Up from the OSR - Venger Satanis and the C'orny C'ult of C'thulhu

 (as always mostly going on a decade or so old parcel of memories, so please feel free to correct or expand on anything)

Like a lot of OSR personages I found out about in the latter half of the OSR, well after I first stopped blogging for a long while, I heard about Vengir Satanis on a blog I am ashamed to admit I looked at from time to time: "Yourdungeonissuck," a trollsite that targeted many in the OSR (including my humble self). 

The very first thing that stuck right out to me was the name. Satanis? Cool. Could be the name of the wizard character of a metalhead from back in jr. high. Good enough. But Venger? As far as I can tell, he took this name from a cartoon character. 

A demon that threatens school children. 
So, cool, I guess. 

What little I saw at the time was that he was a Wisconsin native (what is with that place? It's all satanists and serial killers). He was involved in, or even founded, a Cthulhu cult of some kind. Heavy on the Anton Levay as well. 

Anton in the 80's working on his
5th level fighter. Or maybe doing
a dark incantation of some sort. 

And Venger from a few years
ago. Shave yer head and grow
a bitchin goatee and you got
yerself some Anton in the mirror

LeVay was sort of a bargain basement Allister Crowley. A San Francisco suburb resident who in the 70's started his own little Church of Satan by hanging black drapes and Baphomet symbols in his garage, and inviting heavy metal dudes and C list celebs to pray before an alter with a naked chick on it. But Anton seemed more Forrest J. Ackerman than Crowley.

"Ooga booga!"

Anton's most famous tidbit was he was in love with Church member Jayne Mansfield back in the day, and when rejected told her he will curse her to die in a car wreck, which she did. 

"Ooga Booga!"

Anton capering around in satan cosplay reminds me
of this MST3K classic..

I actually first encounter LeVay in my first teenage job at Waldenbooks. There on the shelf either in the occult or the comedy section was The Satanic Bible. 

reading it at the mall foodcourt
will get you some looks. Maybe
a loogie in your Chick Fil A
chicken sammich

Yeah, I read it. I fuckin' stole it like a lot of books I owned at the time. Fuck you Walden! As a DnD kid of the 80's I had to have a look. I was also s slowly falling Catholic so it was perfect. It was chock full of "fuck you, Jesus" sort of stuff.

Yer mother sucks in hell, Karras...

Though a bargain basement Allister Crowley, it was more approachable Satanism. No esoteric number crunching or Prater Parado crap. But it was full of some corny shit. One bit of life advice I remember was not washing so you don't remove your smelly body oils and smells, which he somehow thought chicks were into. As a matter of fact, he talked about a guy who wanted to get busy with a fishermans daughter that he was in love with, so he wiped himself down with fish to get a nice crusty seaman odor to attract the lass. I put the book down and never looked back. Outside of the Mansfield thing, and naked chicks on basement altars, it was fairly cheese. 

I don't know about casting spells on C level celebs or what not, but early on Venger was high priesting it up in The Cult of Cthulhu. VS discovered DnD around 10 years old an Cthulhu stuff a few years later, which is in line with my experience. Though I never considered it as a religious path (HP Lovecraft was plainly fiction, you see). Venger did, whether serious or not. Here is a snippet from an old interview (undated).

 Since foundation, the Cult has been both wildly successful and devoid of meaningful manifestations, depending on the day.  It’s a struggle to keep busy in the right direction when there are so many false paths open to us.  I’ve written two official books, CoC bibles, if you will; and enough essays and articles to fill a third.

  The organization was meant to live and spread the Fourth Way teaching of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky within a Left Hand Path context.  Self-deification is our chief aim, always has been, always will be.  Of course, the slimy green tentacles of cosmic horror only add to the eldritch mélange.  The Mythos gives us visual aid, a different kind of structure.  The Left Hand Path is like a code of conduct, whereas Lovecraft’s shambling alienage is more a code of aesthetics.

His cult name? "Venger As' Nas Satanis." It was an early indication of his love for apostrophe. 

I cannot find current citation, but I do remember all those years ago when I first heard of him, he had talked somewhere about hostile shakeups or something among the cult membership. He left the group, maybe? I dunno. 

Maybe it did not meet expectations?

Maybe it got harder and harder to take seriously. I mean, not long into the 2000's you started seeing Cthulhu plushes and the great old one's precense showing up in popular media, more often in a comedic context. 

I think the DnD setting Veng created, Cha'alt, kind of took the place of the Lovecraft focus. 

He describes the setting thus:

Cha'alt is an eldritch, gonzo, science-fantasy, post-apocalyptic campaign setting + megadungeon for old school and 5e D&D. It's 216 pages of places, people, races, monsters, spells, magic items, and weirdness for your roleplaying game of choice (including my own Crimson Dragon Slayer D20, which is included in the appendix). Suitable for levels 0-10. Amazing, full-color layout and artwork the likes of which you have never seen, nor will you ever see again!

Gonzo it seemed. With influences that seemed to run the gamut, from cheesy 70's Sci Fi, 80's tits and ass low budget sorcery, some Lovecraft shit still, and Saturday morning fantasy cartoons on acid. 

 

Manos Hand of Fate? I
get that reference!

???

Venger was producing all kinds of product related to his game. Time was marching on. You see him pop up in forums like Dragonfoot, and even Your Dungeon is Suck. He liked to call people "Hoss." Along with him liking to throw up a devil sign and exclaim "What's up, Motherfuckers!" as his call sign. Nothing wrong with that I guess. Kind of cringy, but fuck, we are gamers so we are kind of cringy. "Hoss."

In his earlier images, Venger is a fit and buff dude who spent a lot of time in the gym. He showed up in pictures in a tank top more than he did in black robes.

Bu the years passed. There was a transformation, like with most of us I guess. The guy has a wife and two kids, and though I don't, my older brothers did. And when you have kids it's hard not to eat like a kid. The good priest of evil softened up a bit. Some grey getting into the bitchin' Anton LaVey goatee. 

Not sure the gawds of Cha'alt would approve
of the hippy dippy Tie Dye tee..

Apparently, his stuff had some popularity and a following.  A nice addition I guess to his real estate professional earnings. He became a regular on a vlog along with The RPG Pundit, that very often degraded into political talking points (the left these days seems to embrace satanism, but he is a staunch conservative). 

I think they ended the stream last August. 

I also remember some time ago he posted about offering a year of DM experience and running weekly games for the tidy sum of 50 grand. I think I spit out my beer when I read that. I am not sure it happened. Who would pay for that? That much? But then, maybe he is more popular than I imagined. Or maybe it was a psi op. 

In recent years Venger started his own little convention in Wisconsin. Capped at 50 people, I think it started at maybe a little more than a dozen people attending, and in the sequel cons it get up to a whopping couple dozen. 

OK, look. I can fucking joke. Plenty of corny shit about me to be joked about. So I spread the love. But you know what? I can joke, but I can't hate. The guy does what he loves. He gets a little over a dozen dudes to attend his con? Instead of worrying, he is jazzed about it. He gets a handful more at the next one, and he is over the moon. I mean, its an OSR thing. I would sit there worried that nobody will show up. He does the thing, he games in person including with fans of his setting. And he doesn't have to have them in his house where he has to worry about what they are doing in his bathroom. 

I think it was early last year that he announced he would no longer be publishing. He had gone from a few hundred in sales a month to less than a hundred. I remember feeling kind of bad for the guy. But I actually thought I read somewhere that no, he still will publish some stuff. I dunno, maybe it will be a flexible thing? 

But you can't get too heartbroken. He is in the zeitgeist of the OSR. He has gotten talked about for years in forums. He had been targeted by Your Dungeon is Suck plenty, and I was told long ago that is high praise.

Whatever it is, keep plugging away with the corn and cheese, good priest of d'ar'k'ness. There can never be too much cheese in the world. 

Find his blog at https://vengersatanis.blogspot.com/

Cheers

"Up from The OSR" - Grognardia

 

(Please note: much of what I will be writing about here comes from memories dating back at 10 years or more. Please feel free to correct me if anything is false or at least misunderstood)

In March of 2008, James Maliszewski, long time rpg enthusiast and sometimes writer in the genre, started his gaming blog Grognardia. His first ever post is here. 

This was around the time I had gotten back into regular running of games after a few years mostly off, and started a group in Santa Monica that went on for almost 10 years. One of the first things I discovered while poking around game stuff online was the Grognardia blog, where James was talking about old gaming stuff. Products, modules, mags, systems. I remember thinking "I am an aging gamer who has played since childhood. I can write stuff!" And I did. I started this blog, for good or ill, a few months after the Grognardia premier. 

If I recall JM is a Canadian who was living in Baltimore during the heyday of his blog. Wife and kids. A job maybe. He did some amount of writing for potentially some kind of money. I think in the late 90's he was freelancing for Wizard Magazine. I was an avid reader of Wizard back then. I had not regularly collected comics for years by then, but I followed a lot of what was going on in comics. And Wizard evolved to cover card games and even rpg's to a degree. Just a little tangent here; Wizard had tremendous art within, sometimes full-page posters, but the covers were the big draw. Impulse buy bait to be sure.

I was still going into Hi Di Ho comics in Santa Monica and reading comics for an hour every couple weeks though I wasn't really collecting anymore. I would justify my browsing by buying a copy of Wizard or Toyfare. Another great mag to look at. Mostly due to all the lovely images of the amazing action figure market of the day. I was also a bit of a speculator back then. When Ebay started up I made a small fortune over a couple years selling comics and figures until that bubble burst.

To continue this aside, Toyfare had features where they would pose figures with word balloons and panels and do little skits with them. I am certain Seth Green read these and years later came up with Robot Chicken.

Anyway, I don't know what other pro of semi-pro writing  James did, White Wolf I think, but his blog was bursting at the seams. Sometimes three posts in a day. And the old school goodness really took me back. 

In the early to mid 2010's, James was plugging away creating things to sell on his blog. One item eventually was a Traveller inspired spacegame he called "Thousand Suns." Not to be confused (I think) with a previous Traveller homage from years back called "Fading Suns." JM will tell you all about it in a recent substack post Even seems he is doing a new edition and even adventures for it? OK. The market is fairly flooded with lots of product, but god speed with that, sir. 

But the most well know attempt at product sales was his personal dungeon, Dwimmermount. 

early...ahem..inspiring art from
it. Hee made a whole post about.
I do not think there was any info
about fighters delving into dungeons
with Grandma in tow.  

JM had been posting about his home game Dwimmermount from early on. A very basic dungeon setting with some homebrew elements (dwarves don't procreate through sex, there are aliens or some such, etc). He ran for friends and family. My takeaway over many posts was there was not a lot of investment in the game play by the folks. He openly admitted that there were distractions (I think the TV was on sometimes) and derailing conversations.  This was not the first time I recall James admitted a probably annoying issue with folk in his live games, but putting a brave and understanding face on it. At something called OSRcon James ran a game, and Ken St. Andre of Tunnels and Trolls fame played and proceeded to destroy the session with antics that included cutting orcs face off and wearing it and going "ooga booga" at everybody. In his post about it James was clearly annoyed but took an "aw well" attitude about it. The right thing to do I guess. But I can tell you James does not like being annoyed. More on that later. 

Ken at some convention or another trying to 
impress the chicks. Or something. 

James posted around 2009 that he wanted a few players to join him in some play by posts on the OD&D Discussion Boards. I guess this was the beginning of his playtesting to market the dungeon. I was back then still a commentor in good standing on Grognardia, and I threw my hat in the ring. It was a low commitment thing so why not (also low commitment by JM, but into that in a moment). 

We rolled 3d6 in order. Got a 15 to put in INT Enough to be a low caliber MU for me, so I created Thurston "Thirsty" Brewer, a pub owners' son. He had like a 6 CON so I made him a skinny alcoholic and decided he looked like bedraggled actor Steve Buscemi. 

Amazingly, there are plenty of images of
Steve wearing robes if you google it.

I found an old post by me talking about it, among other things. 

Over a couple of weeks our characters entered the dungeon and explored a handful of rooms and passages. I really do not recall there being any combat. I mostly remember something about a magical pool and some baby giant spiders running along the ceiling towards some destination. More or less nothing of note. Anyway, James just stopped posting. After a couple of days we were like "Um, James? After over a week we just assumed he "went out for a pack of smokes and never came back."

It was weird. I mean, we committed to him and this little campaign. What was weirder, he was still posting on Grognardia daily. Sometimes twice a day. But he fucking left us hanging. Not a big deal, but disrespectful was certainly a fair way to feel about it. Just a quick post "sorry guys, I just got real busy and cannot finish up right now. I will keep in touch about this if we can get back to it." But nope. It remains a mystery to this day. I may have been miffed a bit about the lack of a single word to that little pbp crew. In the link a couple paragraphs up you can check a bit how I felt about my impressions of Dwimmermount from my experiences, and James own play reports over the previous couple years. This was around 2012 when the kickstarter was kicking ass to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars. 

Below are a couple paragraphs I wrote on it then. Certainly, one can tell I had grown my own little attitude about my experiences in the OSR, which whether by my own sometimes behavior or the behavior of others, I was getting fairly negative sometimes. 

As anybody reading this probably knows, Grognardia James’ Dwimmermount dungeon, a recent surprise hit on Kickstarter (close to 50 grand in profit), has been getting some gameplay and a few early reviews (the entire dungeon has yet to be finished). A lot of reviews from fairly moderate sources have not been good. A lot of the dislike seems to be in the presentation of those classic old dungeon tropes that James has been so enamored of and blogging about for years. Empty, dusty rooms with no real function having to be explored and searched. Minimalist room occupant description such as the orcs n’ gold combo mentioned above. Dungeon dressing with no interaction or function. Not exactly inspiring.

See, none of that gives me those kiddy thrills anymore, and apparently others who actually paid for that dungeon agree. I read Grognardia for a couple of years faithfully, and the recounting of Dwimmermount game sessions was probably part of why I was no longer reading every day. No knock at James; I only started this blog, my first and only, when I heard him on some podcast I listened to through dumb luck, and checked out his blog and saw old modules I loved being talked about. But man, the later old school gameplay presented in session reports did not exactly draw me in like I guess it has some others. The Gygaxian mandates and strict adherence to them became a turn off. I actually had a chance to briefly explore the early Dwimmermount in the ill fated thread sessions James started on OD&D Discussion, but that didn’t get far. James dropped that like a hot potato around week two, with no explanation or apology. But hey, those forum play by post sessions tend to be kind of a clusterfuck anyway. Maybe that’s why James jumped out the bathroom window and never looked back.

So am I the only one who has tired (again) of this classic D&D dungeon play? Is the whole mythic maze-underworld something that has popped up as some sort of delayed nostalgia? On forums such as Dragonsfoot, the humanoids are still constantly bleeping and durping about this or that aspect of classic dungeons with childlike glee. Minimalist description dungeon locations the size of Disneyland still seems to be the wheelhouse of the so called “OSR.”

He ran another play by post around 2012 for backers of the thing. I have no idea how that went. It was on G+ I think, which I had zero experience with.

James was raking in around 50 grand so far before he noped out again. But in a much larger, far more important situation. Much like that play by post, he just was not communicating. With backers, his partners, nobody. James had the money, the delivery date passed, and artists who worked on it were not paid. For at least several months, nothing. Then I guess, as best as I remember, he made a statement. His father was sick or some such. I remember some blurb somewhere about how he had been estranged for years from his dad, but I can't of course be sure. It was his dad and that is enough. My own dad passed away a couple of years earlier, almost blissfully because he had real bad dementia for a couple of years and I had helped take care of him despite having a demanding high end professional job. When he passed away it hit hard, but I was back at work in 3 days. I just wanted to be busy. James just dropped all responsibilities. I don't want to judge, but a word about his trouble a few months earlier would have gone a long way to get folk to understand. Folk in the OSR were aging, and many of us had lost our dads, moms, or whoever. People put hard earned money on the barrelhead to support his art. And he did not seem to give a fuck. Perhaps the most baffling and complained about thing was, during his ghosting of his project over those months he was still making multiple posts a day on his blog as if nothing had happened.  

This was around the time I stopped posting on my blog. I was super busy with career, an active dating life (getting in the gym every day after years of recovering from an auto wreck and making great money and dropping tens of lbs can do wonders), still doing Ren Faire to a large degree, and running multiple campaigns was taking up so much of my time. Also there seemed to be a lot of toxicity in the OSR at the time. I remember one gamers statement on some forum saying, "the old schoolers keep bayonetting their own wounded."  And sometimes my own behavior was less than laudable. I was coming off years of Howard Stern fandom, and I naturally have a bit of a dry and sarcastic wit and I often peppered my humor with that level of boyishness (still kind of do but I think to a much lesser extent these days). I said a few things I regret back then. 

Even in the Grognardia comments sections. I had long disagreed with some of the things James posted on. He hated the 80's Ah-Nuld Conan. And man, I loved it. Saw it with friends like 5 times in theaters as a kid. I scoffed at his "Conan should have blue eyes and not be that big!" sort of statements.  Or that Dejah Thoris in the John Carter movie was not hot enough (I retrospect I agree with that one now). Disagree on some things enough and its "why don't you go your own way and leave us to our delusions?" So I did eventually. 

This is my last post of that time period. 

So I only watched from afar from time to time. James eventually handed over the reins to others to finish Dwimmermount. It eventually fulfilled. Reactions were mixed. Ten Foot Pole reviewed a draft copy, and it is more or less similar to other mixed reaction reviews. Including my own opinions. Here is an excerpt. 

Adventure Time! This is a Maliszewski dungeon. If you’re familiar with his other work them you’ll be mostly familiar with this. It doesn’t deviate much from his usual style. The best parts are when it does. He’s got a kind of bog-standard D&D vibe going on that I don’t really get in to. Knights, brave paladins, holy clerics, etc. Not quite the nonsense I equate with 2E, but more of a non-weird 1E style. IE: Boring. This feel is exacerbated by the O M G LAME room descriptions. He’s got this style where he describes meaningless detail. Something like “This room was once a vestibule” followed by several sentences of what it was once used for and what it once contained. That’s then followed by something like “but it’s now filled with just some wooden scraps and debris.” WTF dude? What’s the point of the description provided? It did nothing to help me run the room or inspire me, the DM, to greatness. There is A LOT of space wasted on this kind of thing. Here’s an example from the text: “6. Trophy Room This large room once contained trophies commemorating Thulian military victories. There were plaques, statues, and other similar ornaments all long since looted and removed to other parts of the fortress. There are indentations in the walls, shelves, and brackets that all give evidence to their former presence. Also in the room are the bodies of two dwarves, both quite fresh though cold to the touch. They wear chain mail and carry axes, but the rest of their belongings (if any) are no longer present.” That’s once of the most useless room descriptions I’ve ever seen. It’s long, boring, and does nothing to help the DM with the room. The vast majority of the rooms have this problem. It’s almost like …. idk, the fluff text that appears in those fluff supplements. I loved the “Eye, Tyrant” book, but its not a dungeon supplement. In a dungeon description I need to be able to find information quickly and I need the information convey general ideas about the room. Things to spark my own creativity. That trophy room description does none of that. It’s just text that has to be slogged through, for fear of missing something, in order to run a boring room. That room did not make my job as a DM easier. It did the opposite. Most of the rooms have this problem. I don’t usually comment on layout/etc, all I generally care about is content. I’m going to make an exception here because the style chosen makes the problem worse. I’m not sure if James or Autarch are doing the layout, but it stinks. It takes these long, boring, meaningless text blocks and turns them in to giant text blocks. I believe the style is called Full Justification. ANY soul in the rooms descriptions are completely killed off by this style. You can’t quickly pick out anything important. It’s just a mass of fully justified text. If you’re lucky there’s a second paragraph. HATE.

Ultimately James partners took over and finished up the Kickstarter product, and it seems JM's hands were washed of it. Searching for Dwimmermount on Grognardia it looks like the last time he made a post that referenced it was in 2011.

This is completely accidental on my part, but James restarted his blog in 2020 about the same time I did with mine (I had moved to the Pacific North, and was now involved in 5th edition and online DMing so it seemed a good time) . I was not aware at first but saw his video interview on Wandering DMs. Gaming pods are not my jam, but I listened to the whole thing. Most of what I remember was them amazed at his number of posts on a weekly or even daily basis. I also recall that as best I can remember, James smiled exactly once for about 20 seconds. They used that as an image of him in their ad for the episode.

James has been posting pretty much daily like the old days, and in seems that over these five years he has a lot of irons in the fire. He has been running Empire of the Petal Throne for over 10 years for the same group online. Looking just recently he has Patreon's and Substack's and all. He seems to be doing a new version of Thousand Suns. He also is doing his own version of Empire of the Petal Throne (some years ago it came out that the original creator was a nazi or something). Other projects likely looming. 

I do want to sadly say that when I saw James was doing his blog again I made comments for awhile, and we interacted cordially. He read and commented on some of my posts. Suddenly, my comments on Grognardia were not being posted. Though a lot of the posts I made back in the day that contained any kind of toxicity or anger were deleted by me just to get a fresher start. Not that I was planning to beef with anybody like in those days that seem so long ago, though my wit would stay dry (these days I would say my sense of humor would be more in line with the Red Letter Media guys than Howard Stern).

That's 2012 me on the far left.

I checked out the comments of my final posts in 2012, and I found a couple with me and some other chucklehead goofing on something or other about James and or Dwimmermount. I cannot recall if or how mean the comments were, but I do not think they were deeply hurtful. To most folk anyway. But I deleted them, and it was over 3 or 4 years ago or so and really don't remember the specifics.

Since getting into 5th edition to run on Roll20 almost 6 years ago, I have had little desire to be a part of discussions online. I am on Tenkar's Discord and have made a comment here and there. A couple of private messages with the good constable a couple of times. Other than that little else. But something about the return of Grognardia around the same time I decided to get back on it sort of drew me back in. On the Wandering DM's podcast JM appeared on, one of the guys mentioned something about blogging for yourself as sort of a journal or diary, and that was exactly my newer attitude about it. I just like writing (if you can call it that - I hardly ever use the word "indeed" in my posts) about my gaming experiences and thoughts. I do not try to get the word out about the blog or comment in a ton of places. Most of my posts barely get a couple hundred views (though some occasionally get way more. A recent post about James Raggi has way over 1500 and my one about my alcoholic monk got over 2000). But there was something nostalgia about doing it again, especially since leaving old editions behind. 

And it was double nostalgia commenting on Grognardia again after over a decade. But it is what it is. A case of sins of the past coming back to bite you. And I'm not trying to stick it to him. Lately I just feel like talking about some of the personages of the OSR, and maybe some scandals from back then.  I don't know that the Dwimmermount thing is as big as scandal as Satine Phoenix's Battle of the Bards thing (that seemed a literal take the money and run...to Bali). But it is an interesting part of the OSR history. 

I hope the Dwimmermount thing is something James can laugh about now. I am sure he meant no harm. There were probably a ton of reasons that lead to the eventual outcome. All of us from the OSR heyday have plenty about us to goof on.  On me for certain. And I hope his variety of endeavors pay off for him, and that he keeps posting about stuff my players these days have not even heard of (average age 25-35). Plenty of people are like me and are old enough and old school enough to know about it all. James just ended a 10-year campaign. I just ended a year and a half one and boy, am I a bit burnt out.  

So he is doing what he loves, gaming and writing about old game gew gaws. And if he can make a few bucks off it then good on him.

You should have no trouble finding the Grognardia blog if you have never been there.  His Patreon is here.  And he has a Substack here.

Cheers