Call of Cthulhu Friday: Ramsey Campbell

Ramsey Campbell wrote some of the most prolific and lasting Cthulhu Mythos tales in the latter half of the 20th Century. Although he has long since tried to distance himself from writing Lovecraftian setting stories, he himself freely admits that his favorite tales he produced are those dealing with those soulless god-beings of the Mythos.

As a more modern horror writer, Campbell is heavily influenced by of course Lovecraft, but also Howard, Robert Bloch, Robert Chambers (of “The King in Yellow” fame), and Richard Matheson (“I am Legend” and about a dozen Twilight Zone episodes). As a child of the 60’s and 70’s, these were most often the times his best tales take place in (80’s too). Shagadelic, baby! Yeah! These decades actually worked well as a time period for old school horror. Among free love and The Drug Revolution, Cthulhu and his minions could crawl in the psyche of mankind with impunity.

I think Campbell greatest contribution to the Mythos is The Severn River Valley setting. His earliest Mythos works were originally set in Lovecraft’s Massachusetts, but it was August Derleth who suggested that he come up with a new setting for Mythos tales. So Severn Valley was born, based on an actual river and area of England (The Severn is shown in the photo above) that he spent time in during his youth (including local towns and city areas still in ruins from The Blitz of WW2). His Brichester fills in for Lovecraft’s Arkham, and The town of Clotton is his Dunwich. Many of Campbell’s Severn Valley tales take place in these two locations and immediate environs. Campbell’s Necronomicon is The “Revelations of Glaaki,” at the time of the tales being reprinted in 12 volumes by Brichester’s Ultimate Press, who among other things are also producing pornography (finally the Mythos and sex meet, albeit in a printing shop). Brichester U. fills in for Miskatonic U. To give you a groovy hippy era vibe, Brichester has a variety of mod establishments, including a science fiction bookstore, tennis courts, and a vegetarian student hang-out called “Peace and Beans.”

All sorts of interesting things are going on in Severn Valley. “The Tomb-Herd” is a particularly chilling crowd. There are the tree-like Dark Young of Lovecraft fame running around in the woods (one of the few creatures in his works that Campbell did not invent), a god-monster living in a lake and blighting the homes around it with its cult, and the spacecraft of alien insects encamped in a clearing. There is even a sort of “Innsmouth taint” in one area, but instead of taking on the appearance of a toad, the rural villagers bring to mind the look of fat-faced rabbits (both amusing and chilling).

Campbell came up with quite a few of his own gods for the Mythos, including Eihort, a sort of multi-eyed elephant shaped blob that lays its young into a victim, who is driven mad and finally dies during a thunderstorm, tiny Eihorts bursting forth from his body. One of my favorites is Y’Golonac, a fat, headless being with eyes in its hands. Y’Golonac is usually found sitting behind a massive brick wall in a cavern, waiting for his name to be read aloud from “Revelations.” When it happens, he takes over the reader’s body and wreaks havoc. The Render of the Veils is especially scary, a being who shows you what the world really looks like, and when you see that you go forever mad. His priests call him forth with a blindfold on, which must be a treat to experience. It really is a clever take on why you can never see your God. I used all three of these gods in my 90’s CoC games.

“The Inhabitant of the Lake and Less Welcome Tenents” and “Cold Print” are the anthologies you want to read to enjoy the Severn Valley Setting. But besides his Mythos tales, Campbell has also done extensive work in other aspects of horror, drama, and fantasy. In the 70’s he completed three of Robert E. Howards unfinished Solomon Kane tales. He has written novels about serial killers, demonic alien invasions, and even novelizations of Universal Horror classics. Just a few years ago, after working a several month stint at a Borders Bookstore, he penned a novel about a bookstore staff trapped and hunted by evil forces while working an all night shelving shift (The Overnight, 2004). Clearly, just like Stephen King and Lovecraft, Campell had the ability to make the mundane and normal seem sinister.

Though I had not heard of Campbell in the 80’s, by the early 90’s I had discovered him (I think because of some of his entities showing up in a Call of Cthulhu supplement), and devoured his Lovecraft inspired stuff in a matter of months. He had a huge influence on my Call of Cthulhu games in the 90’s, and my very last few games I ended up doing in the late 90’s were going to be set in Severn Valley. But for some reason I went with Arkham instead. Pity, but maybe one day…

I plan to post more about Campell and his creations in future CoC Friday posts, but in the meantime, if you haven’t read him…go check out those anthologies!

Thinkin’ about campaigns for 2011

November always seems to be the time I start to look towards what will pan out for the game group in the coming year.

I’ve been doing pretty much the same 1st edition campaign for over two years now. So, with maybe three or four games left for my AD&D Night Below campaign (actually, the first few months of gaming in this group had nothing to do with the NB, I hadn’t originally planned for the party to end up in that grinder of a setting) I have to start thinking of what to do next.

A part of me wants to get right into a new D&D campaign. It has now literally been years since I ran for a group of low level characters, and it would be fun to start something fresh after all this time steering the destinies of higher level PC’s. But really, I love running other games besides D&D, and I want to have an opportunity to do more of that without it just being an alternate. So what I will do is take a break from running D&D for the first few months of 2011 (with the exception perhaps of the occasional White Box game) and do something entirely different.

Big Ben has been running his AD&D elf-centric game here and there, but I think for the first couple months of the year we’ll play a bit more of that, plus Terry has expressed interest in revisiting her old 2nd edition game world so we will maybe be doing a bit of that as well. So D&D, which Andy and I basically started the group to play, will be well represented without me actually running it. But run something regularly I will, but what?

As much as I love Call of Cthulhu, I’m still not sure this is the right group for it. Role playing abounds with these guys, but lots of combat also seems to be a big preference. That just don’t happen in CoC. I have done a few street level Champions games with Terry, Andy, and Paul, but I’m not sure that doing that or full blown superheroes will fit the bill for what I want from the group right now (I find Hero System, like all crunchy systems, to be best for small groups).

Basically, I have recently that I would do a space game of some sort for next year’s early months. But what would these guys like? Star Wars? Dune? Aliens/Firefly/Traveller type settings? Anyway, I posted those choices on our Yahoo Groups page, and out of the five who voted so far, Star Wars is the clear favorite. So I think I will do a short SW campaign. This is good for a couple of reasons:

One, I really have a bad attitude about Star Wars. All the Muppets and the childish, unfunny humor. The three prequels that put a bullet in the franchise for me. Sure, I find them watchable on TV here and there, but have zero desire to live in that universe or to know any of the people in it. What, you ask yourself “This is a good reason?” Well, as much as I think much about the films are lame, I love the Knights of The Old Republic setting with a passion, based mostly on my experience with the XBOX game of that same name. 4,000 years before the hubris of George Lucas. And less Muppets because less Outer Rim planets have been discovered. Lots of epic things happening too, like the end of the brutal Madalorian War, and the beginning of the Jedi Civil War. Jedi and Sith are all over the place, and Lightsabers more plentiful than empty beer cans on the floor of a Culver City bus. No stupid “Rule of Two.” Really, there are a million reasons why it is a great Sci Fi setting despite the silly films.

And reason two, well, I had a pretty shitty experience with running this game last year for a group of middle-aged Star Wars freaks who treated me like an employee and stuck around when I left to discuss my game performance at the end of the day (yeah, I know, much more to that tale but I have pretty much moved on from just another negative experience in a fairly overall shitty year). What, you ask yourself “This is a good reason?” Well, yeah. I like my regular group, and I put a lot of work, time, effort, and a certain amount of money (I owned no Star Wars books when I accepted the “assignment”) into the few games I ran for that Hollywood group. I think we can have a lot of fun with it, and light Sci Fi is something I can practically phone in like my D&D games.

So Knights of the Old Republic it is, for the first three or four months of the year, anyway. Besides the KOTOR games, I will of course throw out that odd OD&D White box dungeon crawl as an alternate, as well as some bits of Champions when the group is lacking players on a game night. I’ll alternate my games with whoever does some of their D&D. I’ll let Big Ben and Terry slug it out for those slots.

I just gotta finish up the year, and finish up this damn Night Below campaign. Fun, but jeez, it’s starting to feel like I’ve been walking uphill with this setting over my shoulder forever. Gotta wrap it up (and kill some characters if at all possible). Stay tuned for details on that (finally back to AD&D next week).

Player drops the DM Bomb

Old friend and current player Terry dropped by on Monday night this week to play video games as she often does (Champions of Norrath, Baldur’s Gate, etc.) when she has a dance practice on the West Side.

Handed her a Fat Tire Ale, we horked a shot of Tequila, and before we got to the game she talked about the game regular player Big Ben ran last week that I missed. I had a hell of a busy week preparing for the final blowout weekend of the Northern Ren Faire, and had also just bought a new car (a nifty black Jeep Compass), so I was just feeling a little too stressed to run one of the last games of my two year Night Below campaign. But hey, I wanted an alternate D&D game going besides my own for just such an emergency. That way, I don’t have to feel like I HAVE to provide a game if I am not feeling up to it.

Anyway, out of the blue Terry mentioned that she would not mind doing a little DM’ing. I was not too surprised; early this year while liquored up in the Mirage Casino suite while we were listening to tunes and taking a break from the slots, I brought up the idea that she might try it again. You see, in a way I feel I owe her that.

Around 1993 or so Terry declared she wanted to run some D&D. I had three major campaigns going on at the time with the group; AD&D 1st ed, Call of Cthulhu, and Champions. So we had plenty to do, and by that point in life I had already decided that I wasn’t cut out for the player experience. My joy came out of providing a setting and some challenges and watching the proceedings bloom like a flower. So there were in fact good reasons to not have yet another game by somebody else going on. But on the other side of the coin we did manage to find time to play long sessions of Talisman at the time, so I guess another D&D campaign was not out of the question. So it was like “sure Terry, go for it.”

Terry bought some books, and of course by that time it was 2nd edition they were selling. That was the first thing that got my goat. I would be playing the new version of D&D. Another thing that I was worried about was that despite her having a lot of acting and performing experience I wasn’t sure Terry was aggressive enough to run D&D. OK, it was one of my misconceptions of the time (remember, I was still in my dumb ass 20’s then) that somebody had to be very outgoing and outspoken as I was to run decent games. Terry is often sort of reserved. Don’t get me wrong, she can be a firecracker. Get her mad and you are getting yelled at. And when we are fighting a boss in Baldur’s Gate and she keeps getting killed, her shouts of frustration have me worried the neighbors will think I am killing a hooker in the workshop or something (that’s more of a Saturday night thing).

But in retrospect Terry set-up a decent setting with a fairly clever campaign in mind (adventurer’s coming to a new frontier continent with no civilizations known of), and there was plenty of room for role play among the characters. I came up with a character I loved, Micah, a big tanned sun-worshipping barbarian from some tropical island local (I used the great Conan figure available at the time).

We had a few games over time, but two things frustrated me. One, Terry didn’t seem to have studied the rules very well (something that I could be called guilty on a time or two in my Gm’ing career), and because they were different enough from AD&D I could not be that much of a help (plus I had house ruled so many things away in my game I wasn’t sure I even knew 1st ed. that well anymore). When Terry had to look something up during play, it was often a 20 minute deal. I know, I counted. Later I would realize that the skill of just winging it over spending nose-time in the books is something that you eventually learn as a DM, but Terry didn’t have that yet. So at some point we were in one game where our travelling overland to get to some location spilled over from the previous game. That game had ended with us fighting wolves. Then this game started with us fighting…wolves. Then a few hours into this game we were still travelling and fighting…wolves.

So I made pleas to Terry to just ignore the fucking wandering monster tables and either give us something different to fight, or just get us to the damn location. But I was unheeded. She was determined to go by the book. So some time in the 5th or 6th hour of the game, and maybe 12 beers in, I sort of blew my top. Fellow player Planet Janet and I had already talked a bit on the side about how the games were going, and she was frustrated too (Terry had her boyfriend playing the games, but he wasn’t really into games anyway so he was of the opinion of just being supportive of Terry’s efforts).

But when it came to the zero hour, I was alone in my confrontation, but I felt an intervention was necessary. We were putting hours into this thing every few weeks, and she was taking zero player input (another skill that has to be developed) about how it could be more fun for us. At that time, these were cardinal sins to me. Plus I was having a very broke year then, and I didn’t have wheels for a few months. I was taking three buses over two hours + to get to The Hollywood Bowl area from Venice, and for that you want to be rewarded with some stellar gameplay, no?

So I just told Terry the games were sucking big donkey dick (paraphrasing), it wasn’t fun, and that I was done with it. In a nutshell, that was it. Terry didn’t like it, she dropped out of my games altogether, and we didn’t even talk for almost three years until the mid-90’s when I had a big group in full swing and asked her to come play again. We stayed friends ever since.

But now you see why I maybe owe Terry another shot. She has supported my return to gaming after several year hiatus by being an important part of this group, and that is another reason to let her have a go. But of course, I would want there to be a caveat that she would be more open to player input on the games. Sure, I don’t always have that kind of sympathy for my players, but I have around 35 years of experience, and half my players are shameless power gamers (compared to Terry anyway, who is about as low maintenance a player as you could ask for), so I try not to cut too much slack or they’d eat me alive.

So sure, what the hell. Let’s have Big Ben continue to do his alternate 1st edition a bit, and maybe into next year before too long we’ll let Terry have a go. And of course it will be 2nd edition. But that is OK, I kind of look forward to posting about playing another edition (and one that isn’t 3rd or 4th). This will free me up to do Star Wars KOTOR, Champions, and Call of Cthulhu that I am chomping at the bit to do. But the group was started to do D&D, and we need that going on too. I have to admit, after a two year campaign I’m ready to rest up on the D&D DM’ing a bit.

So sure Terry, you have my vote. If the other guys are up for it, then go for it. Just, uh, go easy on the wolves, eh?

Call of Cthulhu Friday: Mythos Card Game

In the early 90’s I decided I wanted to do some Call of Cthulhu with my regular D&D group. It had been a few years, and I was just chomping at the bit to do a new campaign. But most of my regular players, including my two long-time female players Terry and Planet Janet, did not have much interest. Pretty much none of my players at the time were even aware of the great works of Mr. Lovecraft.

But like other genres I would introduce to this group (the main other one being Champions), it only took one game to win them over. Both Terry and Janet came up with great characters, and often when we had a D&D session planned they would request I make it CoC instead. I remember one great game where only the three girls in my group showed up, so I just let them wander the map of Arkham, poking their heads into antique shops and bookstores, shopping at various clothing boutiques, and having lunch in a diner, all the while being stalked by agents of the evil they were then facing.

When I discovered the Mythos Card game and began collecting them, Terry and Janet got on that boat as well. Soon we all had enough cards for various theme decks, and for a couple of years we spent many a Saturday or Sunday afternoon doing tequila shots and playing session after session. We seemed obsessed with the game at one point (although I think it was only I who managed an almost complete set of all the releases).

In Mythos, you selected one of various Lovecraftian heroes, such as professors, students, journalists, and doctors to be your character de jour (one of my faves was The Pragmatic Hobo). The deck consisted of location cards, event cards, phobia cards, and monsters. In a nutshell, you would place various location cards to indicate your current spot (or that you were travelling there or leaving there), and use its resources to be able to lay out artifact and tome cards, allies, and use the gate at that location (if it had one) to summon monsters to your “threat” that would attack another player at the end of a full round of playing. Both damage and sanity losses were what could take you out of the game. Ultimately, you had a variety of “story cards” that you held on to, because there were various conditions you had to fulfill in order to get the points off that adventure. Get enough points, and you won. Or you could just say “screw the story” and try to take out the other characters exclusively with your threats and phobias. Sanitarium locations existed as places you could go rest and recover some sanity. Appropriately for a Lovecraft themed game, some asylums had a risk of monster attack or some kind of botched medical procedure.

According to Wikipedia, In 1999 Pyramid magazine named Mythos as one of The Millennium's Best Card Games.[3] Editor Scott Haring said "Mythos was a very deserving game, with great art and gameplay that involved more than just monsters fighting each other."

In the end our sessions sort of petered out as we did other things, such as focus more on actual rpg games rather than a card game. I actually think Planet Janet stopped playing because I kicked her ass so thoroughly in almost every game. She claimed it was because I had more cards than her, but that wasn’t really the case. I was damn good at the game. Terry was a good player, but she just made her decks too big, restricting access of cards she really needed to get to in order to fulfill her stories.

Last year Terry came over to play Mythos a couple of times, but then she got hooked on my Champions of Norrath and Baldur’s Gates Playstation games, and ended up preferring those to anything else we might do whenever she stopped by.

But I have fond memories of this card game, in a way I don’t really for Magic the Gathering, which I think I have outgrown. I’ll always be up for more Mythos down the line. Do you have a deck?

Call of Cthulhu Friday: Gaming in Arkham

My very last CoC campaign in the late 90’s was set in 1922 Arkham. This was around the point when that current long-time group had pretty much petered out where I had just Terry and Janet Planet left as regular players. Yep, two players. Terry and Janet had been around in my games since around 1988, 10 years at that point, and I was pretty comfy running games for just the two of them. In fact, around 1989 there was a period of around a year when they would come over to Venice Beach once or twice a month on a Friday night to play a little two player Champions, which was just great times. Sometime in the mid-90’s there was also a point when I was doing campaigns for a group of all women (not by choice), of which Planet Janet and Terry were a part of.

So around 1998 or so I ran what was going to end up being some of the last few games I would be doing before my several year semi-retirement from gaming.

At some point a dude had let me borrow and copy some of his Cthulhu material, including the Arkham sourcebook. I loved reading that book, and all the little 1920’s details that came with it. The big apartment building with interesting NPC’s that the characters stayed in, to the small lunch diner where they “served meatloaf and mashed potatoes in big white crockery,” it was just brimming with period flavor. The shopping district, the city hall, the Miskatonic environs where all cool, and there was even a speakeasy for Terry’s torch singer “Lila” to perform and get caught up in gangster activities (and even meet Al Jolsen who attended one night, who offered her a job when she made a great singing roll if she ever went to New York).

Terry ran her singer, a veteran and survivor of no less than two CoC campaigns (maybe a little light in the sanity department, but she had been a very lucky and well played PC). Planet Janet came up with a new character, a rich English country girl who came to the U.S. to attend Miskatonic. Oh yeah, a buddy of mine and longtime player, Gary, also played here and there, but missed many sessions due to commitments. When Gary did play, he ran an American Indian guy based on the Indian soldier from “Predator.” You know, the dude who seemed to be able to sense the Predator’s presence in the woods (Gary figured he would hear things, but that it would be Cthulhu stuff instead of a dreadlocked Alien).

Anyway, there were just a handful of those games, and most of the ones with just the girls were about shopping and exploring the places in town; mixed with the occasional weird happening. The group tangled with gangsters, evil seamen, and even visited an old Civil War bone yard in a cave that rose from the dead when they took some Necronomicon fragments. They made a few friends in town too, including an English jester dwarf and “Colonel Sausage,” a limbless midget from the local carnival.

Alas, the campaign did not go as long as previous ones. Both Terry and Janet were tough to schedule for get-togethers, and after almost two months of no gaming at one point I said “fuck it” and more or less started my long game-less sabbatical that pretty much ended with my current group a couple of years ago.

But again, I loved that Arkham supplement. Maybe I’ll drag it out one night for inspiration. Although I am kind of leaning on Victorian England or The Old West for my eventual new campaign, Arkham is the classic setting, and a hellacool one.

Call of Cthulhu Friday: Boss Cthulhu

Phew! What a week! Work work work. Made it hard to post! Looking forward the the long Labor Day weekend. Actually grabbing me a couple of days worth of Super 8 motel near Disneyland, and running some OD&D sessions at a game convention. I'm hoping it'll get my mind off the grind for a bit. Good old fashioned escapism.

OK, this has nothing to do with Cthulhu, but I hope this funny pic gives you a laugh, especially if you toil in a cubicle for "The Man" like I do. OK, my boss is cooler than Cthulhu, but you know what I mean...

Best part it, he sleeps pretty much every day of the year, so he's not seen much. Cthulhu, not my boss.

Call of Cthulhu Fridays: Time Periods

Happy 120th birthday HPL! You sick bastiche.

It has been around 10 years since my last Call of Cthulhu game, and now that my group seems to be getting more open to lots of non-D&D alternatives to our regular game, I figure next year might be a good time to introduce it to some CoC . My long time player Terry is the only one of them with any experience with the game, and she loved it. She actually had a character survive at least two campaigns with her sanity mostly intact (by staying in the background and hiring a gangster bodyguard).

But should I do it in the 20’s again? I’ve had a couple of long running CoC campaigns, and they have both taken place between 1919 and 1922. One I set in the Los Angeles area, and the other shorter campaign in and around Arkham.

Victorian England is temping, and there are sourcebooks available for that setting. And I work a couple weekends of a Charles Dickens Christmas Faire up in San Francisco during the holidays, so plenty of inspiration there (the White Chapel district that they set up inside the Cow Palace is just dark and creepy). Switch that era to the Old West, and you have a setting I would love to do CoC for. Last week I got my hands on a copy of Deadlands, and that is inspiring an old west thing even more.

American Revolution seems like untouched and fertile ground for a few games. Or how about the Elizabethan Renaissance (my Ren Faire experience should really pay off for that)?

Hell, I think CoC with some Cro-Magnon Man tribesmen might even be worth a whirl.

Oh man. If only there was time for them all.

Call of Cthulhu Friday: Princess Tasha

During the 90’s I had a long running CoC campaign that I called “Canal House.” The character home base was in a small, two story house on the newly built Canals of America in Venice Beach, California. The house was owned by a mysterious, well-travelled man named Mr. Troy (sort of a chubby little Truman Capote type guy) who filled the house with antiques, many of which had an occult background. It was set up as an antique shop, appointment only.

In the very first game Mr. Troy, who had a lot of Hollywood friends and associates, held a party at Canal House that included the new player characters. They came from diverse backgrounds, but for one reason or another were at that party. There was a Texas cowgirl who was coming to California to try to be a star in westerns, a big heavyweight boxer who was looking for his big time break, a New York gin mill torch singer who had survived a previous CoC campaign I did, and a private investigator with a heavy military background.

Occultists looking for an artifact in the house assaulted the party with clubs and knives. They were dressed in white robes and skull masks, and as most guests ran in terror the player characters stepped up and fought them off. Impressed, Mr. Troy hired them on the spot to stay at Canal House and work for him in occult investigations. In return, he would use his contacts to help them with their desires. A few adventures were had, including fighting more occultists in the Santa Monica mountains, fighting off attacks by Deep Ones that swam right up the canals to Canal House, and facing a fire God on the Santa Monica pier (on the same date as the pier burned down in real life).

Several games in one of my regular D&D players, Planet Janet, decided to give Call of Cthulhu a try (she fell in love with the game right away after hemming and hawing about playing it). She came up with Tasha Romanoff, a sort of Anastasia type who escaped from her mythical Finnish kingdom when her evil satanic uncle killed her family and took over in a military coup. Hiding out in Venice Beach, Tasha was attacked by agents of her uncle, and was saved by the players. Tasha joined the house group and adventures continued.

One great scenario was in a New Mexico mining town under sway of Mythos forces. A pair of evil mine baron brothers ran the place, and some cool encounters took place, including a cowboy style shootout on a dark street in the middle of a rainstorm. At one point the big boxer and Princess Tasha were stripped and tied up by a weirdo brother who intended to molest them both. But the other brother, a fast draw revolver fanatic, demanded a fast draw between him and the naked and bound boxer. The boxer was untied, and with an amazing roll on his to-hit percentage shot the gun toting brother dead, and knocked the other one out. This was actually one of a few times the boxer had saved Tasha, and he became sort of a bodyguard for her. You will see the irony of this at the end of the story.

Eventually it became time for Tasha and friends to go to her kingdom, “Midgardia,” and wrest it from the clutches of her evil uncle. She had gotten word that a rebellion awaited, so off they went to Europe to infiltrate the land. Hooking up with loyal soldiers of her family, Tasha and friends stormed the castle, fighting their way in. Tasha was separated, and ended up in a chamber with her uncle and some monks. She was tied up naked on an alter ready to be sacrificed to uncle’s dark gods.

The party and soldiers fought their way to the sacrificial rooms, and it was the boxer, Tasha’s protector, who burst in first. Now, boxer was a rough and tumble dude, but at this point in the game he was relying on his now trusty elephant gun more than his wits or fists. You know how over reliance on guns can backfire in CoC. Even though there were some of uncle’s soldiers with rifles in the room, boxer shot his elephant gun at uncle, although his focus was suddenly on the invaders and not Tasha.

I told the player “Gary, you know that there is a chance you’ll hit Tasha, right? Her and uncle are pretty much in the same hex.”

Gary was just all “Gotta do it. Gotta.” He was always the combat hog who wanted to take out the bad guy.

So ‘click’ ‘boom’ Gary’s boxer shot his gun, and rolled a 00. Now, CoC had no crit or cruddy, but in any game I run I ask my players before a campaign if they want crits and fumbles. They almost always say “yes.” So it was with this game, and a 00 is going to mean a malfunction, or a hitting another target next to the intended target. Sooo…Gary misses, and I tell him to roll damage. It ended up being something like 16 points. Tasha, with 9 hit points, leaves this veil of tears in a violent way as her young, lovely dark haired head is blown into a hundred bits by a gun designed to take down mastodons.

The soldiers open fire and kill the boxer. Soldiers and the other characters come in and after a bit of shooting fun take out uncle and his men. When the PC’s fully realize what happened, there is some nice sanity loss all around for all. Young Princess Tasha has come home.
In the campaign wrap-up, the PC’s take train and boat home. On the long trip, they lay their heads down at night. They dream of the horrible things they have fought together and overcome in America all the way to Europe, and the dream usually ends with visions of beautiful Princess Tasha’s head turned into red, oozing oatmeal on an alter to dark entities.

Nice, eh? Could you ask for a sadder and more horrifying end to a campaign? Well, it is Call of Cthulhu after all.

Call of Cthulhu Fridays: The Sundered Veil

(above image is fan art for this story found online)

OK, with scheduling conflicts and so much going on right now, I won’t be running any of my game stuff for the group for a few weeks (I don’t do my main 1st edition campaign if anyone is missing, and the alternatives I do also depend on who is there). I’m going to let regular player Ben do his D&D next week for those of us available.

But without actually GM’ing, I lose a little inspiration for my blogging (so you have an idea what will happened if my group falls apart). So I thought that at least for Fridays I would keep myself inspired, and hopeful that I will get to do a CoC campaign for my group at some point, that I would do regular homage’s to stuff related to Lovecraft, which I have been reading a lot of stuff on lately.

OK, so recently I have been rereading the first two League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Graphic novels, and then some. In them, Allan Moore shows an even bigger love of the Wold-Newton stuff than Phillip Jose Farmer himself! It seems like almost all of literary fiction exists in the world he has set up. Forget the laughable Sean Connery film (shame it was one of his last) based on The League, I think Moore’s LEG is one of the greatest triumphs of modern comic/lit genres. The amount of stuff from fiction created since the dawn of man that he has included is just astounding. Entire books have been written to act as a guide to the people and places he references.

In the back of the Volume 2 series (the one where the Martians from War of the Worlds meet resistance from Captain Nemo and the rest of the league), there is a text story (with some artwork) that tells a tale about an astral team-up with Allan Quartemain, John Carter of Mars, Randolph Carter from Lovecraft’s dreamlands cycle, and the Time Traveler from H.G. Wells.

Wow, who could even imagine such a teaming? The weirdo/genius mind of Allan Moore, that’s who. To add to the level of geek cool, here Randolph Carter is a great nephew of John Carter, who of course views his future dreamer nephew as a bit of a wuss.

At the start of the story, Allan Quartermain visits an old mystic friend looking to partake of the Taduki drug from his adventures in King Solomon’s Mines and other places. Passing out and going into a metaphysical trance, Quartermain enters the astral realm. Here his disembodies spirits encounters two other such souls. One is John Carter, his spirit body in transition from earth to his soon to be new home on the Red Planet. Also in spiritual transition is Randolph Carter, the grandnephew of John. As the three wonder the purpose of their meeting, H.G. Wells unnamed Time Traveler and his wondrous machine shows up. The Time Traveler tells them that fate has brought them to him, and they are to help him defeat forces of the Cthulhu Mythos. Awesome.

The quartet is soon attacked from nowhere by motley, primitive beasts that the Time Traveler curiously describes as being known both as Morlocks and Mi-Go. Escaping on the time machine, the group travels to the material world of the far future. It is the sphinx from the Eloi time, but even further into the future than that, when that once lush area is now a desert in a dying earth. Apparently the Time Traveler has made this lasting far flung structure his home base in the battle against the Old Ones. After explaining the problem of ancient Godlike creatures invading the mortal realm, both the Carters realize that they are not bound to any realm and are actually forms destined to other places, so they fade away. John goes to Mars to win Dejah Thoris and begins his adventurers there, and Randolph heads off for his adventures to Unknown Kadath.

Things go from bad to worse when Quartermain is possessed by Ithaqua the Windwalker, and returns to the mortal realm. The Time Traveler is left to his further adventures in the time stream, and Quartermain manages to become free of his possession in the earthly realm. Broken by the loss of his Taduki drug, Quartermain heads off to the Middle East to become an opium addict for awhile before he joins the League.

This team up is amazing, really. To me as a fan of all of them; Lovecraft, HG Wells, and Edgar Rice, this really blew me away. If this sounds good to you, I recommend you get your hands on either the comic issues, or better yet the graphic novels. The story is several pages long in small print, so you for sure get a lot of meat for such a short adventure.

Oh, for extra awesome, the comic book portion of the book begins on Mars, where John Carter, Gulliver of Mars, and other literary Mars figures and creatures gather to fight off the Mollusks from War of the Worlds. Too much cool, man!

100 Posts, ya'll!

Holy cow, I only noticed this weekend that I hit 100 posts! Hurray for me!

Really, no big deal. Anybody can do a bunch of posts. But in the last several months or so I have tried only to post when I actually had something to say or get off my chest (besides a little bragging here and there about fun sessions). When I started the blog, I was just aping James at Grognardia and others, writing about old game products I liked and such, and I have to admit it wasn’t very inspiring for me or anybody else. So I got a bit more real. I posted about some old bad game experiences of my childhood and my teens and onward. It was a bit cathartic really, so before long I decided that I would continue letting off some steam by bitching about my games, my players, and my own possible short comings when it came to my gaming. Oh, and mentioning the fun here and there as well.

Thanks to all of you smart and creative gamers who have taken a look at my crazy posts, and for commenting in the positive and the negative. We are all a part of this semi-underground creative culture of imagining, and we enjoy this collective experience.

I’m off for a week’s vacation starting tomorrow, going north of San Francisco to work at a big world music camp some friends of mine are putting on. A lot of my best friends are even teachers at this thing. It’s gonna be a blast, and I’m going to work on some other types of instruments besides my Highland Bagpipes (irish bodhran drum, bongos, and middle-eastern belly dancer music ensemble). Take a peek at the website for the camp if you are interested in such things. Maybe see you there next year!

Have a great start to your summer!

Dungeon Master as Civil Servant

Am I too easy as a DM? Is this really a low paying (read: non-paying) job that forgoes my fun or frivolity for the service to others?

I started as much an adversarial DM as anybody from my time. That’s how D&D games were generally approached back then, especially by young boys. Characters were a bunch of Elmer Fudd’s with sub-par physical characteristics, walking unwittingly into the torture and humiliation chambers of the DM as Bugs Bunny. It was a very sadomasochistic relationship. You go into a dungeon, you press a button, and *kablooey* you were more often than not dead, as the DM laughed and snickered as if you are some dumbass he has gotten one over on.

The main thing that got me out of that mind set by the early 80’s was having girls at the game. Especially in the case of a girlfriend, it was hard to have them setting off traps and falling into pits. So it was girls that started my softening, I think. Had me go more in a high adventure frame of mind. Twas Beauty killed the Beast.

Then from the mid-80’s on I went through a certain phase of causing characters more emotional anguish than actually pain and death from traps or unbeatable monsters. Most of my players in the late 80’s and the 90’s were newbies to gaming, and lots of death and carnage heaped upon them can turn these new players off. But kill their family or pit them against the other players and you’ve lit a fire under their ass. They love the drama, and it has much more emotional weight than tricky dungeons and screwjob traps.

Death among characters has become a rare thing in my games, and even in my long Cthulhu campaigns of the 90’s, there was some insanity brought on but not much death (although more than in most genres I run). And in my Champions games, forget about it. You aren’t supposed to die there.

But I think my softening over all those years that worked pretty well with newbies in the 90’s is not serving me that well as DM in my latest group. For this new group I had one old player from the 90’s, Terry, along for the ride. Terry was always a good player. Although she internalized a lot of her characters stuff, she was consistent and not at all a power gamer, meta-gamer, or complainer. She just played.

But everybody else who started in this new group had experience with the game (one version or another of it), and at least a couple of them came in with power gaming backgrounds and desires. I especially think Andy and big Dan, like sharks, sensing my softness when it comes to characters, were a bit too obvious in their power-gamery at first. Andy pressed me a lot for things, and because he is our host I often cracked and gave him what he wanted early on. He sort of softened on that, but Dan still hits me with “player entitlement” attitudes that chap my ass. He wants more more more, and the more you give the more he wants. He is a good guy, but Dan more than anybody is getting me more in the mindset of my youth “Fuck the characters, I am God here. Bend to my will and die in my goddamn dungeon.” Dan even seems to want my rolls made out in the open (I think any time I have an NPC make a saving throw against his charm person or whatever, he assumes I’m fudging). I let this guy run a female drow, a race I am sure he is running just because it is so powerful in Unearthed Arcana, and he has made me (and some of the others players) regret it all the way.

What am I, a civil servant? This is my world! I call the shots! I don’t work for you, you are here to play in my game not be served.

I was especially hardened recently when I ran some sessions of Star Wars Saga: Knights of the Old Republic for a group of middle-age Star Wars fans who had played together for years, but were complete strangers to me. A couple of them were actually quite cool at first, but it was apparent by the second game or so that I was looked upon as somebody coming and serving them up a game like it was a job or something. When the session was over, they didn’t even want to socialize with me. They waited until I left (as it turned out) to talk about the game and how I was doing. Can you believe that shit? Especially the host, Joyce, seemed to have had an idea of how the game should be run (like one of the lame-o movies I guess). If things didn’t go her characters way, she would even get pissy and go sit in a corner (this lady is well into her 50’s, by the way, so she was no kid). She seemed to have paranoia about NPC’s, and the fact that I had a really interesting NPC be a catalyst for the adventure drove her nuts, even though he was very much in the background. The slag even had the balls to tell me “you can’t run the game like that, we are used to it like this and that…”. I went home that night after the fourth session and wrote them an email telling them I was done with the game probably as they were still standing around the table discussing my “Performance”. Didn’t even get a “thanks for trying.”

So the last year or so of experience has me starting to rethink my “player friendly DM” attitude of the 90’s. I’m kind of tired of being soft. I don’t want to be a dick DM, but I really think at least a couple of my players need a less kind hand and some hard truth that I am not from a soft DM background. Some hard lessons need to be learned. Some damn characters need to die!

I’m not your D&D civil servant or underling. I’m your damn Game master! The next few games…watch out!

“Hell is coming for breakfast!” – from The Outlaw Josie Wales

Do I like Champions more than D&D?

D&D is my first and always will be my best love. I think.

I’ve been running my 1st ed. (started out as OD&D) game world for over 30 years, and it would be hard not to look at it as a favorite son. And jeez, I can run it in my sleep. I practically phone my games in a third of the time, and the players still love it. It’s easy peasy, and satisfying.

But see, I have these other two games I love. Call of Cthulhu has been a fave since before I ever read Lovecraft. At around 14 years old I played in some games at Aero Hobbies in Santa Monica, and although I found those to be lacking in the fun department (I have to be honest, most of my worst gaming experiences happened in the 4-5 years I spend time at Aero), I fell in love with the feel of the game and the system, and was soon running my own games of it. In the 90’s, I did long running campaigns. My D&D players would hem and haw when I suggested it (not one of them then was a Lovecraft fan), but after a game or two they were often preferring to do it over the D&D. It was great, but unlike my D&D it was a world I didn’t create, just one that I presented (I’d like to say I invented the 1920’s, but that would take Al Gore balls).

So the only thing that came close to my D&D game world love was my Champions campaigns. I started early on in the late 70’s with Superhero 2044. Most people to this day find it a perplexing set of rules to use, but my young mind didn’t seem to have much trouble working around the lightness of the rules. I have spoken elsewhere about my experiences helping playtest, then running Supergame in the early 80’s, so I won’t waste more breath on that here. Soon my friends and I were on to Villains and Vigilantes, but by the mid-80’s it was Champions that had captured my comic book loving heart.

I created my own futuristic game world for it. Heavily influenced by Superhero 2044’s “Inguria,” I made my “New Haven” a pacific island metropolis. America and a lot of the rest of the world was blasted by nuclear war, and New Haven was a place that accommodated many refugees – the majority of whom were rich and or/scientific people. Always exactly 20 years in the future, this setting has grown since the 80’s and the world has become a thing of my own. The 90’s were my heyday with New Haven, and much like CoC my D&D players fell in love with it after giving it a try.

The open nature of what you could create with Champions/Hero System (and in the 90’s I focused on the Hero System 4th edition book) appealed to what I was trying to do with New Haven. That is, create a setting where you could have not just superheroes, but anything that you can imagine from science fiction could be worked in. Aliens, interdimensional beings, things out of fantasy, whatever. Of course, seeing as I was setting my game world in a futuristic version of the Marvel Universe, combined with my weaning on Marvel growing up, many Marvel elements entered into it (I even had a futurist version of the X-Men as a campaign long ago). But my inspirations came from many other, more alternative sources, such as The Watchmen, Marshal Law, and Judge Dredd. Things that turned the superhero myth on it’s ear.

I loved the world, and the open nature of being able to have anything you can envision, and during the 90’s some of my greatest memories are of that game. Close to the year 2000, I pretty much ended my last campaign with a several game long assault on earth by an alien empire. After that, my game group and my gaming in general sort of petered out. And I was well into my 30’s and sort of just figured I had outgrown gaming for other things.

When I started my current group the other year after several years off, it was put together for AD&D 1st edition. But in my mind I knew I would be doing Call of Cthulhu or Champions as an alternative. Well, it is Champs that has come up as the alternative (finally). Regular players Dan and Ben have to take June off (Dan the big South African is getting married, Ben is going to his hometown in Vegas for a few weeks), so I sat down Wed night with Terry, Andy, and Paul for some Champs.
Right before the holidays I had gotten together with Paul and Andy to work up a couple of characters, and even did an encounter with them. They came up with some pretty good dudes. What I was going for was a version of my old Justice Incorporated campaigns (more or less a Dark Champions cross between the A-Team and the X-files).

Andy came up with a cool, Jackie Chan type Hong Kong cop who is in hiding from enemies in New Haven. Paul, still pretty new to gaming generally, came up with a French chemist who, besides having a bit of Savate kick boxing skill, carries chemical compounds that have various affects (gas, smoke, knock out).

Terry, whose characters featured prominently in my 90’s campaigns, came up with “Jane Doe,” a female Bourne Identity type who is a government assassin with amnesia.

I can’t tell you how jazzed I was to be doing a Champions game, especially with Terry, again after ten or more years. This is how gaming is supposed to feel! Terry, who is often a bit slow with her turns and such in D&D, took back to Champions like a duck to water, pouring through the Hero System book to work up her characters. She remembered the rules better than I did!

In that first short session with Paul and Andy, I had their characters hanging out near the theater district near downtown. A mysterious nun in black, wearing white chainmail, and bearing a broadsword showed up to each of them, and guided them into the back alleys where a yuppie couple was being mugged by several gang members. Sister Mary Alice, or “Malice,” was one of my old NPC’s in the game, and was the ghost of a nun who had been murdered. Both the characters, Ken and Jacques, beat up the muggers and saved the couple.

So in this week’s session, the couple thanked them (and unknown to the players Sister Mary will later possess the young woman to have a flesh and blood vehicle for her murderous vengeance on rapists and murderers) and they took off. But Sister Mary guided the two to another assault down the alleyway (comic book alleyways are just chock full of evil doing). They came upon a girl in a hospital gown being menaced by almost a dozen more gang members. The girl was “Jane Doe,” and she had woken up in a hospital with a head wound, hypothermia, and no memory. She woke up with doctors and nurses around her, and thinking she was being tortured she struck out, knocked them away (luckily not killing anyone with one of her heavy killing strikes), and took off to end up woozy in the ally. She came to in time to help Ken and Jacques beat the hell out of the mugger gang.

Successful in the combat, the three strangers were approached by Tawny, a girl who it turned out worked for industrialist Elizabeth Patricia Kyono, a billionaire of Irish and Japanese decent (I’ve always had a great mini for Kyono, and luckily found it). Kyono also ran the hero for hire office Justice Incorporated as a hobby from time to time, and she had Tawny out at night looking for possible employees. As comic book fate would have it, she found three at the same time.

Long and short of it, after meeting with Elizabeth Kyono and agreeing to work for her, the three new members of the new Justice Incorporated took a job protecting some merchants in the bad part of town from a martial arts Dojo turned criminal, and managed to top the night off with them beating up some vandalizing members of the gang. Nice high kicking and karate chopping combat session!

It was great fun, and these being basically martial arts characters very easy to run. They really seem to like their characters, and next week we are hopefully finishing up this adventure.

So right now Champs is my game of choice. When Ben and Dan get back in July, they might not be into it but that is fine. We’ll get back to the D&D, and Champions is best with two or three players anyway. When we are missing a couple D&D players, it’ll be Justice Incorporated, my friends.

p.s. –and oh what a joy to only have to use D6!

Cthulhu and Hot Chicks

Naw, that isn't the newest supplement to Carcosa. Great looking girls mixing it up with monsters from beyond the stars? Hey, beautiful women go with anything.

Like most of you I come across tons of great fantasy art online, a lot of it anonymous. I'm not usually compelled to share, but as an old time Call of Cthulhu GM this one stuck out at me.

With weird fantasy art featuring women, many times you say to yourself "OK, what the hell is going on here?" This is one of those that have you trying to figure it out. An almost elfin, long-legged young girl, partially covered in clean bandages, steps over a giant tentacle that extends from the Great Old One in the background. To just say it is hallucination is way to easy.

So what's up? Is she a previously wounded, now-insane adventurer who escapes from Arkham to be with her one true, octopoid love? OK, kind of a stretch, and a little too sexy/disgusting. How about she's an unusally rare form that Nyarlothotep has taken - he will appear as a human appealing to the eyes, no (and, usually some Egyptian motif, right, like mummy bandages)?

I guess we maybe have to call it a scene from the dreamlands, where she might be a lovely sorceress/siren who calls on the power of The Sleeping One to combat her enemies. Hmmm...maybe it is Carcosa after all.

Group Size - what's your pref?

In my last post I talked about digging on the full group of six players I currently have. Of course that might change before too long (in the last year I’ve had a total of four new players come and go, and three regulars who have not missed a game), but after many years of no gaming it’s kind of a treat to see six players at the table. In all honesty, six is about as many people as our current host can handle (and I stand up for the entire session) in the spot we have (his wife’s fabric workshop in the back studio).

OK, so I got some comments that mentioned the amount of players those particular GM’s preferred in their gaming sessions. Here’s what some of the had to say:

Barking Alien said: …”Its also funny what a full group consitutes for some GMs as opposed to others. I pretty much don't feel like gaming if there aren't at least 3 or 4 players. For me a full group is more like 7 or 8. My current Mutants & Masterminds campaigns averages 8-9. If everyone showed every time we'd have 11 people…”

Sir Larkins sez: …”Seven or eight players for me is way too many. I'm most comfortable with three to four…”

Felipe Budinich said: …”Heh the full group concept also strikes me as funny, usually I have two players, over 4 players and i feel that it gets too crowded…”

So like a lot of things it’s “to each his own.” Space restrictions probably have a lot to do with it. For instance, at this point I can phone in AD&D 1st ed. (30 damn years), so I’m pretty sure I can handle seven or 8 people without serious detriment to the amount of role-playing or amount of time combat takes in my game. But for now I think 6 is going to have to be the cap. The only exception I might make to that is if a girl comes along wanting in on the campaign, if only to keep poor Terry from being the only girl in the group (I actually think she likes that, but that may be a subject for another post).

So I like six for D&D, but what about my couple of other favorites that I had successful campaigns with over the years? Well, in the past I was usually able to get all my players into other alternate genres, specifically Call of Cthulhu and Champions. In the 90’s when I tried to turn the groups on to one of these games, half of them groaned about it (especially the girls), but once they got characters created and got a game in under their belts, they often preferred them to my D&D!

For Champions it was hard for me to handle upwards of six people. Just so much math and crunch. This one particular regular player of mine from the 90’s, “Planet” Janet, was so bad at math (and usually so stoned on tequila and pot) that I had to do it all for her. Champions actually helped my math – heaven forbid you should actually learn or grow in some way from gaming.

I really preferred 2-4 players for Champs. If I only had three players, I would usually do the “street level” type characters. Fighting gang members and serial Killers was usually pretty easy to adjudicate. Ironically, when I had five or six players, it made sense to do the “Super Group” type games, even though it would include tons of super-attacks and tons of crunchy stuff that was just so time-consuming. Those powerful superhero fights took forever. With our current sessions happening for just three hours on a Wednesday night, I doubt we could have Champions as an alternate.

Call of Cthulhu was also a game I think I would have preferred to have like three players for, but my players in the 90’s ended up liking it so much that when we played it as our D&D alternative everyone showed up.

There was one memorable CoC game I ran in the mid-90’s with just three players that was kind of a gas. On a Saturday afternoon my three female players were hanging out in Lisa’s pad above the Hollywood Bowl, and they called me (at home…dateless) to see if I felt like coming over there to run some Call of Cthulhu. That was a session that went late into the night, and there wasn’t even anything of a supernatural nature going on (although I added in a “bump in the night” or two). Basically it was around 5 hours of the girl’s characters hanging out in Arkham shopping, cruising for guys at the Speakeasy, and looking for fun at the nightclub (that one of the characters was a torch singer at). It was one of those games that just would not have worked that well with 5 or more players. I would have needed some beastie to show up to spice things up.

Preferences aside, different group sizes usually create different gaming experiences. But what is your preference?

Way too many D6's!

I’m sure everyone who reads this who has gamed for many years has a ton of D6’s. They are the most common of the die, and us gamers tend to bleed off the dice from board games like Monopoly into our RPG dice collection as time goes by.

Towards the end of my 90’s campaigns, I was running a lot of Champions in addition to my AD&D and Cthulhu games. As a matter of fact, I think the very last game I ran before my several-year semi-retirement was in 2000, and it was Champions.

Champions uses D6’s for damage. Sometimes LOTS of D6’s. If you have somebody like Galactus show up, you can bet your ass you will be a living black hole, gathering up every single D6 you and your players can possibly muster from dice bags and backpack pouches. A dice roll including upwards of 50 dice was not out of the question when the big boys were playing on the board (although I have to admit, I usually preferred the street level games with more down-to-earth heroes and a lot less D6 rolling).

So for several years after that, my dice bag, a big sock really, sat with some D20’s, D4’s, D8’s etc and a big honking shit load of D6’s. Probably around 60 of them in there.

No big deal really, but when I started a new AD&D campaign last year, I just toted along the same bag with all the same dice in it. So each game, when I needed to roll a D20 or what-not, I had to grabby grab and hope I got lucky, or pour alllllllll those dice out on the table and sort through for what I needed. This pain in the ass continued on into this year, and even into a Star Wars KOTOR game I am running for another group. Players just sat there with mouth agape as I yanked out handfuls of D6 hoping to find a 20 amongst them. Often after a few moments a disgusted player would toss his D20 at me “use this, dude.”

Why didn’t I just eliminate all but 5 or 6 of them (let’s face it, for D&D you don’t really need more than 4 or 5 D6 max)? Well, when I had some kobolds attack the other month, and ran out of goblin-size miniatures, those D6’s came in damn handy to represent the little bastards. Not only that, I had them with 3-6 hit points, and you can actually face-up the dice with the appropriate number of points, and if the thing gets hit and lives, you just turn it to the number of hit points it has left! Genius!

Still, I guess it would behoove me to maybe at least put the 6’s in their own bag. But somehow, in some twisted way, I think I am getting used to having a gagillion D6’s in the bag. Let’s face it, as soon as I don’t have them I might need them for something. Maybe Tiamet will show up and blast the party with 50 dice worth of breath weapon. It could happen.

Sticks & Stones

OK, it wasn’t my most played microgame of the late 70’s. That distinction probably went to Rivets. Hell, I think I only managed a couple of games with one of my buddies. It was a fun little game, with 10,000 BC dudes slugging it out with Mammoths, and each other, for supremacy of their area. You could choose for your session a hunting expedition, or maybe an attack on the opposing tribe across the valley. You could steal their goods, and their women. Good times, all played out in classic Microgame style.

I mainly mention the game because it inspired one of my many homebrew ideas to never reach fruition, namely, to do an entire campaign of my own design based on the time period. PC’s would be Cro-Magnon men, doing the type of thing Cro-Mags do. Just like in Sticks & Stones.

The system was a no-brainer. I would use a version of my Road Warrior rules, a set of rules I came up with for a short campaign that I ran in the early 80’s.

I think the thing that held me back and ultimately kept me from going ahead with a game was the fact that I could not decide between realism and fantasy. Should I do this straight, with no magic or fanciful creatures? Or maybe something close to it, but with perhaps with a touch of the supernatural. Shamans and perhaps solitary, primitive wizards came to mind. Maybe light touches of magic, or even a clerical or wizard type class players could play as.

I even considered a full on fantasy take, with dinosaurs alongside man, but supernatural monsters and demons, dragons and perhaps even Gods walking the earth. I even thought of having aliens in a spaceship get encountered at some point (The Barrier Peaks?). Yeah, obviously Land of the Lost had a lot of influence on me there, along with a certain amount of Edgar Rice Burroughs and the Marvel comic Devil Dinosaur.

By the late 80’s, I was running plenty in my D&D world Acheron, and also putting in lot of GM duty with Champions and Call of Cthulhu. Really, with these three games going as successful campaigns that went from the 80’s and well into the 90’s, I just didn’t have time to introduce another game genre to my players. Hell, it had been hard enough to sell my regular D&D folk on Champs and CoC (which they loved once they experienced them).

With all the great shows on Discovery and History Channels in the last decade or so, and movies like the recent 10,000 B.C. (I actually liked it for what it was), I still get stirred to try to get a “Sticks and Stones” type role-playing game going now and again. But if my group plays anything else but D&D for a break, it’s probably going to be CoC or Champs again. But a GM can day dream, can’t he?

Drag Me To Hell

This last Sunday I saw this along with the new Terminator at the Sci Fi Academy double bill over at USC.

Very much like Sam Raimi’s first couple of Evil Dead films, it features a protagonist being tormented by demonic spirits. But even more so than those previous films, this movie will have you reflecting on your Call of Cthulhu games of the past. At least, it had me reflecting.

One of the main themes in my games was the “slow burn” of encountering the supernatural in some unexpected and casual way, then those supernatural forces coming in ever increasing and material ways to torment characters to the point of them having to eventually take drastic steps to prepare for the evil “things” inevitable appearance.

I usually referred to this affect, in game and without, as “The Call,” as from The Call of Cthulhu. To encounter forces dealing with any sort of evil demonic or godlike being is to be forever hearing “The Call.” You will always be a magnet for the weird and otherworldly. It is the destiny of those who encounter evil forces to carry these forces with them till the end of their days (which is probably sooner than later).

I like to have those Lovecraft entities who didn’t give a rats ass about mankind, but I also liked to combine that with classic ancient evil that tends to swim around the borders of mankind’s perceptions. Just call me a “Lovecraftian StephenKingian”. I always thought of my game world as having room for both cosmic alien entities, and evil of a biblical nature. And of course, neither of these forces are necessarily mutually exclusive. The supernatural and super-science are two great tastes that can taste great together.

These evil forces will manifest themselves at first in minor ways. Perhaps the character will hear footsteps in otherwise unoccupied parts of the house at night, or awaken from twisted dreams of doom only to briefly glimpse a skeletal face at the darkened bedroom window. Eventually these pesky hauntings will even come at them in the hustle and bustle of day time life, such as when I had a character sitting in a busy 20’s diner seeing little tentacles and portents of doom in a swirling cup of coffee.

By the time the character is facing more dangerous and violent encounters with corporeal entities, they have been softened up and tenderized by the hauntings, having already lost a decent percentage of sanity before ever actually being in the full presence of horror. Some characters at this point are being role-played as frazzled and desperate. Others, usually military men or big game hunter types, will be seething with a mixture fear and anger at being jerked around by forces they cannot comprehend.

Drag Me To Hell is that kind of horror experience. A young bank exec denies a particularly disgusting old gypsy woman a loan, and ends up cursed by the devil known as The Lamia. The goat God manifests as threatening wind and shadows on the first night, semi-visible and violent abuser on the second night, and on the third night appears as giant clawed hands reaching up through a fiery hole in the ground to grab you and take your soul down to hell for all manner of horrible experiences.

Although I really would have preferred to see good old Bruce Campbell cracking wise-ass and making with the whup-ass on the demons, I found this film to be a pretty entertaining ride and a viable addition to the Evil Dead universe. Check it out, you may just find some inspiration for a new Call of Cthulhu campaign. It sure has me wanting to start up a new one! I just love tormenting player characters!