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

—oOo—
Judge Dredd: The Game of Crime-Fighting in Mega-City One is back! Originally designed by Sir Ian Livingstone and published by Games Workshop in 1982, it was the very first board game to be inspired by the Judge Dredd comic strip from the pages of 2000 AD. In the original game, the players control Judges patrolling the streets of Mega-City One, the vast twenty-second century metropolis on the Atlantic coast of North America, home to eight hundred million citizens and all of them potential lawbreakers. Every Judge is trained from the age of five to arrest criminals, pass sentence, and carry out the sentence—even if that means a death sentence!—all in the name of keeping the city and its inhabitants safe. Every turn a player sends his Judge to the scene of a reported crime, perhaps the Palais De Boing—the only place in the city where it is legal to go Boinging, Otto Sump’s Ugly Clinic for the very best in uglification surgery, or the Alien Zoo where wonders and weird creatures from across the universe can be seen— and attempts to arrest the perpetrator. Perhaps Joseph ‘Mad Tooth’ McKill for Tobacco Smoking, Ma Jong for Stookie Glanding, or Dobey Queeg for Robot Smashing. Notoriously, this is the board game where you could be arresting Judge Death for Littering, or Ma ‘Green Fingers’ Mahaffy for Murder. Unfortunately, only one Judge gets be top dog in Mega-City One, and that is Judge Dredd. Which means the player with greatest total strength of Crime and Perp cards in his score pile at the end of the game is the winner and thus next top dog.

Much like the later Block Mania, the good news is that Judge Dredd: The Game of Crime-Fighting in Mega-City One has returned to the fold of 2000 AD and is now published by Rebellion Unplugged. Like Block Mania, it has undergone a redesign and makeover, but not by very much, and the game play remains very much the same. What has been added are clearer rules for ending the game and a simple expansion to make play a little more interesting and worth revisiting. Everything else remains the same. Same game rules, same art style, same set of perps and crimes, and same take that style of play. So, although a classic, Judge Dredd: The Game of Crime-Fighting in Mega-City One is still a game from 1982. What that means is that the game is easy to learn and easy to play, has bags and bags of theme—even if that theme dates back between 1977 and 1982, a degree of players acting against each other, and a high degree of luck. Judge Dredd: The Game of Crime-Fighting in Mega-City One is by any definition, an ‘Ameritrash’ board game. That by no means is necessarily a bad thing as the game can also be funny and silly, and it is playable by anyone—not just those who played it first time around in 1982 and are noshing down on the nostalgia.

Judge Dredd: The Game of Crime-Fighting in Mega-City One is designed to be played by two to six players aged fourteen plus and has a playing time of between an hour and an hour-and-a-half. The board depicts twenty-eight locations in Mega-City One. Over the course of the game, each sector will be seeded with a reported Crime and Perp. The Judges will proceed to the Sectors where these Crimes and Perps have been reported, reveal them, and attempt to arrest the Perp. Failing that, they may be able to stop the Crime in progress. At the end of the game, the player who has scored the most points from Perps arrested and Crimes stopped, wins the game.
Set-up first requires the group to choose a game length—‘Hotdog Run’, ‘Day Shift’, or ‘Night Shift’—and decide whether or not to use the Specialist Judges expansion. Each player receives six Action cards, and the Crime, Perp, and Sector cards are shuffled. Sector cards are drawn and these indicate where reports of crimes have been made, Perp cards and Crime cards being drawn and placed face down in the indicated Sectors. Each round consists of three phases. In the Movement Phase, the Judges move two Sectors in a direction, taking accounting of bridges to cross the river, but primarily to the nearest Sector containing Perp and Crime cards. When a Judge moves into a Sector Perp and Crime cards, both are turned over and revealed. In the Arrest Phase, a Judge attempts to bring a Perp and his Crime to justice. To do this, his player rolls the game’s black Judge die and adds his Judge’s Strength. Another player roll’s the game red Perp die and adds the result to Perp’s Strength, a total of the value on the Perp card plus the value on the Crime card. Highest total wins. If the Judge’s result is higher, he arrests the Perp and his player takes both Perp and Crime cards and adds it to his score pile. If the Judge’s result is lower, the Judge has failed, is knocked out, and has to discard and refresh his hand of Action cards. If the result is a draw, the crime is stopped and the Crime is added to the player’s score pile, but the Perp runs away, ready to be arrested by another Judge! In the third Refill Phase, new Sector cards and Crime and Perp cards are drawn to bring the number in play back up to six, any Judges knocked out go to the Justice Department Hospital, and each player receives a new Action card, more if their Judge is in certain sectors.

Of course, it is not always possible for a Judge to beat a Perp and a Crime on a singe roll. For example, if Fink Angel And Ratty with a Strength of eight was Body Sharking, which has a value of five, the total Strength the player has to roll higher than is thirteen. Which is not possible with the addition of a Judge’s Strength of six plus a die roll. Fortunately, a Judge has access to Action cards. Most are Support cards, which add a bonus to the arresting Judge’s Strength. For example, ‘Judge Hershey is with you today’ adds three and ‘The Perp is Kill Crazy. You send in the Sonic Cannon.’ adds five. Others though, are Sabotage cards, and can be used by a player to make an arrest attempt by another player’s Judge even harder. For example, ‘Your breakfast of plasti-flakes and synthi-lix is giving you chronic indigestion. You are not in tip-top fighting condition’ levies a -2 penalty or ‘The Perp you are fighting is secretly an East-Meg spy. Add an Extra Die to their Strength’. The worst of these cards, of course, the Escape card, which reveals the Perp to be the notorious Edwin Parsey, notorious confessor of other people’s crimes, which forces all Support cards used in the arrest attempt to be discarded and the attempt be treated as a tie. Other Action cards allow extra movement, send the Judge to a particular Sector, grants on the spot healing, and so on.

Judge Dredd: The Game of Crime-Fighting in Mega-City One adds one expansion—Specialist Judges. There are six of these—or seven if the Judge Fish from ‘The Day the Law Died’ storyline promo is included—and each Judge has a different ability. They include Chief Judge, SJS Judge, Psi-Judge, Wally Squad, Cadet, and Mechanismo. For example, the Cadet Judge only has a Strength of four, but begins play with and can hold seven Action cards, and draws an extra card; the SJS Judge can look at another player’s Actions each turn and wins ties in combat; and the Wally Squad Judge can move through Sectors containing revealed Perps, but does not have to arrest them. All six are nicely thematic and give a player a good little edge in play. The mix means that the players can come back to the game, try another Specialist Judge and a slightly style of play.

Physically, Judge Dredd: The Game of Crime-Fighting in Mega-City One is well presented. The artwork on the board is in colour, whilst the cards is black and white, but also is sharply and crisply handled. The rulebook is clearly written, easy to read, and supported with examples of the rules. In addition, the rulebook includes all of the UMPTY CANDY CARDs from the Jack Caldwell’s Old-fashioned Umpty Candy packs. All three series—‘SECTORS of Mega-City One’, ‘CRIMES of Mega-City One’, and ‘PERPS of Mega-City One’ explain the three sets of cards in the game, giving background for each of them.

Judge Dredd: The Game of Crime-Fighting in Mega-City One is not a perfect game by modern standards. It is too luck driven, the game allows one player to directly hamper another with the Sabotage cards, and towards the end of play, players can congregate around the remaining Sectors that have not yet been drawn if they have been keeping an eye on the cards that have been drawn to date. That said, they were part of the game’s design in 1982 and they should be there also in 2022 because the new edition is intended as a nostalgia piece and to change the game’s design too radically would break from that. Another issue is that the game only draws from the first five or so years of the Judge Dredd strips in 2000 AD—1977 to 1982—so that means forty-year-old stories which may not be as familiar to younger players. Perhaps yet, there is room for further expansions involving the more recent stories and thus more Crimes and Perp cards?
Judge Dredd: The Game of Crime-Fighting in Mega-City One is a fun game, easy to play and all the more enjoyable if the players know the lore, know the crimes, and know the Perps. Rebellion Unplugged have done a fantastic job of updating the quality of the game whilst both retaining the same game play and adding an expansion for more varied play. Judge Dredd: The Game of Crime-Fighting in Mega-City One marks the welcome return of a beloved classic, British in both design and inspiration, in turns funny, frustrating, and evocative of our gaming youth and another age.

Konrad Spiegel is dead. Burned to a crisp, a gold coin in his mouth. It is the strangest thing to have occurred in the village for Schwarzfuß for many years. Jakob Falkenartig was a friend of Konrad Spiegel and fears he will be next, so he wants to hire some bodyguards. The otherwise feckless Bürgermeister Lorenz Künstler wants something done about the situation, as long as it does not involve him, and so hires an errant band of adventurers to do the job for him. Then, of course, there is the matter of the gold. Who has enough gold to leave in the mouths of dead, burned bodies? These are all reasons for the Player Characters to get involved in the events in and around Schwarzfuß. What they will find is a village fearful of what will happen next and who the next victim will be and who the perpetrator is of this terrible crime is. This is the set-up for The Curious Conundrum of the Conflagrated Condottiero, a short scenario for Lamentations of the Flame Princess Weird Fantasy Roleplay. Like other scenarios published by Lamentations of the Flame Princess it is set in the game’s default early Modern Period, this time following a war, the suggested year being 1630 and the war being the Thirty Years’ War. Written by Kevin Green, it is another of his ‘village in peril, but only the Player Characters can save the day’ scenarios, but on a much smaller scale.

The Curious Conundrum of the Conflagrated Condottiero is essentially Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Sign of the Four adapted to the seventeenth century, a fantasy roleplaying game, Germany, but with added flames and less monkey and more The Terminator. Not literally, but the antagonist is an unstoppable killing machine. Actually, the author actually states that the scenario’s inspiration lies in John Carpenter’s The Fog and Kelly’s Heroes, which is all well and good, but since his opinions and tastes in films have proven to be suspect with previous scenarios for Lamentations of the Flame Princess Weird Fantasy Roleplay, he may not be entirely, or indeed, at all, accurate. The author’s taste and opinion with regard to films aside, its set-up is simple, flexible, and easy to use, whether that is the retroclone of the Referee’s choice or another setting or even another roleplaying game. The most obvious of which would be Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay.

The village of Schwarzfuß is not described in any great detail and instead, the scenario focuses on the victims and where they live, the antagonist, and the few NPCs of any note in the village. Most of the NPCs receive a half page of description each, whilst the three remaining victims several pages each, being accompanied by details of where they live, including very nicely done floorplans of their homes. Each of the three remaining victims is very different in personality and the Referee will enjoy portraying each one of them as well as the other NPCs. The venerable, but crotchety old monster hunter stands out as the most fun to roleplay.

Much of the scenario is dedicated to suggested ways and means of dealing with the nigh on unstoppable monster threatening the three victims. It includes faking the deaths of the victims as well as actually cutting to the chase and the Player Characters killing them themselves, and everything in between. There are lots of options discussed here, essentially covering most of the solutions that the players will think of and there is even a suggestion for the Referee to substitute a non-supernatural option if she does not necessarily want her Player Characters facing an unstoppable flaming monster or she wants to run a Scooby Doo-style scenario.

Physically, The Curious Conundrum of the Conflagrated Condottiero is very well presented and written. The artwork is decent, but the maps are excellent.

The Curious Conundrum of the Conflagrated Condottiero is a short scenario. In fact, it could be run in a single session and even as a convention scenario, though it would be unlikely to last more than two sessions. Its set-up is simple and its plot, well, not exactly original, so what matters is how well the plot is done and how well the plot is supported, and to be fair, The Curious Conundrum of the Conflagrated Condottiero does a good job of handling both. The result is that The Curious Conundrum of the Conflagrated Condottiero is a decently presented, well explored, if familiar scenario that is easy to prepare, easy to run, and easy to adapt.

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

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

—oOo—
Name: Dossier No. I – The MawPublisher: Chaosium, Inc.
Author: Matthias Sperling & Björn Soentgerath

Setting: Jazz Age Germany & EgyptProduct: Scenario
What You Get: Ninety-Three page, 93.71 MB Full Colour PDF
Elevator Pitch: The ancient horrors of Egypt have a long reach... a very long reach.Plot Hook: Employees of the ‘Obscuriat’ are directed to locate an expected artefact because of Harry Houdini.Plot Support: Staging advice, two pre-generated Investigators, twelve NPCs, nine handouts, one Mythos artefact, and six Mythos monsters.Production Values: Plain.
Pros# Dense, highly detailed investigation# Excellent end of scene summaries# Designed for two players and Keeper# Physical props also available
# Enjoyable small town, Weimar Republic period feel
# Nice sense of environment# Inspired by ‘Imprisoned with the Pharaohs’ by H.P. Lovecraft and Harry Houdini# Taphophobia# Anthropomorphobia# Necrophobia# Pharaohphobia
Cons# Needs a strong edit# Densely plotted# No clear summation of the scenario# No historical context# Designed for two players and Keeper
Conclusion# Densely plotted, heavily backgrounded scenario needs a lot of unpacking by the Keeper to run properly# Really needs historical Jazz Age context explained# Enjoyable period investigation which surprisingly turns tomb trawl

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

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

—oOo—
Name: 52 HzPublisher: Chaosium, Inc.
Author: Michał Pietrzak

Setting: Modern Day PacificProduct: Scenario
What You Get: Fifteen page, 380.02 KB Full Colour PDF
Elevator Pitch: The song of the loneliest whale reveals horrors out of time.Plot Hook: A Miskatonic University research expedition reveals horrors in the most unexpected of places.
Plot Support: One handout, five (forty) NPCs, one map, and seventeen Mythos monsters.Production Values: Plain.
Pros# One session Scientific Action one-shot# Suitable for two to three Investigators
# Mythos on Mythos action
# Nice sense of environment# Literally ends with a big bang# Thalassophobia# Aquaphobia# Megalohydrothalassophobia# Nucleomituphobia
Cons# Needs a slight edit# Tightly plotted# Bland layout# Bland maps# No pre-generated Investigators
Conclusion# Exciting one session scientific action aquatic one-shot let down by a lack of pre-generated Investigators# Horrors out of the past drive a Mythos conflict with everyone else caught up in the Mythos on Mythos action

The Gamma Quadrant Sourcebook is the third setting supplement for Modiphius Entertainment’s Star Trek Adventures roleplaying game following on from the Beta Quadrant Sourcebook and the Alpha Quadrant Sourcebook. Effectively, it lies at the far end of the Bajoran Wormhole which connects the Gamma Quadrant to the Alpha Quadrant and it is what comes through the Bajoran Wormhole which is the primary focus of the Gamma Quadrant Sourcebook. For the supplement is as much a setting update as much a setting sourcebook and as much a companion to the Alpha Quadrant Sourcebook. What the Alpha Quadrant Sourcebook did was to examine the world of Bajor, and the major polities of the region, including the Cardassian Union, the Ferengi Alliance, the Tzenkethi Coalition, the Breen Confederacy, and the Tholian Assembly. It also looked at the Bajoran Wormhole and explored its ramifications of upon the quadrant, in the process, updating the default starting year for Star Trek Adventures of 2371 to 2372 as the early years of Deep Space 9 was explored. The Gamma Quadrant Sourcebook goes further. Not only does it update the default starting year from 2372 to 2375, but it also examines the whole of the Dominion War, looks at the major factions and events involved, supporting with details of new species, ways to involve the Player Characters and run campaigns set during the war, and more. What this means is that the Gamma Quadrant Sourcebook is really only a book for one of the period settings in Star Trek Adventures, that of Star Trek: The Next Generation rather than the earlier Star Trek: The Original Series or Enterprise.

What the Gamma Quadrant Sourcebook does not include is a map of the Gamma Quadrant. As with the television series, Deep Space 9, it remains for the most part, a great unknown, its exploration and possible contact with worlds there made all the challenging by the presence—both implied and actually present—of the Dominion. Nevertheless, there is plenty of scope for the crew of a starship to explore beyond the Bajoran Wormhole, make contact with the various species there, begin to learn hints of the Dominion, its masters and subject species, and wonder at its strangeness. In fact, almost a half of the supplement is dedicated to examining the Dominion and the Dominion war itself. The former starts with the history of the Changelings, how they fled, hounded by the ‘solids’—as they call most other species, to eventually find a world where they could be safe their Great Link, the world-spanning gestalt formed of their combined bodies and minds. It examines their politics, best described as a ‘fascist theocracy’ in which they are worshipped by their subjects upon whom they impose a strict order through their agents, the manipulative Vorta and the feared Jem’Hadar. Numerous worlds and species both within Dominion space and adjacent to it, are also detailed, such as the Drai, who serve as the Dominion’s geneticists and are thus regarded as a privileged member of the Dominion, and the T-Rogorans, a warlike species that aggressively expanding from its homeworld before encountering the Jem’Hadar and being almost wiped out… Notable worlds include the Founders’ Homeworld, essentially rock with little more than an atmosphere and the Great Link as a singular ocean; an Hur’q Outpost, an archaeological treasure house for anyone interested in Klingon history, the Hur’q having fled the Klingon homeworld thousands of years ago; and the Cursed Penal Moon, where the incarcerated are forced to fight in an ongoing war between two factions again and again as they find themselves resurrected each time they are killed. None can leave lest they die. All of these worlds and many of the species are ripe for visit by the Player Characters, whether as members of Starfleet or another faction.

Besides examining various species in the Gamma Quadrant, the supplement also looks at the various species in the Alpha Quadrant and their relationship with the Dominion. This includes the Breen, Cardassians, the Son’a, and the Orions, as well as potential allies like the Tholian Assembly, the Gorn, and the Nausicaans. The consequences of these potential alliances are also explored. Perhaps the most interesting inclusion here is that of the Kzin, a species rarely mentioned by Star Trek. Originally appearing in ‘The Slaver Weapon’, an episode of Star Trek: The Animated Series adapted by Larry Niven from his Known Space setting stories. However, they have been reintroduced into Star Trek in passing, or at least in mention. No stats are provided for them though in the Gamma Quadrant Sourcebook.

A detailed timeline of the Dominion War is also provided. It provides a background to the conflict as well as a look at the Cold War in which the Dominion began to infiltrate the Alpha Quadrant, secure allies, and foment conflict. This would lead to wars between the Klingons and Cardassians and then the Klingons and the Federation. Options are discussed for roleplaying in this Cold War period, before moving on to the loss and recapture of Deep Space 9, and coming to close with the current state of the war in 2374. Fortunately, supplement does not leave it there. Rather, it both gives 2374 as a default starting, ready for the Player Characters and their starship to become involved in the final operations against the Dominion, and then outlines the events of 2375 ready for the Game Master to run a campaign through this period.

To go with the numerous species discussed earlier, some twelve new species are given stats and details to make playable as both NPCs and Player Characters. This includes the Changelings! Their inclusion, of course, allows a player to roleplay a character similar to Constable Odo from Deep Space 9, and to that end, there is a discussion of how to include ‘Non-Starfleet, Unusual, Or Unique Characters’ in a Star Trek Adventures campaign. This is not confined to Changelings, of course, and there are plenty of species in the Gamma Quadrant Sourcebook, such as Lurians, Rakhari, or Wadi, which could be added as an unusual character to a campaign, let alone those in other supplements. A campaign based in a starbase, whether on a planet or in space, would more readily support this option than perhaps aboard a starship, but there are plenty of examples of such characters aboard a starship seen in Star Trek. Another option for a Changeling Player Character is to have them as infiltrators, undermining the efforts of Starfleet, the Federation, and its allies from within. Such an option does need careful handling, by both player and Game Master, with potential for redemption once the Changeling has been revealed and perhaps the person it was impersonating rescued from imprisonment. Notably, neither the Vorta nor the Jem’Hadar are included here. Instead, they remain adversaries, and are fully detailed in the core rulebook for Star Trek Adventures.

Numerous starships of the Gamma Quadrant are also described. These start with those vessels of the Dominion and its allies. Thus, the Jem’Hadar battleship and the Vorta Explorer, and the Son’a flagship and battlecruiser. The majority of the vessels are those of the Dominion War, all of them notable vessels. Amongst them are the U.S.S. Prometheus, the first vessel capable of Multi-Vector Assault Mode and the U.S.S. Valiant, the Defiant Class operated by members of Red Squadron from Starfleet Academy. An interesting option given is the vessels from the so-called ‘Frankenstein Fleet’, which saw starship frames previously mothballed by Starfleet upgraded with more advanced equipment and technologies. This would result in a radically different and genuinely unique vessel, a mixture of the old with the new.

Lastly, the Gamma Quadrant Sourcebook includes a wide selection of encounters and adversaries. Alongside a handful of encounter seeds for the Gamma Quadrant, there is a discussion of the Bajoran Wormhole and the role of the Prophets, and the nature of exploring the Gamma Quadrant. There is discussion too, of the types of campaigns that can be played throughout the period of the Dominion War, accompanied by several mission seeds and encounter types. Major NPCs given include General Martok of the Klingon Empire, Kai Winna Bajoran Vedek, the Cardassian leader, Gul Dukat, and the leading member of the Vorta species, Weyoun. Their inclusion enables the Player Characters to encounter and interact with some of the major adversaries of the Dominion War.

Physically, the Gamma Quadrant Sourcebook is a decent looking book. There are some inconsistencies in the layout, but otherwise the book is generally well-written and decently illustrated—though not always effectively—with a fully painted images. It does need a slight edit in places. The layout is done in the style of the LCARS—Library Computer Access/Retrieval System—operating system used by Starfleet. So, everything is laid out over a rich black background with the text done in soft colours. This is very in keeping with the theme and period setting of Star Trek Adventures, but it is imposing, even intimidating in its look, and it is not always easy to find things on the page because of the book’s look. The other issue is that the none-more black pages are easy to mark with fingerprints.

Throughout the supplement, the descriptions and game content are supported by a series of in-game documents, reports, diary excerpts, and the like. These typically reflect the mysterious nature of the Dominion and then the fraught nature of facing them and their agents in war, adding a sense of desperation in terms of its flavour and feel.

The Gamma Quadrant Sourcebook is three books in one, covering the Dominion, the worlds in and around Dominion space, and the Dominion War. It is also a companion volume, that to the Alpha Quadrant Sourcebook, which will provide the setting material for the Bajoran end of the Wormhole—Bajor, the Cardassian Union, the Ferengi Alliance, the Badlands, and the Demilitarised Zone. Like the Alpha Quadrant Sourcebook, the Gamma Quadrant Sourcebook sort of tiptoes around the subject of Deep Space 9. Yet despite this omission, the Gamma Quadrant Sourcebook is actually the most enjoyable and the most useful of the three sourcebooks dedicated to Star Trek’s quadrants to date. This is because it does not spread itself as thin as they do, its focus being firmly on the Dominion and their allies, the Dominion War, the consequences of the war, and involving the Player Characters. All of which is backed up by solid advice on running a campaign during just four or five years of Star Trek’s history.

To get the best out of the Gamma Quadrant Sourcebook, the Game Master will want access to the Alpha Quadrant Sourcebook, as that will anchor one end of the Bajoran Wormhole and Dominion War. Nevertheless, the Gamma Quadrant Sourcebook is the definite guide to the Dominion and the Dominion War for Star Trek Adventures, as well as the other end of the Bajoran Wormhole.

The year is 2225. For the last seventy-five years, hyperdrive starships have enabled mankind to colonise, settle, explore, and most importantly, exploit the more than three hundred planets in the interstellar space surrounding the Earth. Three arms of exploration and settlement have been developed—American, German, and Japanese. The majority of settled worlds lie within a four to six Parsec radius of Earth, but there are worked, settled, and visited worlds out to a radius of forty Parsecs. It turned out that none of them are true garden worlds. Many of them are tidally locked worlds and all have environmental conditions which make survival difficult if not outright challenging or dangerous. None have been found to be home to intelligent alien species, although many are home to indigenous species deadly, or at least a danger, to man. Even the Earth is no longer safe having suffered partial environmental collapse. Billions reside on the planet, but many make the long journey in hypersleep to make a new life on another world or to work contracts on resource worlds, for in the main, deep space is a place to work. Metals and rare earths, but above all petrochemicals for the plastics industry, remain in great demand.
The need for these resources has led to the rise of several South Korean chaebol and Japanese keiretsu-like corporations whose reach extends to the far edge of explored space, greater than that of any nation. Mining and aerospace company Reiner-Gama dominates and has its operations confined to the Solar System, but others include the engineering-based Leyland-Okuda; the British-based Erebus, built up from oil extraction in the Antarctic; Russian conglomerate Voroncovo, which provides data brokerage and security services alongside heavy engineering; Hong Kong-based manufacturer, Wu-Ketai; the Tokyo-based Matsuyama which specialises in colony construction and support; and the Tharsis Corporation, a mining company which originated on Mars and is led by Compton de Vaille, who at 223, is the longest lived human in history. The activities of these and lesser corporations are regulated by the United Corporate Combine, but peace, law enforcement, and labour relations across human space are still regulated by the political blocs and organisations of Earth. In the American Arm, the Federal Colonial Marshal Service stations officers on every colony, the Union of American Space Labor supports the safety and well-being of the workers everywhere, and the United States Marines provides military protection and peacekeeping. This includes the Tau Ceti 4 colony, originally divided between China and the United States of America, where the collapse of the newly democratic China in 2166 led to the foundation five new states all of whom claimed control of the former Chinese colony, civil unrest on the colony, and then insurgency and counter-insurgency as the United States Marines stepped in as a peacekeeping force, welcomed and rejected at the same time.

This is the setting for Hostile, a gritty, near future roleplaying setting inspired by the Blue-Collar Science Fiction of the seventies and eights, including the films, Alien, Outland, and Aliens. It is a future in which space exploration and colonisation is difficult, harsh, and dangerous, but in which there are asteroid systems and worlds to be exploited and great profits to be made. Conflict is not unknown—between colonies, between colonies and corporations, between corporations, and when that gets too much the Interstellar Commerce Organisation steps in or peacekeepers such as the United States Marine Corps are sent in, but in the main, space is a working environment. One with numerous hazards—the vacuum of space, radiation, adversely high and low temperatures, poisonous planetary atmospheres, potential insanity from being exposed to hyperspace, and strange alien creatures which see you as intruder, food, or incubation for its brood—which humanity must cope with in addition to the stresses of space travel and working away from Earth.

Hostile Setting is published by Zozer Games. It is the companion volume and setting guide for the publisher’s Hostile Rules, derived from Samardan Press’ Cepheus Engine System Reference Document, the Classic Era Science Fiction 2D6-Based Open Gaming System based on Traveller. The Hostile Setting can be run using the Hostile Rules or the Cepheus rules, but is primarily designed as the setting guide for the former. Instead of offering the chance to begin again in a golden age of opportunity and adventure, the Hostile Setting instead explores a new age of work, industrialisation, danger, retrofuturism, and cynicism. The supplement provides a complete that includes a future history that runs into the twenty-third century, details of major government, corporate, and criminal players along the American Arm, data for some one-hundred-and-fifty world worlds and detailed descriptions of over twenty, rules for character creation, equipment, arms, and armour, a space bestiary, rules for handling and working the hazardous environments of the future—including zero-g, radiation, and mining, starship construction and current designs, a write-up of the USCS Hercules—a newly released commercial towing vessel, including deckplans, over thirty detailed scenario hooks, and nods aplenty to the subgenres it is inspired by.

There is some crossover between Hostile Setting and Hostile Rules. This is primarily mechanically in terms of the Career options—including Corporate Agent, Corporate Executive, Colonist, Commercial Spacer, Marine, Marshal, Military Spacer, Physician, Ranger, Roughneck, Scientist, Survey Scout, and Technician. The Android Career is included also, but primarily for NPCs. The possibility of an Android as a Player Character is discussed and it is strongly—in fact, very strongly—advised that should a Player Character Android be included in a campaign, it should not be able to break its programming. Only six general options are suggested for androids—spacer, survey, scout, physician, scientist and technician. Elsewhere, Hostile Setting and Hostile Rules complement each other. Hostile Setting provides not just the setting that Hostile Rules lacks, but also details of specific arms and armour, equipment, and starships, as well as the rules for creating the latter. The rules for spaceship construction does feel slightly superfluous given the number of vessels detailed as part of the setting, but doubtless, there will be some Game Masters and readers who enjoy tinkering with them and designing their own starships.

In terms of what type of campaigns can be run in the Hostile Setting background, several options are discussed. These include working as troubleshooters, working as a crew of an interstellar transport, members of the United States Marine Corps or Federal Colonial Marshal Service, or explorers out on the frontier. The peacekeeping mission of Tau Ceti 4 lends itself to a low intensity military campaign and Hostile Setting focuses on this colony more than any other in the book with some colourful fiction for the situation there. A Hostile Setting campaign need not even leave a colony or mining station though, the Game Master could easily develop a colony which could support any number of situations involving exploration, survival, criminal activities, technical difficulties, labour relations, and more. For the Game Master wanting a nod to the primary inspiration for Hostile Setting, the film, Alien, there is guidance for creating and handling horror in the setting and a discussion of the types of exomorph—or alien horror—that the Player Characters might encounter in the far, dark reaches of space. Whilst several examples are included, the Game Master is advised to introduce these with care. A number of hyperspace anomalies are also discussed as potential sources of fear. Whatever the type of campaign chosen, there is some solid advice on how to describe the setting, including excellent lists of elements which can help enforce the look and feel of the environment.

Physically, Hostile Setting is serviceably done. The artwork is decent, capturing very much the grim and gritty feel of space being a working environment. One noticeable design feature is the text size, which although sans serif, is large.

The contents of Hostile Setting will feel familiar to anyone who played or read either Traveller or Cepheus, but very much filtered through not one, but three different Science Fiction subgenres—Blue Collar Science Fiction, Horror Science Fiction, and Military Science Fiction—and combined into one heavily implied setting with obvious inspirations. Hostile Setting can use either of those rules, but best works with Hostile Rules, since they complement each other. Further, the Hostile Setting showcases a setting not just where a Xenomorph—or in this case, an Exomorph—could be encountered somewhere far out from the safety of the Earth, but a Science Fiction setting rife with other dangers and other story possibilities. In fact, to come to the Hostile Setting expecting to focus mainly on encounters with dangerous alien lifeforms would lead to disappointment and to solely focus on that in play, would be to ignore those other, in many ways, more interesting story possibilities.

For the Game Master who wants a near future, grim and gritty Science Fiction setting which focuses upon Blue Collar protagonists rather than heroes, the Hostile Setting is a very good choice. The Hostile Setting takes its Blue-Collar Science Fiction inspirations and provides a well-realised background with support and scenario suggestions aplenty.

Scenarios set on or within the bodies of enormous creatures are not new. For example, Genial Jack, is set entirely within the body of a blue whale and On the Shoulders of Giants is set not on the body of a single god, but the bodies of twelve gods. However, Tyrannosaur Inside – A T-Rex Crawl Adventure is very probably the first scenario to be set inside the body of the most notorious dinosaur of all time—the tyrannosaurus rex. Which is both bonkers and fun, but also, a bit “Tell me again, how I use this?”. Published by Beyond Cataclysm Books following a successful Kickstarter campaign, the scenario is designed to be played using with Mörk Borg, the Swedish pre-apocalypse Old School Renaissance retroclone designed by Ockult Örtmästare Games and Stockholm Kartell and published by Free League Publishing. (In addition, it should be noted that a version is also available for use with Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition.) It is not specifically set in the same doomed land as Mörk Borg, in fact, it is probably too over the top, if not a little silly, yet if the Game Master wants to set it in the same world, there is nothing to stop her. At best, and because it does involve a fifteen-thousand-pound meat-eating theropod, Tyrannosaur Inside – A T-Rex Crawl Adventure, works as a one-shot. This does not mean Tyrannosaur Inside – A T-Rex Crawl Adventure cannot be dropped into a campaign. It has the same effect as dropping a tyrannosaurus rex onto a village, which is exactly how the scenario starts.
Tyrannosaur Inside – A T-Rex Crawl Adventure begins in small village whose inhabitants have been scared out of their wits after a dinosaur out of the cretaceous period has appeared their midst. Of course, the Player Characters are tasked with dealing with because they are not the ones running away. The first two questions they have to answer are, how much they know about tyrannosaurus rex and how are they going to get into inside to take it down. The answer to the first question, is not very much, no more than their players do, unless one of the players happens to be a palaeontologist, in which that player is going to be very, very, and the author means, very surprised. Otherwise, the nearest town’s leper can tell you that the tyrannosaurus rex is renowned for having an ‘out’ door (underneath the tail) which can be used as a means of access if you are brave and bring lots of hand sanitiser and for having a helter-skelter which spirals down its spine… The answer is either to use the ‘in’ door, the ‘out’ door, or drill their way in via a toenail… In addition, Tyrannosaur Inside – A T-Rex Crawl Adventure does include extra answers to the earlier question, “Tell me again, how I use this?”. ‘d10 Things To Do With a T-Rex In A Fantasy Kingdom’ provides exactly ten answers by Gareth Ryder-Hanrahan, the best of which includes using it as the hiding place for a lich’s soul jar, grabbing it as a wizard’s tower after casting Flesh to Stone, and never, ever giving a Ring of Wishes to a six-year-old (which reads ever so slightly, as if Gareth Ryder-Hanrahan has actually done this…)

So the first really big surprise about the tyrannosaurus rex is that it not actually a tyrannosaurus rex. Well, it is, but just not the traditional sense. It is in fact, a tyrannosaurus rex operated by comparatively tiny—and that we mean, man-sized—tyrannosaurus rexes, some of whom are actually really bored of being the crew of a tyrannosaurus rex, some of which really hate their tyrannosaurus rex being boarded. Especially by the mostly hairless ape-like descendants of tree rats. So essentially, the tyrannosaurus rex is a giant t-rex-shaped mecha, but with teeth and really good skin. In game terms, Tyrannosaur Inside – A T-Rex Crawl Adventure is a hexcrawl adventure up the length of a tyrannosaurus rex, with each of the creature’s limbs, tail, abdomen, thorax, and head making up one hex. Some of the locations are quite expansive, such as the thorax with its maze of intestinal pumps, whilst others, like the Piddly Left Arm and the Piddly Right Arm, are narrow and constrained. There are some entertaining encounters throughout, such as the Dinogängers, which appear and attempt to replace the Player Characters, a lecture on dental hygiene by a T-Rentist, and a very cosy stop-off with the Old-Rexes!

As to getting around the insides the non-tyrannosaurus rex, it is relatively easy, even it is technically a tight squeeze, since this being a relatively modern tyrannosaurus rex, it is wheelchair accessible with signage in braille, the language of the user’s choice, and so on.

For the Game Master, there is mixture of tips and playtest notes—which mostly point out how silly the adventure is—and a table of motivations for the tyrannosaurus rex actually in charge, written by Grant Howitt. Dave Emerson contributes ‘d6 Reasons You Are Scared Of Dinosaurs’ which does not quite work with the medieval style settings of the roleplaying games that Tyrannosaur Inside – A T-Rex Crawl Adventure is actually written for.

Physically, Tyrannosaur Inside – A T-Rex Crawl Adventure is very well laid out and a lot of thought has gone into how the whole thing is organised. The various locations are always marked with a mini-version of the tyrannosaurus rex map with the right hex highlighted in red. Directions to nearby locations are marked with big teeth, very big teeth…

Tyrannosaur Inside – A T-Rex Crawl Adventure is dinosaurously ridiculous, but for that one instance where the Game Master wants to run a t-rex incursion recursion, Tyrannosaur Inside – A T-Rex Crawl Adventure is exactly what she wants.

Dungeon Crawl Classics Lankhmar #3: Acting Up In Lankhmar is a scenario for Goodman Games’ Dungeon Crawl Classics Role Playing Game and the third scenario for the Dungeon Crawl Classics Lankhmar Boxed Set. Scenarios for Dungeon Crawl Classics tend be darker, gimmer, and even pulpier than traditional Dungeons & Dragons scenarios, even veering close to the Swords & Sorcery subgenre. Scenarios for the Dungeon Crawl Classics Lankhmar Boxed Set are set in and around the City of the Black Toga, Lankhmar, the home to the adventures of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, the creation of author Fritz Leiber. The city is described as an urban jungle, rife with cutpurses and corruption, guilds and graft, temples and trouble, whores and wonders, and more. Under the cover the frequent fogs and smogs, the streets of the city are home to thieves, pickpockets, burglars, cutpurses, muggers, and anyone else who would skulk in the night! Which includes the Player Characters. And it is these roles which the Player Characters get to be in Dungeon Crawl Classics Lankhmar #3: Acting Up In Lankhmar, small time crooks trying to make a living and a name for themselves, but without attracting the attention of either the city constabulary or worse, the Thieves’ Guild! The job in this scenario is a night spent proving protection to a theatre performance.
Dungeon Crawl Classics Lankhmar #3: Acting Up In Lankhmar is a short, one-session scenario which takes place over the course of a single evening. Designed for four Player Characters of Second Level, it opens with them being approached by Jallo, the lead actor and head of a troupe of actors, mummers, dancers, and street performers, known as the Dungsweep Players. Performing at the run down Marshlight Theatre, Jallo has a hit on his hands, ‘The Fiascos of Duke Hogfat’, a satire about the personal habits of one Duke Borvat, a relatively important noble in Lankhmar. Unfortunately, the success of the play means that word of the play and its scurrilous subject matter, has reached the ear of the subject and he is not happy. He has already despatched the head of his house guard, Captain Dimman, and several of his men to threaten the theatre and the troupe with closure, and if they fail to comply, the inference that the troupe will end up dead. Thus, Jallo and the Dungsweep Players want protection and Jallo is prepared to pay for it. For one night’s work, this pay is perfectly reasonable.

Dungeon Crawl Classics Lankhmar #3: Acting Up In Lankhmar is all about the Marshlight Theatre. Apart from being located down an alleyway in an old warehouse, the theatre can be placed anywhere in the city and could easily be placed near the slums between the Old Slave Barracks on Chapel Street, Rookery Way, the Shrine of the Rat God on Squalor Row, and Pimp Street, the setting for Dungeon Crawl Classics Lankhmar #1: Gang Lords of Lankhmar. In fact, Dungeon Crawl Classics Lankhmar #3: Acting Up In Lankhmar can easily be run as a sequel to Dungeon Crawl Classics Lankhmar #1: Gang Lords of Lankhmar, and it can be the events of that scenario which led to Jallo learning of their exploits and their reputation and thus hiring them. The scenario describes the theatre in some detail, and there is a large map of the building which can be placed in front of the players as their characters attempt to stop any attacks by Captain Dimman and his agents.

Bar an initial scene, all of the action of the scenario takes place in and around the theatre. At its core, it plays out as a theatrical ‘tower defence’ style scenario as the Duke’s men and his agents—plus other forces, make their play in striking at the theatre and the performers. There are also scenes unconnected with this main plot thread, which add colour and flavour to the activities in and around the theatre. In addition, the scenario adds an ‘Audience Mood’ tracker as an adventure specific to keep a gauge of the audience and its reaction to the play. Depending upon the actions of the Player Characters, this ranges from the performance being heralded as a triumph to the audience breaking out into a riot! Further, there is a big event in the scenario which potentially, literally puts a Player Character centre stage...
Physically, Dungeon Crawl Classics Lankhmar #3: Acting Up In Lankhmar is as decently presented as you would expect from Goodman Games. The scenario’s ‘Audience Mood’ tracker and its use is clearly explained and should be easy to use.

Dungeon Crawl Classics Lankhmar #3: Acting Up In Lankhmar is huge fun—for both the players and the Judge. The Judge gets some juicy NPCs to portray and verily roleplay, whilst the players and their characters get a fun, exciting adventure with lots going on and a desperate situation to deal with which gets ever more fraught as the night goes on. Dungeon Crawl Classics Lankhmar #3: Acting Up In Lankhmar is a short adventure, but it inventively shows another type of story and scenario that can be played out and run in a specific setting such as Lankhmar. Clever, witty, and engaging, Dungeon Crawl Classics Lankhmar #3: Acting Up In Lankhmar is a great addition to campaign run using the Dungeon Crawl Classics Lankhmar Boxed Set.

Andy Prisbylla / June 16, 2023

Other Cinema Peace Sign Flyer. Source: SF Cinematheque Digital Archives

In our current technocratic society, it’s incredibly rare to meet someone who is genuinely free. The erosion of the Consent Decrees of 1948—which allowed media conglomerates to own and control movie theaters—drastically altered the landscape of film and video production, further destabilizing an already unlevel playing field between corporate interests, content creators, and consumers. The trickle-down economics Reagan touted in his 1981 tax act proved only to favor the affluent, further alienating independent creators who were frozen out of a livelihood through economic blacklisting, a perpetual attack that continues to this day. Bill Clinton’s elimination of the fin-syn rules that required television networks to source 35% of their content from independent producers only helped to continue this trend into the new millennium, and soon the mainstream movie and TV-consuming public was offered a slate of hegemonic programming supplied by a monopoly rule. 

With traditional avenues of information exchange becoming more restricted, pockets of transgressive media resistance—inspired by the countercultural film and video collectives of the ‘60s and ‘70s—gained 501(c)(3) non-profit status in 1980s America. These artist-run community organizations championed alternative educational perspectives on media literacy and performance, such as Artists’ Television Access in the Mission District of San Francisco, California. Operating under the umbrella of this community space exists a cinematic collective with a subversive trajectory: a film screening series and analog archive curated from the margins of mainstream media and acceptable art practice. Under the stewardship of underground filmmaker and curator Craig Baldwin, Other Cinema stands as the vanguard of Baldwin’s personal artistic conviction—what he calls “cinema povera,” an anti-capitalist filmmaking creed where artists only use the materials at their disposal to create art. Combine this practice with an ethos of media archeology and mixed-media collage that predates our current remix culture activities and what’s generated is an exhibition calendar of the modern avant-garde—a thirty-six week screening schedule projecting experimental film and video to the masses. Every Saturday night, cartoons, B movies, and commercials hold equal ground with industrial, educational, documentary, personal essay, and public domain/orphan films, bringing together numerous artists and filmmakers from around the world under one cinematic ceiling for close to 40 years.

Craig Baldwin video interview for Guerilla News Network’s Channel Zero, 1995. Source: Internet Archive

Specific details surrounding the origins of Other Cinema are hard to quantify, partially due to the vastly prolific yet oddly cryptic career of founder Craig Baldwin. Born into a self-admitted 1950s middle-class existence in the Sacramento suburb of Carmichael, California, Baldwin spent his teenage years nurturing a ravenous curiosity for subversive cultures and media. During high school, he was often at the local Towne Theater enjoying the latest midnight show of underground programming, absorbing the cinematic combustion of the ‘60s experimental scene led by filmmakers like George Kuchar and Bruce Conner, who as a teacher would later kick Baldwin out of his film class while attending San Francisco State University. In college Baldwin also indulged in subterranean films such as Peter Watkins’s 1966 pseudo-doc The War Game and exploitation flicks like Paul Bartel’s 1975 sci-fi dystopian romp Death Race 2000. Forming a fascination with film exhibition, Baldwin worked as a projectionist at several movie houses throughout the city, navigating the film worlds through an eclecticism of arthouse, exploitation, pornography, and political activism—including contributing programming and film services to El Salvador Film and Video Projects for the Salvadoran solidarity movement of northern California. His early activism with the artistic political action collective the Urban Rats saw him and his cohorts reclaim San Francisco’s urban landscape through adverse possession or “squatter’s rights,” which allowed Baldwin to experiment with expanded cinema performance, such as projecting film in abandoned buildings and other derelict dwellings. 

This direct approach towards genre and social action speaks to Baldwin’s personal opposition towards the status quo, an attitude that not only informs Other Cinema’s motion picture programming but also Baldwin’s own filmmaking forays. His early experiments with Super 8 film—such as the prototypical culture jam/situationist prank Stolen Movie—bled into his 16mm attacks on advertising, consumerism, and colonialism in Wild Gunman and RocketKitKongoKit before gaining maximum velocity with his Dexedrine-driven, countermyth conspiracy report Tribulation 99. Making up the pure found footage/collage aesthetic of his filmography until introducing live-action performance into the mix with his films !O No Coronado!, Spectres of the Spectrum, and Mock Up on Mu, these early works draw heavily from Baldwin’s now massive archive of analog film. Housed beneath the Artists’ Television Access property, this subterranean scroll of marginalized media is continuously rescued from the bowels of civilization’s ever evolving technological burden and given new purpose. The shift from film in the 1970s to magnetic tape in the 1980s saw major institutions overhaul their audio/visual collections in favor of more economical video formats, sending reels of celluloid to the dumpsters and landfills. Much like the Dadaists of the early 20th century avant-garde, whose use of appropriation and photomontage expressed anti-bourgeois protest through their art, Baldwin and company salvaged these bastardized works from material obscurity and celebrated their ephemeral nature through collage and remix. These hybrid works of the late 20th century serve as precursor to many of our current 21st century new media innovations, resulting in the continued radicalization of modern artistic folklore, such as the mashups and supercuts of Everything Is Terrible! and the radical anti-authoritarian statements of the sister collective Soda Jerk. 

Craig Baldwin projecting films in an abandoned structure for a Urban Rats squatters rights protest. Drawing by Mike Mosher, 1984. Source: Artists’ Television Access

Baldwin and Other Cinema’s defense of the diminished and discarded extends not only to the physical media he interacts with but to the audience he exhibits for. Maintaining a dialectical attitude, Baldwin expresses both respect and disrespect towards film genre and classification by spinning one off the other and forming new categories. Each screening is meant to give equal weight to diverse voices and provoke participation amongst attendees—an ethos Baldwin codified with his underground screening series The RAD, The MAD & The BAD while programming film events for Artists’ Television Access during the organization’s formative years. A protean yet practical film genre grouping system sorted through three major categories stripped of pretense and soaked in punk rock colloquialism, each selection was designated its own time slot on Wednesdays and Saturdays with those represented creating a continuity across each section:

The RAD: showcasing political and social action films 

The MAD: mad genius or auteur cinema

The BAD: psychotronic themes of horror/sci-fi/exploitation

Defying the unspoken restraint behind many traditional classification systems that favor a false high-brow aesthetic to an honest low-brow sensibility, The RAD, The MAD & The BAD crossed the cultural demarcation line with an egalitarian stance towards genre representation, allowing for serious discussion about what constitutes a film’s importance and its commodification within society. More importantly, it displayed through example that poor production doesn’t always mean poor quality, and films created on the margins of capital contain a certain cultural influence and accessibility that corporate-backed productions can only hope to afford or inspire.

Detail from a RAD, MAD & BAD programming flier for Anti-Films & Film Offensive, 1987. Source: SF Cinematheque Digital Archives

The authentic response audiences gave towards the weekly film schedule at Artists’ Television Access saw the prestigious San Francisco Cinematheque approach Baldwin to bring his street sensibility to their precocious crowd with Sub-Cinema, a RAD, MAD & BAD-inspired program that ran over the course of 1985. The creation of other pop-up programs like Anti-Films and Eyes of Hell inspired Baldwin to consolidate his film selections under his own programming umbrella, and soon the ethos that fueled The RAD, The MAD & The BAD manifested itself into the physical embodiment of Baldwin’s own psyche and practice with the foundation of Other Cinema. 

If the RAD, MAD & BAD helped bring acceptance to the concept of marginalization in film selection and exhibition during the 1980s, the programming behind Other Cinema built upon this provocation by introducing new alternative voices from the microcinema scene of the 1990s. One of the forefronts of this new cinematic experience, Other Cinema became a home for a subculture of film using and reusing old and new technologies to create future underground works, with filmmakers and exhibitors from across the country like Sam Green, Martha Colburn, Greta Snider, Bill Daniel, Orgone Cinema, 3Ton Cinema, and “others” coalescing to this space like the children of Hamelin to the Pied Piper’s whimsical flute. Many of these groups and individuals appear in Baldwin’s upcoming career monograph Avant to Live!, a 500-page treatise detailing his cinematic trajectory in the media arts.

Baldwin in the archive, circa 2005. Photo by Lauren DeFilippo. Source: Internet Archive

The decline of physical media coupled with our perpetual progression towards a digital state continues to divide us, with some championing the virtual realm and its democratization of new technologies and others questioning its effect on the human experience and how we interact with each other. The popularity of streaming services continues to challenge the economic longevity of physical media, forcing film formats into a wave of obsolescence. Despite this, Craig Baldwin and Other Cinema rise against the tide with an analog assault of expanded cinema every Saturday night. Filmmakers on the fringe and maverick media archeologists with an overwhelming responsibility to film history, yet hamstrung by a lack of resources, congregate at Other Cinema to embrace the struggle in an ever evolving motion picture renaissance. It’s a form of masochism one needs to make it on this side of the art world—the “masochism of the margins,” as Baldwin often says. It takes pain and sacrifice to live here, yet the psychic rewards far outweigh the material loss. 

Craig Baldwin: Avant to Live! is a collaborative project between San Francisco Cinematheque and INCITE: Journal of Experimental Media and was released on May 30, 2023.

Andy Prisbylla is an underground filmmaker and exhibitor from the rust belt apocalypse of Steel City, PA. His screening series SUBCINEMA showcases subterranean movies and art through digital programming and live pop-up events. Find out more through Letterboxd and Mastodon. 

A city under siege. The City by the Bay sits in the crosshairs of a gunsight, the scope of a sniper rifle wandering across the buildings and streets of San Francisco ready for the trigger to be pulled and another victim felled. The sniper has sent city hall demands for money and is holding all of San Francisco to ransom. Fortunately, San Francisco Police Department has assigned its finest police officers to deal with both the demands and track down the psychopathic killer before he strikes again. If that sounds like the plot of the 1971 film, Dirty Harry, starring Clint Eastwood and directed by Don Siegel, it is. However, it is also the set-up for a board game inspired by Dirty Harry and the cop cinema of the seventies. Published by Next Dimension Games, Go Ahead Punk! is a game set in the San Francisco of the seventies in which the sadistic killer known only as ‘Stinger’ stalks the streets and rooftops, looking for his next victim. Instead of the San Francisco Police Department assigning only the one Cop to the case, it has assigned three—Inspectors Katherine Lacey, Eddie Johnson, and Frank Brannigan. Stinger only needs to carry three more hits, which can be from atop a building if he can obtain a Janitor Key to its side entrance or in the city’s parks if he can find a Park Ranger uniform. Then it is a matter of making his escape from one of the city’s four port exits and the man who scared San Francisco will have eluded the law! All the Cops have to do is locate Stinger and bring him to justice, whether that is before he has made all of his planned hits or after, during his escape attempt.

Go Ahead Punk! is a classic hidden movement game of one player versus many, much in the mode of the classic Fury of Dracula or the more recent Jaws. It pitches one player—Stinger, up against one to three Cops, each with their own means of handling sadistic killers like Scorpio. Inspector Frank Brannigan always knows where to put a bullet in a criminal if he has to; Inspector Eddie Johnson’s preferred weapon is a pump action shotgun, so up close, he rarely misses; and Inspector Katherine Lacey’s knowledge of Personnel & Records means she brings police intelligence to the streets in the manhunt for the marauding murderer. When she spends cash on intel to reveal Stinger’s location, his player must reveal Stinger’s exact location, not just the district. They start with their own equipment, but can find more and make themselves deadlier in a fight. Stinger has his sniper rifle, but might find a .38 revolver, a silencer for his sniper rifle to make hits harder to detect, or even a LAW rocket launcher (useful for taking down that pesky police chopper), whereas the Cops can equip themselves with shotguns and rifles, don bulletproof vests, keep track of each other with police radios, and if they have cash, get intel from their connections on where Stinger might be. They can even get the keys to a muscle car and race across the city in pursuit of the unknown sniper.

Go Ahead Punk! is played out on a 17¼ by 28½ inch map of San Francisco, divided into its various districts and parks and crisscrossed with the major roads and freeways as well as Street Car and Cable Car routes. All players can move using the major roads and freeways, but only Stinger can use the Street Car and Cable Car routes and then only when he has a Transit Pass. There are over one-hundred-and-fifty numbered locations on the map which the Cops will move across openly, whilst Stinger will move across them in secret, his player tracking Stinger’s movement and location on the Movement Tracker sheet which he keeps hidden behind a screen. The various districts are also marked with Hit Locations—black for rooftops, green for the parks, and red for locations where a hit cannot be performed for the third and final hit. There are several hospitals, marked with ER, where both the Cops and Stinger can gain first aid, but Stinger must reveal his location if he does so and there are also four Port locations, the Stinger needing to get to one of these to escape and win the game after performing the three hits. Lastly, there is Hunch Tracker, which tracks the San Francisco Police Department’s general progress in hunting for Stinger. The net closes on him every fourth round, forcing his player to reveal Stinger’s current district, which will narrow it down to a handful of locations.

At the beginning of the game, each player receives a board for his character. This has a health Tracker and space for equipment carried—up to eight spaces’ worth of equipment can be carried in this inventory—and for the Cops, space for any vehicle currently in their possession. Each player is also given their character’s starting equipment, a set of combat dice in their character’s colour, and a reference card. Stinger’s player has access to the Stinger Deck and the Stinger Key Deck. During play, these provide Stinger’s player with key cards to particular locations, the Park Ranger uniform, weapons, and so on. In addition, the Stinger’s player also receives the Movement Tracker sheet and a screen to hide it behind. This screen has a great image of Stinger, sniper rifle in hand, looming over the city as a whole, making him a constant presence, despite everyone not knowing where he is.

The Cop players have access to the Cop Deck and the Cop Inventory Deck and together these provide the Cop players with weapons, vehicles, cash for intelligence, and more. There are some fun cards in here too. For example, ‘Complaint’ sends Inspector Brannigan straight to city hall following a claim of police brutality; ‘Donuts!’ ends a player’s turn; when ‘Car’ card is drawn, the Cop not only gets that card, but gets to pop the trunk of the car and draw another card to see what is inside it; and a ‘Hood! Fight Now’ card means that the Cop has busted down the wrong door and the occupant is not taking it lying down!

A turn consists of two phases. In ‘Phase 1: The Hunt’, Stinger acts first. He can either move, play a card from his hand, draw a new card (and play it if he wants), declare a Hit, or get some first aid at an ER. Both declaring a Hit and going to the ER reveals Stinger’s location. Next the Hunch Tracker marker is moved. If on the ‘Reveal’ space, Stinger’s player reveals the district where he currently is. Then the Cop players take it to turn to do one of five actions. This can be to move—three spaces as opposed to the four of Stinger, play a card, draw a new card to play or keep, share inventory items with another Cop if they are in the same location, or get some first aid at an ER. Play progresses through ‘Phase 1: The Hunt’ again and again until Stinger has performed three Hits. This triggers ‘Phase 2: The Escape’. However, play in ‘Phase 2: The Escape’ is pretty much the same as ‘Phase 1: The Hunt’, but without the need to perform any further Hits.

Stinger’s location can be revealed through four means. A Cop moves into the space he is currently on, Stinger’s player draws a ‘Spotted’ card, a ‘Location Intel’ card is drawn—backed up by Lacey’s knowledge of Personnel & Records or extra cash, or Stinger moves into a location with a Cop there. The latter is a possibility if a Cop has already been injured, whether due to a ‘Hood! Fight Now’ card or an earlier encounter with Stinger, and Stinger’s player thinks he can do enough damage to send him to the ER. Performing a Hit also reveals Stinger’s location, but if Stinger has the Silencer for his sniper rifle, Stinger gets another turn to act before revealing the Hit, reflecting how difficult the Hit was to detect.

Combat takes place between Stinger and the Cops when or more of them are in the same location. It involves the players taking it in turns to roll dice as determined by the weapon they are carrying, modified by combat cards, if any, aiming to inflict damage on the other. Combat continues until Stinger is killed and thus the Cops win the game, Stinger sends the Cops to the ER, or one side attempts to escape and move immediately away. In general, this requires the ‘Escape’ symbol to be rolled on a die, and if the ‘Escape’ symbol does not appear, a player can burn cards from his hand. This removes them from the game, which can be serious for Stinger if those cards are a Janitor Key card or a Park Ranger Uniform card as this prevents Stinger from performing Hits at those locations. Notably, Stinger’s play begins the game with an Escape Token. This can be used once instead of a failed Escape roll and ensures that Stinger escapes once in the game.

In addition to the standard game, Go Ahead Punk! includes rules for solo play. This plays much in the same fashion as the standard game, but the player controls Stinger only—who has been blackmailed into performing the Hits—and the Cops are controlled by the game. The token for Stinger remains on the board at all times with the Cop tokens constantly moving towards Stinger. To make an allowance for solo play, Go Ahead Punk! does feel like a more complex game in comparison to the standard rules.

Go Ahead Punk! is a nicely and highly thematically presented game. All of the components are of solid quality, including the tokens, cards, and various boards—even for a preview version of the game. (Actual figures for the Cops are included in a deluxe version of the game.) The rule book is relatively short, but includes examples of play, combat, and card clarifications. The artwork is terrific though, for example, Stinger is shown on one card wearing the same Mexican style cardigan that Paul Michael Glaser wore on Starsky & Hutch. There are lots of little references like this, and players with any knowledge of the genre will enjoy spotting them.

Go Ahead Punk! has a pleasing ebb and flow to its play. Primarily this is due to the Hunch Tracker, which forces Stinger’s player to reveal the current district he is currently in, tightening the noose around Stinger, forcing his player to send him scurrying away if he does not want to be caught or run into a Cop. Then loosening again, if only for a little while... This in addition to clues left behind by any Hits which can build and build as the Cop players try and work out Stinger’s movements and possible intended location as he performs more hits. Consequently, there is never really a moment after the first Hit when Stinger does not feel like he is being hunted. The Cops are always going to feel like they are responding and successfully tracking Stinger will involve deduction based on first the Hit locations and second, the ‘Location Intel’ cards, as well as a bit of luck. That is, when they are not being distracted by claims of police brutality or doughnuts! Then there is the theme. Go Ahead Punk! feels like the film it is inspired by and familiarity with it will have the players wanting to play in the style of the characters from the cop films and television series and roleplay a little as the game progresses.

Overall, Go Ahead Punk! is a solidly designed classic hidden movement game of one player versus many built around a highly appropriate theme. The combination of the two sets up a brooding sense of uncertainty, never quite knowing when the Stinger will strike again as the Cops desperately search for the deranged killer—and all under the sunny skies of San Francisco.

—oOo—
Go Ahead Punk! is currently being funded via Kickstarter and an Unboxing in the Nook video is available on YouTube.

Lisa Fernandes / June 15, 2023

All of the characters in Paul Schrader’s Light of Day (1987) are looking for a way out. They’re stuck in menial nine to five jobs, on the line in factories and behind candy-colored checkout stands in supermarkets. Their families are suffocatingly close-knit, with parents watching punitively over rainbow-colored birthday cakes, wondering silently what they did to deserve such ungrateful spawn. Why won’t their children go to church, buy a car, come to Sunday dinner, and settle down? The Rasnick siblings, fronting their small band The Barbusters, wander the crowded barrooms and smoldering arcades of a Cleveland that no longer exists: they’re in a state of freefall, but they’re looking for a state of grace. Salvation ends up being but a breath away.

The fact that Light of Day exists at all is amazing in its own right. It started life as a Bruce Springsteen vehicle called Born in the USA, and though The Boss liked Schrader’s script, he ultimately passed on the project. He did give Schrader a new title, and wrote the title song, on the way out the door. We all know what happened to Born in the USA—the album and the song—after that. But Springsteen wasn’t the only musician connected to the project. Light of Day marks the big screen debut of another popular MTV star and rock icon—Joan Jett, who still performs the film’s title track at live shows. 

Jett is a powerful revelation in the part of Patti Rasnick, who holds down various day jobs (barely) to keep her kid fed while keeping her eyes on the prizes of leather and neon, full arenas and autograph-hungry fans. Playing Patti allows Jett to soar within the bruised and tightly-wound skin of a down-at-heels woman struggling to get up while refusing to compromise her ideals. Patti doesn’t care about her bad reputation either, and Schrader wisely doesn’t force her to. Patti is wise enough to know how good she is, how much more she deserves, and how different her life might be had her luck gone differently. Part of Schrader’s point is that the world is filled with Pattis, and Jett brilliantly plays the difference between what she knows and what Patti knows.

Michael J. Fox splits screen time with Jett as Joe Rasnick, Patti’s more settled brother. While Joe clearly has a love of rock music and an artistic temperament, it’s clear that his dreams are simpler. Patti won’t rest until her pain is consecrated and made worthwhile by a major career breakthrough; all Joe seems to want is a regular gig, a nice girlfriend, and for his family to get along for once. While they’re both talented, the level of commitment they bring to the band is very different. Patti is meant for bigger successes, destined to end up a viral sensation twenty years after the movie’s conclusion. Joe is destined to inherit his parent’s nice suburban house, work a good union job, raise a family, and play in bars on the weekends. He’s a nice guy who’s easily pushed around by the stronger personalities surrounding him. Because Patti is the flashier character, Fox’s performance has been somewhat underrated. But he absolutely aces Joe’s smallness, his inability to make bold moves; only when he acts in defense of his vulnerable nephew and tries to please his mother does he finally break out from under his big sister’s spell. Fox stands out in the film’s smaller dramatic moments, as when Joe is seen alone outside of his dying mother’s hospital room, as hunched and withered as the woman in the bed. He makes Joe likable, sympathetic.  

Joe’s everyman dreams anchor a life with no fixed stars. He dates a nice, upstanding-seeming blonde girl from a richer background, but she fades out of his life when she realizes how messy things are between him and the rest of his family, and how poorly she fits into his working class world. Patti herself has no steady significant other, mainly dedicating her life to music, even at the expense of her young son Benji (Billy L. Sullivan). She commits petty burglary to get the band a new sound board and shoplifts steaks with her son’s unwitting help to reward the band after a brief, anemic wintertime tour leads them nowhere. It’s not Patti but Joe who suffers in both incidents—Patti burglarizes a cousin of a co-worker, who knows exactly who took his tools and demands she pay up, forcing Joe to lean on their angelic mom. And Joe witnesses her shoplift and chews her out over it, leading to an explosive fight and the band’s temporary breakup.

Patti is never clever enough in her schemes to avoid detection, necessitating Joe’s apologies, his bowing and scraping to those who Patti has wronged. This is, we know, how it is between the two. His embarrassed apologies to their parents, who stand back and sigh and tisk at their daughter’s misfortunes, are accepted and received with almost presidential superiority. They all know they can’t really help her. The truth is that Patti sold her soul to rock ‘n’ roll years ago. It’s the only thing that saved her life when the family priest raped and impregnated her as a teenager, a fact she can’t bring herself to confess to her uber-religious mother Jeanette (Gena Rowlands), who still looks to the preacher as a spiritual advisor and looks down on Patti as a fallen Christian.

In turn, Patti has rejected her suburban childhood, the manicured lawns, the safety of the snowbound lanes surrounding their split-level house and the bromides of Jeanette and their cipher-like father, who loves his kids but stays out of Jeanette’s way. Even worse, Patti has rejected God and churchgoing itself. Joe still needs and loves all of these things; he’s never seen to pray, but their parents aren’t worried for his immortal soul. As a duo, Patti and Joe’s united dreams are beginning to untangle. The older Joe gets, the more he begins to yearn for the safety that his parents offer with every home-cooked meal and trip to the mall. The conflict that wears upon them all is a doozy—Joe, Benjamin Senior (Jason Miller), and Jeanette don’t know who Benji’s father is, and Patti simply wants to forget his name and that of the God he claims to serve. 

Interestingly, Patti does not reject or blame her son for what has happened to her. She is shown to be strict but loving, and parents with a sense of humor; she also would rather die than allow Jeanette to raise her child even for a couple of weeks. While Patti tries to prove she’s a good mom by trying to do right by Benji, she also pulls him out of school abruptly in the name of rock ‘n’ roll righteousness. She’s not interested in looking like a good mom to anyone. Ultimately, her choices are another act of defiance against Jeannette.

Joe is a conventionally good uncle, and becomes something of a surrogate father to Benji as Patti joins a different band and spends most of her nights performing. He wants Benji to have an ordinary life instead of whatever haphazard world Patti can offer him. Little Benji, seen strumming a plastic guitar in several scenes, clearly plans on taking after them both—and Joe will do anything to prevent that. He inserts himself nonstop into the boy’s life to offer him a sense of regularity and shouts down Patti for turning Benji into a pawn in her war of attrition with their mother. Joe’s the one who’s stuck making most of the decisions when Jeanette suddenly begins to decline in a way that seems to portend Alzheimer’s Disease but instead presages a quick, devastating cancer death. Only Gena Rowlands’s haunting, gentle performance helps make that part of the story work. Really, Jeanette’s death only exists as an object lesson for Patti (less of one for Joe, whose mourning seems secondary to the situation). 

And die she must, for Jeanette is just one in a long line of suffering, imperfect, Christlike figures who haunt Schrader’s writing. She’s the most human among them, the most easy to relate to, and the easiest to sympathize with. She’s no radical like Travis Bickle, but she causes a storm and a revolution in her own limited way. In Jeanette, forever forgiving, forever faithful, forever motherly—even when she’s trying not to be—Schrader finds maybe the most holy and sacrificing of all the female characters in his entire canon.  

Martyrdom may rule the entire Rasnick household, but it’s Patti who refuses to kneel. It takes Jeanette’s death to change anything, to bring about reconciliation. Patti promises that she’ll do what she must to join Jeanette in heaven, but one cannot picture her in church every Sunday. One can’t imagine her accepting communion, or subjecting Benji to the rituals she has rejected for so long, doled out by the man who abused her. Nor should she. If she spends more time in an arcade than at Sunday services, Jeanette will never know. The important thing is that they come to understand one another before Jeannette dies.

All of the Rasnicks are failed, in one way or another, by the great Gods in their lives. Jeanette‘s prayers draw Patti back to the fold of both home and religion, but don’t provide much succor as she lays dying, much of her recent recall obliterated by the strain of the illness. Joe quits his job to take The Barbusters beyond their regional roots, but returns to pressing out TV trays and taking care of his mother. Benji is let down by his mom’s choices and his family’s infighting. Benjamin Senior, who has spent his adult life worshiping his wife, now has no one in his bed. Patti is betrayed by the gods of rock; she ends up the lead singer of a Vixen-like pop metal band called the Hunzz, precipitating The Barbusters’ breakup and ever-so-slightly selling out to the mainstream in the process. What keeps them all going is their love for one another in the face of their imploding dreams, tied together like lifeboats on a sinking ship. 

The grimy and arid depictions of life in Cleveland in the mid-to-late 1980s shows a town slowly calcifying into a mini desert—the vanishing dream of Reagan’s Morning in America. Schrader’s visual palette snakes between the muted pastels of a shopping mall (stuffed with luxuries the Rasnicks can barely afford) to vermillion neon signs and concrete-colored urban landscapes filled with foreboding looking factories, which look rusted out and precarious, as if they’re about to chug to a stop at any moment. Schrader has derided his work on the film as visually uninteresting, claiming that his landscapes are flat. And yet he plays with the colors of the night and the late-day sunshine in a way that feels natural and unique. The scrubby parks and roadside motels and gloomy supermarkets are compelling precisely because of their glorious ordinariness. And the beautifully framed shots of the band rehearsing together as light streams into an otherwise silent and dark bar are as striking as a Renaissance painting. 

Decades later, the landscape the Rasnick siblings inhabited is long gone. The MarshAlan Industries building where Joe and bandmate Bu (Michael McKean) plied their trade was abandoned in 2000 and razed in 2006; the Euclid Tavern, where The Barbusters play their triumphant film-ending gig, shuttered in the late teens. Light of Day memorializes the Rasnicks’ America, a world frozen forever on a tightrope between what could be and what has died. 

To quote Dennis Potter, the song has ended, but the melody lingers on.

Lisa Fernandes has been writing since she could talk. Her bylines include Newsweek; Women Write About Comics; Smart Bitches, Trashy Books; and All About Romance.

Let's kick off this inaugural Deities & Demigods II post by trying to figure out what should be in the standard stat block for these gods. Let me begin with some assumptions.

The Triple Hecate, 1795. William Blake

1. I will favor AD&D 1st Edition. This is the system I have used the most. This is also the system that was the genesis of my original One Man's God feature. So I would like as much overlap as I can.
2. I will pull in material from any other edition or variation of D&D as I see fit. In particular, some of the Avatar details from AD&D2 and D&D3 as well as any other material that might fit the bill.
3. I am working under the assumption that these stat blocks ARE NOT designed as super-powerful monsters to kill. In already borrowing from AD&D2, and a house rule we used in the 80s, these stat blocks represent their avatars or mortal manifestations on/in the Prime Material. Their true forms on their own plane are at least 10x more powerful. Likely more.

Now these assumptions are working under a much larger assumption of how my Deities & Demigods II posts will be like moving forward.

Today I want to focus on the stat block. I am not detailing anything about this god, yet nor am I even defining things like standard divine abilities or power levels. Let's go with AD&D 1st Ed standard until I have reason to do otherwise and see where this goes.

I am going to start with the example of Hecate from Greek Mythology. After this, I will use her and this example to develop a new pantheon of gods. I spent a lot of time with her yesterday in preparation for this post. 

Let's look at how Hecate is presented in the various D&D books.

Deities & Demigods: AD&D 1st Edition

For this I want to break down the AD&D 1st Ed Deities stat block.

HECATE (goddess of magic)
Lesser goddess

ARMOR CLASS: -2
MOVE: 12"
HIT POINTS: 289
NO. OF ATTACKS: 1
DAMAGE/ATTACK: See below
SPECIAL ATTACKS: See below
SPECIAL DEFENSES: See below
MAGIC RESISTANCE: 89%

SIZE: M (51⁄4')
ALIGNMENT: Lawful evil
WORSHIPER'S ALIGN: Any being working with magic
SYMBOL: Setting moon
PLANE: Nine Hells

CLERIC/DRUID: 14th level druid
FIGHTER: Nil
MAGIC-USER/ILLUSIONIST: Special
THIEF/ASSASSIN: Nil
MONK/BARD: Nil
PSIONIC ABILITY: I
S: 12 1:25 W: 9 D: 20 C: 22 CH:25

I separated the sections with hard returns. I would use color, but that gives some screen readers for the visually impaired issues. So instead, I will go with the sections.

The first section starting with AC is very combat-focused. The number of attacks, damage per attack, special attacks, and more.

The second section starting with size is personal information and worshiper's information. This one is great for expansion.

The last section starting with classes is somewhat combat-focused and somewhat personal. For Hecate here, we expect she has some spellcasting ability but maybe not a lot of fighting.  Though as a personal note, I disagree with her Wisdom being so low.

After this follows her description. 

Ok. One of the most common complaints about the presentation in the D&DG is that this is too much like a monster. I high-level monster, but a monster all the same. It has AC and HP, so it must be able to be attacked and killed.  This is not what we want or need. We have nothing here about her Clerics (save for those that use magic), holy days, or anything a worshiper might need/want.

There is a table in back that is actually much more useful than anything in the stat-block above.

This includes their name, Sphere of Control, Clerics [M,F,N-H], Rainment [head, body], Colors, Holy Days, Sacrifice [Frequency, Form], and Place of Worship.

For Hecate, these are: Magic, Hell Hound, yes, yes, no, bare head, tunic, blue-white, fall equinox, monthly on the full moon, ox, and mountain glen. 

This is good material. 

Legends & Lore: AD&D 2nd Edition

I don't need to go into as much detail here since the entries for all gods are typically shorter. But let's have a look at what we have anyway.

Here we get into the concept that the stats are not the God, but their avatars on the Mortal plane.

Ok, so you can't fight the god, but their avatar instead. A little better I guess.

There is mention here of the duties of the priesthood, what spell domains they gain, what Weapon and Non-Weapon prophecies they have access to, and so on. Though nothing about holy days, animals, colors or the like. Each pantheon/mythos does have some new spells and artifacts listed so that is also nice. 

So the avatar and details on the priest characters are a good takeaways from this one.

Deities & Demigods: D&D 3rd Edition

Lastly, let's look at 3rd Edition, even if it is very different than the first two.

Ok I did pick this for a reason. There is a lot of information here for the players of the Clerics of these gods, which also gives us a Rosetta Stone of how to talk about the gods of other editions. That Rosetta Stone is the D&D Patheon, which at this time was primarily the Greyhawk one. Other editions use a similar set of gods and talk about what their priests can, can't, and could do.  BUT that is all for another time. Let's get back to Hecate.

We get Domains, Divine Rank, her Alignment, favored weapons (which can be used by her priests) and Portfolio.  All good information.

Unfortunately, 3.x goes on to embrace the worse parts of the 1st and 2nd Ed's books and then makes a bunch of their own. 

I mean yeah, there is lot of information here, but is any of it needed by her clergy? Ok the sections on Dogma and Clergy and Temples is good. But do I *really* need to know or care how many Feats she has. No. Not unless she is going into combat. Which she shouldn't do.

There is an "Avatar of Hecate" on the next page that is reminiscent of the AD&D 2nd Ed one, but still, not exactly something we need.

What, if anything, can I get from all of this?

Well. Sadly the default presentation for the first 25 years of D&D appears to be "God as High-level Monster," which is not at all helpful.

I broke down these stat-blocks WAY back in 2010 when I was detailing a new cult, the Church of Lolth Ascendant, for the Drow Goddess Araushnee. There I captured the stats that seemed most valuable to the clerics (and players of the clerics) of that particular Goddess.

This has me wondering.

What should the format of a "Deities & Demigods II" be? What is the purpose of a book of gods for a D&D-like game?

Given what I have worked through here and in previous posts, I can see two different but related projects.

First, I can see a need/desire/want for a continuation of the format of the 1st Ed AD&D Deities & Demigods, monster-like stats, and all. 

Secondly, I also see a need for a book of gods, demi-gods, and heroes, along with all the above-identified positive things like duties of the priesthood, holy days, and more. I would add new divine spells that are only available to those priesthoods. That's a much larger and more exciting project to be sure.

Deities & Demigods II is something I can do here, with some work.  The other project, the so far unnamed one, that will be something that will take longer. 

I think for the next post, I should first figure out what would be needed for a D&D-game god write-up.

Moving through the city the sounds of animals fighting can be heard. In a small depression, what looks like three panthers are attacking a large lizard.

 These creatures are not panthers of course, but Displacer/Warp Beasts. 

There are three, but sometimes it can be difficult to tell. They ignore the lizard and move towards tastier prey, the party.

They have treasure type D.

Hecate. Encyclopedia Britannica.Trying out a few things today.

First, I wanted to play-test a Sorcerer character, which is the Wasted Lands equivalent of the Witch from NIGHT SHIFT.  In particular, I wanted to try out Hecate since I had already done Ereshkigal, even though I knew they shared certain similarities. 

Secondly, I wanted to do Hecate because she is the first focal point of my new series on the Deities & Demigods II project/feature here.

Thirdly, and related to both points above I wanted to work out how my Heka (the Hecate of my Grecco-Egyptian myths) and Helga (the Hecate of my Roman-Norse myths) would work out.

And lastly, I wanted to try out the Divine Touchstones feature of this game. As it turns out, this feature makes all the difference in the world. 

The Character: Hecate

For my second (and third and fourth) character, I am choosing Hecate, the goddess of witches, magic, the crossroads, and ghosts. She has been a favorite for a long time.  She will also be the first Goddess I cover for my D&DGII project.

Hecate is a Sorceress in the Wasted Lands, no doubt. Well...some doubt. While her main deal is magic, she also has that aspect of Ghosts. In the end, I stuck with Sorceress and found a nice way to add the spooky stuff I wanted.

Hecate

Class: Sorceress (Persona Aspect)
Level: 7
Species: Human

Alignment: Dark Neutral

Abilities
Strength: 12 (0)
Agility: 14 (+1)
Toughness: 16 (+2) N +1
Intelligence: 15 (+1) N +1
Wits: 13 (+1)
Persona: 17 (+2) A +2

Fate Points: 10
Defense Value: 8
Vitality: 5 (d6)
Degeneracy:
Corruption:

Check Bonus (A/N/D): +4/+2/+1
Melee Bonus: +0
Ranged Bonus: +1
Saves: +4 to Magic based

Special Abilities
Arcana, Arcane Powers

Corruption
- Unnatural Parlor

Divine Touchstones
1st: Sense Ghosts
2nd: First Level Spell: Nightvision
3rd: Summon Hellhound
4th: Class level: Necromancer (1 level)

Necromancer (Divine Touchstone 4th)
Channel the Dead 22%
See Dead People
Summon the Dead 15%
Command (Spirits)
Protection from Undead
Turn Undead 20%

Spells
1st: Mystical Senses, Create/Extinguish Light, Sense Death
2nd: Animal Summoning, Eternal Flame
3rd: Fly

Arcane Powers
1st: Beguile
4th: Shadow Walking
7th: Exorcist

Divine Notes: Magic, Witchcraft, Crossroads, Ghosts
Background: Priestess

Gear
Dagger: 1d4

This version of Hecate is the Greek Goddess of magic, witches, ghosts and the crossroads. I leaned into the last two to give her powers over spirits and undead. She gains her Divine Touchstones as part of significant aspects in her adventuring career. Sense Ghosts would be something that came to her naturally along with Nightvision, she is also the Goddess of the Night. Giving her a level for her 4th Divine touchstone was really what sold me on the touchstones. If she wants another level then she will need a higher-level touchstone to get it.

This is really what sets Wasted Lands apart from other gritty Swords & Sorcery games. 

It is also what helps set one character apart from another.

Heka and Helga are by definition just other versions of Hecate with something a little different. What is that something? Well here it is the arcane powers they get, but mostly it is the Divine Touchstones they earn.

For these next two characters I am keeping the base stats all the same. Human, 7th level Sorceress. But the differences now come from the spells, Arcane powers, the Divine Touchstones. One note since Sorcerers can choose their Aspect between Intelligence, Wits, and Persona, I picked different ones for each. 

The Character: Heka

Heka is the Hecate of the Greeco-Egyptian mythology.  While she is not a goddess that research into the Ptolemaic dynasty existed and would have worshiped (like Serapis or even later Hermes Trismegistus), she could have been in a D&D-like world. 

In this mythology, Heka is more focused on the learning aspect of magic and is the goddess of Dark Secrets. Her relationship with Isis is the same as that of Ishtar with Ereshkigal.  Dark and Light sisters. So for this, I switched her Aspect to Intelligence.

Like Hecate, Isis is connected to the underworld, so Heka would also be an underworld guardian and more of a protector of occult secrets.  While this could lead to "Wisdom" and "Wits" I felt intelligence was the better choice. I have also always felt that Isis was one of the more intelligent gods in any myth.

Heka

Class: Sorceress (Intelligence Aspect)
Level: 7
Species: Human

Alignment: Neutral

Abilities
Strength: 12 (0)
Agility: 14 (+1)
Toughness: 16 (+2) N +1
Intelligence: 17 (+2) A +2
Wits: 13 (+1)
Persona: 15 (+1) N +1

Fate Points: 10
Defense Value: 8
Vitality: 5 (d6)
Degeneracy:
Corruption:

Check Bonus (A/N/D): +4/+2/+1
Melee Bonus: +0
Ranged Bonus: +1
Saves: +4 to Magic based

Special Abilities
Arcana, Arcane Powers

Corruption
- Uncomfortable Aura

Divine Touchstones
1st: First Level Spell: Read Languages
2nd: Enhanced Senses
3rd: Class level: Sage (1 level)
4th: 1 level of Necromancer

Sage (Divine Touchstone 3rd)
Lore: 27%
Mesmerize Others: 10%
Spells: 1st Level: Prestidigitation

Spells
1st: Beast Speech, Command, Protection from Undead
2nd: Beguile Person, Extra Sensory Perception
3rd: Clairvoyance

Arcane Powers
1st: Detect Thoughts
4th: Telepathic Transmission 
7th: Polymath

Divine Notes: Magic, Witchcraft, the Dead, Occultism
Background: Priestess

Gear
Dagger: 1d4

This version of Hecate combines part of the concept of Isis. So her connections to magic and the underworld are the same. As I said I consider Isis one of the most intelligent gods, so Heka reflects this. By combining that with magic, witchcraft, and the underworld she becomes a figure of Occult knowledge. Much like her fellow syncretized god, Hermes Trismegistus. Indeed, if Hermes Trismegistus is the "patron" of the various Hermtic Orders, then Heka would be the patroness of various Occult orders. Maybe even laying claim to secrets from that great temple of learning from the Ptolemaic Kingdom of Egypt, the Library of Alexandria. It certainly ties into the lesser-known Roman Goddess Cardea, the Goddess of Doors, and access to knowledge that has been conflated with Hecate before. 

I deal with the Roman Hecate below.

The Character: Helga

Helga is the Hecate of my Roman-Norse mythology. She combines aspects of Hecate, Hel, Hades, and Frau Holt. She also has connections to Frigga and Freya and would be the patroness of seers and seiðr. For this reason and the Frau Holt connection, I see her as more of a Crone-like figure. 

I also gave her the Wits Aspect for her connection to wisdom. 

Helga

Class: Sorceress (Wits Aspect)
Level: 7
Species: Human

Alignment: Dark Neutral

Abilities
Strength: 12 (0)
Agility: 14 (+1)
Toughness: 16 (+2) N +1
Intelligence: 15 (+1)
Wits: 17 (+2) A +2
Persona: 13 (+1)  N +1

Fate Points: 10
Defense Value: 8
Vitality: 5 (d6)
Degeneracy:
Corruption:

Check Bonus (A/N/D): +4/+2/+1
Melee Bonus: +0
Ranged Bonus: +1
Saves: +4 to Magic based

Special Abilities
Arcana, Arcane Powers

Corruption
- Unnatural Parlor

Divine Touchstones

1st: Empathy
2nd: First Level Spell: Sense Death
3rd: Class level: Psychic (1 level)
4th: Spirit Guide: Hound

Psychic (Divine Touchstone 3rd)
Psychic Power: Temporal Sense
Supernatural Attack
Sixth Sense
Supernatural Power: Precognition

Spells
1st: Command, Glamour, Predict Weather
2nd: Invisibility, Invoke Fear
3rd: Fly

Arcane Powers
1st: Enhanced Senses
4th: Beguile
7th: Wild Form

Divine Notes: Magic, Witchcraft, Seer
Background: Priestess

Gear
Dagger: 1d4

This version of Hecate leans more into the dark side as befitting a Goddess of Magic, Ghosts, and Witchcraft that was syncretized with the Goddess of the Underworld and Goddess of Magic and Witches. 

In many ways Helga feels like a better fit to me. Maybe because my whole idea of a Roman-Norse pantheon stretches back to a time when I was first reading myths and had a book that had both of them (along with Beowulf), which was the same time I was learning to play D&D.

Helga is the darker side of Witchcraft. while she has "good" figures in her mix like Freya, Frigga, and Frau Holt, she has Hel as well. 

Taking the base "Hecate" stats wand moving forward I emphasized her connection to the psychic world and her Seer powers. This gives her the Divine Touchstone of Psychic to gain some of those powers and a few more spells and powers.

--

I am EXTREMELY pleased with these characters. Not just as characters but as a means to work out my ideas on who these Gods should be.  The Divine Touchstones are a great way to help build what later could be called divine abilities. I also see all three of these goddesses as being active as goddesses in a NIGHT SHIFT game. 

This game, the WASTED LANDS, is going to be really great and I am looking forward to seeing the final versions in print.  Please sign up for Kickstarter if you can. 

This also gives me a LOT of ideas for my new Deities & Demigods II feature. 

 Leaving the Necropolis, there are rows of what could be homes. There are plenty of over-run mushroom farms.  None of these mushrooms look like the edible ones from earlier in this cave.

These homes are not just abandoned; they are overrun with mushrooms. There are even dead bodies, or the remains of them, covered in mushrooms.

The surfaces are also covered with Yellow Mould. 

Additionally, there is a type of Zombie found in a few of these homes (1 in 1d6) that have 1d4+1 Yellow Mould Zombies.

These are treated as normal zombies but are not undead. They are covered with the same yellow mould and any character killed by the zombies or the mould will rise up in 1d4+6 hours as yellow mould zombie.  Once this happens they can not be raised.

Note: If the party has any of the healing wands from the level above they cause damage to the mould and zombies at 1d4+2 per charge used. Likewise, any healing magic will cause damage instead of healing.

One of the great bits of synchronicity of my education back in the late 70s early 80s was my discovery of two very different authors.  The first was Erich von Däniken who had a lot of ideas that appealed to my young self, a self that was fed a steady diet of mythology, astronomy, UFOs, and new-age ideas.  For me, at age 9 to 10, this seemed like great stuff.  It all seemed to fit so well.  Then I discovered the second author, Carl Sagan.  I had seen the various episodes of "In Search Of..." and all the episodes of "Cosmos." So at age 10 there seemed to be a worldview that *could* include both.  I mean, the fringes of science were the fringes, after all. Sagan told me that in black holes, the laws of physics break down.  Maybe there were other places/things/times like this?

"Chariot of the Gods"

It is no stretch of the imagination that Carl Sagan and Cosmos utterly changed my life.  I always had wanted to be an astronomer, and Sagan was the model I wanted to follow.  Too bad I get to a point in Calculus where I stop understanding it.  Thankfully it was enough to help me out in statistics.

And I read, with abject horror and then absolute delight, Sagan's masterful takedown of von Däniken (and Velikovsky). He so utterly destroyed everything von Däniken had said and claimed.  The evidence and case were overwhelming for me; Erich von Däniken was a fraud, and Sagan was the true visionary.  At the age of 10, I tossed out, mentally speaking, all the things that were spiritual or pseudoscientific.  I relegated all my "magical thought" to my new obsession, D&D. 

But I never really let the ideas go away. Even Sagan himself entertained the possibility of ancient aliens, but as always, he met it with his famous standard, "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence."

One of those ideas was about ancient aliens visiting Earth and being interpreted as gods or angels. 

Von Däniken was not the only one to have these ideas. There was Zecharia Sitchin, who gave us, among other things, the 12th Planet and Nibiru.  But the biggest one was Immanuel Velikovsky.  There are more, but this is not a post on pseudohistory or pseudoscience.  This is a post about gods.  I'll try to recover from my self-inflicted irony wound here later. 

The Aliens

I would like to reconstruct the "Ancient Alien" idea with some major changes.  First, since this is a One Man's God post, these are not aliens but actual gods. I am going to present them as such. They can be "Alien Gods" to be sure, but these are Gods in the D&D/FRPG sense of the word.

I will do it, though in such a way as to leave enough doubt in the readers' minds. That "doubt" is really just my wiggle room so I can use them as "gods" in my various D&D campaigns or as aliens in my various modern games like NIGHT SHIFT.

I want to build something that feels like it came right out of the occult-infused 70s.  

Given all of this, it should not be a huge surprise that I will be drawing on many of the same research and literature reviews I did for my April A to Z of Conspiracy Theories.  I am going to include and draw on the following posts (many of which were originally written for an earlier version of this very post):

• The A to Z of Conspiracy Theories: A is for Ancient Aliens 
• The A to Z of Conspiracy Theories: C is for Cryptoterrestrial Hypothesis
• The A to Z of Conspiracy Theories: D is for Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark
• The A to Z of Conspiracy Theories: E is for Extraterrestrials on Earth
• The A to Z of Conspiracy Theories: O is for Outer Space
• The A to Z of Conspiracy Theories: Q is for Queen is a Lizard
• The A to Z of Conspiracy Theories: Z is for Zecharia Sitchin

I would take a lot of this material and put them together as a group of gods. I have PLENTY of examples. 

Case in point: The Norse Gods and the Nordics.  Take the "alien race," the Nordics, for example. Called such because, well, they are tall and blond. In my take here, the aliens become the Norse Pantheon, essentially what you see in the Marvel Movies with the Asgardians.  

Case in point 2: The entire plot behind the Stargate movie and TV series.

Mine will not be so neat and certainly not so benevolent as those. 

Also, I want to avoid some well-documented racist tropes inherent in the Ancient Aliens as Gods theories. This can best be summarized as "white people couldn't figure it out, so therefore Aliens!" Even in the 70s, I saw this. 

Union of the Snake

The academic work on this is known as the Ophiolatreia: Rites and Mysteries of Serpent Worship. This covers many religions and practices. But it also plays a little loose with the definition of "Serpent." 

Let's try something simpler. There are 1000s of Gods, and there is no way I am going through all of them to find "interloper" gods or ones that don't quite fit with the rest. But I can start with the same resource I have been using this whole time, the Deities & Demigods.

I will work it this way. I'll take all the Gods in D&DG and find the ones that don't fit, and for the most part, I will focus on the reptilian or snake-like gods. I will add a couple more because they fit well with my ideas. 

The Flock

Given the fixation on snakes and reptiles, there needs to be a good representation of those sorts of gods in this new pantheon.  Also, many of these gods will be "sky" gods. While there are archetypes all gods fall into, I am not going to necessarily follow that here like I did in the Roman-Norse Pantheon.   

While the people here are reasonably "Good" aligned, I can't say the same for the gods.  In fact, I am going to have this pantheon of gods be primarily evil.  Their design here is to enslave humans and make them build these giant temples for whatever reason. Conquest? Food? I'll see as I build them.  The humans here are doing what they can to appease these powerful beings in the only ways they know how given their times and tools at hand. This is what makes the process more "Stargate" and less "Marvel's Thor."

So who are these people? This has to be Bronze Age or long before; the Neolithic sounds better. 5,000 BCE feels right.  This also allows me to use some Proto-Indo-European notions of gods.  Indeed I might even reconstruct my own versions of the PIE Gods, not unlike what I did with the Roman-Norse Pantheon.  OR, and here is an idea, the PIE Gods existed, and these "Alien Gods" were the ones they warred with.  This tracks with the common element in many PIE myths of the Hero/God slaying the Dragon/Serpent.  Could the Dragon/Serpent be these Alien Gods?  This is the Chaoskampf of many myths.

Remember, I am not putting together a Master's Thesis or Ph.D. Dissertation here. I am building something for the D&D, NIGHT SHIFT, and WASTED LANDS RPGs. I get to bend the rules of proper academic research as much as I like.

I will use these ideas to expand my monsters, Ophidians, and Saurians.

The Gods

Here are some gods that look like they fit my criteria of a snake/reptile/non-human god in a pantheon of human gods. Eastern religions, or, more to the point, non-European ones, have far more variety in their gods. Note: I am also going to get into the subject of Good vs. Evil here. Some, like Queztequotal (Aztec) and Shāhmārān (Turkey) are objectively good figures. Others are not.

While I will focus mostly on the myths as presented in the DDG, there are far, far more. I am going to avoid monsters for the most part, but some will sneak in.  Though I will add more gods that I know as appropriate.

American Indian Mythos

• Snake-Man

Babylonian, Sumerian, and Akkadian Mythos

• Apsu
• Aži Dahāka / Dahak
• Inshushinak
• Ištaran
• Nirah
• Tiamat
• Tishpak

Celtic Mythos

• Caoránach
• Oilliphéist

Central American Mythos

• Kukulkan / Queztequotal
• Huhueteotl
• Tlaloc

Chinese Mythos

• Ma Yuan

I talk a lot about Ma Yuan and Ma Yüan-shuai in my discussion of the Chinese myths, I think I might keep him "as is" for this.

Egyptian Mythos

• Apep
• Flame Snake (monster and enemy of the Gods)
• Mehen
• Nehebkau
• Set (to a degree)

Finnish Mythos

• Syöjätär (a monster, but that is the closest thing they have)

Greek Mythos

• Enceladus
• Gorgons
• Hydra
• Ophion
• Ophiuchus

Indian Mythos

• Bhenswara
• Nagas
• And dozens more

Japanese Mythos

• Ugajin
• Yamata no Orochi

Norse Mythos

• Jormungandr

This could be a pantheon all on its own. Several of these have their own "portfolios."  And there are so many more.

While I am considering this as something to use with NIGHT SHIFT as "Ancient Aliens." In the WASTED LANDS, they could be heroes (still aliens of a sort) that become gods. Though in at least one case, Jormungandr is another name for Yig.

I could revisit these as part of my Deities & Demigods II since this might be my last Syncretism post for a bit while I spend some more time on my Deities & Demigods II ones.

One Man's God Special: Syncretism

• Syncretism Part 1, The Gods of Faerûn
• Syncretism Part 2, the Greco-Egyptian Gods
• Syncretism Part 3, the Roman-Norse Pantheon
• Syncretism Part 4, Orcus and Dispater
• Syncretism Part 5, Chariots of the Gods

 While within the Necropolis, the party moves near an open temple. As the party approaches, they are surrounded by Shadows moving in. Though before they can attack, a haunting music can be heard. The Shadows move back and surround two elves, a male and a female. The woman is playing a long double flute that looks like it is made of bone.  The man is holding a skull with eyes of balefire.  

The shadows move back into the ground.

When the last of the Shadows have gone, the woman stops playing.

They are dressed similarly and even look the same, obviously related.  They look like the shadow elves you have seen, but their skin is darker, and their hair is lighter.  The woman greets you first.

"Greetings. I am Runu, and this is my younger brother Urnu," she says.

There is a snort from the male, and a "younger by mere seconds." escapes his lips just loud enough to be heard by all.

Runu points to a rune on the ground that one of your shoes has kicked dirt onto. 

"The Rune of Ake keeps the shadows confined to the temple. When you walked over it broke the magic. But no matter." She brushes the dirt away, and the great circle of runes glows briefly and then fades.

They tell you they are Shadow Elves, but they are also Drow/Dark Elves and therefore despised by all elves. More importantly, they tell you they are not under the sway of the Vampire Queen.  

They mention they need a particular jewel from an idol in the central temple.  The idol is that of the Demon Lord Orcus and the temple is his.They causally mention they know they are searching for the tomb of the Vampire Queen. ("Why else are you here? It's not the scenery!")  They also add that the large temple is the access to the lower levels. There is a secret door under the idol.

If asked why they are helping, they will say that the Shadow Elves will kill them on the spot, but the adventurers are a curiosity to them and they have a chance to reach the temple.

If asked why they need it, they will claim it was stolen by the Vampire Queen, and they want to return to their home temple. 

If the party tries to attack them, they use their Rings of Invisibility and sneak away. They do want the adventurers alive to face the monsters in the Temple.

The double flute are "Pipes of the Susurrus" and they require training to use.

There is nothing of note in this local temple.

--

Note: Runu is a Profane Necromancer, Urnu is a Gothic Witch. Most of what they tell you is true. Save for a few details.

- The Shadow Elves will kill Runu and Urnu true, but they will also kill the adventurers. Runu is playing up how many Shadow Elves are here.

- Runu summoned the shadows herself to scare the adventurers. 

- They do need the gem, the Eye of Orcus, but it is far more dangerous than they let on.

- They want the adventures to face the monsters of the main temple. 

- They have no love for the Vampire Queen

I have a couple of things going on this month. First off I am still doing the #Dungeon23 challenge. The level for June is the dead city of the Shadow Elves. Also,  I am waiting for the print proof of Monster Mash II to arrive. So I figure I can do a little for both today and detail the Shadow Elf from Monster Mash I as an OSE Monster listing. 

I have done Shadow Elves before, but not as a proper Old-School Essentials monster. 

Shadow Elf

Tall, thin elves with pale gray to dark gray skin. They have jet-black hair and long, pointed ears. Also known as Umbral Elves. They live in dark cave systems and places where shadows are the strongest.

Armour Class: 6 [13]
Hit Dice: 1* (4hp)
Attacks: 1 × weapon (1d6 or by weapon)
THAC0: 18 [+1]
Movement: 120’ (40’)
Saving Throws: D12 W13 P13 B15 S15 (Elf 1)
Morale: 8 (10 with leader)
Alignment: Neutral (Chaotic Neutral)
XP: 19
Number Appearing: 1d4 (2d12)
Treasure Type: C

• Infravision 90'
• Immune to the touch of Ghouls and Ghasts
• Necromancer spells. A Shadow Elf can cast one 1st level Necromancer spell.
• Leader: Groups of 15+ are led by an elf of level 1d6 + 1. The leader may have magical items: 5% chance per level for each magic item table.

Shadow Elves are often confused with Dark Elves. 

Most Shadow Elves follow the Faerie Lord Scáthaithe, The Umbral Lord.  Others have fallen under the sway of Darlessa the Vampire Queen.

Shadow Elves as an OSE-Advanced Race

Shadow elves have the following requirements and can take the following classes.

Requirements: 15 or greater on DEX
Ability Modifiers: +1 to DEX

• Acrobat: 10th
• Assassin: 10th
• Barbarian: NA
• Bard: 10th
• Cleric: 5th
• Druid: 5th
• Fighter: 10th
• Illusionist: 9th
• Knight: 10th
• Magic-User: 8th
• Paladin: NA
• Ranger: NA
• Thief: 10th
• Gothic Witch: 10th
• Profane Necromancer: 10th

I need to update my twins, Runu and Urnu, to these rules. With Runu as a Profane Necromancer and Urnu as a Gothic Witch. 

Much like the Miskatonic Repository for Call of Cthulhu, Seventh Edition, the Jonstown Compendium is a curated platform for user-made content, but for material set in Greg Stafford’s mythic universe of Glorantha. It enables creators to sell their own original content for RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha, 13th Age Glorantha, and HeroQuest Glorantha (Questworlds). This can include original scenarios, background material, cults, mythology, details of NPCs and monsters, and so on, but none of this content should be considered to be ‘canon’, but rather fall under ‘Your Glorantha Will Vary’. This means that there is still scope for the authors to create interesting and useful content that others can bring to their Glorantha-set campaigns.

—oOo—
What is it?
Veins of Discord is a scenario for use with RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha.

It is a thirty-four page, full colour, 38.59 MB PDF.

The layout is clean and tidy, but needs a slight edit in places. The artwork is decent. However, there are no maps, so the Game Master will need to refer to the maps included in the RuneQuest Gamemaster Screen Pack.

Where is it set?
Veins of Discord is set in Sartar, specifically in and around the village of Apple Lane.

Who do you play?Any type of Player Character can play Veins of Discord, but ideally they should be invested in the future of Apple Lane and they should be capable working in the surrounding wilderness. The scenario presents an interesting situation if a Player Character is the thane of Apple Lane or an Ernalda worshipper.
What do you need?
Veins of Discord requires RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha, the Glorantha Bestiary, and especially, the RuneQuest Gamemaster Screen Pack for its information about Apple Lane and its surrounds. The Red Book of Magic may also be useful.
What do you get?
Veins of Discord begins with a strange visitor to Apple Lane. Accius Yuthuppa wants wilderness guides to help him investigate the nearby Thunder Hills for reasons that nobody can quite fathom, though, it turns out, the pay is pretty good. It quickly becomes clear that he ill-suited to the wilderness, even the relatively tame wilderness around Apple Lane, but after collecting numerous sods and clods and rocks, he disappears from the lives of the Player Characters, only to be remembered as an odd encounter.

Not long after Accius Yuthuppa has left, several Dwarves arrival in the Apple Lane, their leader wanting to negotiate for the mining rights to the nearby hills. The Dwarves will compensate the village (and its thane) for these rights, but if the thane or the people of Apple Lane decline, the dwarves will move on and find someone else to negotiate with. Either way, the Dwarves will begin mining in the hills. Naturally—because after all, what the Dwarves are doing could be seen as unnatural—this has consequences.

Veins of Discord confronts the Player Characters with a dilemma as the actions of the Dwarves bring them into conflict with the Elves of the nearby Tarndisi’s Grove. Do they side with those that they made agreement with or do they side with the Elves who want to undo what they regard as the damage that the Dwarves have inflicted on the earth? Whether they gave permission for the Dwarves to mine in the hills, in which case, the Elves will be unhappy with the Player Characters, or the dwarves successfully sought permission from someone else, the Elves will still make a plea for assistance. Whichever side the Player Characters decide to support, the Elves will assault the mine, and there will be long term consequences for supporting one side and not the other. Ultimately, there no easy answer to the situation presented in the scenario.
Veins of Discord is a straightforward scenario, though the Game Master will need to prepare the final showdown in the mine as it involves a lot of combat. Full stats and descriptions are provided for both the Elves and Dwarves involved in the scenario as well as various other creatures. One thing missing from the scenario is a map of the mine. The Game Master can run the scenario without it, but its inclusion would have been useful.

Another aspect of the scenario is that although the plot and central idea behind Veins of Discord—modernity and industrialisation versus traditionalism and the natural world—is not necessarily new to roleplaying, it is not necessarily a familiar plot in RuneQuest. The players will need to both roleplay their characters’ reactions to what is to them a very alien concept and the fact that their characters will not at all be familiar with the consequences of what the Dwarves want. Not so much a challenge, but rather something that they should keep in mind.

The format and plot to Veins of Discord means that it actually plays out over the course of several weeks. The Game Master could easily run another scenario as the events of Veins of Discord play out offscreen.
Is it worth your time?Yes—Veins of Discord is a straightforward and enjoyable scenario which presents the Player Characters with a surprisingly modern dilemma that ultimately cannot be solved to everyone’s satisfaction and feels all the more satisfying because of this.No—Veins of Discord is too location specific, being set in Apple Lane, and involves both Elves and Dwarves, and an industrial theme which may not suit a Game Master’s campaign.Maybe—Veins of Discord is flexible in that it can set elsewhere, but its industrial versus the ecological theme may not not suit every Game Master’s campaign.

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

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

—oOo—
Name: Horror at El Dorado RoyalePublisher: Chaosium, Inc.
Author: Ben Burns

Setting: Modern Day MexicoProduct: Scenario
What You Get: Thirty-four page, 38.40 MB Full Colour PDF
Elevator Pitch: Some bridezillas never forget, never forgive.Plot Hook: Wedding of a friend at a five star resort. What can go wrong? Then the dreams and the deaths begin...
Plot Support: Six pre-generated Investigators, seven handouts, no NPCs, one map and two floor plans, one non-Mythos monster.Production Values: Decent.
Pros# One-two session one-shot# Encourages the use of mobile phones and Wikipedia by the Investigators
# Non-Mythos horror scenario
# Non-Mythos monster not new to Call of Cthulhu# Nicely detailed ritual# Good mix of interaction and investigation# Solid staging advice# Easy to replace the pre-generated Investigators# Decent artwork# Thalassophobia# Aquaphobia# Gamophobia# Heortophobia
Cons# Needs a slight edit. No, it really does.# Tightly plotted# Handouts a little bland# Monster timeline unclear# Monster stats could be better placed separately# No NPC stats or portraits
Conclusion# Despite the lack of NPC stats, a solidly serviceable movie style one-shot which combines holiday horror and wedding woes.# The best scenario by Ben Burns for Call of Cthulhu to date