The Coins of Aerovian Continent.

 

One of my biggest irritations with the D&D system is it’s hideous “gold point” system, that reflects nothing of actual monetary practice in Europe from 400-1600. This makes developing any kind of background economy very difficult, and disrupts and undermines what should be the main story telling features of quasi-medieval fantasy economies. In a game where treasure accumulation is an important measure of character success, having a rational background to the money system is important; after all what separates a serf, from a kulak, from a merchant, from a lord is the same thing that divides 1stlevel characters from 9th level characters; money.

More importantly, it defines the resources that money can command. In the actual middle ages there were a number long term trends; inflation, depreciation, and so on that can be overlooked, but only if you see the long term consistency; Land is wealth, the cost of armor and weapons makes those who have them rare and powerful, trade is dangerous because it requires large investments with huge amounts of risk.

The currencies of the middle ages descend from late Roman times, and they were already economic chaos, various reforms following reform as the Empire bled itself of metal to pay for the armies, bribe barbarians, build churches and fill them with treasures, bribe barbarians, build  monasteries and fill them with treasure, bribe barbarians, build city walls, bribe barbarians, and build ships to try and hold the economic and military Roman world together, all while dealing with a manpower drain to monasteries, disease, and war. Over the few final Roman centuries a whole smorgasbord of coins were minted and melted, and reminted, some by towns, some by emperors, some by desperate generals, and what began as a simple system of As and Denier bushed out into a bewildering fecund forest of metal.

D&D reduces this amazing variety to a decimal system and introduces coins in metals that were almost never seen. Platinum was unknown to the middle ages in Europe (when conquistadors first encountered it in South America they tossed it back into the rivers they were panning, hoping it would mature into silver). Copper was never coined, though some bronze coins were molded in the late Roman Empire, and in dark age England. By the year 1000, the usual start date for middle ages, they were effectively gone from European commerce. (except when they weren’t, China and Asia pumped some in from time to time).

Medieval Europe relied on three major kinds of coins descended from Roman models; a large denomination coin, the Shilling , the everyday silver coin that most people would be familiar with called the Penny, and an occasional Gold large denomination coin called an Ecu or Noble. A Few types of Shilling were minted in limited areas of Spain from Electrum..but that was a rarity. Later in the middle ages the richest cities would counter inflation with an even larger coin; The famous Florins and Ducats and Byzants based on imported coin type from the rich east, these coins were needed by spice and cloth merchants to pay for ship loads of goods, and by kings to hire the very large “state” armies of the many 15th century wars. .

All these coins were essentially bullion guaranteed by the issuing authority; often a king, sometimes a town, or a bishop, or a baron even...but effectively interchangeable pence to penny, shilling to sou. Florin to Mark.

That’s pretty much the scene; three kinds of coins ultimately amounting to no more than bouillon guaranteed with the King’s mark. Which was why kings liked them...they could cheat and debase the coin a tad, and it, like the dollar, would still spend as it’s face value since it be reckoned as if it were bouillon. To counter the kings and barons, bankers and merchants would use a touchstone; a bit of slate upon which a coin was rubbed, the lines being compared to the color of known quantities, detecting (hopefully) the cheats.

Real medieval coinage is based on the value of a pound of silver. One pound of Silver divided evenly into 20 portions (or sometimes 22 or 24, this isn’t an exact science here)- the Shilling/Sou/or Roman Soldus… itself divided into 12 silver pennies. The penny was the main coin of European transaction.

There were many other coins, but all based on multiples of one of these two; larger values minted in gold like the Noble (6 shillings), or smaller ones (usually in silver as well) like the haypenny. Notice the 12 and 20 relationship? That's because dividing coins this way is easier. A circle can be bisected easily by eye three times to produce 6 surprisingly precise equal parts, 5 is a much harder division to get right...and people get fussy when you give them “short change”.

D&D coinage is based on a decimal accounting, it’s easier book keeping, but it isn’t right. And it’s bugged me for years. I keeps the system locked into the computer like tyranny of sameness, reducing a perplexing, ambiguous, and colorful riot of names and values into mere “gold points” so bland and uninteresting and patterned that one may as well be playing a video game, and an old one at that.  

    my desire is to make regions distinct with their own coins so that a breath of wonder and suggestion of depth comes into the game.  Also age; hoards of coins that are very old being distinguished from what is current, and that from what was brought from far away...

So, what to do? I’ve tried developing conversion tables, to turn the D&D gold points into reasonable facsimiles of Deniers and Ecus and Solidos and whatnot. That totally failed. It would require rewriting every rule book and treasure table to be functional on the fly. I don’t have the oomph for that. So my new compromise is this; a simple name change table, allowing the complexity of unique coins from different regions without having to engage in crazy conversion tables.  Later I'll compose a similar one for the ancient past, and for places farther away...

Based on the weather forecast, Sunday is going to be spectacular, so the Sunday morning Porch Sale is still on. In the meanwhile, there are covers of classic songs, and then there are Kimberly Freeman covers of classic songs, on … Continue reading →

Kelvin Green hates small villages. He must do. After all, in Fish Fuckers – Or, a Record, Compil’d in Truth, of the Sordid Activities of the People of Innsmouth, Devon, he unleashed aspects of H.P. Lovecraft’s ‘The Shadow Over Innsmouth’ on a small west Country village with piscine horrors wanting to procreate with the inhabitants of said village, whilst in More Than Meets The Eye: A Short Adventure with Lots of Tentacles, he unleashed a weird, fantasy homage to a certain franchise of films involving giant robots capable of transforming into everyday objects, but with aliens/not-shoggoths rather than robots. Both scenarios are written for use with Lamentations of the Flame Princess Weird Fantasy Roleplay, whereas the third of what has become Kelvin Green’s ‘village vitriol’ trilogy is a systemless scenario. However, despite the scenario being systemless, it is set during the Early Modern Age, between 1625 and 1725—the default period for Lamentations of the Flame Princess Weird Fantasy Roleplay, and its tone and playstyle matches that of the Old School Renaissance.

The Seed, published by Games Omnivorous, is a system agnostic scenario of fantasy horror which would work with any number of Old School Renaissance retroclones. The most obvious one is Lamentations of the Flame Weird Fantasy Roleplay, another is the publisher’s own 17th Century Minimalist: A Historical Low-Fantasy OSR Rulebook, but with some adjustment it would work with Cthulhu by Gaslight or a darker toned version of Leagues of Gothic Horror for use with Leagues of Adventure: A Rip-Roaring Setting of Exploration and Derring Do in the Late Victorian Age! Take it away from its European setting and The Seed would work well with Mörk Borg as they share a similar tone and sensibility. Notably though it adheres to the Manifestus Omnivorous, the ten points of which are:

1. All books are adventures.
2. The adventures must be system agnostic.
3. The adventures must take place on Earth.
4. The adventures can only have one location.
5. The adventures can only have one monster.
6. The adventures must include saprophagy or osteophagy.
7. The adventures must include a voracious eater.
8. The adventures must have less than 6,666 words.
9. The adventures can only be in two colours.
10. The adventures cannot have good taste. (This is the lost rule.)

So yes, The Seed adheres to all ten rules. It is an adventure, it is system agnostic, it takes place on Earth, it has one location, it has the one monster (the others are extensions of it), it includes Osteophagy—the practice of animals, usually herbivores, consuming bones, it involves a voracious eater, the word count is not high—the scenario only runs to twenty-eight pages, and it is presented in two colours—in this case, fluorescent pink and black. Lastly, The Seed does lack good taste. Be warned, just like The Feast on Titanhead before it, this scenario is one of gut churning—in some cases, literally—horror, bodily fluids, and madness. 

The setting for The Seed is the village of Midwich. And being the village of Midwich, it has its own cuckoo—a giant alien terraforming bio-machine which sits at the centre of the village and pumps out a fluorescently pink, corrosive—mentally and physically, miasma which rots mind, body, and anything else it envelops. Its aim, or rather it is programmed to transform the planet into a world suitable for colonisation by an alien species from another dimension. Which requires that it is fed, which is why a bunch of misogynist cultists—members of the Final Brotherhood—are feeding whatever organic material they can into the Seed’s greedy maw, whilst phallic-headed alien dogs which ejaculate acid patrol the mist and protect the Seed. Meanwhile, the Storm Society, a semi-secret scientific society has sent agents—inspired by a pair of Marvel Comics’ legendary creators, to investigate the Seed and what it is doing in Midwich. So, at some point, the Player Characters should expect figures in diving suits to loom out of the fluorescently pink gloom…

Which is the point at which the Player Characters turn up. Perhaps they want to find someone in the village, or the Storm Society has sent them to check on its agents already in Midwich, but whatever their reason for being in the village, they find something really weird going on. Of course, to determine what requires penetrating the pink miasma and potentially suffering its deleterious effects, ranging from hair loss and sudden uncontrollable anger to constant vomiting and the sudden, inexplicable attack by a random monster from the Game Master’s preferred Wandering Monster Table. Within the miasma, the Player Characters are free to wander wherever they like, explore as they like, and do as they like, and were it actually not for the effects of the Miasma, then determine what is going on would be relatively easy, as for the most part, the physical threats present in Midwich are not all that challenging.

Physically, The Seed is a vibrantly pink and white booklet with a separate cover, on the inside of which is the map of Midwich. The illustrations are a mix of the weird and the gruesome, whilst the map is large and easy to read. It needs a slight edit in places, but is overall quite a sturdy product, being done on heavy paper and card stock.

Like The Feast on Titanhead before it, The Seed is short and brutal, it being possible to play through the scenario and even survive in a single session. Unlike The Feast on Titanhead, the effect of failure in The Seed is disastrous, but not necessarily apocalyptic, however unless the Player Characters have a strong motive to investigate or a strong sense of altruism, the corrosive effects of the Miasma may be too strong for them, and so may drive them away rom Midwich, keeping them from investigating further. To that end, The Seed is need of some development upon the part of the Game Master to create hooks strong enough to motive the Player Characters, whether she is planning to run it as a one-shot or as part of a campaign.

Much like the earlier More Than Meets The Eye: A Short Adventure with Lots of Tentacles, Kelvin Green serves up another slice of ‘village as victim’ horror, this time weird Science Fiction horror for a profoundly pink encounter. The Seed is literally the seed of a session’s worth of weirdness and horror for the roleplaying game of the Game Master’s choice. 

Across species, worlds, galaxies, and dimensions, one absolute applies to technology: usability. No matter the tool, if ostensible improvements do not improve upon the actual user experience, the general response is “ignore” or “actively avoid.” A natural response to that … Continue reading →

Noah Berlatsky / October 8, 2020

John Fawcett’s 2000 Canadian werewolf film Ginger Snaps is usually discussed as a feminine and feminist allegory: “the most complete feminist horror film ever made,” as this site’s K.E. Roberts puts it. There’s no doubt that the linking of the werewolf cycle to menstrual blood, and thus to female adolescence and female stigmatization, demands a feminist reading. Hidden inside the story about women, though—like a dirty secret, never to be spoken—is a story about queerness. The tragedy of Ginger Snaps, in fact, is that patriarchy makes queerness unspeakable and unthinkable. As a result, the film can imagine no future for women in patriarchy other than death.

The movie starts, in fact, with imagining death. The Fitzgerald sisters, Brigitte (Emily Perkins) and Ginger (Katharine Isabelle), live in a dreary, lower-middle-class, mostly white Ontario town, which they hate, and which hates them. Disgusted at the thought of being normal, they swear to each other to die together before they get old. To seal their love affair with death, they create a kind of slide-show horror movie as a school project, with images of Ginger impaled on suburban fences and run down by suburban lawn mowers. The bloody show is successful in nauseating their instructor. It’s also a winking ironic foreshadowing: the sisters are about to experience the horror movie story they long for, and it’s not going to be fun at all.

But beyond that, the film–within-a-film is a camp signal to the viewer that all is not as it appears. Or rather, it’s a signal that all is exactly as it appears. The movie shows the Fitzgerald sisters as they use fake blood and special effects to stage bloody scenes of death, just as the filmmakers of Ginger Snaps stage their dog disembowelments and nightmare janitor eviscerations. The truth of the movie, which you know going in, is that it’s fake. And the thing that is most obviously fake is not the blood and gore, but the pretense that the Fitzgerald sisters are sisters.

Obviously, the actors, Isabelle and Perkins, are not sisters. They look nothing alike. Isabelle as Ginger is a conventionally attractive movie lead, while Perkins as Brigitte is mousy, big-nosed, and human- rather than Hollywood-shaped. You’re supposed to suspend disbelief about their blood ties. And yet, the movie pushes at the edge of that suspension, as if it wants you to notice the artifice. The girls are not twins, but are in the same grade: Brigitte skipped a year, Ginger too casually explains. The boys in the film notice and comment on the fact that the two don’t resemble each other. And in a queasy scene towards the films end, Ginger, more than half-transformed into wolf, leans into Brigitte and husks, “We’re almost not even related any more.”

If sisterhood is a convention, rather than a truth, then the girl’s intense friendship, and indeed their shared room, takes on a different valence. So does their alienation from their peers. The narrative provides no real reason why the Fitzgeralds feel like outsiders, or why they’re hated by their classmates. But if you accept what you’re actually seeing, then the dynamic is obvious. Two girls who really are not sisters are engaged in a passionate, intense, open same-sex relationship. Their peers hate them for it.

In this context, Ginger’s transformation isn’t just a metaphor for female adolescence; it’s a metaphor for queer adolescence, in which increasing evidence of deviation in gender and sexuality must be pushed ever further into the closet. Ginger grows a tail—a penis metaphor, surely—and hair on her chest, even as she gets her period for the first time. She becomes more femme, wearing tight clothes, redoing her hair, flirting with boys. At the same time, she becomes more masculine. She just about sexually assaults Jason (Jesse Moss), a boy she’s making out with, after he asks her who the guy in their relationship is.

The chaotic confusion of gendered presentation and gendered desire could be a metaphor for trans experience, for lesbian experience, for male gay experience. The common through-line is social ostracism, shame, and a need for concealment. Most of the movie is devoted to Brigitte and Ginger’s efforts to keep Ginger’s condition closeted, so that she can pass.

Part of obscuring Ginger’s condition involves hiding it from the film’s viewers. It seems likely that Brigitte and Ginger were made sisters in the script specifically to defuse queer possibilities. The erotic tension between them is expressed through misdirection, and routed especially through relationships with guys. Ginger has unprotected sex with Jason, infecting him. Werewolf Jason later almost assaults Brigitte, who stabs him with a phallic needle to cure him. In a parallel triangle, Brigitte has a possibly more than platonic relationship with local drug dealer Sam (Kris Lemche), who Ginger then tries to sleep with. And most explicitly, Ginger viciously murders a school janitor who she believes has been staring at Brigitte. “I don’t like the way he looks at you!” she hisses. That could be read as the anger of an overprotective sister. But it could also be jealousy.

Brigitte and Ginger’s desires aren’t just hidden from onlookers, diagetic and otherwise. They’re  hidden from themselves. When Brigitte first approaches Sam for help with a werewolf cure, she tells him that she’s the one infected, rather than Ginger. That’s an admission as much as a lie; if the curse in the movie is queerness rather than lycanthropy, then it touches both (supposed) sisters. Brigitte, notably, still has not gotten her own period, even though she’s 15. Her femininity is queer too.

Ginger, for her part, says that she has a hunger inside her that she at first mistakes for a desire for (heterosexual) sex. But then she realizes that what she actually wants is “to tear everything to fucking pieces.” We learn what that means in practice when she claws two men to death, and then suggests to Brigitte that the two of them “swap fluids” and go away together. You have to wade through apocalypse, blood, death, and the destruction of all things to get to a place where you can love that girl who is not your sister.

There’s a moment when the movie seems to foresee a plausible happy ending for that love whose name it never speaks. The sisters’ mom, Pam (Mimi Rodgers), discovers that Ginger is killing her way through her classmates. She’s understandably upset, but she doesn’t turn them in. Instead, she reacts the way you’d hope a small town mom would on learning that her kid is queer. She offers to burn down her house and chuck her mediocre husband to support her child.

The filmmakers aren’t as supportive, alas. Brigitte does agree to swap blood with Ginger, making some feeble denials to Sam about how it’s the only way to lure Ginger out to cure her with the good heterosexual injection Sam’s whipped up. But, inevitably, the taste of Brigitte causes Ginger to rage ever more out of control. Brigitte, knife in one hand, injection in the other, tries to save her, but Ginger again chooses the wrong thing to impale herself upon, and expires in the arms of her sister, who can’t be her lover.

“I’m not dying in this room with you!” Brigitte shouts right before the end. It’s a rejection of the teen sisters’ suicide pact, and an embrace of adulthood and possibility. Or, alternately, it’s a stifling acceptance of heteronormativity. “To die” is a standard double entendre, especially when it’s used to refer to what you’re doing in a bedroom. Ginger is beckoning, with bared fangs, to a realm of monstrous difference, where the girls can admit they are unrelated, and still wrestle and thrust and experience release together. Brigitte says no and kills her rather than be consumed by queer desire.

Ginger Snaps is about how patriarchy destroys women. But, as its callous title indicates, the film itself is only ambivalently opposed to that process of destruction. The movie cares about Ginger and Brigitte, but it’s also invested in denying some of the possible ways they might care about each other. In Ginger Snaps, death is better than, and the natural result of, girls loving each other intensely, or too well. Ginger wants to tear down the whole world. Ginger Snaps tears down Ginger instead.

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

If you name your publishing label "Basic Witch Games" you are going to get my attention. 

So last night I got a new PDF from a just-as-new company.  The PDF is The Muse and the company is Basic Witch Games.  Now full disclosure, I knew about this class a while back and gave the author a tiny bit of advice about it and encouraged her to add a bit and publish it.  

So ethically I can not provide you all an unbiased review. 

Also, the book uses some of my own OGC, so there is another reason.

But I do want to tell you this is a fun class. It's not for every group, but that is true of all classes really, but for the right group this can be a lot of fun. 

The Muse is the first in what I hope will be more Basic era content from Basic Witch Games.
The class is something of a tempter or even a seducer.  I am immediately reminded of the old Houri Class from White Dwarf.  

The class itself is 14 level B/X style class.  The cover has a nice visual transition from red to blu to cover the red and blue of the beloved Basic and Expert books. In addition to the spells from my witch classes, there are new spells too.  There is also a new magic sword.

Basic Witch Games will be coming out with more material and even a Dark Fantasy / Romantic Fantasy setting. So I am looking forward to seeing what they do. 

So check them out. Spend a buck for this.

They can also be found on Twitter at, @BasicWitchGame

Nitrogen, Phosphorus and Arsenic (from the cycle of chemical compositions) 

 Leo and Hercules, 1918 

Fantastic Composition (Vision with masks), 1920 

Green Eye Composition, 1918

 Composition 1922

 The Gravedigger's Monologue 

Fight, 1921-22 

Creating the World, 1921-22 

Satan, 1920 

Marysia and Burek in Ceylon, 1920-21 

Story, 1922 

 Capricornus, 1918 

 

 "A struggle between nonsensical and indescribable things. A row of chambers turned into an underground circus. Strange beasts appeared in the loges. The crowd was a mixed bag, an audience half-animal, half-human. The loges turned into bathtubs, connected to urinals in the Mexican or Aztec style. A sense at times of two layers of visibility: the images in the depths were chiefly black and white, while the background had putrid red and dirty lemon-yellow diagonal stripes. The majority of the visions had beasts of land and sea and horrible human faces. Giraffes whose necks and heads turned into snakes growing out of their bodies. A ram with a flamingo nose hung with pink guts. Indian cobras slithered out of the ram, then the whole thing crumbled into a mass of snakes." - quote excerpt from the artist describing tripping on peyote, read more here.

 

"Shortly after Poland was invaded by Germany in September 1939, Witkiewicz escaped with his young lover Czesława to the rural frontier town of Jeziory, in what was then eastern Poland. After hearing the news of the Soviet invasion of Poland on 17 September 1939, Witkacy committed suicide on 18 September by taking a drug overdose and trying to slit his wrists. He convinced Czesława to attempt suicide with him by consuming Luminal, but she survived. The film Mystification 2010, written and directed by Jacek Koprowicz proposed that Witkiewicz faked his own death and lived secretly in Poland until 1968."  - quote from biography on the artist found at Wikipedia.

Another full class today.  This time one that is based on the classic Dragon Magazine #5 and #20 witches. 

The rules for my reviews are here.

D&D Witch Class From David Belmonte

I am, without a doubt, a huge fan of the witches for Dragon Magazine. I have spent hours reading and rereading those articles. I have many witch characters I have made using those rules and spent many, many more hours playing them.  So if you say that your class is based on those, you have my attention.

The Witch Class from David Belmonte is a 10 (1 cover, 1 title, 1-page addendum, 7 pages content) page PDF that is Free on DMSGuild.  So the price point is already good. It also presents a full witch class.

The pdf is sparce really. There is no art save for the cover art and the artist is not credited. 

The witch in this case is a Wisdom spellcaster. (They were Intelligence and Wisdom in Dragon #20).  

The powers this witch gets are in line with the witch from Dragon #20. Though the witch in Dragon got a lot more powers, this witch is a little more inline with the D&D 5 rules.  There are no subclasses listed even if the obvious choice would have been High and Low Order witches with some different powers.

There are 8 new spells.  One of the Spells "Oracle" only works "in obscure woods"  whatever that is supposed to mean.  

So nice effort, but it falls a little short for me.  Though it is tough to argue the price I guess.

Oh. Now this was fun.
I have heard that some people didn't care for this one, but you can't watch it thinking it is a Lovecraft movie.  Lovecraft never translates well on screen.  Watch this one thinking it is a crazy Nick Cage movie.

Sadly I did not see this one when it came out, but I had heard a lot of good (and bad) about it.   Well the movie itself did not disappoint.  I mean really, Lovecraft, Nick Cage?  This has disaster written all over it but it gets pulled together well.

So the movie follows the story rather well. Well, as can be expected.
Our narrator, the unnamed surveyor, becomes Ward Phillips a hydrologist played by Elliot Knight.  I have to admit I did enjoy that the narrator, our POV character, is played by a mixed-race, Nigerian-British actor who is very active in gay rights.  Lovecraft would be so happy.

Nick Cage is at his Nick Cage best.  Super serious when he needs to be, and bat-shit insane with an accent when the movie needs that.  He reminded me of his characters in  Vampire's Kiss and National Treasure. And let's not forget, Cage has won an Academy Award, a Golden Globe, and Screen Actors Guild Award.  He is great as troubled Nathan/Nahum Gardner. 
The sons are changed and there is a daughter, Lavinia played by Madeleine Arthur (who has some solid geek cred with credits in "Supernatural", "Legends of Tomorrow", "Tomorrow People", "X-Files", "Magicians", and "Spooksville").  Oh, and Lavinia, who plays a Wiccan, also has a copy of the old 1980 Simon Necronomicon.  That made me rather happy to see, to be honest.
And Tommy Chong.  Seriously.
Tommy Freaking Chong playing the "crazy man" Ezra/Ammi Pierce.

The hardest thing I think is to capture the horror of Lovecraft on film.  I am not sure how many half-failed attempts I have watched over the years.  In fact, I think the only good ones have been "From Beyond" and "Re-Animator".  Maybe, MAYBE, 1970 The Dunwich Horror with Dean Stockwell.

What I REALLY enjoyed about this was I watched it with my two boys.  We all love Lovecraft and we all love Nick Cage movies.  So this was a nice treat.

This is supposed to be the first of a shared universe of Lovecraft films, but it did rather poorly in the box office.

Watched: 7
New: 7
NIGHT SHIFT Content
What NOT to use here?  Might need to grab my 5e Cthulhu Mythos book and give this one a go using the Night Shift game.  The characters can play the parts of investigators to the scene.  My kids would LOVE that.

So there is a new bit of errata out for D&D5.  Nothing new there, in today's Internet age errata is easy to get and often flows out easy enough. For some reason, this latest one has some of the old-school crowd up in arms. Again.  Let's see what it is all about.

This is the Errata for Volo's Guide to Monsters. A book that is described by all accounts as optional. 

What does it say exactly? Let's have a look.

Kobold Traits (p. 119). In the Ability Score Increase trait, the text has changed to read “Your Dexterity score increases by 2.”
The adjustment to Strength has been removed.

Orc Traits (p. 120). In the Ability Score Increase trait, the text has changed to read “Your Strength score increases by 2 and your Constitution score increases by 1.” The adjustment to Intelligence has been removed.

Orc Traits (p. 120). The Menacing trait has been replaced with the following trait:

Primal Intuition. You have proficiency in two of the following skills of your choice: Animal Handling, Insight, Intimidation, Medicine, Nature, Perception, and Survival.

Ok. So this is all for characters. Optional characters. 

Checking online...oh. For fucks sake.

A message to my fellow 50+-year-old gamers. Lighten the fuck up.
Seriously. You all look like a bunch of Chicken Littles, running around screaming about the damn sky is falling.

Wizards of the Coast doesn't care what people who don't buy their product think, to be honest. 

The world didn't end when the whole Oriental Adventures debacle happened back in July.  Everyone was claiming it was the start of censorship and that Wizards would start taking down or editing older books. Censorship! Censorship! CENSORSHIP!!

These optional rules, in an optional rule book for two races that 99% of you would never allow in the first place in a system you never play has fuck-all to do with you.

In D&D5 there are 15 standard races with 28 sub or variants for a total of 34 choices. None of which have negative ability mods. The only two that did have them were in a supplement and those two are being edited to come into line with the other 34 choices. These are two outliers. They are being brought back into line.

How is this any different than say a new rule in Savage Worlds?  Or even in Monopoly? 

Yet, people are losing their shit online and looking like a bunch of idiots. 

The OSR gets a bad reputation online for the reactions of a few. This is just another example.  On one hand, the old-school community will claim not to care or even pay attention to what WotC does with D&D and then turn around and freak out when they release a rule errata that many in the 5e gaming community might just ignore.

So, stop freaking out all the time. 

Daniel Elkind / October 6, 2020

Mort Künstler illustration for a March 1960 True magazine story on “America’s Mystery Giant,” Bigfoot.

During Christmas 1879, the last known wild tarpan (Equus gmelini) was run off a cliff somewhere in Ukraine. Native to the forests of Poland, this undomesticated horse species had survived in Europe’s ancient woodlands since at least the time of Herodotus. Apart from a few individuals scattered among various zoos, its death left Przewalski’s horse the sole wild species. 

Apparently some wild horses remain in Poland’s managed old-growth Bialowieza Forest, but their population is the result of Nazi-era experiments in back-breeding extinct animals, the tarpan included, from captive specimens. Lutz Heck, a Nazi zoologist and head of the Berlin Zoo, was not alone in his enthusiasm for resurrecting the dead. He and his hunting buddy, Hermann Göring—who, in addition to being propaganda minister and chief of the Luftwaffe, was also Reich Hunt Master and Forest Master—intended to reinvent a host of ancient and endangered “native” animals like the auroch and wisent to populate their future game reserve. In the future Europe they imagined, they and other elite Nazis would retreat to lodges in forests like Bialowieza to hunt and kill these impossible animals.  

Impossible animals—animals that do not, should not, or cannot possibly exist—have been part of human iconography and myth from the art of cave paintings to medieval bestiaries. Their absurd anatomies have been used to symbolize and subjugate, to parody and portend. (Think of the details in The Garden of Earthly Delights.) Ironically, it was the discovery of very real fossils belonging to implausible behemoths in the earth beneath our feet that renewed a belief in fantastic creatures. Since the dinosaurs were extinct, however, living anachronisms would have to be found. And because science values “skulls and skins” above all, a whole menagerie of freakish and often fraudulent specimens have cropped up to support one claim after another of isolated species still stalking remote parts of the globe. 

With the introduction of photography, new opportunities for deception arose. Using nothing but their father’s camera and some painted specimens, two girls from Yorkshire managed to fool Sherlock Holmes inventor Arthur Conan Doyle into believing that fairies lived all around us. Obviously, Conan Doyle was less of a skeptic than his invention. In dispelling the shadows, he seemed to believe, science had also purged the world of mystery: “Victorian science would have left the world hard and clean and bare,” he wrote, “like a landscape in the moon.” 

First American edition, 1959

In the early days, these pretenders tended to come from the ranks of the learned—from disciplines such as evolutionary biology, zoology, and Egyptology. Their hoaxes appealed not to fear but to the equally compelling desire to confirm whatever pet theory one had already developed. George Montandon, for example, was happy to christen De Loys’ Ape (Ameranthropoides loysi) a new species based on nothing more than a single, staged photograph taken by a Swiss petroleum geologist named François De Loys. After much publicity and speculation, however, this new primate species turned out to be a dead white-bellied spider monkey (Ateles belzebuth). Erudition can entrap as effectively as ignorance—perhaps more so. Montandon apparently “endorsed and required the creation of a large, vaguely human-like South American primate because—as a supporter of the then seriously regarded ‘hologenesis’ hypothesis—he needed a primate that could serve as an ancestor of South American humans.” 

Sergei Isaakovich Freshkop (often Frechkop), a mummy expert from Moscow, was an early proponent of another theory, now likewise discredited: the initial theory of bipedalism, which suggested that all mammals started out upright. One of his most promising students at the Free University of Brussels was Bernard Heuvelmans, who coined the term cryptozoology, and dedicated his 1955 opus Sur la Piste des Bêtes Ignorées (translated as On the Track of Unknown Animals in 1958) to his former mentor. 

Heuvelmans’ book is an exasperating, encyclopedic bestiary located at the “frontier of science and fantasy.” It’s also a beast of a book, a doorstop-sized chunk of zoological history with no less than 50 photographs, 120 illustrations—from the “monkey-eating eagle of the Philippines” to a “reconstruction of the abominable snowman”—and five hand-drawn maps. (To my eternal disappointment, neither my home state of New Jersey nor the Jersey Devil seems to merit any mentions.) If you’ve ever wondered about how we got from Conan Doyle’s The Lost World and nineteenth century Forteana to the Weekly World News of the checkout aisle, you would do well to look him up.  

Heuvelmans, who died in 2001, lived through some radical transformations in the state of the art. On the one hand, he was a trained zoologist with a dissertation on aardvark teeth; on the other, he marshaled folklore as scientific evidence and wasn’t shy about slapping his name on sensational pulp. (Allegedly, the Yeti bits in Hergé’s Tintin in Tibet derive from his input.) For Heuvelmans, as for Conan Doyle, it was all about bringing back a sense of faded romance. Along with German mammalogist Ingo Krumbiegel and Ivan T. Sanderson, Heuvelmans is often considered one of the founders of the field of cryptozoology. Perhaps more important, he embodied the embattled crypto figure as a righteous scholar who stalks the unknown while reminding the “armchair naturalists” and stuffy old Pharisees in the academy of the great mysteries that still remain in the forests of Minnesota. 

Much of Unknown Animals is thus spent in attempting to “confound the skeptics”—i.e. agreeing that we cannot say we don’t know for sure—rather than in attempting to demonstrate that there is any evidence for his claims. Heuvelmans casts this power struggle as a kind of religious schism. In Searching for Sasquatch (2011), Brian Regal attributes the contest between “eggheads” and “crackpots” to the growing professionalization of natural science as a discipline. Folklore scholar and zombie expert Peter Dendle puts it even more diplomatically: 

Unconfirmed species served as an implicit ground of conflict and dialogue between untutored masses and educated elite, even prior to the rise of academic science as a unified body of expert consensus.

What’s particularly interesting about 1950s cryptozoology is the way it seemed to exploit this haunted zone of possibility between fiction and verifiable fact, using doubt to its advantage. After all, dinosaurs, too, were once considered the stuff of fantasy. It was only with Cuvier and the bones unearthed by American paleontologists Edward Cope and Othniel Marsh in the 19th century that the systematic study of fossils could take place, bringing dinosaurs closer to the realm of nonfiction, if not yet science. But Sanderson and Heuvelmans went even further. Leveraging their status as outsiders, they argued that dinosaurs not only existed, but likely still survived in some remote corner of the globe. Though they claimed to despise the academy, the cryptozoologists simultaneously aspired to remake it in their image. At the same time, they were right to call out the overreliance on fossil evidence and the role of colonialism. Too often native accounts were dismissed, while white administrators who rarely left the comforts of their coastal abodes were given the benefit of the doubt regarding matters in the interior. Then there was and still is the practice of naming a new species after the first western interloper to lay hands or eyes on it. 

Fawcett Publications, 1970. Cover art by Frank Frazetta

Take the gerenuk. Native to Somaliland, where it is known as garanuug, this beautiful giraffe-necked creature is often called the Waller’s gazelle because in 1879 a hunter-naturalist “discovered” and named it after the Waller who procured the specimen. Ditto Clarke’s gazelle, Père David’s deer, Burchell’s zebra, Hunter’s hartebeest, Meinertzhagen’s forest-hog, and so on. But in what sense can one claim to discover something well-known or to name something that already has a name?

It echoes an earlier struggle, during the 18th century, when European naturalists were skeptical about biological life in the New World. The Comte de Buffon was especially vocal in his doubts that any significant new species remained to be discovered there. Thomas Jefferson, perhaps the founder of American paleontology, disagreed. Jefferson had a network of people supplying him with newly-discovered fossils, specimens that ultimately convinced him that mammoths or mastodons must still exist somewhere out in the American wild. “It may be asked, why I insert the mammoth, as if it still existed,” he wrote in 1785’s Notes on the State of Virginia. “I ask in return, why I should omit it, as if it did not exist? […] [the north and west] still remain in their aboriginal state, unexplored and undisturbed by us, or by others for us. He may as well exist there now, as he did formerly where we find his bones.”

In sowing doubt and helping to bust down the door to amateurs, Heuvelmans and his descendants also opened up the flood gates to crowdsourced conspiracy, in which one begins with the desire to believe and then seeks corroborating evidence among the like-minded. The more corrupt our political and environmental reality seems to get, the more technocratic the solutions proposed, the more desperate the reaction from people with nothing left to lose. In a world of constant contact, ubiquitous information, and surreptitious surveillance, doubt has become a powerful weapon against orthodoxies of all kinds. For some self-styled freethinkers, it serves as a shield from truths too ugly and dangerous to perceive directly. It reminds me of the Toynbee Tiles, an anonymous graffiti phenomenon that started with tantalizing mosaics pressed into the asphalt of major cities in the US and abroad, promising some kind of utopian TOYNBEE IDEA/IN MOVIE ‘2001/RESURRECT DEAD/ON PLANET JUPITER, but ultimately spelling out a paranoid Protocols-like media conspiracy: MURDER EVERY JOURNALIST I BEG OF YOU.

We need monsters. Without them, the world is somehow more terrifyingly rational, shrunken, diminished. The imagination rebels against such austerity, casting shadows where they didn’t exist. “But then everyone thinks himself better than his neighbours and gives them beastly habits or animal appearance,” writes Heuvelmans. “Most of the ancient travellers gave tails to the savages they found, especially on islands. Marco Polo mentions men with tails in Sumatra. Gemelli-Careri finds them in Luzon, Jean Struys in Formosa, the Jesuit missionaries in Mindoro near Manila, Köping, a Swede, in the Nicobar Islands.” Then, as if looking in the mirror, he turns back to Europe and the West: “in Europe in the seventeenth century the Spaniards believed Jews had tails, in France the people of Bearn attributed them to the Cagots who lived at the foot of the Pyrenees, and in England the Devonians believed the same slander about their Cornish neighbours. . . . Every savage believes in someone more savage than himself.”

Daniel Elkind is a writer and translator living in San Francisco.

 

Another full class today.  This one has been selling well so let's see what is inside.

Again, here are my rules and guidelines for these reviews. 

Hex Witch - 5E Player Class

This is a 9 page PDF (1 cover, 1 title page, 7 pages of content) and sells for $2.95 straight. So well above the 10 cents per page guide at 42 cents per page. This presents a full witch base class and three subclasses, known as "Wiccan Pathways." Now for myself, I try to avoid using the term "Wicca" in games since it is a recognized religion.  Even in the stuff I wrote for the WitchCraft RPG we used "Wicce."

The paths are the Augury Witch (seer), the Fey Witch (combat spellcasting), and the Wyld Witch (healer). So some nice variety. 

This witch also gets Hex powers that a little like the Hexes the Pathfinder witch gets or the Occult powers I give my witches. 

This witch uses Charisma as their main spell-casting ability. 

Some powers sound good, but are not 100% clear on what they really do or how they work. Living Objects for example is described as inanimate objects coming to life. But are they still made from the material they were or are they flesh and blood?  Will Dispel Magic turn them back?

This one also properly credits the artists which is good.

I like it, but it left me wanting something more in the end. 

We’re in the home stretch now. For the last 40 years, the worst of Dallas’s summer heat was worth tolerating for an autumn that seemingly goes on forever. Some Octobers are anomalies, with surprising rains and even the subfreezing temperatures … Continue reading →

Wait...didn't I watch this one last night?  Well, you would think so just comparing the posters.
Also known as "Sex of the Witch" this one came out a year after Byleth did.  Though in fairness BOTH movies do have a scene that the cover could represent.

An old wine merchant is dying so he curses his family, in particular his greedy grand-children.

One by one people start to die.

The plot, minus the sex and witchcraft, could have been a thriller or even a comedy.  There are some parallels to some murder mysteries like Clue and Knives Out.  In the sense that people keep dying and there are a bunch squabbling children trying to get Daddy's wealth.

There is lots of sex and nudity and it is pretty much the ultimate evolution of the Italian Giallo, Eurosleaze flick.  It was only missing a deformed henchman in my mind. Though there is a creepy dude in black.

I will admit that I am now likely to use "fondling the goldfish" as a sexual euphemism after watching this movie.  The said scene is about 40 mins into my copy.

It is notable that Camille Keaton of "I Spit On Your Grave" fame appears in this one as well as one of the nieces, Anna.  she gets clawed by the previously mentioned creepy dude.

The movie's biggest crime though is that it is a slog and actually kind of dull.

Maybe a Byleth +  Il Sesso Della Strega supercut is needed.  In fact, I know just how to do it.At least we know what poster to use.
Watched: 6
New: 6
NIGHT SHIFT Content
The rich brother writes his sister out of his will because she was a witch and seduced him when they were younger.  Now their illegitimate daughter is back. She is also a witch (more powerful since her blood is "concentrated") and begins to kill off all her half-siblings (they think she is "just" a cousin) so she can have all the inheritance for herself.Since she is a diabolic witch her patron is Byleth, the Demon Prince of Incest. While Byleth, or Beleth, has a history this version is closer to the D&D/Pathfinder demon Socothbenoth.
Now, this would obviously be a more R or even NC-17 rated game. To borrow a Scooby-doo trope one of the characters is a distant relative to the brother's wife (so no weird blood relations here).

Seriously. It is. 

Like Old-School D&D was a pioneer of gaming,  Run-DMC was a pioneer of old-school rap and hip hop.  Many hip-hop groups cite Run-DMC as their primary influence and for many of us Run-DMC was out first exposure to the wider world of rap and hip-hop.  Could there have been a Public Enemy without Run-DMC? Wu-Tang Clan? NWA? Snoop-Dogg? Outkast? Salt-n-Peppa, De La Soul? Cypress Hill? US3? Digable Planets? TLC? (damn, I still love TLC).

We owe it all to Run-DMC.

Silly?  Yeah, a little. But my love of Run-DMC is pure and true. And yeah I know all the words to these songs. 

But making a claim, any claim, about the OSR is pointless.  While there are trends, there are no main drivers here. No one setting policy or dictating terms save for collective memory of a time when you could turn on your radio and hear "It's Tricky."

Consequently, the claim that OSR is conservative only track because the OSR is as has been often pointed out, full of old fucks.

I am pretty far left and get more liberal and more left and more blue with each passing year. 

I shouldn't need to say this, but here it is.

Like THAC0 BLOG and The Elf Game, I don't just reject Nazis and White Supremacists, I utterly reject them and condemn them, and they are not welcome in any part of the games I play, write or enjoy.  They can take their orange shitgibbon Trump with them. 

Oh. 

And Black Lives Matter. 

And fuck Trump.

Don't like it? Get the fuck out of the OSR.

Welcome to the FIRST Monstrous Monday of October 2020.

If you are on social media you might have seen this little gem from last week.

The answer of course is, me. I had Zombie Witches on my bingo card!   

Well if I didn't I do now.

Photo by Thirdman from PexelsZombie Witch
Medium Undead (Corporeal)
Frequency: Very Rare
Number Appearing:  2d4 (2d4)
Alignment: Chaotic [Chaotic Evil]
Movement: 90' (30') [9"]
Armor Class: 5 [14]
Hit Dice: 4d8+4** (22 hp)
Attacks: 2 claws + 1 bite, Cause Fear
Damage: 1d6, 1d6, 1d4
Special: Only harmed by silver, magic. Cause Fear 1x per day as per spell. Curse.
Size: Medium
Save: Witch 4
Morale: 12 (12)
Treasure Hoard Class: None; see below
XP: 100

When a powerful lord or lady dies they are often interred with fine weapons, treasures, and other grave goods that will support them in the after-life.  But these lords also know that these good are desired by the less pious and greedy.  So the lords will often arrange for a coven of witches to be sacrificed in a dark ritual and buried with the grave goods.  The witches do not volunteer for this task, they are captured and sacrificed after the lords' death. It is believed that the anger of the witches will transcend death and the tomb will be protected.

This is true and the undead witch, now a mindless zombie will attack anything living that enters the tomb.  Appearances may differ, but they are all undead witches in various states of decay or mummification.

Often lower level witches are used (under 6th level) and the only remains of their magic is a cause fear ability they can use as a group 1x per day.  They then attack as fast-moving zombies (normal initiative).  They will fight until they are destroyed. If the last zombie witch is destroyed and there are still combatants alive they will lay their final curse.  Anyone taking goods away from the tomb must save vs. death or be afflicted with a rotting disease that drops their HP by 1d6 per day until death. Healing magics, potions, or other means will not stop the spread of the curse.  Only a remove curse or similar magic can stop this curse. Then the victim can be healed. 

If destroyed, zombie witches will reform by the next new moon.  Only a cleric casting bless or a witch casting hallow or  remove curse on the tomb will stop their return. 

Zombie witches are turned as wights or 4HD undead.

Zombie Witch
(Night Shift)
No. Appearing: 2-8
AC: 5 
Move: 30ft.
Hit Dice: 4
Special: 3 attacks (2 claw, bite), cause fear, bestow curse

Weakness: Vulnerable to silver, magic weapons and holy items.  Holy water does 1d6+1 hp of damage to them.

If you want to see the other undead witches I have made over the years here is a list:

• Baobhan Sìth
• Bell witch
• Eretica (Vampire)
• Jigarkhwar (Vampire)
• Rusalka
• Strigoi (Vampire)
• Soucouyant (Vampire Hag)
• Umbral
• Zugarramurdi Brujas, more Zugarramurdi Brujas.

Today I want to focus on a Witch class proper.  I grabbed this one a bit ago and it has been languishing on my harddrive ever since.

Again, here are my rules for these reviews of this series. 

A lot of pdfs on DMSGuild are named "The Witch" and I guess I am not really any better on DriveThruRPG, so to distinguish them I am going to include the author's name in the titles.

The Witch from Greg Baxter

This is an eleven-page PDF (8 pages of content, 1 cover, 1 title, 1 legal) that sells for $1.33 on DMSGuild (PWYW, suggested). So just a little over that 10 cents per page rule of thumb.

This product covers an entire witch base class.

These witches are very tied in with Hags and have the first witches as human women that have broken free from their transformation into hags. 

The main ability of these witches is Intelligence. 

The subclasses for this witch are Haglore Scholar, Athame Witch, and Rune Witch.  They have a lot of flavor, to be honest, and would be fun to try out.

No new spells, but the spell lists are rather extensive covering the Player's Handbook and many of the other sourcebooks.

The art is minimal, but at least there are credits to the artists. 

All in all there are some fun options here and I'd give them a try

Best known as a manufacturer of props—both gaming and comic book related, Type 40 has now entered the actual gaming industry with the first of its ‘Seeds of Terror’ for use with Call of Cthulhu, Seventh Edition. Each Seed is designed to be concise and easy to run, and not only that, be easy to purchase, prepare, and run all within a single session. To that end, each includes a set-up and a plot, all of the necessary maps and handouts, and five ready-to-play pre-generated Investigators. The very first in the series is The Mummy of Pemberley Grange.

The Mummy of Pemberley Grange: A 1920s Call of Cthulhu Seed of Terror for 4 or 5 investigators takes place at a country mansion in the 1920s to which the Investigators have been invited. Their host, Jessica Pemberley, rich socialite and Egyptophile, has shipped a mummy to her home all the way from Cairo and has invited them to an exclusive ‘unwrapping party’. This is a great event, an especially prestigious event which promises great, even macabre spectacle, made all the more so because of its intimacy, just a handful of attendees rather than the very public spectacle of a Mummy unwrapping as had occurred during the Victorian Era.

Essentially, the unwrapping in The Mummy of Pemberley Grange goes ahead as planned. Then something happens and the Investigators find themselves in a perilous situation—hunted from room to room and down corridor after corridor by a nigh-on unstoppable monster. All the Investigators have to do is keep out of the monster’s clutches and find a means to stop the threat facing them. Fortunately, everything that the Investigators needs is contained within the walls of Pemberley Grange—maps, clues, books, et cetera. The solution, once found, is gruesomely entertaining, though some players and their Investigators may find it quite unpalatable.

For all that there is a plot in The Mummy of Pemberley Grange, it is a simple plot and a straightforward plot. In fact, The Mummy of Pemberley Grange is primarily the set-up for a trigger event, and once that event is triggered, whatever happens next is driven by the actions of the Investigators. Aided, of course, by the occasional nudges from the Keeper in the form of the unstoppable monster…

The Mummy of Pemberley Grange comes with five ready-to-play pre-generated Investigators. They include an Egyptian archaeologist, a reporter, a businessman, a socialite, and a dilettante. Each comes with a little background, but for the most part, the players have plenty of space in which to create the details of their Investigators’ backgrounds. The three handouts are also well done.

However, there are a couple of issues with The Mummy of Pemberley Grange. The first is the map, which shows the floorplans of Pemberley Grange. The floorplans are in fact excellent and have a period feel, but they are only of the ground floor. Which is a bit of a problem should the Investigators want to go upstairs. The second is that there are twenty or so locations given on the map, but only a handful are given any description, which means that the Keeper is going to have to make up whatever might be found in these rooms. This should not be a problem if the Keeper has watched her fair share of episodes of Downton Abbey or Poirot, but if not, the flavour and feel of the scenario might suffer, let alone the pacing if the Keeper has to improvise too much.

Physically, The Mummy of Pemberley Grange is presented and easy to read. The handouts and the map are available to download separately, as are the Investigator sheets. They are also easy to use.

A classic Mummy unleashed horror scenario rather than a Mythos scenario, The Mummy of Pemberley Grange has potential to be great fun and the nature of its monster and set-up makes it easy to run as a Cthulhu by Gaslight scenario during the Victorian Era. Equally, it could be shifted to the USA or Australia just as easily—or another country with a few name and language changes. In fact, those changes would only take a few minutes, but really, that would only double the set-up time, because The Mummy of Pemberley Grange really can be downloaded, read through, and prepared in ten minutes—and that is being generous. Overall, The Mummy of Pemberley Grange really delivers on its low preparation promise; after that, it is up to the Keeper to deliver the horror and the Investigators to run scared as the Mummy stalks them in the halls of Pemberley Grange.

—oOo—

A full play through of The Mummy of Pemberley Grange is available to watch on YouTube recorded as part of Melbourne International Games Week.

This is another one from last year.  The Blu-Ray was not available till November, so here we are. This is another one of those notorious movies of the 70s Euro-sleaze horror. One I had been looking for a while mostly because I never thought I'd find it.

Byleth: The Demon of Incest is a little Italian gem that features murders, gratuitous nudity and enough brother/sister incest for an episode of Game of Thrones.

Let's get right to the point. It's not good. It is slow and the lead Mark Damon as Duke Lionello is not great.

The movie revolves around Duke Lionello, his sister Barbara and Barbara's new husband Giordano.  This is a problem of course since Lionello and Barbara have been having an incestuous affair.   An affair that Lionello is loathed to give up.

The movie does make use of the demon Beleth, which is expected.  At one point Barbara asks her brother, Lionello, if he still has his white horse.  They later talk about "Byleth" on his white horse.

Of course, you are never sure if Lionello is possessed by Byleth or just crazy.  I like to think possessed because that is what I do here.

The Severin Blu-Ray version is really good.  There are some color issues from the original negative, but otherwise, it looks great.  Too bad the movie could not live up to the hype.

Watched: 5
New: 5
NIGHT SHIFT Content
Come back tomorrow night for my ideas on this one!

Illustration from "The Snow Queen"  Illustration from "The Little Witch"  Illustration from Alexander Sharov's "Wizards Come to the People" The book about Fairy Tales and Storytellers.  Illustration from Otfried Preussler's "The Little Water-Sprite"  Illustrations from "English Folk Tales"  Illustrations from Hans Christian Andersen's "The Little Mermaid"  Illustrations from "Scottish Folk Tales and Legends" 
Illustrations from  Otfried Preußler's "The Little Ghost"

Most artworks found at Book Graphics. 
 Artist previously shared here.