I Hated Stories in my Game Mags

“…Your humming has summoned up a pair of mud ghouls, Lute!”



Over at Grognardia today James mentions some pulp fantasy fiction in Dragon Magazine back in the day. I had an immediate thought I wanted to comment upon there, but rather than lay a negative on his blog, I will do it here where it belongs.

I HATED that shit in my magazines. Short stories featuring some fighter or barbarian or thief or another. The Dragon, White Dwarf, The Dungeoneer…whatever, I hated it. They could have been the greatest stories ever told for all I knew. I didn’t care, I rarely read more than a few paragraphs before turning away to look at the Anti-Paladin article or whatever for the thousandth time. I didn’t care if they were good; if I wanted to read fiction I would get a book or Argosy Magazine or something.

Tables, charts, rules clarifications, character class and alignment articles, and even comics. These were fun to read and you would read the same entries again and again, and a thousand times again. But the stories. Ugh. Who read these more than once?

I more or less stopped buying game mags by the late 80’s, but I did pick up the occasional Dungeon magazine in the late 90’s, and they seemed blissfully free of amateur fiction. I hope that is still the case today, especially if I get a hankering to buy one.

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!

R.I.P. - ADAM ADAMOWITZ OF FALLOUT 3

What with my love of post apocalypse settings, including game ones such as Gamma World and Metamorphosis Alpha, I had meant to post about my Fallout 3 experiences for a long time. I’m sad that the passing of the concept designer for the game, Adam Adamowitz, has been the catalyst.

I love this game, and am still playing it after several months. My character, Mac, left the safety and comfort (well, except for the occasional Radroach) of Vault 101 to search for his father (voiced by Liam Neeson), and has spent his countless hours in the wasteland exploring, helping people, and building up good karma. His rewards for his being good instead of evil have been many, including a spiffy shanty house in the town of Megaton that he long ago saved from the eventual explosion of the atom bomb worshipped in the town square. Mac continues to adventure, and with my purchase of the add-on Broken Steel hopes to soon bring pure, radiation-free water to the Capitol Wasteland through completing Project Purity.

Adam also worked on the current huge hit, Skyrim.

I did not know much about Adam, but I know I loved his work. He had everything to do with that world, from the raggedy human survivors, to the terrifying super-mutants. This weekend, I’m to play a couple extra hours for Adam.