Book: Dreams of a Strange House

 Strange Houses by Uketsu, translated by Jim Rion, HarperVia, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers, 2025, original Japanese 2021.

Provenance: Browsers Bookshop in Olympia. A nice, well-staffed bookstore in downtown Olympia. Purchased on a whim, in part because the front cover had a house blueprint on the front with Japanese icons on it.

Review: Long ago, before I became a author, game designer, and general worldbuilder, I was a civil engineer. And as a result, I have always had a fascination with buildings and how they work and grow over time. In particular, I find blueprints and floor plans interesting, in what they say about the house and people who live there.

Strange Houses is set in modern Japan. The narrator, an author of macabre fiction is approached by a friend who is homebuying with his spouse. And they found a excellent modern house, but there was just something off-base about it. And they sent the floor plans to the author, who quickly noticed some things that were off-kilter. He brought in an architect friend and together the two start unspooling a mystery, which quickly turns disturbing and horrific. 

The book produces the house plans, as well as other house plans as the story unfolds, along with family trees and timelines. And these are presented in the running text as well, allowing the reader to discover the evidence as the author does.  Now, I read a lot of old detective novels from the 20s and 30s, and in such venerable tomes by Christie and Van Dine, they provide floor plans as well. In fact, putting a map or house diagram on the back of paperback editions was a thing back there. So that's not much of a surprise, but what the book does is that was they learn more about the house(s) they make changes to the house plans to reveal new ideas. 

So there are clues in the house plans, which is cool, and I noticed most of them before the two investigators spelled them out in text. But, I also noticed stuff that they left uncommented-upon. In the plans, there is one large room on the second floor without any exterior windows. OK, that's odd (though my first thought was to ask if there was a skylight). But (and this is the weirdness they don't address) there also is one toilet on the floor, and you'd have to pass through the windowless room to get there. It is a little strange that the investigators that are looking really, really hard at the house don't call it out. 

I've mentioned this before in my comments on various Call of Cthulhu products, where the maps don't line up with the text, or have their own discrepancies,  like chimneys that are prominent on the first floor and disappear on the upper floors, or locations of kitchens and bathrooms that would be logistical nightmare regarding the pipes. So I'm sensitized to such things, and in this case seeing stuff that the (real) author would prefer me to miss. And if fact, at the time I wrote it off as simply "Well, they lay out houses differently in Japan", but I went to the trouble of looking up Tokyo floor plans (thank you, Internet), and nope, the ones here look like they make no sense.

In any event, the investigators make some immediate assumptions, which turn out to be mostly true, but the logic leaps are a bit much. And then they find a second house, where the family had previously lived, which also had some odd features. And then there's the family house, of more traditional design, which had its own sense of weirdnesses.

And all of this is presented in drawings and conversations between the investigators, and interviews with various people. It is all presented as evidence, in a fairly bloodless fashion (though there is blood in many of the descriptions and conclusions). In this way it feels a lot like Lovecraft's "The Call of Cthulhu", where nothing really happens to the narrator as he goes through the files of his deceased uncle and comes to a chilling conclusion. Same here, though there are more questions than answers in the final tally.

The clinical approach of the investigators left me cold, and the fact that things are (maybe) not wrapped up neatly bothered me. The (real) author is a mystery figure whose photograph is a black robe and a white mask (very Studio Ghibli). The books (there are more in this style) are huge in Japan. I want to say that it is the cultural differences that ultimately frustrated me, but I think the translation is on-target.

It is ultimately a case that I bring too much to the book. I know too much about a subject and it brought me in conflict with the reality presented in the novel. And the ultimate loose ends and unreliable testimonies frustrate me, particularly in comparison with the venerable "The Call of Cthulhu". Strange Houses is a short, compact read (given all the house plan illos), but I can't really recommend this even to friends who have spent time in Japan. It was a misfire, though apparently a very successful one.

More later,

Recent Arrivals: The Odd Lot

 So it has been a while, but new games continue to accumulate here at Grubb Street. Some are Kickstarters, but others are from various stores in the area. And I have to say, it's a good thing. There are more game stores operating in the Puget Sound region now than there were 10 years ago, and I am pleased to see brick-and-mortars even as I take advantage of funding new products in advance. 

Some of these new projects that have shown up push back the standard limits of what is a role-playing game, and reflect the wide diversity found in the hobby. Some cleave closely to one version of D&D or the other, or have that heady whiff of nostalgia to them, while others challenge a lot of basic assumptions and tropes in the play-style. So this is a mix of old and new 

Let' see what's here: 

Elder Mythos Deluxe Edition by Michele Paroli and Marta Palvarini, Mana Project Studios, Boxed RPG containing a 240-page digest-sized hardbound, 2 Card Decks, 9 dice, GM Screen, and 10 scenario maps, 2025, Kickstarter. This is a Lovecraftian game where you play. not a cultist or an investigator, but a Mythos Entity itself, both competing with and collaborating with other (player) Mythos entities. It is listed as using the Year Zero engine, but that is pretty much just using that system's dice pools and a card-based initiative session. As an Elder God, you use your turn to manipulate lesser entities (including mere mortals) in the play field, and to mess up the manipulations of the other players, then describing those manipulations in detail. There is a GM/Eldritch Master who is supposed to corral the whole thing. The game play feels like a brain-storming session where there are no bad ideas, but there are bad ideas. The entities you represent stand outside of time, space, and traditional role-playing tropes. The book itself has variable fonts, white on black printing, and a lack of index to help you navigate. So this one would be a learning experience.  

Pendragon Gamemaster's Handbook by Greg Stafford et. al, Chaosium, 238-page hardbound, 2024, Wizard's Keep Games. I mentioned there's been a rising tide of game stores in the area, and I was happy to see one of the locals, Wizard's Keep Games, carrying a deeper level of Chaosium products. This Gamemaster's book is a toolkit-style of book on diverse subjects, supporting the core book -- court life, religions, and the supernatural, as well as new rules for running large battles, plus a goodly collection of NPCs and creatures. The presentation on parchment-ish paper is as solid and the art styles are appropriate for the period, and should become a browsable book in my collection.. 

Call of Cthulhu The Sutra of Pale Leaves: Twin Suns Rising, by Damon Lang, Andrew Logan Montgomery, Jason Sheets, Yukihiro Trada, et al, Chaosium, 192-page hardbound, 2025, Wizard's Keep Games. The past is another country. Japan is another country. An adventure set in Japan in the go-go eighties (40 years ago) is several countries removed. This particular adventure establishes a new manifestation of the King In Yellow and its infiltration into Japanese society. The book deals with Japanese mythology, manga, and the Yakuza, and sets up for a SECOND volume of adventures, Carcosa Manifest. The primary designers come out of the Sons of Singularity, who did The Sassoon Files, and The Blessed and the Blasphemous, and the design here shows a lot of their approach in the form of flowcharts to guide the adventure and confidants to use as plot hooks to bring the players in. 

Orbital Blues by Sam Sleney (writing) Josh Clark (art) and Zachary Cox (more writing), Soul Muppet Publishing, 206-page digest-sized hardbound, 2021, Mox Boarding House. An impulse buy, as I note that Mox has slowly be growing its RPG selection over the years, and bringing in some more esoteric titles. Orbital Blues has been out a few years. It is a pretty straightforward game system - a character has three stats (Muscle, Grit, and Savvy) and uses d6s to resolve tasks and combat. Its genre is "Space Western", which includes Firefly, Mos Eisley, and in particular Cowboy Bebop. It's a dystopian setting, where the future has passed through the planets and satellite settlements and then moved on, leaving poverty and oppression in its wake. You're outlaws on the fringe of society, trying to make a dishonest credit by smuggling, bounty hunting, and heists. Also picked up a copy of A Starborne Resistance,  a slender 48-page squarebound, which provides a planetary setting of a dying colony ignored and oppressed by a once-mighty Confederacy. The books have that art-book look, in that no two-page spread looks like any others. Lack of an index means you're going to have to remember where you read that particular useful rule. Looks interesting. 

Orders of Inquisition by the RPG Professor, Self-published,  120-page softbound, 2025, Kickstarter. This is the sort of product I enjoy, and one that kickstarter excels at bringing to a wider audience. It takes the traditional tropes of gaming fantasy and turns them on their heads. As opposed to the gods (of all alignments) being player-supporting forces, the gods are distant and cruel, and their agents in the world fanatics. The book rolls through the alignment godheads presenting the negative side of faith, followed by specific orders, new classes, spells, and relics. In general, its crammed with some really nice, non-standard ideas. It would be an excellent addition to the more grimdarkish campaigns.

(And as an aside, I always wanted to develop a Good-aligned cult that believes fanatically that the dead should stay dead. Which is a really good thing when talking about vampires, and a really bad thing when you're talking about your fighter who has just been resurrected.)

Mythic Bastionland by  Christ McDowall, Bastionland Press, 208-page hardbound, 2025, purchase at PAX. This is the weirdest book of a weird lot. It looks great, but you really need to bore into it to understand what is going on. It's a fantasy Pendragonish setting, where you are a knight with powers and a mentor. You travel the land (hex-crawling to create the Realm) and encounter stuff, until you are powerful enough to go to the City and join the Round Table. I think. The presentation is the challenge - a collection of  one-page summarized followed by detailed descriptions of the various knights you can be. It wraps up with a series of dialogues between DM and players which to make some sense of it all.. The is beautiful, the presentation is compact, but it requires a lot of engagement just to wrap your head around. 

Random Jottings 22 Omnibus by Michael Dobson, Canal Press, 202-page softbound, 2025, gift of the author. Mike Dobson was my boss for several years at TSR, and following his tenure there he continued to write histories, books, articles, and commentary. A lot of that can be found here. This is a personal fanzine in which he talks about his travels, Wikipedia, and most relevant to this audience, his time at TSR and other gaming companies, and includes an article in the Comics Journal. Good bits of history. 

The Planar Codex by Cody Faulk et al, Daggerwood Games, 200-page hardbound, 2025, Kickstarter. Coming from my Manual of the Planes background, I always find planar books interesting. And this is a 5E (2014) product and is Great Wheel adjacent, and you'll recognize versions of the Feywild the Nine Hells, the Seven Heavens, and Mechanus (formerly Limbo). That means that they can be supplement old-school and Planescape-style settings, or be used to create a new planar arrangement. The approach is nice and very player-centered - new subclasses for all the original classes, new spells, and new races. My only gripe is that the fiction that headers each section is printed in an italic script font, which makes it slow going for these old eyes. 

The Medieval Fortress by J.E.Kaufman, H.W.Kaufman, Illustrated by Robert M. Jurga, Da Capo Press (Perseus Books Group), 320-page softbound, 2001, from the collection of Sacnoth, but actually purchased from Barnes & Noble in Tukwilla in 2005 (The receipt was being used as a bookmark). OK, NOT a gaming book per se, but the type of book I really like - a comprehensive reference work on medieval fortresses and walled cities. So this is browser's book for me, to be picked up and leafed through, and a reference if I'm doing any serious historical castle design. Good illustrations, though the photos are a bit muddy in black and white.

Draw Steel Heroes Book One: Heroes by Matthew Colville, James Introcaso, Willy Abeel, and Robert Djordjevich,  MCDM Productions, 402-page hardbound, 2025, Kickstarter; Book Two: Monsters, 378-page hardbound. This one demands a LOT more attention that this brief write-up can provide. This is a deeply impressive re-imagining of the D&D-style of game, reconfigured from the ground up, showing origins in 4E in its crunchiness. It is quite specific in its goal - it is about combat encounters, and the rules reflect that at every turn. No base assumption of D&D is left unchallenged - use of 2d10s instead of a d20, you always do SOME damage in combat (the only question is how much), Characteristics are refashioned with a small spread of scores. The archetypical classes are rethought, as well and while recognizable, function in different fashions. Spell are are rethought as abilities. Everything has shorthand box. 

The game is more than combat, but will function best at a table with a battlemap or online, as opposed to everyone in comfortable chairs scattered across the living room. The monster book contains new versions the reliable and recognizable foes, along with high level baddies that do some world-building for us, and rethought alternates for the TMed creatures like the Mind Flayer and the Beholder. There is a lot of lore in the game, but most of it is parked in descriptive text of the character classes and creatures, so it bears a complete reading. My one nit in presentation is that the excellent art for the monsters needs to be labeled, so I know which of four stat blocks on the page is applicable.

In short, Draw Steel is an adventurous reincarnation of the traditional TTRPG, and if you bemoan the lack of crunch in a lot of modern incarnations, this is one to check out. Its the one I'm going to be moving through in the next few weeks. 

And that's it for this bag of stuff, mixed though it be. I really like the spectrum of projects that come out of roleplaying, and while not all of them are my particular pipe of tea, I am glad they're available, and if they strike your fancy, you should hunt them down.

More later,  

Recent Acquisitions

So I've been picking up more game product of late. Part of it is from the Page Turner down in Kent, part of it is from a once-every-three-months trip to Olympic Cards and Comics down in Lacey, with the mighty Stan!, and part of it is from a "Zinequest" promotion on Kickstarter, where I may have gone a ... little .... overboard. 

Now, I have not read most of there beyond leafing through them, and I usually only review game material that I have played (reviewing a game product from its text is a little like reviewing a movie solely from its script - it's nice but doesn't really talk about the final product). So these are some first impressions:

Through Ultan's Door (Ben Laurence) This is a beautifully produced 'zine along the ideas of what a 'zine should be. Issue 1 has a separate cover with a dungeon map on the inside, along with a heavy paper encounter sheet and 32 page saddle-stitched self-cover book. Beautiful, detailed art for the map and inside by Huargo and others. It is a single dungeon within floating city in the Dreamland. I have three issues, the last one being split into two booklets. Good stuff.

Flott's Miscellany Volume One (Andrew Devenney and others, Superhero Necromancer) 48 pages, saddle-stitched cover. This is an expansion of the A Visitor's Guide to the Rainy City. The Visitor's Guide was a pretty cool overview of a sinking city that could be plunked into a deserted stretch of water in your campaign, and could make a good Ravenloft domain as well. This Miscellany has a lot of stuff to add to it. Arrived a little damaged, but it is the content that counts.

Thirsty Sword Lesbians (April Kit Walsh, Evil Hat and Gay Spaceship)  A high quality 222-page hardbound, full color, High graphics. This is "Powered By the Apocalypse Engine" project, and is my first time looking at that particular game engine. What I find noticeable on the first blush is the lack of stress on combat (no big tables with every butterknife and bohemian ear spoon available), and with it lack of detailed combat mechanics. Yet I can see running a Julie d'Aubigny-style campaign with it.

The Merovingian Hack (Justin Bengston) is a much more utilitarian 'zine - 32 pages self-cover on ordinary paper stock. Uses a simplified roleplaying system known as a "hack" - there are Cthulhu hacks, Cyberhacks, and even a Empire of the Petal Throne Hack. This one is for playing in 8th century France. Pretty basic stuff, but could be a foundation of a campaign

Swordpoint (Alan Bahr, Gallant Knight Games) 65 pages, saddle-stitched, cover. "A Swashbuckling Roleplaying Zine".  Interesting landscape (length-wise) presentation as opposed to portrait (tall, in the manner of regular books). Even though it carries an OGL statement, it seems far removed from D&D, which as a system has always been challenged in capturing the style of cinematic swordplay which embodies this particular subgenre.

Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft (F. Wesley Schneider, Product Lead, and a host of writers, developers and editors, Wizards of the Coast). 256 pages, hardbound. A descendant of the Domains of Dread, in that it talks about a LOT of the demiplanes of Ravenloft, as well as tuning your horror-based D&D campaign to the style you prefer. Lots of lore in bite-sized bits. There's even a mention of Markovia, from Neither Man Nor Beast, and that's cool.

The Dee Sanction (Paul Baldowski). 68 pages, hardbound. Black cover with a big golden magical emblem. The elevator pitch is Queen Elizabeth's Occultic Suicide Squad. Sorcery is outlawed. You have been caught using sorcery. Your life is spared as long as you work for court magician John Dee to fight occult threats to England. Very nice presentation, but an overuse of boldface to indicate game terms.

Glorantha Sourcebook (Greg Stafford and Jeff Richard, Chaosium Inc.), 220 pages, hardbound. I have always had a soft spot for Glorantha, ever since playing the original White Bear and Red Moon. But its lore has always been a heavy lift, since there it is deep, involved, and often counters itself in telling the tales.This book from 2018 is making a great stab as separating it all out in a relatively linear fashion (for a cosmology where a lot of stuff happens, and THEN time begins). I'm reading this one in the evenings because, of course, I have a soft spot for Glorantha.

City of Cthulhu (Gareth Ryder-Hanrahan, Pelegrane Press), 220 pages, hardbound.Trail of Cthulhu is a variant/descendant/alternative to Call of Cthulhu, the core rules addressing some challenges in the original (like the very real chance of players not getting a vital piece of info because of a bad die roll). Trail's support material can be used as a supplement for standard material, and tends to hew towards the more existential dread end of the spectrum as opposed to the pulp world-shattering menaces. In this case, we have a city book for Greater Arkham, which has made its deal with dark forces and swollen in size, like a cancerous corruption. May be a good setting for the players should the stars suddenly prove right.

City of Flesh (Elizabeth Chaipraditkul and Steffie de Vaan) 52 pages, squarebound. "A tarot-based femmecore roleplay zine set in the rotting womb of a dying colossus". That's the back cover copy.  It is one of those art project, graphically intense, oddly-laid out efforts, like Ennie-winners Mork Borg or Mothership. Probably will require a bit more attention than your standard quick read.

Maximum HP (Loyd Metcalf and others, 48+ pages) Five issues, variable length, saddle-stitched or squarebound. This D&D 'zine almost slips into quasi-magazine state, in that it has ads in the back for various gaming stores and services. It looks and feels like a pieces from a local campaign, and is nicely put together. Every issue has a theme, the first one being Dwarves, with a lot of interesting bits, including the use of dwarven elephants (woollyphonts). I will admit that I did not see that coming.

Grey Seas are Dreaming of My Death (Derek Sotak and others). 108 pages digest, squarebound. This one missed picture day (because I forgot to include it). This is a William Hope Hodges RPG. William Hope Hodges is one of those "lost horror writers" from the Pre-Lovecraftian era, best remembered for The House of the Borderland.  He also did a lot of nautical horror, much of it set in the Sargasso Sea (which abuts the Bermuda Triangle as a spooky chunk of naval property), and this book sets up to partake in the horrors. Really want to play this one.

That's it for the moment. I have a bit of reading material

More later,

Plague Books: Mellow Yellow

The King in Yellow, stories by Robert W. Chambers, Third Place Press, 1895, Reprint edition 2015

Provenance: I picked this one up at Third Place Books in Ravenna, along with China Mieville's October (reviewed here). The text is a "rediscovery edition", which means it was in public domain, then dusted off, repackaged, and republished because it might see a sales spike. In this case, said spike was due to HBO's True Detective, which refers to the King in Yellow.

The book itself has been reformatted for its current size and has a new cover treatment. It has one of those covers that is slightly tacky to the touch which seems to be popular with publications these days. I don't care for it, but that may just indicate my advancing age.

The publisher, Third Place Press, by the way, has spun off from Third Place Books in 2018 and is now VerVolta Design + Press.

Review: Robert W. Chambers was a popular and now-forgotten author from the early part of the last century. In his day he was a well-known fixture in magazines and books, such that his old-school writing involving "shopgirl romances" was mocked by both H P Lovecraft and F Scott Fitzgerald. He was big in his day, but not critically acclaimed, similarly to Jacqueline Suzanne's potboilers or Tom Clancy's thrillers of later ages. His very name invoked a particular style of writing - old-fashioned, archaic, moralistic and fusty, but still more popular than some of the new stuff being cranked out.

Which is kinda sad, because he's a pretty good writer, but more about that in a moment. 

Most people that DO know about Chambers in the modern day know about him because of his contribution to the Cthulhu mythos with the King in Yellow.  Chambers pulled some phrases and concepts from Ambrose Bierce in creating his King in Yellow stories and were in turn pulled by Lovecraft as namechecks for his own weird fiction, in particular "The Whisperer in Darkness". From there it moved out to become a major supporting pillar of the genre, with the King in Yellow, the Yellow Sign, Hastur, and Hali all getting their moment in the moonlight, analyzed and reconfigured repeatedly.

The King in Yellow, as presented by Chambers, is a play that drives people mad. There are a couple couplets presented throughout the text, but the exact nature of what it says (particularly in the 2nd act, where things go horribly bad and drives the reader insane). In Chambers, the play is "things best left unknown" incarnate. Someone reads the play and goes mad. When referred to in the text, it gets its own font. That's how alien it is.

And most fans will only read the first four stories, which is are the most mythos-y of the collection in that they name-check the King in Yellow. "The Repairer of Reputations" is the most weird of these weird tales, in that it portrays a futuristic New York (of thirty years after the story is written) with a heavily militarized America, a recent invasion of New Jersey by Germany, and suicide chambers in Washington Square. Yet all that is world-building background, in that the narrator is a sociopathic madman who believes himself to be heir of the Imperial Dynasty of America. It is actually a wonderfully strange story, and in a long section name-drops a lot of material used by later writers.

The remaining three, "The Mask", "The Court of the Dragon", and "The Yellow Sign" have similar arcs, filled with growing dread and strange happening resolving in someone encountering the accursed play with horrible results. "The Demoiselle D'Ys" is a fantasy that evokes the later Clark Ashton Smith. "The Prophet's Paradise" is a series of one-pagers. And the remaining four, his "Street" stories - "The Street of the Four Winds", "The Street of the First Shell", "The Street of Our Lady of the Fields", and "Rue Barree" are about art students and demimondes on the Left Bank of Paris (Chambers was an art student in Paris before he became a writer).

And in these stories, there is a bit of really fine writing, and you see why Chambers is an unappreciated genius. "First Shell", set during the siege of Paris during the Franco-Prussian war, captures the entire fog of war better than many modern novels. "Our Lady of the Fields" concludes with a practically orgasmic train trip, and "Rue Barree" has a section of the drunk protagonist that is amusing. Even up in "The Repairer of Reputations", with its long paragraph  of Mythos-friendly terms, is impressive. You can see where Chambers earned his reputation.

This collection, Chambers' first, did a lot to establish himself. He later settled into a more traditional, commercial success thereafter, and you can see the talent here. Yes, you should read past the first four stories.

More later,

Big Pile of Books: Lovecrafting

Have I mentioned I have a big pile of books on the end of my desk? Yeah, I have a big pile of books at the end of my desk. Here are some reviews;

Johannes Cabal: the Fear Institute, by Jonathan L. Howard, Thomas Dunne Books, 2011

Provenance: A friend lent me the audio version of Johannes Cabal and the Blustery Day, a collection of short stories featuring a particularly sardonic,erudite, and irritated necromancer who keeps having things get in the way of his quest for eternal life. They were fun, and when I was in New York last year I picked up a copy of The Fear Institute at the Strand (a highly-recommended bookstore, but I will give the edge to Powell's in Portland).

Review: What attracted me to this particular book (as opposed to others in the series) was the fact it was set in Lovecraft's Dreamlands. The Dreamlands were mostly part of Lovecraft's work in poetry, where he is influenced by Lord Dunsany, and is the more fantastic setting of his mythos. A lot of the same players and characters fit in, but it the Dreamlands are more aesthetic than horrific, which causes some interesting interplay between his view of this world and the land of Dreams.

Other authors have played in this space, so it is interesting to see how this other Howard takes it on.

And it's all right. The writing is solid and engaging, and has the proper level of bounce and snap. But I think I like the other authors' take on Lovecraft's fantasy world better. This adventure really doesn't need to be in the Dreamlands, and could be in Oz or the Forgotten Realms save for a couple solid name-checks. Cabal's sardonic commentary applies to fantasy worlds in general as opposed to prying up the underlying nature of Lovecraft's universe. There is a dualogy between Lovecraft's worlds - his Dreamlands tend to more romantic, awe-inspired, and positive, while his mythos works set in our world tend to be more horrific, nihilistic, and terrible. Both settings have living gods, but those gods are more active in the Dreamlands and the characters who toil in their shadows more empowered.

Anyway, the plot. Cabal is hired by a trio of individuals who intend to go to the Dreamlands and defeat Fear, Fear being the worst bane of human civilization. Despite himself, Cabal goes along as the official guide. There are adventures with Zoogs and Men of Leng, and I think he really nails the Men of Leng for the first time that I've read. The amusingly selfish Cabal verges on being heroic because of the nature of the universe he is cast in. Elder gods are confronted. Time paradoxes are invoked. It wraps up with a strong lead into the NEXT volume.

It's OK. Cabal as reluctant hero gets him away from him from merely whining about his state, and reasons are given as things progress. But I don't get the feel of the Dreamlands from this tome in the same fashion as I did the other versions. Howard doesn't add to the mythos (again, with the exception of the Men of Leng), but instead it functions as a mostly-understood backdrop for Cabal's ongoing frustrations with reality, both his own and that of alternate planes.

Its worth a read, and in the proper hands, would be good series on NetFlix. But it remains OK.

More later,

Is Cthulhu REALLY a Great Old One?

Here's something that has always bothered me. In H.P.Lovecraft's "The Call of Cthulhu", there's the following passage:

They worshipped, so they said, the Great Old Ones who lived ages before there were any men, and who came to the young world out of the sky. Those Old Ones were gone now, inside the earth and under the sea; but their dead bodies had told their secrets in dreams to the first men, who formed a cult which had never died. This was that cult, and the prisoners said it had always existed and always would exist, hidden in distant wastes and dark places all over the world until the time when the great priest Cthulhu, from his dark house in the mighty city of R’lyeh under the waters, should rise and bring the earth again beneath his sway. Some day he would call, when the stars were ready, and the secret cult would always be waiting to liberate him

Boldface and underlines are mine.Cthulhu, who in later texts is recognized as a one of the Great Old Ones, is referred to here as being a "great priest". Does this mean that Cthulhu is a priest OF these Great Ones, or is he one of the Great Old Ones, and his position among them is that of a Priest (i.e. - he's the cleric of the party)?

Either way, it is is an interesting take on things. If he's a priest who venerates these Great Old Ones, he's subordinate to and separate from them, and the Great Old Ones (of which later writers have constructed an entire pantheon) are unknowable, godish beings who we have never really met. If is a priest among the Great Old Ones, what do these Great Old Ones worship?

Hang on, it gets even more interesting in the next paragraph.

Meanwhile no more must be told. There was a secret which even torture could not extract. Mankind was not absolutely alone among the conscious things of earth, for shapes came out of the dark to visit the faithful few. But these were not the Great Old Ones. No man had ever seen the Old Ones. The carven idol was great Cthulhu, but none might say whether or not the others were precisely like him. No one could read the old writing now, but things were told by word of mouth. The chanted ritual was not the secret—that was never spoken aloud, only whispered. The chant meant only this: “In his house at R’lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming.

So no one has ever seen the Old Ones, but here's a statue of Cthulhu, which we know from the later in the story is a pretty fair representation of his titanic majesty.

So it seems, from this reading, that the entire later industry of Great Cthulhu as one of a pantheon of elder eldritch beings may be off. His fictional worshipers, as well as later real-world chroniclers, have confused and conflated the two, promoting the priest to the godhood itself. Of course, all of this is from a highly unreliable narrator, a mad and degenerate worshiper of these Great Old Ones, On the other hand this is a primary source, THE primary source, of Cthulhu lore.

Anyone have an theory on this?

More later,

Play:Theatrical Exorcism

The Woman In Black, adapted by Stephen Mallatratt, from the novel by Susan Hill, Directed by Robin Herford, Seattle Rep through 24 March.

Pity that I did not see this a few weeks back, when we were supposed to see it, but due to other obligations  had to move the tickets to this past Sunday. And it is a pity because I would recommend it, but it has but a week to play out.

And the play worked for me in part because the Lovely Bride and I went into it stone cold. There were no ads on classical public radio that I caught, no reviews that may have occurred in the press, no summaries that I had a chance to read in advance. And we were caught in traffic on the way up to the theater, so breezed in at the very last moment before the curtain rose, so there was no chance to find out quite WHAT was going on. Indeed, once I tell you, even in the briefest form, your mind will immediately start to work on how it functions as a genre  and as a theater piece, with the certainty of watching a movie's trailer and guessing spoilers.

You see, it is ghost story.

Ahah! I can see immediately that you know what I'm talking about. If there is a ghost story, there is a ghost, so we are already prepared for a haunting, and, armed with that familiarity. like seeing that trailer for a movie, you are already armed with assumptions and expectations. Armored against what is about to happen. Protected.

So, if you have any interest in the play (and you should - it has been running forever on London's East End), you should put aside this review until a later date - once you have seen it or let it pass beyond its current showings. Because it is a ghost story, and telling you that much changes how you see it. But I will tell you more.

The Woman In Black is adapted from a novel by Susan Hill, written in the 80s in the style of the "Female Gothic" novel - You know Jane Eyre, Frankenstein, that sort of thing. Moors and castles and secrets. Yes, now you have more armor, more than when I went in. It was a rather meaty novel, so turning its strengths on the printed page into results on the stage would be a challenge.

And they pull it off. Bradley Armacost is Arthur Kipps, who has hired an actor (known only as The Actor and played by Adam Wesley Brown). Kipps is a solicitor (ah, yes, it is a gothic, so England is its home) who seeks to exorcise a horrific experience in his life by sharing it with friends and family as a presentation.  Kipps is a horrible neophyte to the theatre, to the point of reading the stage directions. The Actor sees the chance of making Kipps personal story something that could reach out and actually engage with others, and embraces him, challenges him, and takes over Kipp's part in his history. So we have The Actor playing the younger Kipps and Kipps playing all the other roles in the play within a play.

Both actors are marvelous. Brown moves between being the theatrical life-coach for Kipps to Kipps himself, neatly and enthusiastically, while Armacost sells us at the get-go as a plodding dullard of a solicitor, who over the course transforms himself into all the people he met on the dogs-end of Britain. Both men sell their selves and we are comfortable with them. And comfort is a part of horror.

I won't go into all the details of the plot - I've given you enough just telling you it is a ghost story. But I will say that stagecraft is wonderful as well. Starting with a bare stage and couple props, the story consumes and expands the world into the wilds of England, such that we are totally taken into the Actor's statement of the theatre selling reality, such that play-within-a-play may as well be the play and be reality. The walls break down, as it were.

But I am interested in how to do horror on the stage. Adapter Mallatratt's presentation adopts novelist Hill's concept of the slow boil of horror, which in theatre has the challenge that the audience may not tolerate anything slow on the stage. Yet the play works as it slowly, slowly turns up the existential unease of book-turned-play-turned-personal-testament, and does so neatly. It starts from a place of comfort and familiarity and ends up breaking the man so you understand in part why Kipps is like he is.

There are a lot of tools at work here. There are jump-scares. There is humor. There are characters and mysteries and things left unsaid and warnings and foreshadowing. There are remote locations and things that cannot be controlled. There are extremely clever things done with lights and sounds. There are sudden frights that leave the audience laughing, but they become uneasy laughs, such that the final revelations are sufficiently scary.

The initiating incident of the play is in people telling ghost stories at Christmas (a British thing), but even telling people "I'm telling a ghost story" gives the audience clues about what to expect - spoilers as it was. Yet that is the way of talking about horror - we get insulated from it - it was a story about someone else, not anyone you know. It is an old book found in the library or some uncle's keepsakes that reveal a Lovecraftian horror beneath the sea or just someone telling a story. Blankets against the cold.

But I have said too much. If you have the chance in the final week, go see it - indeed, one thing I noticed was that much of the crowd was younger, or at least less-grey, than my standard Sunday afternoon matinee. Ignore the posters in the lobby until the intermission (sorry, the interval) and the summary in the program book.  So go see this play, but forget I said anything about ghosts. It's better that way.

More later,

Book: H.P.G.Wodecraft

Scream for Jeeves: A Parody by D.H.Cannon, Illustrated by J.C.Eckhardt, Wodecraft Press, 1994

Provenance: Brain Thomsen, head of the book department at TSR back in the day, lent me a copy of this in the mid-90s. I enjoyed it a great deal, and after I returned it, I kept my eyes out for a copy. Never found one. It was one of these small press, single printings, and never saw it again (apparently, there is a Kindle reprint, because of course there is). In any event my colleague Sacnoth turned up with a copy he was giving away. He had gotten it from a colleague who was cleaning up his library, and my good old chum Sacky had gotten a spare. And because I was the first to speak up, I got the copy (beating out Stan! for it).

Review: So how does it stand up after 20 years? OK. This was put together back in the age when mash-ups (as the kids are calling them nowadays) were pretty much the domain of fandom. The book itself is a series of well-known Lovecraft tails retold with Bertie Wooster as the protagonist. And they are surprisingly good, in that way that cheese and fish are not supposed to go together, but sometimes they are delish.

H.P. Lovecraft wrote a particular style of story: florid in style and nihlistic in outlook, his protagonists rarely survived their brush with the unflinching, uncaring, overpowering mythos. P.G. Wodehouse wrote another particular style of story - light, comedic, well-mannered and veddy, veddy British. Wodehouse's best-known protagonist was Bertrand ("Bertie") Wilberforce Wooster, a well-meaning specimen of the upper class who regularly gets himself in a mess and who is saved regularly by his valet, Jeeves. So how do these worlds collide?

Not badly at all. The world is Lovecraft's, but the viewpoint is Wodehouse's. And in the three stories, Bertie just misses the worst of the eldritch horrors that inhabit the Lovecraftian universe, usually through the efforts of Jeeves, but just as often through his own thick-headed nature. So he remains blithely ignorant of much of the proceedings, as well as their dire, cosmic content.

There are three stories in the volume, plus an essay. Knowledge of the Cthulian canon is an aid, since they are based on three of Lovecraft's tales.  "The Rats in the Walls" transfers into "Rats, Cats, and Bertie Wooster". "Cool Air"  becomes "Something Feotid". And "The Rummy Affair of Young Charlie" should be a Wodehousterized "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward" but instead takes the protagonist of that tale and drops him into the plot of "The Music of Erich Zann", with a dash of Sherlock Holmes from "The Last Bow". References to Faulty Towers, Arthur Machen, and other Lovecraftian tales also abound, so that if you are an invested fan of an these, you will find the Easter eggs abounding. All the tales are illustrated in a 1920s style by J.C.Eckhard which both the flavor of Lovecraft and of Wodehouse and would be suitable for either Weird Tales or Milady's Boudoir.

Lastly in the volume is an essay seeking to tie together Lovecraft, Wodehouse, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, which is a hit and miss affair. Cannon can line up two of his subjects on any point he seeks to make, but the third always seems to be a tough fit. The great connection that I see, years later, is that the three authors have enjoyed a posthumous life through their creations, particularly in the gaming field. Lovecraft's creations thrive on the gaming shelves including a Holmesian adventure in the early Cthulhu by Gaslight set. Holmes himself lives on through a variety of remakes, reinventions, adaptations, lost stories, further adventures. And I have have created characters who bring the Code of the Woosters to the Realms (Giogi Wyvernspur and Tertius Wands) as well as placed a facsimile of the Drones Club in a Baker Street RPG. The inventions of these three creators continue to inspire, and the nature of the worlds they present are ripe fields for future creation.

More later,

Book: Existential Horror

Annihilation by Jeff Vandermeer  Farrar, Straus and Giroux (a division of McMillan) c 2014

Provenance (where I got that book): Elliot Bay Book Company, sometime last year. I really miss the old location near Pioneer Square, so I don't make the new place up on Cap Hill a destination trip, but if I am up there, I drop in, find something interesting, and then buy horribly expensive and bad-for-you ice cream at the nearby Molly Moon's. In this case, the something interesting was this book, in the SF section but presented in a more literary format. I mean, look at the cover. Dominated by the title, tan, heavier stock, embossing, big block letters, the strange alien GREEN plant thing is only really noticeable after you realize you've been looking at the big block letters for fifteen seconds already.

Despite its look (and its text-heavy, bright green back cover), the novel came home and sat on my shelf of abandoned books (more on that somtime later) for a while, until the Lovely B and I went to the movies, where a trailer for the film of the same name (and same concept, but different resolution, I understand). And I said, Yeah, I have that at home. So I took it down and read it.

Review: Annihilation is a very good book about the eradication of self and identity. It has that mounting horror of slowly being swallowed by python, and being conscious of it the entire time. Deep and descriptive, yet enigmatic and questioning, It is one of those book that you realize quite early on will not end well, but you are still drawn through it. From the first line you know that something is off, and as things progress, they will get worse.

Here's the precis: Our protagonist is a member of an all-female team assigned to investigate an anomaly. This anomaly is Area X, a shimmering curtain along a tidal zone, in which the life has ... mutated? transformed? been replaced by? integrated with? ...  alien life. Previous teams into the zone have not come back, save for the protagonist's husband's, and they were deeply altered.

And the send of self-destruction comes from before they even move into the Area X. The team members are not known by name, only by position  - psychologist, surveyor, anthropologist  (our protagonist is the biologist). None get capital letters to their titles. They have old weapons and strange devices on their belts. Only the surveyor gets an assault rifle. Their training was odd and off-base for the mission. Information has been withheld. Hypnotism was involved. Even before they saw the strange plants and creatures of Area X, the erosion of who they were had begun.

And it accelerates quickly. An underground complex that the protagonist cannot help but describe as a tower shows the their reality is quickly shedding its skin around them, leaving behind structures that may be flesh or only the memory of flesh. The sense of creeping dread, slowly swallowing them but not to the point of creating despair, is evident in the pages and masterfully pulled off. It is the calm analysis of the dying which underlies the otherworldly nature of Area X with its vibrant, unexplained alien life. Is what is there being eliminated, or transformed? Does that apply to the protagonist as well?

Annihilation is extremely well-written, evocative, and downright creepy. Not, there are not happy endings, or even much in the way of explanations. No one pops out and says "Well, you see, it is all because of this." And that's OK, but much of the trip of internal, as are the changes. There are two more books in the series, but I don't feel overwhelmed to get to them immediately. The book ends with enough for me to think about, and that's OK.

More later,

Cthulhu Lies Dreaming

Let's do some gaming stuff.

At the recent GameHole Con (Quick review - great convention in Madison, you should go), I ran a part of a Call of Cthulhu campaign I had done years ago. Then characters were all underclassmen at Miskatonic University in March of 1925, when, according to Lovecraft's original short story, The Call of Cthulhu, the Great Old One stirred in his sleep, disturbing the dreams of people throughout the world.

And for this I created some pregens, gave them backgrounds, and had them make a POW check. Those that succeeded got strange dreams. Then I asked them what their term project was in the class.  Here are the characters:

Frank Johnson was our athelete, a football hero playing with the Miskatonic Badgers.
Deborah Blaine was our "New Woman" journalist.
Virginia Frink was our science student - her parents disappeared at Devil's Reef, near Innsmouth
Skip Cavanaugh was our dilettante, changing majors six times in six semesters.
Jedediah Wright comes from a long lines of Congregationalist ministers. He is studying theology.
Samuel Whately is pre-med, and comes from a farming community in Vermont. He interns at St. Mary's in Arkham.

Some made their Power Check, some didn't, but it was an interesting writing challenge. Here are their dreams

Frank Johnson’s Dream

You are in the woods, a thick pine woods. It is a summer night, but a full moon provides ghostly illumination, and the stars twinkle overhead. Your path leads west, towards a clearing. As you approach, white flowers glow in the field below you glow like fireflies, and the stars are obscured by a mounting thunderhead. You watch its moon-limned edges grow on the horizon, until it looms over you.

Then the thunderhead turns, and you see two huge yellow eyes emerging from the mass, and you know the towering creature is no cloud. It screams and you scream and you are awake.

Please make a SAN check.

Deborah Blaine’s Dream

You are at a trendy party, mingling with guests in tux and tails, or sequined gowns. There are waiter carrying trays of champagne and appetizers, and no one seems to care about Prohibition. There is jazz music playing in the distant in an odd minor key. You walk towards people and they turn away from you, some in disinterest, some in fear. You are concerned and try to join small groups that break up as soon as you arrive, and soon you are moving quickly from person to person, only to find the other guests flee from you. Something is wrong with your face.  

You reach a mirror and recoil in horror at yourself. Your face has melted, the skin gathered in on itself to form long, looping tendrils around you nose and mouth. You try to scream, but you cannot – the tendrils themselves coil of their own volition. You reach out to the mirror and your reflection touches you as well, but it reaches through the mirror and grasps you by the wrist, seeking to pull you inside. You awaken in a cold sweat.

Please make a SAN Check

Virginia Frink’s Dream

You are in an old house. Belonging to your parents? You are not quite sure. It’s night, and the ocean thunders outside, and you know without looking that the house is up on a cliff (your parents’ house was nowhere near the shore). There are shouts outside, but you know (someone warned you?) not to look out the windows. The sound of the surf grows louder, and with it the groaning of ancient timbers under sail, and the shouts grow louder as well.

You finally look out the window to see a great sailing ship breaking up on the rocks. The crew is abandoning it, and other dark figures are swarming over it like ants, killing the seamen they encounter and shredding the sails. Behind the wrecked ship is a great wave rising out of the ocean, a single pinnacle of water streaming off all sides.

Then the wave parts and reveals the tip of a huge leathery wing, the ocean itself draining off its flesh. The creature it belongs to, some massive dragon, turns towards you and you sudden awaken.

Please Make a SAN check.

Skip Cavanaugh’s Dream

You dream of a strange, burning city. Even on fire, its buildings seem to flicker and fade into and out of phase with the world, and twist inwards on themselves in patterns that seem to make sense but deny all reality. The buildings are huge, built by ancient giants, and you see people like ants trying to scale them, climbing up their burning sides to avoid the waters below.

Waters. Yes. You are now waist-deep in thick, salty waters. The tide is coming in. No. The city itself is sinking, and the ocean is coming in. You try to run to one of the towering, flaming structures, but you are trapped in mud. Not mud. You are ensnared by tentacles, looping round your legs like strong ropes, holding you in place and dragging you beneath the surface. You open your mouth to scream and salt water pours into your throat.

Please make a SAN check.

Jedidiah Wright’s Dream

You are in a church. Anglican, you would guess, from the amount of decoration and stained glass, and the smell of incense and heavily oiled wooden pews. There are parishioners in the benches, but you have a hard time focusing on them. They seem to fade in and out like ghosts. The stained glass seems to shimmer as well, and its scenes are aquatic in nature – coral, tropical fish, and octopi.

The minister is your father, or your grandfather, with a full white beard and wild white hair, gesticulating and shouting loudly. His words are unclear, but it is a hellfire speech. As you walk up the aisle, you see that he is bleeding from the eyes, the blood running down into his beard. And then you realize it is not a beard at all, but rather a nest of snakes, coiling and coiling like tendrils round his saw-toothed, lamprey-like mouth.

You awaken with a start. Please make a SAN check.

Samuel Whately’s Dream

You are in the morgue in the basement of St. Mary’s. It doesn’t look like the morgue you know, but you are sure of it. Instead of a small room with a bank of drawers holding the deceased you are in a great marble-shod palace, the biers of the dead laid out with military precision in all directions, each body covers in a translucent white sheet. Somewhere, far in the distance, a gong sounds.

The gong sounds again, and the cadavers begin to stir. The gossamer sheets slide from them and you see they are monstrosities, partially unmade through partial autopsies and botched studies. Great surgical wounds crisscross their forms, the skin pulling away from the stitches to reveal the oozing muscles beneath, the organs straining to escape. You run, but there is no place to run, the dead are everywhere.

You awaken in your bed, breathing hard. You catch your breath, and hear you roommate snoring across the room. In the distance you hear the university bell tower. Then the arms of the dead things reach up from beneath your bed and seize you dragging you down beneath the floorboards to join them. You awaken again, but are unsure if you are truly awake.

Please make a SAN check.


More later,

Adventure: Not-So-Pulp Tentacles, Part II

Darkness, Descending by Mike Mason, an adventure from Cthulhu Britannica, from Cubicle 7 Games

Goodness, it has been more than two years since the last time I checked in with my plucky crew of Lovecraftian malcontents? Seems as if. My Call of Cthulhu group is still playing semi-regularly, but for the past few years, we have been working our way through the upgraded Horror on the Orient Express, run by one of my fellow group members. I tend not to review RPGs I am playing a character in, as such a review is a reflection on the limited information my players has, the group the GM/Keeper's style as it is of the product itself. And while I read a lot of Call of Cthulhu gaming material, I don't tend to review THAT publicly without actually taking it out and running it.

Anyway, this is the second of the adventures from the Cthulhu Britannica booklet from Cubicle 7 Games. The first was Bad Company, which I talked about here. The book consists of four adventures for different eras, set (mostly) in Britain. I won't be running the last two for this group, since they have modern and futuristic flourishes which would be difficult to fit into my campaign, in which it is eternally 1928 and consists of a company of random individuals who have come together to fight the Mythos.

The group consists of Smokes, our exiled Chicago gangster; Horace, our spy/newspaper photographer; Cliffy, our aspiring archeologist; JB,our wealthy dilettante, Hyacinth, our author' and her bombastic boyfriend/hero of her novels, Goodwin McNash. My style with them is very pulp/adventure, and I tend to run with more of an eye towards survivability than TPKs. They have been world-travelers, but are based out of London, and I've been eying this adventure as a means of doing something local. Spoilers, of course, follow.

Cliffy's player could not make it, so I used him to bring the others. The young archeologist was assigned to a dig sponsored by Cambridge in the county of Norfolk. A small team working in a small forest found a site of an old Roman settlement. Among the potsherds, tools, and weapon fragments the group found a particularly ugly bat-statue, and Cliffy called in the rest of the team as volunteers.

The bat-statue is one of five vaeyans, used to imprison an Elder God, Cyeagha. Cyeagha can only break free (apparently) on the fall equinox, which is three days away. Removing the vaeyans will allow him to return. Cyeagha has already possessed a local poacher, and is working on one of the archaeological team as well. should Cyeagha escape, bad things happen. Challenge to the players is to figure out what is up, and either keep the Elder God trapped or banish him entirely.

The adventure is based on a Eddy C Bertin's "Darkness, My Name Is", from The Discples of Cthulhu short story collection, moved from Germany to England as its location. It is designed as a one-shot  as opposed to part of a larger ongoing campaign, and shows it, from pre-generated charters with more archaeological backgrounds to a lack of SAN rewards and the general "everyone dies horribly" ending if things go terribly wrong. So some work is needed to make it part of a campaign.

There are some additional challenges for the adventure. A good chunk of the space is made up of describing the inhabitants of Middle Harling, a community to the dig site, but there is nothing within the presented flow of the game to get the players to TO Middle Harling.over the course of the game. This is particularly nasty since some of the clues to explain what is going on are located in Middle Harling, and straightforward playthrough could miss them entirely.

For my session, I dropped them off in Middle Harling at the outset and let them interact with the locals a bit before Cliffy (being run as an NPC) picks them up to take them to the dig site. They are made aware of the local constable and the church and in particular the local pub. While it felt like the first ten minutes of an episode of the old British Avengers TV show - before the small quirky town reveals its dark secret, it actually gave me a good collection of NPCs to do horrible things to later on.

Worse from a playing perspective was that I had no note how far it was from the small town to the dig site. It had to be short enough that that they could come back and interact easily, but far enough away that whatever happened at the site would not immediately become known. I settled for a 45 minute walk (or a half-hour run), but it is something that is pretty basic for the game. In this case, unlike the usual curse of Cthulhu, the maps were pretty good, and had player versions that I could share with relative clarity.

Organization was a pain. Useful information was sometimes lost in body copy or in numerous sidebars, such that despite it being a short adventure, I kept flipping back and forth trying to find some scrap of data that I swore I knew was in there. Plus, the entire section on Middle Harling itself was banished to the back, after the adventure itself, making it unclear when or where the players would encounter it.

And the handouts were a bit odd, with Library Use getting standard information on "What is an Equinox?" while the translation of an old Latin tablet gets a summary as opposed to a full translation. This is worse because it has an incantation to trap Cyeagha, without any clue to what it says (there is a second spell to defeat Cyeagha utterly which is presented in such an off-handed way I'd be surprised to see anyone understanding and using it).

Art was a bit off as well, as the description of Cyeagha's minions (vomitting forth black tendrils) did not quite match up with the art of half-melted, tentacle-armed individuals, but that part is minor.

In play, however, the townsfolk were surprisingly useful, and I could show the madness that the players take for granted slowly dawning on them. The vicar who translated the tablet for them went more than a little mad, the constable was overwhelmed by sudden deaths, and one of the farmers met a messy end at the hands/tentacles of the possessed poacher. The investigators did have enough action and mystery, and headed down a few wrong paths before they understood that they needed to re-bury the statues (and re-chant the locking spell for the good measure). The poacher (unkillable, slimier each time he returned, and the possessed archeologist made a last-minute assault to break the magical seal on the their god, but ultimately, the player characters survived. And, being an ongoing campaign, they had to figure out how they would seal off the area to prevent anyone else from trying to break the thing open again (like - what about NEXT equinox?)

In general it was OK, but it required a bit more work than I had put in with the Goodman Games versions. Still, it provided a nice base that one can spin an adventure out of, and merits a revision to strengthen the parts that could be part of a long-standing campaign.

More later,

Book: Midsummer Night's Dreamquest

The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe by Kij Johnson, TOR Books, 2016

Provenance: Kij Johnson was a colleague at Wizards of the Coast and one of the ringleaders of a writer's group I belonged to (The Thousand Monkeys) more than a decade ago. I saw mention of the novella on the book of Face and the Lovely Bride ordered it from Amazon as a Christmas present. I am glad I got it in hard copy so I may press it upon friends to read it as well.

I have spoken of Lovecraft before. I love his cosmic vision, enjoy his prose, tolerate his poetry, and detest his racism. But I have also said that it is the nature of creation to have other creators arrive and develop, add, and subtract. That is what Kij Johnson has done here, to amazing effect.

Vellit Boe is a professor at the Ulthar Women's College in the Dreamlands. One of her students, Clarie Jurat, the daughter of a major supporter, has run off with a man from the Waking World, a dreamer, Vellit Boe must find Clarie and convince her to return before her father finds out. That sets Vellit off on a mission that leads from the stairs to the Waking World to the court of King Randolph Carter to the ghoul warrens below, as the situation becomes more dire with every step.

And it works. Vellit Boe's dreamlands is a "real" world with its shapechanging sky, few stars, monstrous inhabitants, capricious gods and questionable geography. It is a dreamworld with a grounded sense, a trust in its own mutability.  It has its own rules - they are just unlike ours, and change at a whim.

It is a world with its own gender issues - this is the Dreamlands shown from a female perspective. It does not negate what has gone before, but recognizes that it is a male viewpoint with male heroes and male interactions. The women were always there, it says, but confined to the scenery, to the background, to the support team. Kij brings these women forward, aware of the hurdles before them  - Dorothy Sayers' Harriet Vane would be comfortable in Johnson's Ulthar. Exceptional women are still considered unusual. The timeline is also advanced, to say that the Dreamlands exists in a hundred years back - the Women's College is a new thing, and there are steam engines and mechanical farm equipment in this version.

Yet while even subverting it, Johnson remains true to the work. There are the zoogs and the gugs, and the world pivots on the caprices of the gods sleeping in distant Kadash. The seriousness of the situation, and the doom that hangs upon Vellit Boe, deepens the further she goes on the hunt. It lacks the nihilism of Lovecraft, but does not shy from the hard choices.

And the tale is a perfect novella. Love or loathe Lovecraft's style, it often involves ornate flourishes and arcane terminology. Vellit Boe's language is tight and precise and the book is just as long as it needs to be. It could have been a short story, but a little cramped, ticking off locations, more paean than prose. And it could have been a thumping large fantasy epic, or even a trilogy, where you are ten chapters in even before Claria disappears. But  it is not, and its economy serves it well.

This is a contender for the Hugos and Nebuli this year, barring any further weirdness from the Sad Bunnies and their ilk for whom good fiction is unrecognizable and anathema. Read it now and avoid the rush.

More later,

Fifteen Authors

So, there's been a meme rolling around the facebooks about fifteen authors who have influenced your work. And while my name has been dropped a couple times (which is appreciated), I have not yet been tagged. But I do have my list, and am putting it here, since it requires a few more comments than I would want to burden the nets with.  The thing is I wanted to think about authors that influenced me, and note how they did so.

Here we go:

Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens)  is the quintessential American Author, and the first one that left his mark. Read Finn and Sawyer and Yankee in my youth, and devoured as many of his short stories as a man could humanly consume and still leave room for desert (though for the life of me, have never been able to finish The Innocents Abroad). Returned to the books I read as a kid and found so much more there. His satire was biting, and his writing style was natural and colloquial - you imagine him sitting on the front veranda listening to him spin a tale, a thimbleful of brandy untouched on the settee next to you because you don't want to interrupt him by reaching for it.

J. R. R. Tolkien is of course at the foundation stone for any western fantasy author of the past forty years. Grandfather Tolkien distilled the mythology of Northern Europe into stories that epitomized the middle of the Twentieth Cent. Gary Gygax always denied that he was influenced by Tolkien in D&D, and I believe him. But the the other influences he did have were niched or out of print by the time the game arrived and unknown to his market, while Tolkien was not. Plus the fact that the races available to the players (and therefore their first experience with the game) were directly out of the Council of Elrond. From Tolkien we get the epic nature of fantasy, the intensity of world-building, the ensemble as a fantasy trope, and, for good or ill, the idea of fantasy lives in trilogies and is sold by the pound.

Ursula K. Le Guin is my anti-Tolkien. Compact, neatly plotted, and personal, her fiction is stands in comparison with the massive triple-deckers that docked in the bookstore shelves in the 80s and 90s (a few of which I might have penned). Earthsea's first three small books in particular was delightful for what it did not reveal as opposed to what it did - there is worldbuilding here, but it did not get in the way of the characters. Loved Lathe of Heaven but could not get my teeth into Dispossessed.

P. G. Wodehouse should be of no surprise to those who have encountered Giogi Wyvernspur and Tertius Wands. I came upon Wodehouse early in my marriage, at a time before the Fry and Laurie version on the TV, when knowledge of the pair was more limited, and found Woodhouse's banter delightful. The saying is that Wodehouse wrote one story for sixty years, but his plots really were as convoluted as a door-banging French farce, and the raw pressure moving the story forward is incredible. The one to read is Code of the Woosters.

Hunter Thompson probably is a surprise (or not) because of his drug-fueled cynicism and habit of installing himself in his nonfiction. I found him when he was writing for Rolling Stone and I was in college. He is responsible for my use of the word "mojo wire" for any form of electronic communication. Foul-mouthed and observant, his best is Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72. A cleaned-up version of him (with more than a dash of Chicago columnist Mike Royko) showed up as the protagonist in Liberty's Crusade.

Arthur C. Clarke brought me into SF in junior high. In the Titusville Library, I found a copy of 2001: A Space Odyssey, which started with the line: "Behind every man alive now stands thirty ghosts". (It's wrong, but it's a great opening line). Loved Childhood's End (though it seriously creeped out the Lovely Bride). His short fiction, collected in books like The Wind from the Sun and Tales of the White Hart, is where he is at his best. I love how he could put a stinger in his final line of a story ("If any of you are still white, we can cure you").

Ray Bradbury, on the other hand, is the lyrical master, the wordsmith, the Norman Rockwell taking small-town America to the stars. Martian Chronicles was the one that kept coming back to me, stitched together of  published stories and vignettes to create an interplanetary How the West was Won. He is both comfortable and chilling.

Harlan Ellison is like Clarke in that he is a master of the last line. There was a time when EVERYTHING he wrote was in print and available on the shelves at Von's bookstore in West Lafayette, Indiana. He excelled at short stories, but gains his status here as an editor - I discovered his Dangerous Visions earlier in high school, and had my mind blown by the borders of SF being pushed back. His career has gone from terrible infant to grey eminence, but he has been my favorite sort of writer - a working one.

Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler are a matched set for me, and I will get the two confused. Hammett gave us characters like Sam Spade, Nick and Nora Charles, and the Continental Op (who is a favorite for me). He encapsulated noir, where the hero suffers for doing  justice. Chandler taught me the importance of location as character - his stories of Phil Marlowe made LA (legendary from the Gertrude Stein quote of having no "there there") into a character. Chandler also wrote what is to my mind (and a bunch of other people as well) the best opening paragraph ever:

There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot, dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands' necks. Anything can happen. You can even get a full glass of beer at a cocktail lounge. - "Red Wind"

He evokes the setting, but the undercut at the end, the joke, the punchline is what drives it home.

Frank Herbert wrote one of my favorite SF books: Dune, and for that if nothing else he deserves his place on the list. There is so much stuff going on here: Adventure Fiction, Man against Nature, Coming of Age, Strong Female Characters, Court Intrigue, Mysticism, Utopia, Dynastic Revenge, Cultures in Conflict, all wrapped up in an epic tale on a distant planet in the far future. It is what I was shooting at with The Brothers' War - a huge book that did not feel padded. Dune was muscle tissue all the way through. For me, it was a perfect book that could have just stopped there. The sequels were OK (Children of Dune was excellent), but the longer it went, the more of the life was bled out of it, and I never followed up on the authorized postmortem texts. Always the book I pick out from the shelves  on a whim and then find myself fully rereading.

William Gibson is the author I read in hardback. I may know his literary moves by heart these days, but starting with Neuromancer he has charted a course in the future that has looped, by sharded realities, back onto the present. Again, he's a master of the first line, building the world and encapsulating it on the welcome mat. "The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel". Not "a" television, but just television. The rest of the world just follows naturally.

Barbara Tuchman represents for the Non-Fiction-Authors for me, her A Distant Mirror is as meaty as any Tolkienian Appendix. She managed to pull off both common life and political machinations, and influenced my part of Cormyr, a Novel with Ed Greenwood (I wrote the past chapters, he wrote the modern stuff). Daniel Boorstin's The Discoverers and William Manchester's A World Lit Only by Fire also deeply inspired my work and worldbuilding.

George Orwell and Sinclair Lewis round out my fifteen, as they both fit in my mind as "political writers". Animal Farm is Orwell's best to my mind, while I found his Down and Out in Paris and England to be excellent, it arrived late in my own career arc. Lewis's Babbitt I read in high school and keep by my computer just to plunge into a few paragraphs of his pithy observations of 1920's booster-ism and American life. Sort of like the News from Lake Wobegon with more teeth.

There were a lot of near misses. Just recently discovered Nero Wolfe, devouring his work with the passion of a mid-life fling, but cannot call him an influence. Patrick O'Brian's naval stories define the genre, but reading them was something I picked up from Margaret Weis, and except for one short story, that potential influence lies unrealized. Zelazny's Amber Chronicles (the first five, thank you) were just nudged out by Dune. I like Lovecraft yet cannot fully embrace his nihilism. I cannot endorse C. S. Lewis without confessing I never read Narnia. I enjoy both Howard Waldrop and China Mieville but cannot say they have been influential. Bill Burroughs pushes out beyond Hunter Thompson into stranger lands. I will confess that, when left alone in the house, I will pull a copy of Allen Ginsberg's Howl I purchased at City Lights bookstore in SF off the shelf and read it aloud, scaring the cats.

 Of my own ragtag bunch of colleagues and contemporaries, Lester Smith and Rob King's work will be discovered and discussed long after our fantasy realms are forgotten, and Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman embody Chandler's exhortation to "exceed the limits of a formula". Troy Denning and Doug Niles will be rewarded for their long labor in the literary fields in some retrospective. And in the aforementioned Cormyr, Ed Greenwood did a fly-through of a second-story restaurant in Arabel that has nothing to do with the plot but is just flat-out brilliant. But they are the writers of my time and place, and my considerations of their works are wrapped up with late-night conversations, parties and volleyball games, and drinks at a Lake Geneva bar, their influence more than just words on paper, and that very personal connection takes them off the list (with my apologies).

Those are my fifteen. What are yours?

More later,

My Year in Books: Ant Farm

[This year, I was curious about what I was reading, so when I finished a book I put it on an ever-growing pile by my desk. This is the last one in the series.]

Le Livre Des Fourmis (The Book of Ants) by Robin D. Laws, Pelgrane Press, 2014.
Provenance: Purchased at GenCon from Robin D. Laws, who also gave his autograph with the note: Vive la Revolution Surrealiste!

I don't review game products here. Wait, let me back up and clarify that on two points. I don't review game products that I have not actually played. Reviewing a game based on the printed word is sort of like reviewing a play by reading the script - it doesn't tell the full story. There are numerous reviews of adventures that I have run for our Call of Cthulhu group. The other clarification is that I promote other people's games without fear, particularly if they've just released something. For me to delay a review due to my slow reading habits should not stand in the way of you finding out about cool and new stuff.

Anyway, this is bit of fiction in that it ties into a recently published adventure setting called Bookhounds of Paris, which uses the Trail of Cthulhu game system. I've played Trail of Cthulhu, though have not run it (the amazing Steve Winter was the GM), and don't have the game product that might illuminate this further. But it stands on its own as a nicely weird merger of the Cthulhu Mythos (in particular the Dreamlands) with the avant garde artists of the interwar period.

The volume is presented as a diary (in the form that CoC players know well) by Henri Salem, a supposedly minor player in the artistic politics in Paris between the wars. He hangs with Andre Breton, Jacques Vache, Pablo Picasso, Max Ernst, and Salvador Dali (yeah, keep your Wikipedia open - I knew about half these guys before I started in on the work). They are a cliquish and diverse group, continually squabbling and factionalizing as they try to move forward (or backwards, or sidewards) the cause of Surrealism and thereby change the world. In the midst of this Salem's bunch discovers how to access the Dreamlands.

The Dreamlands were a Lovecraftian creation, a setting for many stories and in particular poems. Expanded and explored over the years in stories and games by other hands, they have their own parrallel existence. The surrealistic movement of the 20s and 30s worked to break down the walls between the conscious and unconscious nature of man, between dreams and reality. They considered what they were doing a form of enlightenment, a philosopher of which its art was considered mere artifact, by-product of the process of awakening and overturning the world. They are perfect candidates for exploring the Dreamlands.

The cool thing is, that in discovering the Dreamlands, the surrealists begin to change them. As opposed to a traditional fantasy domain, these Dreamlands are more fluid, responding the power of the dreamers themselves. So the Surrealists do change the world, only not the one they are thinking of.

I really like this for this effect, and by Laws way of threading the reality of the movement and its petty politics in with the arcane and mystical. Being Lovecraftian, things end badly for those involved, as it does in the real world for many of the participants. The book is an engaging, twisted melding of two great flavors, and now I suppose I must hunt down the game product to see what they did with it there.

More later,

The Gaming News

I have been a tad busy this month, but would hate to let September slip away without some Gaming News.

Let me start with the good news: Jim Ward has gone home from the hospital and is on the mend. He really appreciated all the kind words and cards. Two months in the hospital is enough to make a man despair, and the support was greatly appreciated.

Also good news: former TSR editor Jim Lowder has been taken on as the consulting editor for Chaosium's  Fiction line. The original series of books edited by Robert Price and others were important in spreading the mythos further, and I look to see what the future holds for this.

Speaking of Cthulhu, Oscar Rios, who has put together the excellent Islands of Ignorance and Tales of the Crescent City, has launched a new kickstarter for Tales of the Caribbean, taking the mythos into the lands of rum-runners and voodoo. Oscar has delivered some excellent books so far, and I have no doubt that this will be a strong addition to his line.

Finally, Jon Peterson, has tracked down the script for the nigh-legendary D&D movie, the one that Gary Gygax was working on. Even at the time I was working at TSR, this project, announced in the pages of DRAGON magazine, was the stuff of legend. Jon walks us through the script beats.

That is it for the moment. October may be a bit bleak here as well, at least up to release day. After that, more later.

Adventure: Pulp Tentacles VIII - A (P)Review

Starfall Over the Plateau of Leng by Jon Hook, an Age of Cthulhu Adventure from Goodman Games.

This is an interesting situation. Those readers who have hung on through this blog through thin and thinner know that I will review adventures, but primarily adventures that I have run, which for the past few years has been the Age of Cthulhu adventures from Goodman Games. But because I want to run them first before reviewing them, such reviews usually trail the release of the product by months.

Not so in this case. After swatting Goodman Games about the head and shoulders, one of the authors finally got in contact with me and asked if my group would playtest the next upcoming adventure. We did so, and delivered a healthy chunk of advice, comments, and nit-picking, I was more recently asked if I wanted to do a review of the mostly-finished product, since they are currently doing a kickstarter to get the thing printed. As a result of all this, this review has a different tone than others that have appeared in this space. Previously I have been comfortable of issuing a spoiler warning and then going off on my merry way, since so much time has passed that most of those who initially purchased the adventure would have time to play it. Here I must be more circumspect, in that I don't want to give too much away. I am going to try to keep the facts revealed to those on the Kickstarter page itself.

Here is the short version - It was a very good adventure in the initial draft, and it is even better now. The changes made involved some tucking in of historical nits, answering a few open questions, and sharpening up some NPC motivations. It gives the players an excellent doorway into the Dreamlands, Lovecraft's semi-medieval dimension world that lays alongside our own reality.

The adventure opens with an assignment - the investigators are charged by a historical society, IHAS (no cheeseburger jokes - we told them all already) to track down an artist who has gone suspiciously silent. IHAS stands for International Historical and Archaeological Society, and serves as a starting point for investigators from diverse backgrounds to operate under a common origin. Such societies are a bit perilous in games, in that if they are too knowledgeable about the mythos, the players tend to treat them as a crutch, going to them whenever they need info. If they are too much in the dark, they tend to be useless. This one strikes the balance between monster and whirlpool and provides a solid launching point for the adventure.

For my ongoing group, I had already brought them together as a group, so this was less a worry. The group currently consists of the The Writer, Her Heroic Subject, the Secret Agent/Photographer, the Archaeology Student, the Wealthy Dilettante and the Mobster. They are based out of London as opposed to Arkham, so I managed a little shifting about that seemed to work out well. IHAS operates out of a London Club within my universe, and I have previously used club society as a way to introduce other NPCs for adventures.

Back to the plot. IHAS was dealing with an artist, but the artist had a major mental crackup, and was sent away for a cure in Eureka Springs, Arkansas. Now no word is coming out the sleep clinic she was bundled off to, and would the characters be so kind as to give a look-in? For my group, this had the added benefit that the Mobster was on the run from Chicago organization, so going back to the states involved some sleight-of-hand and laying low. For the adventure, it gives you a great deal of information on the path between Arkham and Eureka Springs, including rules for thumbing a lift.

Eureka Springs has its horrors, but the investigators' path ultimately leads to the Dreamlands and its fabled Plateau of Leng (its in the title - I give nothing away here). The challenge for any Dreamlands adventure is getting the player there in the first place, and Starfall gives it to you in spades. In the course of play I sent one character there physically, one by use of a new skill, one who drank the dream brew, and the remainder with a mystic ceremony. Oh, and one I spiked his chicory when nothing else worked. The adventure leads, by twists and turns, to the Pharos of Leng, a mighty lighthouse that is bringing down upon it the destruction of both Dreamlands and reality.

So how does it all come together? It is less the blazing pulp of the previous previous Indian adventure, and is a good intro to Dreamlands without getting too deep into the separate world (ownership of any of the various editions of the Chaosium Dreamlands book is helpful but not required). The adventure itself is neatly self-contained and does not commit your adventurers to a long-term campaign in the Dreamlands (unless, of course, they want it).

For my own group's adventures, I would mention the Mobster playing hide-and-seek with other members of the Chicago Outfit, the point the group was almost defeated by a staircase, the fact they could actually use the Tibetian they had learned in a previous adventure, experiments with the Dreaming Skill, the Writer in mourning over the death of her Heroic Subject and the Heroic Subject dressed in a kilt made of Zoog pelts. But to say more would involve spoilers.

One thing that I am inordinately pleased about is the maps and illos. Bradley K. McDevitt does his usual wonders with the black and white art style, and Tom Martin gets the nod for the maps. But this adventure gets kudos for avoiding the traditional "Curse of Cthulhu" - maps which are unclear, or contrary to the text they are supposed to co-ordinate with. Nicely done on that.

As mentioned above, Goodman Games is doing a Kickstarter, and at the time of this writing it has a week to run. It has already made its nut, and is now reaching for stretch goals - at the moment, the reward is a mini-adventure for Eureka Springs, which would a cool thing to have if your group is the type that needs to cool its heels while translating something from Polish, or something similar. Its worth checking out and supporting, because this is an excellent entry into Lovecraft's Dreamlands.

More later,