihood is that the player characters will encounter Snurre, the black-armoured, orange tusked and bewhiskered, bandy-legged, and ugly King of the Fire Giants, along with his bodyguards, very early on in the dungeon. They are literally found in the dungeon’s third room and a careful party could get inside and deal a mighty blow to the Fire Giants and their mysterious backers before anyone can react by killing King Snurre. That though, still leaves his even uglier and wartier wife, Frupy, and a lot of angry Fire Giants. On the other hand, the Fire Giants will react quickly to any intruders and the adventurers could find themselves forced to retreat very quickly. As with G1 Steading of the Hill Giant Chief and G2 Glacial Rift of the Frost Giant Jarl, a handy bolthole is described at the beginning of the scenario should the player characters decide they need to beat a hasty retreat.
With what is essentially the ‘reception room’ upfront, the areas beyond are given over to communal and private quarters, barracks, storage, guest chambers, and the like. Amongst the more mundane locations, E. Gary Gygax gets to write some interesting set pieces. These include the eerie Hall of Dead Kings—the crypts of the Fire Giant Kings, a smithy heated by molten lava, a torture chamber, and the Temple of the Eye—actually in use as opposed to the strange temple all but abandoned below the Steading of the Hill Giant Chief—where the Drow conduct ceremonies to some unnamed elder god. Some of these encounters veer between incredibly deadly to deadly and silly, though are horrifically weird. The fact that the King’s Torturer can throw a player character into an iron maiden and slam the door shut—killing them instantly, and the Royal Headsman can lop of heads and limbs aplenty with little recourse from the player characters point to just how deadly the adventure is. The silly is the fact that G3 Hall of the Fire Giant King repeats the error of G2 Glacial Rift of the Frost Giant Jarl by shoving a very large and ancient Red Dragon atop a huge mound of coins and other treasures into a tiny cavern. This is compounded by the addition of an illusion of a Red Dragon in the adjacent, much larger cavern. It goes against the whole sense of naturalism which permeates the rest of the scenario.
The weird includes the Temple of the Eye and its priests’ quarters. The temple is all unease and a sense of foreboding, swirling lights, purple stone, rusty black mineral block altar, and malachite pillars, where the player characters’ meddling is likely to either kill them, send mad, enrage them, age them, and so on, or under the right—potentially terrible—circumstances grant them just what they need. The quarters of the Drow priests is protected by a Wall of Tentacles, a horrid spell which will reach out with tentacles and beaks to bite, abrade, and constrict those forbidden to pass through it.
The last and third level is entirely different. Rather than worked or polished stone, it consists of natural caverns and is populated by a range of monsters more suited to the environment—Ropers, Piercers, Lurkers, and the like—although in a relatively small area. However, it is currently occupied by a number of visiting forces. These include the Drow, divided between forces divided between Eclavdra and Nedylene, the latter and her forces not only stuck out of the way, but hemmed in by a group of Mind Flayers, also monitoring Drow activities near the service. Beyond the third level itself, a tunnel leads off into the depths...
Then there are the Drow themselves—the existence of which is the big reveal in G3 Hall of the Fire Giant King. Famously, this is their first appearance in Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, and the end of the module includes their full write up as if they had been included in the Monster Manual. This feared, even infamous, Race of Dark Elves has continued to feature in Dungeons & Dragons ever since, but here they remain mysterious and intriguing. The contingent in and below the Hall of the Fire Giant King is led by the warrior-priestess Eclavdra, many of them wielding a new magic item, Rod of Tentacles.
In terms of plot, G3 Hall of the Fire Giant King is rather hit and miss. There are links to the wider plot in the correspondence found in the Council Room, including instructions given to King Snurre by the mysterious ‘Eclavdra’ about bring together various other species, including Ogres, Orge-Magi, Cloud Giants, and other in readiness to attack the lands of civilised Humans, Dwarves, Elves, and so on. In these scrolls is the first mention of the ‘Drow’, the allies of—or rather the power directing the Giants. Perhaps one of the best links to the wider plot is that rooms in the Halls of the Fire Giant King are potentially put aside for the Frost Giant Jarl and his wife and Chief Nosnra and his wife—that is, if they survived the events of G1 Steading of the Hill Giant Chief and G2 Glacial Rift of the Frost Giant Jarl respectively. Its inclusion not only points to the wider involvement of the Hill Giants and the Frost Giants, it points to the effect that the player characters have had on the ongoing campaign. In other words, that both Hill Giant Nosnra and the Frost Giant Jarl and their respective wives are there because of the player characters. Another really nice touch is that Queen Frupy actually has a Potion of Giant Control for using on her husband, Snurre!
Yet in other places, plot within the scenario is either sorely underdeveloped or overused. Not once, not twice, but four times NPCs in the scenario are subject to ‘Curse your inevitable betrayal’ plot lines. There is Ombi, the Dwarf who was once Snurre’s slave, but is now his advisor; there are three Rakshasas—who even King Snurre distrusts, but who the player characters we are told, are sure to see as “…trusted friends and associates”; a Human female Thief, who will help out before running off with any loot she can—including that stolen from the player characters; and Boldo, King Snurre’s former lieutenant who will do anything to get back in his majesty’s good books despite having been locked up for his lack of deference. All four will eventually betray the player characters should they be prepared to befriend them, though the Dungeon Master will need to determine exactly who the Rakshasas look like and what they want as no advice is given to that end. Similarly, the Titan NPC who will ally with the player characters—and the only potential ally who not actually portray them—is left up to the Dungeon Master to develop in terms of personality and motivations.
However, what this does means is that there are much stronger roleplaying elements in G3 Hall of the Fire Giant King than there are in the first two part parts of the trilogy. Most of this will be with the various traitorous NPCs already mentioned, of whom Obmi is the most notable given that he would appear again in E. Gary Gygax’s work on the World of Greyhawk as the ‘Hammer of Iuz’ and as a villain in Gygax’s Gord the Rogue novels. Then there is obvious rivalry between Eclavdra, the envoy to the surface world from below, and Nedylene, the Drow sent to check up on her. Neither NPC is really developed and again, this is left up to the Dungeon Master to handle.
In terms of the overall plot, G3 Hall of the Fire Giant King both delivers and disappoints. Yes, there is the big reveal about the power behind the hostile activities of the giants on the surface world—the Drow, and there is no denying the impact of that. However, no information is given and again, another tunnel or exit leads off to the next part of the campaign, which at this point feels like it should be complete with the publication and play through of G3 Hall of the Fire Giant King. The next part is, of course, D1 Descent into the Depths of the Earth and so it is actually far from being complete.
G3 Hall of the Fire Giant King is rewarding in terms of the treasure that the player characters will be able to carry away from its halls and caverns. In comparison to their lesser brethren in the earlier modules, the Fire Giants are rich. Most carry gems about their person, but both King Snurre and Queen Frupy have much, much more. Some of this though, is locked up in vaults and even then, hidden. Often the player characters will find it challenging to uncover it, whilst getting back to the civilised presents a whole other set of problems...
For all that G3 Hall of the Fire Giant King describes the Fire Giants as being tough opponents, and able to cleverly react to the intrusion by the player characters, the advice on how they react is underwritten. With the Throne Room and both the quarters of King Snurre and Queen Frupy so close to the entrance of the hall, there is the possibility that either or both of them are killed early on in the player characters’ sorties into the Fire Giant lair. What happens then? How do the survivors react? Given that the purpose of the scenario for the player characters is as the module states, “…to slay fire giants and all who associate with them.”, why is there so little advice to help the Dungeon Master here? Now of course, this is an ‘Old School’ module and yes, that means that the Dungeon Master is left to decide these things for herself, and whilst that is intentional, it leaves the Dungeon Master with a lot of variables to work through when preparing the adventure.
Physically, G3 Hall of the Fire Giant King is again a slim booklet, but sixteen pages rather than eight. Again, the booklet is cramped, but E. Gary Gygax again packs in a lot of detail, especially in the descriptions of Queen Frupy, of King Snurre’s vaults, Ombi and his quarters, the Temple of the Eye, and so on. The maps are generally clear and benefit from being across three levels rather than two. Unfortunately, the artwork is mostly terrible. In fact, the best piece of artwork is Dave Trampier’s profile portrait of King Snurre himself.
—oOo—
G3 Hall of the Fire Giant King was published at a time when there were few magazines in which they could be reviewed. In many cases, G3 Hall of the Fire Giant King would be reviewed when it was published in the collected G1-2-3 Against the Giants in 1981. For example, this is the version that Anders Swenson reviewed in Different Worlds Issue 20 (March 1982). He wrote of G3 Hall of the Fire Giant King that, “The fire giants live in a well-constructed dungeon complex inside a volcanic mountain. This is simply a tough nut for the adventurers - the giants are in a place constructed for defense where they can repel a sortie with secondary positions, impromptu barricades, and ambushes. The designer expects this tobe a running battle.”
White Dwarf was the exception and managed to review the trilogy of G1 Steading of the Hill Giant Chief, G2 Glacial Rift of the Frost Giant Jarl, and G3 Hall of the Fire Giant King together in Open Box in White Dwarf Issue No. 9. However, this did not mean that they were reviewing independently of each other, the late Don Turnbull concluding, “In summary, there are three D&D scenarios which have been very carefully planned in considerable detail, both individually and collectively; they have been presented in exemplary fashion and are fit to grace the collection of the most discerning. They require skill in play (which is right) but also require a party of high-level characters, and my one regret is that they were not aimed at parties more likely to be readily available to players (though, in fairness, you can't expect a weak party to take on gangs of Giants). No DM should be without them, for even if he never gets a chance to run them, they are a source of much excellent design advice.”
However, G3 Hall of the Fire Giant King was reviewed separately in Space Gamer Number 44 (October, 1981) by Kurt Butterfield. He wrote that, “The scenario is well thought out and nicely detailed. DMs will find some intriguing special instructions given for deviously playing several of the intelligent inhabitants of the dungeon. There’s also some useful and interesting information on the Drow (dark elves).” before continuing, “This is definitely not ab easy dungeon, and since the monsters are quite strong and numerous, players will often be hard put to survive. Many of the monsters could be left out and this would still have been a challenging adventure.” He concluded by writing, “I advise all DMs who are looking for an exciting, worthwhile adventure for their players to pick this one up. You won’t be disappointed.”
—oOo—
G3 Hall of the Fire Giant King brings the ‘G’ series of adventures to a big, challenging finale—if not necessarily a conclusion. In comparison to G2 Glacial Rift of the Frost Giant Jarl, it is undeniably a better dungeon. Perhaps not quite as atmospheric, but better and more interesting in terms of individual locations, plotting, and roleplaying potential. Unfortunately, neither the plotting nor the roleplaying potential is as developed as it should be, that is, sufficiently enough to be helpful to the Dungeon Master, and ultimately, enough to explain the reasons for what is going on between the Drow and the Fire Giants. There is though a sense of scale and grandeur to G3 Hall of the Fire Giant King, the enemies and big and tough, the halls are tall and eerie, and there is a sense of mystery to the place in uncovering just what is going on (as much as the module explains everything). Unlike G2 Glacial Rift of the Frost Giant Jarl, the dungeon in G3 Hall of the Fire Giant King does not feel as static, but much of what is going on is confined to individual locations rather than the whole complex and perhaps in as organised a place as the Hall of the Fire Giant King, the module could have done with a schedule of events to give some idea of what its various inhabitants are doing and when. Again, this something that is left up to the Dungeon Master to decide.
G3 Hall of the Fire Giant King is a big, bruising, even brutal dungeon crawl. It will take clever gameplay and tactics upon the part of the players and their characters to survive, but just like G2 Glacial Rift of the Frost Giant Jarl before it, G3 Hall of the Fire Giant King needs a lot of input from the Dungeon Master to bring out the best of its details.
—oOo—
It should be noted that Wizards of the Coast collected and published G1 Steading of the Hill Giant Chief, G2 Glacial Rift of the Frost Giant Jarl, and G3 Hall of the Fire Giant King as part of Tales from the Yawning Portal for Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition. It is a pity that Goodman Games would not have a chance to revisit, develop, and update the series as it did for B1 In Search of the Unknown and B2 Keep on the Borderlands with Original Adventures Reincarnated #1: Into the Borderlands. Certainly there is some archival material in the early issues of Dragon magazine, such as the examination of these modules as tournament adventures in Dragon 19. In the meantime, the next review in the series will be of Against the Giants: The Liberation of Geoff.
Jonstown Jottings #22: GLORANTHA: Trinkets from Dragon Pass
—oOo—What is it?
GLORANTHA: Trinkets from Dragon Pass is a short supplement for for RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha.
It is a five page, full colour, 9.71 MB PDF.
GLORANTHA: Trinkets from Dragon Pass is decently presented and organised. It needs a slight edit.
Where is it set?
Dragon Pass.
Who do you play?
Adventurers of all types who could come across curios, novelties, gewgaws, and the like.
What do you need?
RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha. It can also be run using the RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha – QuickStart Rules and Adventure.
What do you get?
A single table with fifty entries.
GLORANTHA: Trinkets from Dragon Pass is a short—a very short—supplement containing one table. On this table is listed fifty entries listing gewgaws and trinkets and curios and knickknacks that you could find amongst an NPC’s personal possessions. For example, “A bronze clasp, once belonging to the belt of a fierce Orlanthi fighter. It resembles the head of a trollkin.” or “Something which resembles a brass bracelet, but it is instead a decoration for the central horn of a triceratops domesticated by dragonewts.” Some of them are even ever so slightly magical, such as “A miniature wicker boat. When a copper Clack is put in it, a faint, illusory image of Jeset the Ferryman appears for a moment.”
Is it worth your time?
Yes. GLORANTHA: Trinkets from Dragon Pass is an inexpensive way of adding verisimilitude to your RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha campaign.
No. GLORANTHA: Trinkets from Dragon Pass is simply too expensive and does not offer enough value for money for what you get, plus the small details do not always matter.
Maybe. GLORANTHA: Trinkets from Dragon Pass is expensive for what you get, but who knows what you might find packed away on that Issaries merchant caravan?
Have a Safe Weekend
The Future of BECMI and Black Box Basic
But that was not the end of "Basic" or BECMI D&D. I reviewed into the Maelstrom yesterday and talked about how it had a real proto-90s feel even in 1985. So let's look briefly into the future of the D&D Basic line to see what the 90s has in store.
In 1991 TSR was a very different place than when Gygax and Co. set out to create a new kind of game. Most, if not all, of the old guard, were gone. AD&D 2nd Edition was the house game of choice and the order of the day were the worlds and settings created for it.
At some point, and I have no insight on this, a new version of the D&D game was introduced. Like the previous games it was in a box and contained some basic information. Unlike those previous games, this box was more like a board game box, the levels went from 1 to 5, and there were maps, dice, and game pieces included.
The New Easy to Master Dungeons & Dragons Game (1991)This new "Basic", sometimes called "Black Box Basic" was a new attempt at an introductory set of rules for D&D.
The design is by Troy Denning and the rulebook was written by Timothy B. Brown.In what is sure to be a blow to old-school purists, Gygax, Arneson, and Mentzer are never mentioned in the book. To add insult to injury Lorraine Williams is given a special thanks.
Outside of that and the gimmick of the boardgame style box the rules inside are very clean, easy to read and understand and play with. Obviously, these rules are drawn from the BECMI core and this set is designed to be an introduction to the D&D Rules Cyclopedia.
The box itself is a treasure trove, to be honest.
The rule book for players is quite attractive.
Dice, card stock characters and monsters, and a 1991 TSR catalog.
Zanzer's Dungeon. The map is really nice and scaled for 1" = 5', so compatible with D&D 3.x, 4e and 5e.
DM's Screen and book.
The underside of the box displaying all the pieces.
A 1991 TSR catalog for the D&D line. Let's have a better look at that Rules Cyclopedia...
Someone will have a cover mocked up of this by next week I am sure.
The DMs Guide and screen with the Players Book. Both came in the Basic set and The Dragon's Den boxed set.
There were also three add-ons, called "Adventure Pack" for this. I only own The Dragon's Den and it has pieces that compliment the Basic set. The DM's Guide/Screen and Player's Book are included in both. All three are available on DriveThruRPG, but they are not as complete as the physical products.
Although reading online I can't confirm if the Rule Book and the DM's Guide/Screen actually came with the Dragon's Den.
This is the future for the D&D line until the end of the decade.
Yes, that is the Rules Cyclopedia PoD. Here they are all together.
When I decide to run a new Basic-era campaign (instead of a bunch of one-shots) I am going to be overwhelmed with choices.
Leagues of Gammerstangs
(Note: ‘Gammerstang’ means awkward person in the local dialect.)
Leagues of Cthulhu: Guide to Cumbria details an area of the north of England, bordering Scotland, which is best known as the Lake District—for the lakes Windermere, Coniston Water, Ullswater, Buttermere, Grasmere, and many others, and as the home of the ‘Lake Poet School’ whose members included William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey. Since the Victorian period it has been primarily been seen as a tourist destination, but prior to that, it was a source of worked-flint, a frontier of the Roman Empire, a frontier region between England and Scotland, a rural backwater, and more recently, with the coming of the railways, an industrial centre. Yet in ages past, races of the Mythos like the Elder Things and the Fungi from the Yuggoth operated in the region, whilst with the coming of mankind, the Deep Ones migrate to the Cumbrian coast and begin interacting with them. The Celts brought worship of the Shub-Niggurath and avatars of Nyarlathotep to the region, whilst the Romans also imported the worship of dark gods from the far edges of their empire.
Now despite its title of Leagues of Cthulhu: Guide to Cumbria, the supplement actually describes not the county of Cumbria as it is today—which only dates from 1974—but rather Cumberland, Furness, and Westmoreland. (For ease of play, the supplement simply uses Cumbria.) It covers the region in three chapters. The first of these introduces the area and gives its history, geography, a guide to getting there and what to find when you do, the latter including cuisine, entertainment, policing, and so on. The inclusion of a guide to toponyms—Cumbrian place names, the local dialect, folk remedies, and general superstitions all add a pleasing degree of verisimilitude. In game terms, it suggests various Leagues of Adventure faculties to be found in the region, for example, the Anglers’ Club, Bath Club, Mariners’, and Society of Aquanauts share a clubhouse in Bowness-on-Windemere. (The presence of the latter a knowing nod—backed up by an even more nod to The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes.)
The second chapter is the gazetteer and forms the heart of the supplement. It covers ancient sites, natural features, Roman sites, and settlements, many of which are accompanied by adventure seeds. Thus, the Castlerigg Stone Circle outside of Keswik, whose number of stones is said to be uncountable and at the centre of which is a firepit which when unearthed was a blob of “some dark unctuous sort of earth.” The adventure seed for this suggests that this was the remains of a Black Spawn of Tsathoggua. The natural features include the region’s various caves and lakes, the Roman sites two major forts in the area, whilst the settlements cover its towns and villages, from Ashness Bridge and Aspatria to Whitehaven and Workington. It describes the Dacre family, a prominent Cumbrian family which in the past was split between its worship of Cthulhu and Shub-Niggurath, and supports this with a new Bloodline for Leagues of Cthulhu. Tying back to the Lakeland poets and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a notable narcotic ‘Kendal Black Drop’ of the period, better enables users to enter the Dreamlands or simply opens them to the thoughts of the Great Old Ones…
The third chapter presents denizens of the region. They include lists of dignitaries—aristocrats, bureaucrats, clergymen, and Members of Parliament—all names which Game Masters and Keepers will want to research before bringing into their campaigns. The only famous person fully detailed is the bon vivant Earl Lonsdale, known as the ‘Yellow Earl’ for his favourite colour. This may or may not signify something… Lastly, the supplement details a cult, the Brotherhood of the Maimed King. Linked to Arthurian myth, this is horridly both fecund and bucolic and is the content in the book which is probably the easiest for the Game Master and the Keeper to develop into a scenario.
Physically, Leagues of Cthulhu: Guide to Cumbria is a plain affair. It is simply laid out, there are no illustrations, and there are no maps. The latter is more of an issue than the former, forcing even the most casual of readers to do some research to give context to places and features described in the text. That said, any good Game Master or Keeper will probably do more research if she is going to run a scenario or take her campaign to Cumbria, so maps are not as much of an issue as they could be. Still, it would have been nice if there had been one included.
Anyone coming to Leagues of Cthulhu: Guide to Cumbria expecting the Mythos to be running wild across the rolling hills, up and down the fells, along the long the deep valleys of the region, conspiracies of worshippers working to bring about some grand plan to end the world, will be disappointed. Leagues of Cthulhu: Guide to Cumbria is not that supplement. It is broader in its over overview of the region, encompassing the supernatural as well as the Mythos, but layering it under folklore and myth and superstition. What manifestations of the Mythos there are in Cumbria are holdouts, relics from the ancient past, perhaps best left to linger and die off rather than arise again due to some meddling from all-too inquisitive Globetrotters or investigators. Anything in Leagues of Cthulhu: Guide to Cumbria will need some development upon the part of the Game Master or Keeper to turn into a full mystery, but is still worth keeping on the shelf as reference or just in case the Globetrotters or investigators feel like a holiday in Wordsworth country.
Review: M1 Into the Maelstrom (BECMI)
Until that is Bruce Heard began producing material for Calidar.
M1 Into the Maelstrom is really a fantastic adventure for the D&D Master's Set that realizes that set's potential. It is also a great lead-in to not just the Immortals Set coming up, but also the future of the Mystara-line and even pre-sages Spelljammer and the adventures of the 90s. Additionally, and somewhat forgotten, this book introduces us to our first named Immortals and introduces demons to BECMI.
There is a lot going on here. Let's get into it.
For this review, I am going to consider my original print module and the PDF from DriveThruRPG. There is a Print on Demand version as well, but I do not have it.
M1 Into the MaelstromBy Bruce and Beatrice Heard. 32 pages, color covers, black & white interior. Cover art by Jeff Easley, interior art by Valerie Valusek and maps by Dave "Diesel" LaForce.Into the Maelstrom deals with the machinations of three Immortals, Koryis (Law), Vanya (Neutral) and Alphaks (Chaos), and are featured on the cover. Alphaks is our focus here. He is the focus of the next few adventures and is one of the "Big Bads" of the later BECMI and Mystara lines. He was the ancient Emperor of Alphatia AND he is the first demon we see by the name demon in any BECMI book to my knowledge. He is a "Roaring Demon" or what 1st Edition calls a Type VI or Balor demon. We won't learn more about them till the Immortal set, but here they are. Demons in Basic D&D.
Our adventure starts in the Known World. We bring back King Ericall of Norwold and he needs the characters to investigate the source of some poisonous winds coming from the north between Norwold and the Island Empire of Alphatia (to the east). The poisonous fog/winds are the result of Alphaks trying to reenter the world via a two-way portal from the Sphere of Death (call back to Death's Ride!)
The three immortals are essentially playing a game. Alphaks wants into the world, Koryis doesn't want him in and Vanya is going to side with the winner. As the adventure progresses each immortal will earn points for the actions, successes and/or failures of the PCs. The DM keeps track. The PCs can also gain curses or boons as the adventure continues.
So another new addition is the "Sea Machine" or water-based battles as an addition to the War Machine. Pretty nice bonus add if you ask me.
The first part of the adventure goes pretty normal. That is until the seagoing vessels encounter the titular maelstrom. The PCs are sucked into the swirling vortex of death and spit out into a starry void with air they can breathe! How's that for adventure?
Here this becomes a proto-Spelljamming adventure, there are several locations (Islands) that the PCs can stop at, but each has their own unique set of hazards.
The PCs must navigate, in all senses of the word, the machinations of these three immortals. There is even a giant battle with a navy of the dead controlled by Alphaks.
In addition to the new monster stats (the Roaring Demon), there are PC/NPC stats in back for characters to use in the adventure.
So for the first time, we get a BECMI adventure into the other planes. Here the characters get a chance to travel the outer planes via a flying ship and even dip a toe into the Astral plane. Depending on the outcome the characters can also be set on the path to Immortality.
This adventure is "bigger on the inside" as has been described. There is a lot here that can be expanded on to a near-infinite degree. With a ship that can transverse the planes a good argument could be made about even returning to the Known World and Norwold.
Let's also take a moment and talk about Diesel LaForce's maps.
These things are works of art really. I am not sure how as a DM you can look at them and NOT want to run this adventure. "Dimensional Guide to the Star Kingdoms?" Hell yeah!
Into the Maelstrom, along with the other modules in the M series work not just as a Master's level set of adventures, but also our introduction to plane hopping and dealing with immortals in the D&D game. Compared to the same treatments in AD&D, such as the H Series, the M series is more subtle in it's approach. The H series is largely about kicking in doors, killing monsters and taking their stuff. Only in the H series, the doors are planes, the monsters are gods and demons and their stuff are artifacts.
Going back to the beginning, if I had known more about the arc (let's call it the "Norwold Saga") then all of these adventures do tie into all the others in a nice, dare I say it, Adventure Path. Maybe that is something that WotC could do to reintroduce Mystara is give us this for 5e rules.
Keep in mind that this "Adventure Path" or even meta plot was alive and well in the mid-80s. Long before the 90s that this sort of gaming is most associated with. I might have to explore this idea further.
In the meantime, M1 Into the Maelstorm stands out as not only a great adventure, but a groundbreaking one in many ways.
Falling Into The Sky: Disappearance, Aviation, and ‘The Twilight Zone’
Grafton Tanner / June 25, 2020
“Really nothing there, is there?”
—from Duck Pimples (1945)
Classic episodes of The Twilight Zone (1959-1964) follow a simple formula. An ordinary person experiences something extraordinary, and we follow along as they figure out what is happening. Very often, the story ends with a twist: the cross-country traveler has been dead all along, the aliens are actually astronauts from Earth, To Serve Man is a cookbook. But not every episode adheres to this formula. In fact, the very best of Rod Serling’s visionary series aren’t so simple.
“And When the Sky Was Opened,” from the first season, is one of the very best. Based on the Richard Matheson short story “Disappearing Act,” the episode tells the story of three pilots—U.S. Air Force Colonel Ed Harrington (Charles Aidman), Colonel Clegg Forbes (Rod Taylor), and Major William Gart (Jim Hutton)—who return from the first voyage into space only to be erased from existence, one by one. The story begins after the pilots have crash landed, but Rod Serling’s opening monologue includes a bit of crucial exposition: the pilots vanished from radar and lost all contact with mission control for twenty-four of the thirty-one hours they were in flight.
After the mysterious and sudden disappearance of Harrington upon landing, Forbes desperately tries to convince Gart that something has taken Harrington from this world, that perhaps “somebody or something made a mistake” and let the three pilots return when they shouldn’t have. Gart, confined to a hospital bed, has no memory of Harrington, and Forbes comes to realize that no one else remembers the pilot. The story ends with Forbes arriving at the horrific realization that he is next to disappear. Begging for his life, he runs screaming from Gart’s hospital room and vanishes. When the nurse fails to remember Forbes, Gart then understands the colonel was telling the truth, and Gart, the aircraft, and the mission disappear without a trace.
The episode is a success for many reasons. The acting is palpable; you can feel the existential horror of the pilots as they come to terms with their absurd fate. As the panicked Clegg Forbes, Rod Taylor gives a dynamic performance of a man splintering into madness, and when the supporting cast gawks at him with pity, you start to wonder whether Forbes is really delusional. The episode also refrains from ending with a twist. There is no grand surprise at the end, only eerie ambiguity. Something has disappeared the pilots from existence. Without a conclusive reveal, all we’re left with is a lingering cosmic horror—the bizarre, nauseating suspicion that the universe operates according to unknown logic. Perhaps there’s no logic at all.
Like every Twilight Zone episode, “And When the Sky Was Opened” reflects both modern and timeless human anxieties. It can tell us quite a bit about memory and information loss, about the politics of disappearance both in postwar culture and in today’s time of social amnesia, when too much information inevitably causes some things to be remembered and others to be forgotten. And the episode uses aviation to reveal the politics of social forgetting, exposing the truth that only those who remember the past disappear.
“And When the Sky Was Opened” is not the only Twilight Zone entry to feature disappearing aircraft. The third season also-ran “The Arrival” tells the story of a commercial flight that lands mysteriously without anyone on board. A detective with a perfect record is assigned the case, and he slowly comes to believe the plane isn’t real. When he attempts to prove this by placing his hand in the path of a spinning propeller, the plane vanishes. The twist? The detective does not actually have a perfect record. In his entire career, there was only one case he couldn’t solve: a missing airplane that disappeared mid-flight years earlier. The empty plane is merely a ghost that has come back to torment him. And in the brilliant “The Odyssey of Flight 33,” a routine flight encounters a strange tailwind that accelerates it past the speed of sound. When the plane slows, the pilots attempt a landing—only to realize they have traveled backwards in time to some prehistoric era. They successfully pick up the tailwind again, hoping to travel back to the present. This time they stop in 1939. The episode concludes with the pilots preparing to ride the tailwind back to the present one last time before the plane runs out of fuel.
“Now, most airplanes take off and land as per scheduled,” Rod Serling reminds us in his opening to “The Arrival.” “On rare occasions, they crash. But all airplanes can be counted on doing one or the other.” Except when they don’t. Serling wrote Twilight Zone plots around vanishing airplanes because he knew they shake our faith in a thinkable world. How can something so huge and with so many people involved simply vanish?
***It’s a question asked in the wake of every major aviation mystery, from Flight 19 to the recent disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370. The commercial flight took off from Kuala Lumpur International Airport and headed to Beijing on March 8, 2014. It never landed. Shortly after takeoff ATC lost contact, and the plane, with its 239 people on board, disappeared from radar. The search for it became the most expensive in aviation history, but nothing was found. Some say it crash landed; others have speculated it was hijacked. There is no consensus among investigators.
James Bridle calls aviation a “site where technology, scientific research, defense and security interests, and computation converge in a nexus of transparency/opacity and visibility/invisibility.” But it’s more than that. For over a century, aviation has been the engine of information science, as well as the proof that once-impossible dreams can come true with the help of mighty computing power. Along with the realization of human flight came unprecedented connectivity, which in turn caused an explosive outbreak of information: projections, predictions, models, and data. Over the twentieth century, technology progressed at a dizzying rate. Planes, along with everything else, got faster. “At such an exponential rate,” David Graeber writes, “it must have seemed reasonable to assume that within a matter of decades, humanity would be exploring other solar systems.”
And then something strange happened. Technological advancement slowed in some areas, and planes were no longer quite as fast. While aviation slowed, however, information science did not. Today, futurity is measured not by the speed of an airplane but by the speed of WiFi. A technology today seems futuristic if it provides us with a steady drip of information, of which there is more than could ever be analyzed by anyone. The so-called infodemic—a viral outbreak of information and misinformation—did not start with the 2020 outbreak of COVID-19. It’s been ongoing since the birth of the information age, and it’s only gotten worse.
Without aerospace science, funded largely by the military, there would be no information age, for aviation is only possible via advanced information technologies. The disappearance of planes, such as Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, proves that information can vanish too—a shocking truth almost too horrible to bear in our control society. “For everything that is shown,” Bridle writes about plane-tracking, “something is hidden.”
Information loss is a natural occurrence, and it’s especially prevalent—and dreadful—in a society obsessed with eliminating unknowns. But sometimes, disappearance is artificially induced to serve certain interests. Ideas that challenge ruling ideologies, the ones that resist capital especially, are erased. Memories of radical events are written out of history, consigning non-normative knowledge to the margins—very often deleting them from the official account altogether. If they do survive, traces of these events hunker underground, or they hide beneath the cover of normativity, passing as “appropriate” but occasionally winking from behind the veil at those who also know. If they are eradicated, stamped out of the cultural script, radical memories will always return as ghosts, terribly inconvenient reminders of an alternative future that was foreclosed by capitalism. This act of hauntology, of the forgotten past haunting the present with visions of lost futures, is crucial for collectives to combat the neoliberal “eternal” present—if only we could remember.
When American soldiers returned from World War II, they came back bearing secret knowledge: the horrors of warfare and the absurdity of power. Waking up as civilians, the returned had their memories wiped by the burgeoning postwar consumer society, which promised pleasure through purchasing and fixed gender roles as binary, locking into place a suffocating bureaucratic rationality that extended from the corporate sector to the body. Like the pilots in “And When the Sky Was Opened,” those who remembered had to disappear for the postwar dream to persist. Rod Serling served in WWII and witnessed the carnage of war firsthand in the Philippines. He grew familiar with the randomness of death during his service. He saw a fellow private decapitated by a falling food crate while telling a joke. The collision of comedy and death stunned Serling, who was eventually awarded the Purple Heart but experienced difficulty returning to civilian life—how far removed it was from war’s chaos. To cope, he filtered his knowledge through the medium of television, encountering fierce resistance from studio executives as he created The Twilight Zone, itself an indictment of unbridled power disguised as a fantasy series.
By the time Serling died in 1975 from a series of heart attacks, Augusto Pinochet was forcefully disappearing thousands of political opponents in Chile. Animated by American free-market ideology, Chile began a neoliberal conversion in the 1970s, and anyone who opposed it was punished. Some were thrown from helicopters into the ocean; others simply vanished. Decades later, the United States would wage its own regime of disappearance. Conducting “extraordinary rendition” in the wake of 9/11, CIA agents abducted so-called enemy combatants, transported them to makeshift prisons, and tortured them for information about global terror cells. Forty of these combatants remain at Guantanamo Bay, a concentration camp operated by the United States. The prisoners kept there are “ghost detainees”: neither dead nor alive, liminal, in between the cogs of a ruthless penal machine beholden to no one. Their flickering presence/absence haunts the American imaginary.
Living with the knowledge that things will disappear is a dreadful existence, made all the more horrible when we understand that not all disappearances are accidental. Realizing something erased his co-pilot and lifelong friend from existence, Colonel Forbes is sick with dread. He knows that erasure is an act of historical violence. It is a singularly cruel feat to exterminate every last memory of a person, especially if they carry a truth that reveals the hideous countenance of injustice. Capitalism is a disappearing act. Work is contingent; markets, volatile. Things are stable until they aren’t—which means they never truly are. When the sky opens, only the privileged survive. Only the amnesiacs are left alive.
Grafton Tanner is the author of The Circle of the Snake: Nostalgia and Utopia in the Age of Big Tech and Babbling Corpse: Vaporwave and the Commodification of Ghosts. His writing has appeared in The Nation and the Los Angeles Review of Books.
Retrospective, Review and Refit: M3 Twilight Calling (BECMI)
It has been his adventures that my family have enjoyed the most.
X1 Isle of Dread (w/ David Cook)X2 Castle AmberB3 Palace of the Silver Princess (w/ Jean Wells)B4 The Lost CityA2 Secret of the Slavers Stockade (w/ Harold Johnson)
His Basic set rules are what really got me deep into D&D, maybe even more so than Holmes.
So it is really not such a surprise that when I began to look for a "Big Finale" sort of adventure my attention would turn to the Master Series.
While I initially thought that Bruce Heard's M1 Into the Maelstrom would be my choice (and it is still a fine choice, for something else I have in mind) it was quickly replaced when I discovered Tom Moldvay's M3 Twilight Calling.
Twilight Calling is actually rather perfect. It is a high-level adventure that feels like a high-level adventure. The main focus of the adventure is around a rising power among the Immortals, Alphaks the Dark. He wants to release the ancient Carnifex race (more on them in a bit) who are sealed away in an extra-planar pocket dimension. He can't do this himself, only Lawful creatures can enter the realms protecting it and thus break the seals. The adventure begins all the way back in the "Broken Lands" of the D&D Expert Set (both B/X and BECMI) but soon the characters go on an extra planar romp through the "Seven Realms" to the final location, Carnifex Castle.
The CarnifexCarnifex are an evil species akin to both lizards and dinosaurs. We get a good insight to Moldvay's Pulp sensibilities here where evil lizard men with alien brains and cold-blooded evil are the bad guys. For me, it works. Works much better than orcs or even drow. They are described as lizard-like humanoids.Not much more than that. So given the adventures I had been taking the kids through a thought occurred to me. What if the Carnifex are the progenitors of all the reptilian races of the D&D? Lizardmen, troglodytes, Yuan-Ti, and others. We learn very, very little about them in this adventure.We know that Carnifex means "butcher" in Latin. It also translates also into executioner, hangman, tormenter, murderer, scoundrel, and villain. So yeah, these are not supposed to be nice guys. This all made me think about the Silurians from Doctor Who. An ancient race related to the dinosaurs. This also made me think of the "Dinosauroid" or the "Dino Sapiens" that scientists have imagined as a humanoid descendent of the Troodon.
If you are thinking of a Sleestak you are not alone.
This is fantastic really. But for my Dragonslayers' game has no context for Alphaks the Dark. And the Carnifex really could be anything. So. How do I take this adventure and make it work for my group?
Enter The Dragon. Well The Dragon #38 to be exact.
Dawn & Twilight: Dragon 38 (1980) and M3 Twilight Calling
Dragon 38, still called The Dragon then, was one of those issues that are just full of great ideas. I had a copy on my Dragon Magazine CD-ROM, but I knew about it beforehand for the famous Gygax From the Sorcerer's Scroll article "Good Isn't Stupid, Paladins & Rangers." I played a lot of Paladins back then so this was a must read. BUT that article pales in comparison to what the rest of the issue gave me.In the same article it is mentioned that dwarf women have beards. Great. But I said dwarf witches do not. In fact that is the surest way to be called a witch in dwarven culture, if you can't grow a beard.There is a story from Gardner Fox, a comic by Darlene that is better looking than most of the comics in Dragon before or since. But three articles in particular grabbed my attention.
Tesseracts by Allen Wells gave me some wonderful ideas for when I ran Baba Yaga's Hut and other crazy adventures. It gave me the frame of reference of how I wanted to run M3.
Leomund’s Tiny Hut: The mighty dragon by Len Lakofka gave me the hook I was looking for, though not in the way I am sure he thought it would. Len's article is a great one and it gives us out very first look at the Yellow, Orange, and Brown dragons. Brown dragons, of course, would later appear in the Mater Rules as the Chaotic counterpart to the Gold Dragon. I did a version of my own Orange dragon (really more of a Pumpkin Dragon) in my Pumpkin Spice Witch book. The Yellow Dragon then was a new one. And it fit perfectly into a hole I had. In M3 there are different color realms that all correspond to the color of a chromatic dragon; Green, Red, Black, Blue, White, and then Yellow. But no Yellow dragon. Until Len gave me one. He also has updated stats for Tiamat and Bahamut.This got me thinking. What if Aphaks was not just some rogue would-be immortal? What if he/she were a third Dragon god? The Master's set has four dragon rulers. The Forgotten Realms has more than two as well (IIRC). Or how about even a better idea. What if Aphaks was Apsu, Tiamat's "dead" consort? The Carnifex could have been his creations. The ancient evil enemy of the Dragonborn?
The Seven Magical Planets by Tom Moldvay can read a proto version of M3. This article leans more on the alchemical aspects of the seven planets, the Sun, Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn. They do not line up as well with the M3 sequence, so I might change them a bit. If I go with Babylonian/Summerian ideas then I would rename the planets to their Summerian names. Mercury with Nabu (Nebo), Venus with the goddess Ishtar, Mars with Nergal, Jupiter with Marduk, Saturn with Ninurta (Ninib), for the classical planets (and suggested by Moldvay in the article) and Sin/Nanna for the Moon and Utu/Shamash for the Sun.I am not sure if the alchemical correspondences still line up. In the end it might not matter all the much as long as the feel is right. This is a D&D game, not a Hermetic study on Alchemical principles.
So where does this leave me?
Well, long ago Tiamat reigned. She battled with the gods over her creations, the dragons. Her blood was spilled and from that the Dragonborn were created including their god Marduk. Gilgamesh in this world view was the first Dragonborn King. Enkidu was "like an animal" or human.
When the Dragonborn came into this world they encountered the evil Carnifex. They had been old even when the Dragonborn where new. They harkened back to a deep time of the world when it was a hotter place and populated by reptilian beasts and eldritch horrors. Their wars were long and bloody and they could only defeat them by sealing them up in a demi-plane of imprisonment. I posted about this in my Dragonborn in Oerth.
I have an evil, or at least corrupt, god, Apsu, who is murdered by his own children. His former consort, Tiamat then gives birth to dragons to fight the gods that killed Apsu. But maybe he is not dead in the same sense that humans consider. Maybe he is now in the realm of death (like Aphaks the Dark). This helps explain the undead encountered in M3 (and there is a lot) and why he would want the Carnifex loose. Destroy the world your children made by letting their ancient enemy out. It's a good plan really.
I might need to find a copy of Dragon #38 just to have really. I'll have to check my FLGS.
Mystara, The Known World of BECMI
But it was in the Companion and Master Sets that Mystara got its start.
The Known World of B/X was based on the world of Tom Moldvay and Lawrence Schick. He detailed it a bit over at the Black Gate blog. This was expanded on by James Mishler in a post on his blog Adventures in Gaming, The Original Known World. But that only leads us to the B/X known world, not the one in the BECMI Companion and Master sets.
The B/X Known World only occupies the East-most lower gray box. The BECMI World, Mystara, is going to be bigger. Even this is just the continent of Brun.
I am not sure who came up with the idea for Mystara to look the way it does but there are some obvious parallels.
From the Master DM's Book,
Here is Mystara, courtesy of http://pandius.com/
If it looks familiar there is a good reason.
(image from here, http://www.scotese.com/earth.htm)
That is the Late Jurassic, early Cretaceous period of the Earth, 150+ Million Years Ago.
Long time reader here already know of the Paleomap Map project of Earth History. It has many maps of the different stages of Earth history and potential future maps. I will admit when I first saw maps of the really old Earth it was disquieting to me. I love maps and throughout all of human history, the Earth has been the same. Not so throughout ALL history and prehistory.
It's also kind of cool to see where the places of Mystara will line up to our world.
Mystara and the Lands beneath the Waves by GrimklokThe Known World of Mystara was later expanded and given more detail in the wonderful Gazetteer Series, the Hollow Earth series and finally the Challenger series.
While delving into everything Mystara would take me another month, or another year really, there is still vibrant and active community on the web to support this world. In fact I would say it is far more active than most other worlds. Starting in the early days of the MPGN listserve lists run by TSR, the MYSTARA-L listserve was active back in the days when my access to the Internet was via a mainframe. Many of the same people on those lists then are still active in the various Facebook groups and websites today.
For me, I always had a soft spot in my heart for Mystara. It was the world of my Basic era days and when I moved on AD&D I still kept the world as "my own." It was understood that when I was a player it was in Greyhawk/Oerth but when I was a DM it was in the Known World/Mystara. Eventually, right before college, we merged our worlds into one. I got the western half and my DM got the eastern half. So you know I was thrilled when I found the James Mischler/Chatdemon Mystoerth map. The worlds share a lot of details in common so that a merge was inevitable really.
Click for largerThis appears to be the original map. While researching this I found an old post by Rich/Chatdemon that offers up an alternate name, Oerstara. I kinda like that. A lot. It sounds like Ostara, the pagan holiday that Easter comes from. Oestara could have been an alternate name for the planet. Like Earth and Terra.
What I love about Mystara (Mystoerth) is that while so much of the world is "known" there are still many, many parts to discover anew. The communities are also very active in detailing new places, moving the timeline forward and adapting material from other sources. I have already seen plans in place to adapt a new 5th Edition book to Mystara months before the book even hits the shelves. That's dedication.
Would I like to see WotC produce new Mystara material? Sure, but if they don't I know the world is in fine hands.
Links
Cottage Cosmos: Alan Jefferson’s ‘Galactic Nightmare’
Richard McKenna / June 23, 2020
Bear with me, because this might get a bit rambling: the way I see it, in a healthy world, not only would we have in hand the levers of the factories, we’d also have the tools for our own artistic fulfillment. And to anyone saying that the tools are there for the buying if you just toil away at the grindstone long enough, I’d reply that tools aren’t simply physical artifacts. Tools are also time, the mental structures like self-belief, the very idea of art as something worthwhile—all of which are etched upon your cerebral cortex by your environment and your upbringing. It isn’t just because we can’t afford brushes that most of us don’t become artists—though for plenty that actually is the reason—it’s because if we do have spare time, we’ve often been trained to feel that art and creativity are not worthwhile ways of using it.
None of this is helped by the establishment’s ongoing drive to turn the clock back to 1902 and formalize creativity into a narrow set of structures accessible only to the wealthy or those the wealthy choose to sponsor. We’re trained to consume their creativity instead of employing our own, so that our “betters” get the structures, spotlight, and funding to follow their muses while our own muses are left moldering in our heads. I don’t mean by this that each of us is necessarily a budding Mozart; I mean that art shouldn’t only be in the hands of those the establishment decides are budding Mozarts—and that Mozarts are in any case an unhealthy metric for judging the value of creativity.
Yet, despite all that, fully-formed miniature Mozarts do sometimes appear and seize the tools of creativity for themselves—occasionally at the helms of gleaming spacecraft decked out with banks of pulsing synthesizers. Such is the case of Alan Jefferson, the self-taught polymath behind Galactic Nightmare.
I appreciate that this is a roundabout and slightly bombastic way to start an article about an alien war rock opera concept album made partly in a bedroom in Hull, but Galactic Nightmare deserves flights of rhetoric. Composed, written, played, sung, recorded, and illustrated almost in its entirety by one young Yorkshireman, it tells the tale of how computer expert Doctor Larson discovers a series of extraterrestrial transmissions describing an attack on the inhabitants of planet Zeon by a race known as the Immortals, who plan on using them as cell donors for the serum that gives them their longevity. The Zeons eventually win out, but Galactic Nightmare ends with a newsflash warning that the Immortals are beginning their invasion of Earth.
I don’t know how many of you have been walking around for years with vastly detailed imaginary worlds inside your heads—I know I have—but listening to Galactic Nightmare feels like watching somebody’s head split open, their imaginary world bursting out in full laser-lit, synth-blasting glory: an effect only made more intense by the lovely artwork Alan himself created to illustrate it.
“[I] worked as a milk man on my father’s milk round at Featherstone for a short time before leaving to attend Wakefield Art College when I was 17, where I completed a three year graphic design course,” says Alan. “I left to find there were no jobs for graphic designers without experience and ended up as a corrugated box designer.” After a year of low-paid work in said box design, and a period of low-paid greeting card illustration, he decided to pack it in and go freelance.
Together with a love of art, Alan had long nurtured an interest in recording and making music, becoming involved in it, like many kids, by taping songs from the radio and TV: “I had a reel-to-reel tape recorder when I was 13 and used to tape singles from Top of the Pops with the microphone attached to the TV speaker grill. So I had always been interested in listening and recording music from a young age, but as for playing, that came much later… I was more interested in drawing, making my own SF comic books, and playing football and cricket in the school teams.”
A few examples of Alan’s homemade comics
Alan had been a science-fiction fan since he was a child, drawing his own comics inspired by the strips in the Gerry Anderson TV21 comic and The Eagle, his brightly-colored imagery revealing a vivid personal aesthetic that would later erupt in the artwork for Galactic Nightmare. “The First SF film that inspired me as a child was Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea,” Alan recounts, “[then at] art college, The Omega Man, Planet of the Apes and 2001: A Space Odyssey… and This Island Earth.” With its glowing, unearthly palette and wars on distant planets, it’s perhaps the mood of this last film that Galactic Nightmare most evokes.
Alan’s interest in music led to him working his way up from a tiny squeaking Stylophone to an electronic organ, upon which—inspired by things like Keith Emerson’s crazed antics in The Nice’s performance of “America” on BBC2s Old Grey Whistle Test and Uriah Heep’s performance of “July Morning” on the same program—he undertook to learn to play. “Having no formal music training—as my school had six hours of music in four years and only had kazoos to play—this was extremely ambitious, but I managed it. I then purchased a dual portable organ keyboard and Korg synthesizer and continued to learn songs by ear from records.”
Alan’s art college friend Jack Stoker played guitar and had a deaf next-door neighbor that meant they could rehearse without complaints, so once a week Alan would “… pack my gear into the Mini and make my way to Garforth were we would play the songs I taught him to play. At this time I got the Mini Moog synth due to being impressed by Ken Hensley using one on stage and on records in Uriah Heep.” (And I think we can all appreciate the recursive beauty of a Mini Moog being transported around West Yorkshire inside a Mini.)
After Alan and friend had been playing together for about five years, he purchased a four track TEAC reel-to-reel recorder and mixer to do multi-track recordings, initially recording instrumental covers, laying down each sound separately on the four track and gradually overdubbing, before starting to write original songs that eventually evolved into the demo for an SF concept album influenced by Uriah Heep, Deep Purple, and Boston. Alan sent it around the record companies, but the lukewarm response was that it was not commercial enough.
In 1979, after hearing Jeff Wayne’s 1978 double-LP rock opera adaptation of H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds, Alan decided to give the SF concept album another try, this time basing it around a narrative. “I had a title for a song called ‘Giant Metal Monsters’ which I wanted to incorporate into the story. So I developed the story around that. In order to be different from H.G. Wells’s ‘War of the Worlds’, I placed my story of alien invasion on another planet with alien beings. I would write the song lyrics first or fit the lyrics to the music. ‘Old and Grey’ is a prime example, where I had this chorus riff and thought of the lyrics to fit it. The whole song then developed from that riff, as did the reason for the Immortal invasion of Zeon in the story.”
Some of Alan’s concept artwork for the Galactic Nightmare packaging
Galactic Nightmare was recorded “in fits and bursts over several years, also while recording other non-SF music” in a 12′ x 12′ room in Alan’s house near Pontefract, and completed in a bedroom in Hull using a Tascam 8 Track reel to reel recorder, Teac 4 Track reel to reel recorder, two cassette recorders, a 6×4 and a 6×2 small mixers, Great British Spring Reverb, Electric Mistress flanger, phaser/distortion/ noise gate pedals, Hammond C3 organ with a Yamaha amp/rotating speaker, a Grant Stratocaster copy, AKG/Sennheiser mics, and Paiste hi-hat and crash symbols.
“The complexity of recording all the sounds individually—in real time, no sequencers then—was extremely time consuming,” says Alan. “Frustratingly, there were also the problems of equipment reliability in those days. For example, the Mini Moog was an expensive synth that needed new keys after six months as they were always wearing out! If I had stuck knives in them as Keith Emerson did in his Hammond organ you could understand it.” In fact, the creation of Galactic Nightmare was at times an actually physically dangerous process. “While I was rewinding the Tascam 8-track recorder, another very expensive machine, one of the large eight and a half inch tape reels flew across the room—very dangerous! It was only held on by two small aluminum nuts.”
The process was grueling in other ways, too. “Mixing down was a nightmare, as you needed four hands on the faders to mix all the sounds from the eight track, four track echo, spring reverb, and cassette deck. We had moved back to Hull again so there was only myself to do it. I ended up mixing down a lot of the tracks in sections down on to the four track and then splicing them together with splicing tape. Many splices had to be redone so you didn’t notice the joins,” says Alan. “Now on computers you can have all these things automated apart from joining tracks. But that is also easier to do on the computer.”
In 1985, six years after he’d begun it, Galactic Nightmare was finished. But the record companies’ cool reception to the demo cassette he sent them—together with a 17-page story file, including lyrics and illustrations—convinced Alan to take matters into his own hands. “Rather than waste my efforts, I made improvements to Galactic Nightmare, including re-recording a different beginning and ending, and decided to release version two myself on vinyl LPs. I designed and illustrated an LP cover using updated illustrations from the story file showing elements of the story, hopefully to get people interested in the musical.”
Releasing it on LP proved prohibitively expensive, so Alan opted for a cassette version that would be accompanied by an A2 poster of the cover art and four-page story file. He placed ads in several magazines, but unfortunately his DIY advertising offensive proved unsuccessful, perhaps victim to the mood of the day—consumer tastes were shifting from small-scale experiment to large-scale bombast, and the country’s various cottage industries were rapidly being marginalized. Alan made a second attempt to spark some interest from UK record companies: “[I] got some nice replies, including one from Sir Tim Rice who found it interesting. Stephen Garrett of Channel 4 urged me to turn it into a stage play. Lucas films and Spielberg films returned everything unread/unheard!”
It took thirty years for Galactic Nightmare to get a proper release. Though its initial appearance hadn’t been the success Alan had hoped, pervasive memories of those strange adverts and the few copies that had circulated gradually accumulated a strange momentum of their own over the decades, and in 2015 Trunk Records released a limited edition Galactic Nightmare double LP. The different format meant editing the the original cassette’s 98 minutes down to 88 minutes to fit four sides, and though not one to shy away from daunting undertakings—as the entire story so far should indicate—Alan admits that “[it] was a nightmare to do, even using computer sequencer software.”
This, then, is the story of Galactic Nightmare—a hand-crafted cosmic odyssey whose vast scope ranges between esoteric locales as disparate as Zeon and Mythmolroyd. It remains a stunning DIY chef d’oeuvre, and Alan’s dedication to realizing his own personal vision over the space of years to little interest from an incurious outside world continues to be inspiring. The quality of the whole thing, from the artwork to the production to the music, completely belies its artisan genesis: in fact, perhaps the only thing that gives Galactic Nightmare‘s origins away might be Alan’s vocals—but, strangely, while I’m sure he’d be the first to admit that he might not have the pipes of a Phil Lynott or a Justin Haywood, the earnest, plaintive quality of his voice only makes the album that much more touching and human, and even more clearly the product of one person’s quest to bring to life his own riotous vision as opposed to some slick, corporate box of delights. It’s galling to think that something so unique was snubbed by record companies who were happy to throw money at forgettable “concept album” dross like the Intergalactic Touring Band.
Them’s the breaks, I suppose. Alan is now retired and considering getting involved with music and painting again—to follow along, visit the Galactic Nightmare website he has put together himself—and has also produced an enhanced version three of Galactic Nightmare that boasts two extra tracks and lasts 110 minutes. Let’s all hope that when it eventually sees the light of day, it gets the treatment and reception it deserves. I don’t know if Alan would agree with my ideas about art and creativity, but what I do know is that we should all take his example and try and make more home-produced concept rock operas about alien invasions—or whatever else—because, like Galactic Nightmare, they can only make the universe a better place.
Many thanks to Alan for very kindly agreeing to speak to us and allowing the use of his artwork, all of which is © Alan Jefferson.Richard McKenna grew up in the visionary utopia of 1970s South Yorkshire and now ekes out a living among the crumbling ruins of Rome, from whence he dreams of being rescued by the Terran Trade Authority.