2012 - a great year of just plain gaming

With the Temple of Demogorgon 4 year anniversary just this last week, I thought it might a good time to talk about some of my gaming from the last year (as seems to be the tradition). Mostly the last year was about focusing on actually running games over blogging or kerfuffling in the OSR, and I found it both peaceful and fulfilling.

In 2012 I didn’t do much in the way of gaming outside the regular group. After a couple of shitty experiences in the previous and other years both at tabletops and online (there were some good ones too), I dedicated myself to the regular group and to new campaigns with gusto, and kept my posts here to an average of 2 or 3 a month.

Pretty much started the year jumping right into my long-daydreamed about classic Runequest game. I did a lot of research, and dreaming up of my own stuff in relation to existing data for this campaign. It was a lot of work, but I love Glorantha and could not wait to portray my version of it. Though I used a lot of the Celtic imagery and some clarifications on locations from later editions, I did my best to keep my Glorantha very basic, they way I experienced it as a kid. There was a bit of work to be done with the crunch, as I almost immediately threw out some of the Strike Rank stuff and started houseruling to make the game and all it’s combat focus go smoother. I think that went well, as I’m pretty sure I captured the groups imagination with strong tribal-clan setting, a nice break from generic medieval Europe setting of D&D. I finally got to do the classic Gringles Pawnshop and Rainbow Mounds scenario’s, and it was all good. I think I left the campaign off later in the year with the players wanting more, and that is the feather in the GM cap as far as I’m concerned. I will for sure revisit the characters later this year.


In January regular player Paul brought a copy of Arkham Horror boardgame when we were low on players, and though lengthy (as most boardgames seem to be) it was fun, and got my juices flowing to do some Call of Cthulhu. We did eventually get a few sessions in, and it was good times. I called this part of the campaign “Fangs of New York,” with a classic New York setting. Byakhees and Chinese Gangsters over Times Square on New Years Eve, Cho Cho People and Chaugner Faugh in the Jersey Pine Barrens. Really great sessions, and as in the past some players hemmed and hawed about the genre, but loved it once we played. Quite honestly, I think I do my best GMing with Cthulhu. I’m really “on” when I run it. Looking forward to getting in some more of this soon. It is a good game for when you are low on players.


Just a quick video gaming mention as an aside. Around the earlier part of last year my video game of choice ended up being Fallout 3. I hadn’t played a video game with this much enthusiasm since Resident Evil 4. Just a great and immersive game, and a big time waster in 2012. Right now, into 2013, I’m putting a bit of effort into Borderlands 1 and Bioshock (I might have mentioned in the past that I am always 2-4 years behind on my video games).

My Knights of The Old Republic campaign continued. Despite the crunch, or maybe even because of it, the group on a whole seemed to really enjoy it. I cannot compare it to AD&D as I hadn’t run that for the group in over two years, but out of everything else I have done; Mutant Future, Champions, and Call of Cthulhu, this seemed to be what the gang liked best. I ran it right up to the holidays, but have set it aside since I want to do D&D so bad. We’ll hopefully get back to it later this year, maybe summer.

In addition to this new D&D campaign we are just getting underway, I also still want to do a mini-campaign with the high level dudes left over from the Night Below campaign I ended two years ago. The players seem very attached to these characters, and it seems a shame to not do the occasional outing with them, despite my mild dislike for high level play.


So we in the group have started my new AD&D 1st edition campaign, and the characters seem like a lot of fun so far. So my gaming wish list for lucky number 2013 is to do a bunch of this AD&D campaign, a smattering of the high level AD&D, More Call of Cthulhu here and there, a continuance of KOTOR later in the year, and…heaven forbid…maybe sneak a little Champions in? That would be a damn good gaming year for me.

Another Campaign Ends

Last night we wrapped up the fairly short (maybe 8 sessions or so) Runequest campaign I popped on the group a few months ago. I had actually intended to mix in a lot more Call of Cthulhu, a sort of Chaosium mix, but we were having such a good time with the RQ that we pretty much stuck with that and breezed through the campaign.



I used the classic Apple Lane setting for this, and went through the usual progression (besides my own added bits and encounters) of the tribal initiations battle circles, Pawnshop Baboon attack all the way through finishing up Rainbow Mounds last night. Whiteeye and his trollkin defeated, and the Lizard Mother and the Lizard Spirits destroyed (the Newtlings made Terry’s character Rowan their queen – for what it was worth).



The party got to touch the adamantine column hidden behind the newt idol, gaining some spells. They also found the Issaries statue to later sell to Gringle. In a wild twist, the party forgot to search White eyes’ lair for the main treasure. They rested after the White eye fight for a night before moving on into what they though was a tunnel to another area (it was actually a small chamber with White eyes bed and the main treasure of the adventure), then later got distracted and didn’t finish searching that area! Thousands of lunars and other precious stuff left behind! Kind of a hoot.



I mean, they were told there would be a lot of items White eye and gang robbed people of, but they happily left without any of that. I waited until they were back at the village to tell them. There was the usually thrashing around for a couple of minutes trying to find the poor GM at fault, but the realization set in that they had been idiots to not realize they didn’t have what they, in part, went to the Rainbow Mounds for. Doesn’t really make up for anybody not getting killed or maimed in the campaign, but it helps.



So time to regroup, get out the Star Wars stuff, and repack my mini’s box with Sci Fi figures. We’ll be doing KOTOR for the rest of the year, with the odd Call of Cthulhu game thrown in here and there when we are short on important players.



But yeah, there ya go. Another campaign in the bag. It’s always kind of a satisfying peace that comes over you when you are at the finish line of a fun campaign.

Cup runneth over - but not Full

Look at that great action scene from Herioc Comics in the pic above. Isn't it just bugnuts amazing? A blonde babe in black leathers, standing in a T-Rex's mouth, smacking a gorilla in a space suit with a great white, as Ed Wood-looking flying saucers float about.

Reminds me so much of my old Champions campaigns. No, really. Dinosaur rampages during unusual great white shark migration as alien apes attack a major city. And hot super babes? Oh, you bet. Over the decades my female players would not always have beautiful characters in their D&D, but in Champions they were all Baywatch circa 1996. Ah, the good old days.

But shit, I'm running an old school Gloranthan Runequest campaign and a Call of Cthulhu campaign at the same time. I posted over the years about how I would really love to do these campaigns, and here I am now doing them. I have my players loving my currently hiatused KOTOR campaign, and they also often ask about their high level characters in my 1st ed. Ad&D campaign (been more than a year now I think for that). So why do I pine for Champions? Why do I wish I could run this crunchy system and my awesome futuristic comic books setting?

Because I am a gamer, and true gamers are never satisfied. There are so many games to run (including multiple settings and time periods over several game systems, such as CoC for Ancient Rome and Victorean London), I'll never get to them all. I know I should be happy with what I am having fun with at the moment, and I really do. But the daydreaming man, the daydreaming. It'll get you every time.

A little Chivalry and Sorcery, anyone?

Chaugner Faugn and the Tcho Tcho People

The party had gone to the a secluded portion of the New Jersey Pine Barrens in search of a missing anthropology professor and one of his students. The prof, from New York University, was looking into tales of the existence of a displaced tribe of Tcho Tcho people (an especially nasty cannibal tribe from Burma) near a small ghost town originally founded by German immigrants who for one reason or another imported the Tcho Tchos. Some decades ago the Rosens died out, but rumors say some of the Tcho Tcho’s still exist.

The party spent the first night in a mostly intact barn, looking over some weathered notes the professor had left behind. In the later hours the Tcho Tcho chanted from beyond the treeline, and threw rocks at the barn. Next morn, the group discovered a tunnel leading down in the ruins of the old house, and descended to find a short maze, and eventually some kind of worship chamber filled with human bones, and huge statue of the Tcho Tcho diety Chaugner Faugn. Also there was a prone figure, and it was alive! It turned out to be the student assistant of the professor, now emaciated and his face mutated. His nose had become long and probiscan like an elephants, and his ears were fanning out in mockery of an elephants ears. All sure signs of complete domination of Chaugner. He begged to be killed, lest night falls and he comes for them to kill them like he did the professor. The party would have none of it (all mostly good souls), and decided to carry him out and eventually to a hospital.

And here is where all Call of Cthulhu characters who carry big guns try to prove they have balls. As the others were leaving, Roland Smythe, the big game hunter, took a parting shot at the big statue with his elephant gun. To his shock, it turned instantly into a living, roaring Chaugner Faugn, and loped off its base to chase Smythe. The group, terrified and party split up, plunged into the small maze area while Chaugner battered around trying to seek them out.

Luck rolls and intelligence saved the day for them, as they escaped the underground tunnels into daylight. But Tcho Tchos armed with spears and bone clubs (and a couple of old swords) waited, with the masked and robed shaman. The party managed to fight their way out of the village area with only modest wounds, and hiked the 5 miles to the main road and escaped.

All that leaving out much of the detail, but suffice it to say it was a great session. We have already had a couple of games so far, but this is the one I think really blew the players away and got them honest to god terrified during the underground incident, with the added bonus of a thrilling fight with cannibals, and a hectic escape. The players really seemed to have a great time with this session, and I think I have them hooked.

This happened in the early 90’s with one of my old long running groups. My regular players hemmed and hawed when I suggested a 1920’s horror game (I don’t tend to get players with a lot of experience with HP Lovecraft), but within two or three sessions are just eating it up. So I was confident the current gang would love it as well. Man, that’s the power of a good Call of Cthulhu session.

As I wanted to get back to a little more Runequest (sans Strike Rank), I’m thinking this Chaugner Faugn encounter would hold the group over so I can get back into a little Glorantha goodness. Then back to CoC, and we’ll see what horrors that nimrod with the elephant gun brings down upon them next. Smythe!

Dive bars…always with the dive bars…

It’s my basic gaming staple. Bars. Usually divey ones.

Whether it’s D&D (ok, those are “inns” and “taverns”), my futuristic Champions setting, Star Wars, or Call of Cthulhu, I always play the dive bar card. I’m not sure I ever did it with post apocalypse stuff like Gamma World, but if you ever saw Book of Eli with Denzel Washington, then you know those are great places for encounters/fights as well. I know from firsthand experience, because in the 90’s, especially when I was into darts for extended periods, I spent a decent amount of time in them.

It’s my go-to setting, because I can always get characters to spend time there. Often an entire session if I want. Have an interesting guy behind the bar, some mixed-economy patrons (there are always “yuppie” types who like to go slumming at dive bars), some ladies of ill-repute, some informer types, low-level criminals, and you have a nice mix of NPC’s to play with. Have a table or two with some open gambling, and frost the cake with fist-fight betting (cage matches or otherwise) and you got yourself a good time.

Players can chat to a lady of choice, get in on the gambling, or if they are the rugged type get involved in some nice punch-up play for fun and profit. My current group really loves my bar settings, and what was maybe going to be a very brief encounter often turns into the better part of the night.

Case in point: In the last Call of Cthulhu game, the characters needed to go to a lowbrow Hudson Bay dockside bar to find a guy who could lead them to a Ghost Town in the New Jersey Pine Barrens they needed to investigate. So after dealing with an attack from multiple byakhees (they have been stalked by a Chinese Business man since NYE who can summon them with an ancient whistle), they went into the bar for the usual bar fun.

Of course there was some fist fighting going on. It didn’t seem like any characters were going to get involved in it this time, until the young Turkish antique dealer grabbed Wing Kong, the young Chinese cook/martial artist, by the arm and sort of forced him into it. She is a brash young Turk, that girl is. Anyway, in the ring against “Slippery Pete,” Wing, who’s English is not so good, just dodged around confused while the guy threw punches. Wing Kong is the best HTH fighter in the group, and it was refreshing to me that he didn’t want to fight unnecessarily. But Andy’s old business man/’semi-hobo Michael (sort of an aged Clint Eastwood type) got up on the small dais and pushed Wing out of the way to take on Pete himself. After a devastating head butt and a good right hook from Pete, poor Michael was laid flat on the ground (this seems to happen pretty much every game to the poor old guy). Wing did not like that, and he got up to give Pete a thrashing with his five fingers of death (our young female Turk even tried to get a punch in). By the end of the evening, a group of international sailors were buying Wing drinks, and even Slippery Pete, black eyed and bruised, joined the characters at the bar.

I didn’t intend for the group to spend the better part of the game there, but these dive bar encounters just seem to have a mind of their own.

We have almost an hour left of the game, so we did manage to get them to the Pine Barrens, and a little bit of investigation into the presence of some Tcho Tcho people there. More on that, and a Mythos deity, next game.

Cthulhu's Brother

I'm currently reading the Brian Lumley book The Clock of Dreams, one of the Titus Crow stories set in the Mythos.

Lumley's stuff is from the "Derleth School" of Cthulhu Mythos adventuring. That is to say, Lumley took to August Derleth's imposing of a Christian-like "good vs. evil" mentality upon the Elder Gods and The Great Old Ones. Die-hard fans of Lovecraft took exception to much of what Derleth did, including such minutea as his coining the phrase "Cthulhu Mythos (Lovecraft himself used the term "Yog-Sothothery"), but mostly for his creation of heroes who could take it to the grill of Lovecraftian monsters. They are not milquetoast academics who faint at the smell of a fart like most of Lovecrafts heroes. Guys like Crow, though outmatched, fight back against the slimey gods of the Mythos. Lumley said it best here:

I have trouble relating to people who faint at the hint of a bad smell. A meep or glibber doesn't cut it with me. (I love meeps and glibbers, don't get me wrong, but I go looking for what made them!) That's the main difference between my stories...and HPL's. My guys fight back. Also, they like to have a laugh along the way.

I have to admit that this is my favored type of character for Call of Cthulhu play, mostly because I prefer long campaigns. BTB CoC is not meant for long campaigns

Still, I take exception to the somewhat corney creation of entities such as Kthanid (pictured above), a brother of Cthulhu who is his twin, except for his crystal eyes. He is the "good" to Cthulhu's "evil," which I just find way to simplistic and far too Christian in concept. In The Clock of Dreams his is a helpful figure, and I have to admit I think a helpful monster should be pretty rare in The Mythos, no matter what flavor. And c'mon, a helpful brother of Cthulhu is just plain lame.


For my Cthulhu games, I like to find a kind of balance to the hopeless universe of Lovecraft. Sure, you may find a powerful friend here and there, but really, you need a mostly hopeless and terrifying universe to get the most juice out of this genre.

Bumper Crop of Cthulhu minis

I really don’t do a lot of shopping for figures lately. The other year I bought a few cheap batches of great, prepainted plastic minis from Ebay, and there were plenty of fantasy and sci fi ones. And with a nice basic color coat on them, it only took a little extra model work and couple extra colors to make the mini stand out or look like a particular character or NPC. These, and my older metal minis, form the stock in my miniature soup.

But for 1920’s Cthulhu fun, my mini collection is a bit lacking. Sure, I have the odd Mi-Go or Dark Young figure left over from the olden days, but not much in the way of 1920’s humans. Here and there some of my Champions and other modern figures can do in a pinch, but it’s really not enough.

So yesterday, seeing as I was in the Neighborhood for the Queen Mary Scottish Festival, I stopped by The War House in Long Beach. Actually, since I have been competing at these games for years now, I kind of make that Saturday afternoon my yearly pilgrimage to the place. I remembered from the year before that they had some Cthulhu minis, and I was hoping to find a couple of items for characters or NPC’s in the current campaign.

They had Chronoscope, which has a few nice pulp adventure minis. But these are pretty pricey. Not that I can’t afford it, but I really need to justify how much use I will get out of something I buy for gaming. But then I saw that War House still had a nice lot of official Call of Cthulhu figures, but sadly most where monsters and again, I have to justify to myself that I will use a particular mini enough to make it worth it.

Then I spotted this pack of Adventurers. 10 character/NPC types in one package…for 10 bucks! I immediately saw three or four that I liked rolling around in that little see-through plastic bubble, so that was my purchase. I cannot pass up 10 metal minis for that price. I knew I would use a few of them. The photo above from the official web site actually shows less than are actually in the pack, so people online are getting a better deal than they bargained for.

There is a big gamer hunter that might come in handy for a “Most Dangerous Game” type scenario, or for a character. The young female archeologist is perfect a couple of the players characters, and the two or three pith helmet guys will be useful eventually. The cops as well.

OK, so the old librarian lady and the South American native guy might not find much purchase in the game, but ya never know.

I haven’t sat down to paint for many months, so here’s my excuse. Hope my paints haven’t dried out.

Suddenly – Cthulhu

It does feel very sudden. In the last four years of this gaming group’s existence, I have run a long AD&D campaign that took characters from 1st level to close to 10. I did a handful of Metamorphosis Alpha sessions. I timidly started a Star Wars KOTOR campaign that most players quickly fell in love with. I have even managed to get in a couple of sessions of my beloved Champions setting (too long ago now, around 2 years). And with Big Ben regularly running AD&D I have gotten to sit down as a player more than I have since I was a teenager.

But the entire time I have had Call of Cthulhu in the back of my mind. My “big three” games of my adult life have been 1st edition AD&D, Champions, and Call of Cthulhu. These are the games I ran long campaigns for over the years from the late 80’s and throughout the 90’s. Full, satisfying, amazing campaigns with these three genres. And seeing as during the latter part of the 90’s we only seemed to be able to get one several hour session in every month or so, I am in sort of a renaissance of gaming. Running and playing almost every week (weeknight) which a few years ago would have been inconceivable to me. But here we are literally rolling in gaming goodness.

This has given me the opportunity to branch out a bit, and that was especially good for me because after a little over two years of AD&D I was ready for a break. With Call of Cthulhu holding a special place in my heart, I could have gotten a campaign underway sooner, but in all honesty I was not sure this was the best group for it. I have Terry, a veteran of those 90’s Cthulhu campaigns (which were often mostly comprised of female players, which would be another difference from the current group), but the likes of Dan Dan the Power Game Man™ might risk it being more farce than fearful. So as recently as a few weeks ago I decided to go with Runequest, but quickly hit a (hopefully temporary) snag because of my dislike for Strike Rank. I decided after game two to shelf that, and go the hell ahead with Cthulhu. With Big Dan overseas for a temporary period, it seemed like a good time to get a session underway before he came along and futilely tried to powergame a Basic Role Playing character.

My last campaign towards the end of the 90’s was set in around 1922 or so, so I decided to have 5 years go by and set the first session on NYE 1927. My catalyst would be my old NPC “Mr. Troy,” a sort of Truman Capote look/sound alike who was a wealthy antiquarian and high society mystic. Mr. Troy featured as a sort of benefactor in my previous campaigns, at one point setting the old characters up in an occult themed antique shop on the newly built Venice Beach Canals (“Venice of America”). At the start of this game, Troy is in New York, and after character set-up I managed to tie most of them in with Mr. Troy so they can be present at his New Years Eve party at a Times Square hotel penthouse.

One character was a female Turkish Antique expert, and another a female dilettante who used her massive trust fund to travel the world and indulge her hobby in archaeology. These two I connected to Mr. Troy, them being hired to both accompany him to the “underworld” private auction where a well-preserved 2000 year old Chinese urn containing the ashes of a X’an Dynasty sorcerer. I spent a few minutes running this auction with the girls in attendance, and got to introduce a rival of sorts for Mr. Troy, “Hong Lo,” a restaurateur and reputed occultist.

One of the male characters was a young Chinese martial artist working in Hong Lo’s restaurant, which incidentally was catering Troy’s party. So that’s how I got Ben’s guy at the party.

Andy ran a 70 year old investment expert named Michael who had taken a bath in the 1893 market crash, and since then has lived frugally off of some minor, safe investments. During some rougher patches he learned to handle himself brawling for survival or profit. I got him invited to the NYE party of Troy’s because he knew Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney, heir to the Whitney fortune, business-man, wanna be Bohemian, and invitee to the party and he asked Michael to come along with him and his free-spirit pals.

The Times Square penthouse party was within view of the madness of Times Square on NYE, and within a stone’s throw of the ball-dropping. The party had a Chinese theme, and the female characters, the antique expert and the archeology-loving dilettante, stayed near the displayed ancient urn and acted as both custodians for it and information dispensers. As a band played and the large, eclectic crowd (sort of reflected in the character make up; Chinese food service people, business people, academics, entertainment folk, Bohemians, dilettantes, etc) in the party danced, ate, drank (those wacky Bohemians hissing like vipers as they smoked reefer by the fireplace) and had a good time.

Not long after the time Hong Lo showed up uninvited and unannounced ( still a bit miffed that Troy had outbid him on the private auction of the urn), and with some of his Chinese thugs acting as servers, he had secretly arranged for the urn to be covented in the chaos of the midnight countdown. A gun was pulled, the urn was grabbed for, and a nice pulp action sequence began as the martial artist intervened, and even the girl characters threw some Indy Jones punches during the ensuing brawl. It was actually a pretty enjoyable action scene, and proving that CoC is pretty good for this kind of thing.

Eventually Hong Lo whipped out a special magic whistle that could summon Byakhee, and as he blew it an loud, eerie Byakhee cry brought forth one of the creatures from the air of the wintery New York evening sky. As drunken party goers screamed and ducked in fear, the Byakhee rages around the room, and a couple of the characters engaged Hong Lo (Andy’s old dude going cane-to-cane combat when Hong Lo revealed his sword cane).

First sanity loss of the game, with Terry’s dilettante taking the worst san hit for 5 whopping points. She went catatonic for a couple rounds, as Big Ben’s kung-fu cook took it to the Byakhee’s grill. His well placed kicks hurt the creature pretty bad (I threw one of the Mythos’ few harm able creatures at them for this first game), and one of Mr. Troy’s armed assistants shot it down.

So 1927 passed by with a bang, and a successful session was in the bag. I was really happy with it. In past years my D&D players would hem and haw when I suggested something like Cthulhu, but they would soon be requesting it over D&D after they saw how fun it was. I think my current group could well feel the same. I’m really looking forward to more of this!

Arkham Horror begats Call of Cthulhu

Being down three players last night (Dan Dan the Power Game Man is overseas for awhile, Little Ben has to take a month or two off suddenly, and Big Ben had a cold), we decided to finally play Paul’s copy of Arkham Horror he got for Xmas instead of my Runequest session.. In all honesty, I’m not feeling Runequest like I thought I would. I love the setting, but the super crunch of the combat rules really killed my buzz. I’m going to go back to the drawing board on that for awhile. Like I said a thousand times on this blog, my pet peeve in GMing it to feel like its work. I don’t wanna work during a game. I want to have a couple of beers and paint a picture. I’m all heart and passion at the center, not the crunchy shell. I actually was willing to carry on without using the mind-numbing, high maintenance Strike Rank, but with a couple of the guys being heavily for using it BTB, I just wanted to step back for a bit and take another look before we spent another session trying to adjudicate a battle with the characters and a couple of weapon snakes.

So we finally play AH (the latest version), and it seemed pretty cool. As the only real Lovecraft aficionado in the group, I had to hold back and not bore everybody with the back story of every side street on the Arkham map and all the monsters and books and such. What was weird was they, the Cthulhu novices, seemed to enjoy it a bit more than me. In all honesty, I like a board game to be a little simpler, and to be able to be played inside of three hours with 4 people or less. I’m actually surprised that we finished by 11:30, but I think we fudged a couple of things to be able to get to the battle with the endgame god (in this case it was Yig the serpent god, and we beat him with only one character dying).

We’ll have a better handle on it next time so it will go quicker, but one really good thing came out of this: we got the Lovecraft bug, and I’ll be running some Call of Cthulhu for my next session! Next week at Big Ben’s D&D I’m thinking of taking up a half hour or so for some CoC chargen so we can do less of that when I get the Cthulhu session underway.

Usually this would be a good time to get that weekly gaming in, but some of us are having our schedules become busier on weeknights than usual. Andy is getting involved in some kind of local politics, Terry is going to start bartending at her club a night or two during the week, and in addition to my usual once weekly music practice I want to start learning some new instruments – so all of a sudden we find ourselves dashing about trying to work it out for weekly gaming now. Once or twice a year we have a longer weekend session, and I suggested we try to make that once a month or so to make up for some lost weeknight sessions, so in the long run I think it will be all good and the group will carry on with standard operations bullshit for the foreseeable future.

Obligatory 5th Edition post

My experience with an D&D beyond 1st edition could fit into a thimble. In the early 90’s one of my players wanted to run D&D, so she went out and bought the 2nd edition stuff. She ran a few games, but I don’t really recall the major differences in systems.

One of the main reasons I stuck with 1st edition all through the 90’s was probably because most of my players tended to have very little gaming experience until they came to my games. “I always wanted to play but never go the chance” people. I of course was the “seasoned veteran,” and was able to lead these gentle lambs through many a campaign with 1st edtion. Hell, they didn’t care. That was a time of wide-eyed wonder for my players, it seemed. And I often had a lot of females in games then (at one point in the mid-90’s outnumbering the guys at many sessions), and in my games they tended to lean heavily towards role-play (especially shopping trips, which in D&D, Call of Cthulhu, and Champions was always great for developing those “winging it” DM muscles), so task resolution was not the main source of fun during those times. We’d have these amazing several hour session with minimal combat or action.

From around 2000-2008 I was not gaming, and not even really keeping up on what was going on with D&D. My stuff was all in boxes in a garage, and my internet interests were more about comic books, music, and movies.

Then out of nowhere *BAM* I’m running games for a regular group, reading about D&D and other games constantly online, and started this friggin’ blog. Gaming and D&D was all up in my grill. Still, I’m not exactly Grognardia James in terms of my knowledge of the history of gaming, and what is going on in the OSR. Obviously I’m a much better talker than a listener. Powergame Dan sometimes marvels at what I know that is going on in gaming and the OSR, but really it’s reading Grognardia and a couple of other select forums that gives me any particular knowledge on what is going on. And that knowledge is not exactly deep even after three years.

And in all honesty, looking at online stuff about gaming is starting to lose it’s luster. “G whiz” factor is gone. It might be different in my case if I was back in semi-retirement gaming-wise. I’d look online and do a shitload of “remember when.” But with a full and regular group going, I’m trying to enjoy that more. In some ways because I’ve slowly realized that it is a fairly rare and precious thing.

As for 5th edition, well, it’s not very relevant to me. I don’t think D&D is relevant at all any more. You don’t see it getting played by characters in films or TV shows like you sometimes did in the 80’s and 90’s. You never hear it getting joked about. Even the Ubergeeks on The Big Bang Theory don’t play it. In dorkdom these days, it seems pretty bottom of the barrel. If you watch Attack of The Show for a week you might hear a smarmy D&D reference, but even in venues like that it is rare.

So I don’t much care. I have a KOTOR campaign going, a Runequest campaign just started, a 1st edition setting to get back to, a player who is regularly running 1st edition games for us, and am itching to do some Call of Cthulhu before too long. I have plenty on my plate. So let me join the throngs of “happy wanderers” and toss my own “I wish them well” into the ring. That’s it, Mac, Smile and wish them well. But it’s ok if inside you just don’t give a rats ass.

Temple Of Demogorgon – 3 Years and still underachieving

As usual, a day late for my own party. Yesterday, Saturday, marked the 3rd anniversary of this most humble, somewhat under the radar and highly underappreciated gaming blog. I’m obviously not keeping a real keen eye on things like that. I’ve never really felt like this was a “vanity blog.” I hardly ever talk about my life outside of games. Having a big, noticeable voice in the online community was never my goal (less than 175 followers after three years is fairly pathetic). I don’t work at all at it, or try to be on a lot of blog rolls. What would even be the point of that? You don’t get paid to blog with under 10,000 readers. You don’t get prestige in any circles that matter for shit in the world at large.

I mean, this is a community that rewards blogs with huge followings because the particular blogger is a skeeve who happens to know some low end sex workers (poor me always having females in my games who were mostly legit actresses and entertainment industry people, professional artists, or successful business women of one kind or another), or made his bones by posting fairly droll commentary of various kinds 3-5 times a day. I don’t constantly post charts and tables (I stopped having time for coming up with that shit when I got out of high school), or focus on corny-ass old school cartoon dungeon mentality that tries to recapture the vibe felt by a 14 year old playing D&D in the late 70’s. I don’t make post after post of “Mr. Nice Guy” gamer fluff that is about as interesting as watching flies fuck. I don’t laser focus on any one thing, like games about Mars or Cimmeria. I don’t try to be especially wacky, refined, literary, or insightful.

This is just a dude who was out of gaming completely for almost a decade, and fell ass backwards into a host who was willing to help put a regular group together and lived fairly close to me and was looking for a 1st edition DM. Luckily we found some folk who were (mostly) not hopeless, catpiss-smelling nons or disturbing geektards. It was a perfect storm that swept me up into putting hours of precious time back into this hobby. And some of that time went into this blog. Yeah, it’s weird, because before that I had zero interest in blogging.

But I sometimes do tend to over think things, and starting this blog may have been an offshoot of that. It’s mostly because I actually enjoy writing down my thoughts, but I really felt I had a lot to say, and had a lot of unique situations from back in the day to talk about. My early, often shitty experiences as a youngster playing in a filthy game shop full of older weirdo’s; girlfriends who played in campaigns (once again non-skanks, sorry); friendships gained and lost. Growing up on onward all while gaming on the sidelines of a fairly full, non-nerd life.

A couple of times doing the blog felt like it was overshadowing the games, especially with my less than satisfactory exploits trying to get involved in the local gaming community outside my comfort zone of a regular group of hand-picked non-cretins. But earlier this year I had an epiphany and decided my focus would be on playing and not writing about playing. That is what it should be about, no? Enjoy the fruits more than you study their roots. Having a bunch of people read your words is great, but having 6 people in front of you hanging on your words and laughing, moaning, bitching, begging, cursing, and yelling is priceless.

So this last year big changes at work and in my career, a couple of somewhat regular relationships including one at work (Sam Adams might tell you that is NOT always a good decision) and some other good life things gave me less time to post. It comes and goes of course, and through the holidays up to right now I’ve had more freedom to post more often. But the fact is I’ll probably post less again. I’m going to try and struggle through a few Runequest games (one game and I already want to houserule half the shit) so I’ll want to post on that a bit just because it’s new. And hopefully I’ll get some Call of Cthulhu games going, and I know from past experience that will be worth posting about. But again, I want the actual gaming to be more important than reading my own thoughts and sharing them with a small, closed community.

So going into another year of this, and who knows how far it will go. Another three years? That’s a long time when you are getting into middle-age. Then again, my doctor tells me because of my outstanding Scottish genetics I could get back close to high school shape in a year if I skipped a few beers and got back on my mountain bike on weekends. Miracles can happen. In two years I could be married, have kids, working harder to make even more money. Who knows. I still want a beach house and a super-model as mother to my future children. Weirder things have happened. Just look at the very existence of an OSR. Who would have thought 30 years ago that this was a possibility.

Thanks for your support and best of luck in the new year!

One campaign wraps, some others begin

Well, last night we did what will be the last KOTOR session for awhile . After having done Night Below with 1st edition for two years (with little breaks for Metamorphosis Alpha and Champions) I was a little burnt out, so I knew from then on I would keep to 6 month campaigns of whatever I ran. We started KOTOR in July I think, so the holidays seem to be a good time to end it. I think we had between 12-14 sessions, and it has actually been pretty fun. For people who are only marginally into Star Wars, we got into it and everybody seemed to like their characters and there were some pretty good interactions.

I found the Star Wars Saga system a bit of a challenge in that there is very little wriggle room with the rules. If you house rule one thing, you risk messing up some other thing related to it. My first instinct as a GM is to houserule any little thing I don’t like. But in a way this was a good discipline exercise for me. I could focus less on rules I wanted to change and more on the actual gameplay.

So with a session of dicking around Coruscant, with three pretty good combat actions sequences, including Rokran and Lushia the Jedi getting to lightsaber duel two other Padawans under power suppressors in the Jedi Temple (with the block ability, these fights can take a long time with no force powers involved), we set things to rest and will do the second half of the campaign later next year. But for now…

Both Call of Cthulhu and Runequest are what I want to do next. Big Ben’s 1st edition games will help keep us a D&D group, but after all that Night Below it’s going to be awhile before I want to run extended D&D. Just for fun we are going to do some one-offs here and there with the now high level Night Below guys, but my focus will be CoC and RQ.

But which to start first? I had long, successful Cthulhu campaigns in the 80’s and 90’s (some of those 90’s runs were so much fun as to seem unreal). But I have also been itching to do some classic Glorantha again for almost 30 years. As for the players, some seem the most into Cthulhu, some seem to be very curious about RQ. Terry having been a big part of those 90’s Cthulhu games (her mobbed-up torch singers Lila survived two campaigns where most others died or went nuts) is inspiration to get going on that, and the fact is that with Dan Dan the Power Game man™ being back in South Africa seeing family for a couple of months, it’s a great time to do some subtle, low combat Cthulhu.

Anyway, with both games being based off Basic Role-Playing, I think I’ll interchange sessions; run both games at once. Maybe do Cthulhu when we only have 4 or less players, seeing as six is kind of a crowd in an investigator group, and RQ the rest of the time.

As my last Cthulhu game ended set around 1923, I think I’ll jump ahead a few years to 1927 or 28. Lots going on towards the end of the decade in America and beyond. I’m going to take the adventures from Times Square in New York, to New England (brief visits to Innsmouth and Arkham might be called for), and eventually to California, the setting of my previous campaign.

For Runequest, the big question is do I want to have characters start in the stormy hill country of Dragon’s Pass, or in the arid and sometimes barbaric land of Prax to the east. Actually that decision is my biggest struggle with it at the moment. What is the best way to introduce players to Runequest and Glorantha who have zero knowledge and experience about it? That is actually part of the excitement for me. Complete Glorantha noobs. Blank slates.

But anyway, here we go. New year, new genres, new campaigns.

Oriental Adventures & The Legend of Green Snake

I was going through a box of my older DVD’s last night, and came across my copy of the 1993 Hong Kong film Green Snake. I really love this movie, which I think I originally saw at the WLA revival theater The Nuart in the mid-late 90’s. I don’t know if there is a voice-over English version, but I hope not. The movie is so beautiful to look at (when the sadly terrible special effects are not on screen) and combined with the sing song native language it is almost mesmerizing, and part of the films charm (at least for a Yankee).

Wikipedia describes the film thusly:

Two snake spirits have been training for many centuries to take human form and experience the love, freedom and wisdom that is supposedly only available to humans. White Snake (Joey Wong) is the more experienced one and proceeds to get engaged with local scholar Hsui Xien (Wu Hsing-Kuo), with whom she plans to have a child which would complete her passage into the mortal realm. Green Snake (Maggie Cheung) is the younger and more impulsive of the two sisters and she is not yet quite sure about the benefits of the human world. The two snakes move into their magically created house and start a successful medical practice in the town.

Their enemies are a buffoonish Taoist and an overzealous Buddhist monk Fa Hoi (Vincent Zhao) who make various attempts to banish them from the human world. The monk thinks of himself as a keeper of the natural order of the world and is very prejudiced against spiritual beings seeking to improve themselves. He brings things to a head when he abducts White's husband from the human/spirit mixed marriage into his religious reeducation camp–styled temple.

Anyway, whenever I think of this film I think of Oriental Adventures (applying things that I like to gaming terms was a habit I never managed to fully lose after attaining it in childhood). Around 2003 I was into the second or third year of my gaming semi-retirement when I ran into an old player of mine at a suite party at Loscon in Los Angeles (a very rare sci fi con appearance by me) at around 2am. Lisa was from that period in the mid-90’s when almost all of my players were female and we were mostly doing Call of Cthulhu and Champions. Lisa, pretty high on joy juice, talked about how much she loved the old games, and raved to her fairly new husband about my DM’ing prowess (of course a party at a convention is the perfect place to hear that). It was decided right there that I would be doing up some games for these guys and whoever in the near future. At the husband Jeff’s request I would be doing some Oriental Adventures (something I hadn’t run since around 1990). Current player in my group Terry, who had played with Lisa in most of those 90’s games and was Lisa’s roommate back then, was up for it as well so there we were doing OA on a semi-monthly basis on weekends for awhile.

The movie Green Snake had a heavy influence on many of those games for me. For one thing, Lisa ran a Hengeyokai, and I tweaked that race just a little to match the changelings of Green Snake (animal spirits who spend many years of training and meditation to change into the higher human form). Then there was the super-powered, self-righteous monk of the film who both admires and distrusts the White and Green Snakes, Fa Hoi. I totally ripped-him off to create Tai Seng, a monk who I used as and NPC to guide the players towards various adventures and activities (he was not a prick like the movie version…for the most part).

Anyway, take a look at my favorite scene from the film, where the snakes White and Green make their transformation to beautiful human form on the roof of a tavern during a rainstorm, while a wedding/orgy goes on inside (little nudity so be careful at work). Maybe you’ll get the chance to watch in it’s entirely at some point. If you are going to run OA in the future, I demand you watch it! It might give you some great ideas as well.

The H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival

There should be more of these. LOTS more.


A goddamn Lovecraft fest going on practically in my own back yard (Redondo Beach). Guesting Roger Corman no less. And guess what? It's the weekend I start my several week run at the Northern Ren Faire, downing ales and playing world music. The only Old One's I'll be around are a lot of old hippies. Oh, and young hippy chicks. Yeah, that and the boozing in an Elizabethan village in the woods are why I'm going...

But if I was going to be in town, I'd be trying to get tickets to this thing.

Keep on Truckin' (more or less)

Wow, more than two weeks without a post! What the hell is going on around here? Actually, one big thing that is going on to sap up my “Funny time” is a big promotion at work. Career making. So to earn that nice extra chunk of change and the occasional invite to a big Hollywood client party now and again, I need to spend more time actually doing something productive on the computer, instead of all this frivolous, asinine game stuff that is unrelated to my actual playing of the games.

Also, with my long AD&D campaign now well over, I’m slightly less inspired to post about gaming stuff in general. Sure, I’m doing KOTOR and want to do Call of Cthulhu and more Champions in the future (and leave us not forget my current obsession Runequest) All this, combined maybe with my disappointment at how many less than fulfilling gaming experiences I’ve had outside my own group in the last couple of years (those great OD&D session at local events being an exception), in person and online, will keep me from posting very often for the foreseeable future. A lot of the negative crap I read online reminds me of those early Aero Hobbies days I had as a young teen at the local game shop. Exposure to a lot of bitter, unhappy people who seem to make up a huge portion of gamers (and maybe pop culture geeks in general). I keep getting sucked into stupid arguments with people online that I probably wouldn’t even acknowledge if I met them in real life. I gotta cut back on that for sure. Treat these people online who get on my nerves much like I do fucked-up shitty drivers when on the road. Think of them not as people, but as nothing more than blips in a video game comin’ atcha.

In gaming, I need to focus more on the actual gaming. Right now I’ve been playing every other week in Big Ben’s evil campaign, where I’m running a monk (the one non-evil character). That has been fun to a large degree because my guy came along after the first game, and this lot of evil punks were practically at each other’s throats. So my lawful neutral guy has brought some sense of order to the party.

In my game every other week, I’ve been doing the KOTOR thing and it’s a success so far. It’s based on the campaign I put together for the infamous Star Wars group I ran for a bit the other year. But the difference this time is I know these players, they are all pretty cool, and not one of them is even that much of a fan of Star Wars movies, which is a big plus for me. I’m trying to run anything but a Star Wars film with this. I don’t think the other group necessarily appreciated a little bit of hard sci fi and rated R situations being injected into their precious George Lucas setting. Yeah, it’s fun, with some great characters. The players are loving all the options you get for character building. I more or less dig the system (for Sci Fi…I don’t know how they could have called this game engine “D&D” at any point), and both Big Ben and Paul have PDF’s of the SW Core rules, and seem to know the system already better than I do.

For more changes on the game front, we are for the foreseeable future pretty much losing Andy’s place to play in after almost three years of playing there. But luckily, despite his wife just having a baby recently, Dan the Power Game Man has managed to sweet talk the new mom into letting the gang come over to play on weeknights there. Mulholland on a weeknight is a bit of a pain to get to from the West Side, but it’s good to know we still have a location.

So the games continue. My online presence, well, may be a bit less for awhile. I’ll still check in to post here and there when inspired, or pissed off by one of my players, or any possible number of things that get my goat or gets me excited (yay)in the grand scheme of gaming. I’ve really lost my taste now for trying to get involved in any kind of other groups outside the great gang of people I have now for our regular thing. Actually gaming on a regular basis. Seemed a far off dream around three years ago. I’m going to focus on keeping that healthy for as long as I can. For my gaming life right now, it feels like home.

Tintin and Me

Since childhood my folks would buy stacks of comics for me at various garage sales and swap meets. One day, sometime in the mid-80’s, they came home with a pile of large format Tintin books, and therein I discovered the Zen joy of the adventures of this diminutive French reporter and his rum-chugging sailor buddy Captain Haddock (Haddock actually didn’t come along until the later, best stories. He started out as a sort of villain). They were great adventure stories, spanning the globe and even going to the moon (while most of the stories were firmly grounded in a certain realism, the moon adventure was far more a flight of fancy).

A sort of sly, winking Euro-humor within the stories really added to the subtle flavor of the tales. The antics of the heroes were always rousing adventure, with the occasional violence sudden and brief. The very feel of the stories lent themselves very well to a Call of Cthulhu vibe. I mined ideas for my COC games pretty heavily in the 90’s. For example, there was a scene where Tintin and Haddock were trapped on a train in the Mountains (a footnote at the bottom of the page let you know it was the highest rail in the world at that time) of Peru that was out of control and rolling back down the mountain at increasing speeds to eventually end up careening off a bride hundreds of feet up. My ripping off of that entire sequence (and also later the attempted sacrifice of the heroes by cultists and their being saved by knowing an eclipse was coming) made for one of the most exciting Cthulhu games I had ever ran.

Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson have produced a 3D animated movie of Tintin for Fall of this year, with an all star cast of voices including Daniel Craig, Simon Pegg and Nick Frost (of Shaun of the Dead fame). Although an animated version has the best chance of being true to the source material, I am a bit sad this will preclude a live action version any time real soon. The film will for sure be huge in Europe where Tintin is still beloved, but who knows how it will pan out in the states. I actually think there is a big fan base out there in the USA, plus references to Tintin are all over pop culture here for decades. The popular 80’s cheese band Thompson Twins are named after Tintin’s policeman pals, and every now and again you see the little dude and his dog “Snowy” on T-shirts. So we’ll see. A big hit or not, I’ll be seeing the film. If for nothing else, Tintin inspired some great gaming from me, and just all around gives me a warm fuzzy feeling inside. Blistering barnacles!

The Runequest Obsession

Runequest was the second game I ever played after D&D. When I started hanging out at the local hobby shop as a kid, I had only around a year’s worth of experience with D&D. But the older crowd there were sort of past D&D, and heavily into other games. Traveller and Runequest was what were getting the most play at that time. Owner Gary had campaigns of RQ going on, and he had one big wall of the play area covered in situational maps for his games. Gary loved that game so much. Gary died a few years ago, but you can still find some writings of his online outlining various Runequest themes. He had obviously continued on with the Runequest love from the late 70’s and onward through the following decades.

When I stopped hanging out in the store after the early 80’s, Runequest pretty much left my life. The gaming side of my life would carry on for many years with only three favorites; AD&D, Call of Cthulhu, and Champions (games like Toon, Bunnies & Burrows, and Empire of The Petal Throne never got on my playlist, unfortunately). But I left my RQ at Aero Hobbies and never really looked back. I think my preference for AD&D, besides true “Sorcery” magic, was that I had a game world I loved and the rules of RQ would never have translated into it. By the late 80’s, RQ would have been just another game that my regular players were unfamiliar with, and would have taken up precious Champs and Call of Cthulhu time if I introduced it to them.

But man, those early games at the shop. They were this huge mystery to me. The world of Glorantha was based on historical places that were very much unlike what Tolkien, Terry Brooks, and other “classic fantasy” writers were presenting in their worlds. It seemed alien to me. Of course, I had yet to have any interest in ancient Mesopotamia, so I didn’t grok that influence. Adventures took my guys (my favorite was a Dragonnewt and second favorite was a duck. I called him “Scotty MacQuack” because I found a duck figure playing a bagpipe!) from the rough plains and temples of Prax, all the way to the greener hills and grasslands of Lunar Tarsh and Dragon Pass (I think I have that right). This was a patchwork world that was being put together and expanded, in-game, by the game designers at a time when I was having my earliest adventures with it. Cheapo modules like Apple Lane and Barristor’s Barracks gave me the medium to eventually start running some Runequest adventures for my friends. But those games soon got swept away by other things we wanted to play.

Well, I got my hands on a copy of second edition, 1970’s Runequest, and some other items on PDF like Cults of Prax, Pavis & Big Rubble, and Snakepipe Hollow. I never had these before, and my imagination is being fired up again by reading more about Glorantha than I ever did back in the day. Then I was just confusedly being a character running around in these modules and sourcebooks being run by the older pricks at Aero. Now, with all this reading I’m doing, I finally am starting to feel like and “insider” in regards to Runequest. I’m unlocking it’s mysteries for myself, man!

So I guess you could say I am a bit obsessed by old RQ right now. With a (probably short) Knights of The Old Republic campaign in full swing right now, I won’t be running any Runequest any time real soon, but when I do get to introduce its mysteries to my regular players I’ll be ready. It’s a long road to Rune Lords status. Better to get on that road sooner rather than later!

Campaigns End

Well, there you have it. Last night we finished up my Night Below campaign. At a bit over two years in duration, it is surely the longest campaign I have ever run. It was cause to party, and I was sucking down the brewskies with the satisfaction of a long run concluded.

No combat went down in the session, although towards the end during the final treasure shares, Krysantha the Drow and Vaidno the Bard seemed prepared to whip out there weapons and throw down, specifically over what to do with the Crown of Derro Domination. That would have been cool; finally a character death, at the hands of another character no less. But they managed to table further discussion on it and leave it with Vaidno for now. I have to say, it was really nice to relax and watch the characters, more vocal with each other than ever, pretty much take the ball and run with it. Some great role-playing went down.

Back at the surface and cleaned up, the characters were taken before the Queen of Tanmoor, Libertine, who had secretly come to town with some royal guards to see what all the fuss and kidnappings were all about. Meeting with the characters and hearing their story, she gave them modest rewards, and each a Royal Medal of Valor.

The group all went to Terry’s long-time hobbit character’s castle on the border of the Halfling lands for a party in their honor, with all kind of food, kegs of ale and wine of the finest hobbit make, and musical revelry. Lumarin the high elf MU amused himself by giving Terry’s hobbit’s children Tenser’s Floating disk rides in lieu of a pony.

Although rolling in dough from the adventures (I think most characters ended up each with somewhere in the neighborhood of 15-20 thousand golds worth treasure, not counting magic items), nobody is truly rich, so there will be plenty of reason for them to set out and adventure again in the future. I have a couple of high level modules in mind I might like to use on them.

But for now, the characters can go on with their normal above ground lives. Vaidno can go visit the tower the Deck of Many Things provided him (along with his 18 charisma), and Terry’s fighter Helena can marry the NPC soldier she got hooked up with in the course of the adventures . What the others will do, time will tell. But all characters have earned a deserved time of rest in the sunlight of the surface world.

Considering that three years ago I was on year 4 or so of gaming retirement (and dying to run games), I consider myself fortunate to have had the opportunity to run a fairly intense and complex campaign for such a great group of players. Most of our games were like little parties, and were big fun. I want to give special thanks to Andy for hosting us at his place; his wife’s backroom workshop (thanks to Andy’s wife Kara are in order as well) which, with its kitchen and nice garden backyard patio, was a nice place to play. For Andy, Terry, and Dan who have been there pretty much since the inception of this group over two years ago, I give wide thanks for being there for the whole ride.

Andy and the wife are probably going to be renting out the back room at some point in the near future, so we are losing the space to play most likely. Our best bet after that for our regular games would have been Dan’s spacious house up on Mulholland Drive, but he is still having construction done on the house and his wife is apparently days away from having her baby. So the games I run may lessen for awhile. A break might be nice, but I’m hoping to put AD&D aside for awhile and do a little of the Knights of the Old Republic thing I want to run. Some more Champions would be nice with just three or four players, and you know I’ve always got my precious Call of Cthulhu in the back of my mind, waiting for the right time to strike from the shadows. Game dreams and hopes galore.

But whatever happens in the near or far future, I’m just damn glad to have been able to run a long and fulfilling campaign. Here’s to more gaming goodness to come! “Excelsior,” as that old bastard Stan “The Man” Lee would say.

Blood Meridian and the Immortal Warrior

“Whatever exists.” He said. “Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent.” He looked about at the dark forest in which they were bivouacked. He nodded toward the specimens he’d collected. “These anonymous creatures may seem little or nothing in the world. Yet the smallest crumb can devour us. Any smallest thing beneath yon rock out of mens knowing. Only nature can enslave man and only when the existence of each last entity is routed out and made to stand naked before him will he be properly suzerain of the earth.” – Judge Holden

Judge Holden is like something from another world. A kind of mutant in the old, pre- civil war west. He is almost 7 feet tall, an albino, and is completely bald and hairless right down to the lack of eyelashes. Seemingly strong as an ape, he has been observed to lift a large anvil up over his head, and then toss it nearly ten feet on a bet. He has escaped near certain death by doing outlandish things like firing on his enemies point blank with a Howitzer under one arm and a lit cigar in the other hand. He is widely travelled and highly educated, maybe self so, and can converse with others in multiple languages (German, French, Italian, etc.) about such far ranging subjects as philosophy, paleontology, archaeology, linguistics, law, geology, and astrology. At night in the wilderness he will often spend his time collecting natural specimens of flora and fauna, keeping careful notes. To even those who know him, the Judge seems more than a little supernatural and fully out of place in most situations.

In Cormac Mccarthy’s 1985 book Blood Meridian, Judge Holden rides along with a group of border scalp hunters, fighting renegade Indians for a price. Apparently, the Judge met the current group he rides with as they were fleeing from superior numbers and low on ammo. Holden is sitting on a boulder in the middle of nowhere as if waiting for them, and in mere moments after their meeting, the Judge has gathered the proper local materials to show them how to create gunpower, with which they chase off their foes. Every man in that group of disparate men claim to have met the Judge at one time or another in the past, adding to his spooky mystique.

On top of everything else, Judge Holden seems supreme in his evil. Even among cutthroats, bushwackers, rapists, murderers, and thieves he stands out. When the group of outriders devolve into killing and scalping innocent villagers and pilgrims, the Judge takes no hesitation in slaughtering children when others flinch. An obvious pedophile, the Judge will keep a young captured boy or girl alive for a couple of days, before tiring of them and scalping them to add to the loot pile. He flatters children with sweets, and in communities the Judge arrives in a young girl or boy will invariably go missing or be found murdered.

In Blood Meridian the brutally biblical seems to meld into the blatant metaphysical. The colors and textures of the Southwest, much like those Carlos Castenada’s Don Juan experienced, take on an alien life of their own. But here it is more sinister. Every sunset seems like an open gateway to hell. When a lone tree in the prairie is struck by lightning at night, tarantulas, lizards, scorpions, and vinegaroons seem to gather around it in natural awe as if summoned by demons.

Judge Holden walks this landscape like some sort of ancient and devilish warrior of a bygone fantasy age. Like the good hearted immortal warrior John Carter of Mars, Judge Holden seems to come out of nowhere in the past and is not necessarily restrained by natural laws. Decades after the beginning of the novel, towards the brutal and controversial end of this visceral epic, Judge Holden seems completely unchanged and unaged in any way, his great strength and great appetite for evil undiminished.

I just finished this book, and one thing was on my mind at the end. What a great character Judge Holden would be to insert into a Boot Hill, Old West Cthulhu, or any weird west. The Judge could obviously appear in any age one wished, him being a supernatural entity and all (at least in my conclusion). A Roman citizen; a black knight in the Middle Ages; or even a futuristic setting. But I think to use him in the Old West would be best, to portray him as he appears in the book. And as I said, he appears to be the same in the 1850’s as he is in the 1870’s. I feel he could easily show up in the 1920’s, prancing to dark music arm in arm with Alister Crowley at an occult function.

If you haven’t read Blood Meridian: or the Evening Redness in the West, do so. But only if you can stand the brutality; inhumanity; and Cormac’s ruthless use of metaphors. I think that if you are a descriptive game master (or even not) you can up your game by making as study of this author’s colorful and flavorful (to the point of delirious overload) prose.

In true gamer fashion (and because this is a game blog) here is the basic Call of Cthulhu stats for The Judge as best I can make them on the spot. I may just use him if I ever get around to my Old West Cthulhu campaign. Hey, what if the Judge is yet another avatar of Nyarlothotep? Hmm…

Judge Holden
Occupation: Soldier/Warrior. Holden is an unapologetic lover of war and conflict.
Age: unknown. Appears generally to be in his late 30’s/Early 40’s.
Strength: 18
Dexterity: 15
Intelligence: 17
Education: 17
Constitution: 16
Power: 17
Charisma: 16
Size:18

*Note: as a supernatural/near supernatural being, Judge Holden is already “crazy,” and therefore immune to sanity affects.

Skills:
Anthropology, archeology, paleontology, geology: 60%
History, linguistics, chemistry, physics: 50%
Accounting, law, psychology, calligraphy, occult: 40%
Climb, jump, ride, sneak, drive carriage: 50%
Oratory, persuade:65%
Pistol: 70%
Rifle: 75%
Knife, club, brawling, grapple: 80%

*The Judge likes to dress in clean white clothing whenever possible, including a hat to cover his bald head in the sun. If he finds himself hatless in outdoors, he will first bargain, then kill, for one. Same for weapons if he is weaponless. Gaining a firearm, especially a pistol, will be a priority if he is unarmed.

Judge Holden prefers to be naked when camped out or in private, sometimes donning a light robe. When travelling he likes to carry his gear in a European Portmanteau instead of the more rugged leather satchels of his companions. If encountered “in lair,” he will probably be only wearing an open robe or coat and otherwise nude. In this circumstance he is likely to have: 40% a young but adult female (50% whore/50% against her will victim), 40% chance of a child under the age of 13 (60% female, 40% male). In addition, there is a 10% chance Holden will also have some form of unusual person (mentally disabled person, midget or dwarf, carnival freak, etc). All will be naked and possibly assisting Judge Holden in his abuse of his other “guest.” The Judge seems to also be capable of restraining and raping a strong, full grown man.
In this case he may only commit this act out of some kind of vengeance, although it is possible he has an attraction to certain grown men outside of revenge. His preference for evening “companions” is almost exclusively children of a pubescent age.

The Judge loves to use his oratory/persuasion skills to cause ruin of others. He once convinced a mob at a church revival that an otherwise steadfast preacher was a child and goat rapist. This is the type of thing he might do in a town for laughs. Once somebody becomes his enemy, the Judge will seek revenge on them relentlessly, even if he has to wait decades for the opportunity.

Call of Cthulhu Friday: Cthulhu zeitgeist

There is more of it out there than I thought. Not just plushies and Miskatonic U. bumber stickers ( Go Pods!), but I’ve discovered from my Amazon.com browsing that there are a pile of Cthulhu humor books out there. “Where the Deep Ones Are” is obvious, but an interesting one, not so much humor as a “Cthulhu for Idiots” type info book, is Cthulhu 101. Made for people who don’t really know what the works of Lovecraft are all about. It gives you the lowdown on the various entities of the Cycle, goes over Lovecraft and his life, and hits on the pop culture items where the Old Ones and their crew make their mark. Cthulhu zeitgeist!

Much as I am with zombies, I’m sort of Cthulhued out (although that may not jibe with the fact that I do a twice monthly Cthulhu post). Although I’d love more than anything to have a CoC campaign going on in the coming year, I think I can take a pass on the plethora of ancillary Lovecraft floating around out there. I wonder what HP would think of all this stuff?