Halloween and Modular Game X updates!

Although I don’t do it every year anymore, I’ve pulled out a few of my Midnight Syndicate and Nox Arcana albums. These used to be the same band a long time ago. Joseph Vargo joined Midnight Syndicate, gave them some direction and vision, and they put together the first of their Gothic albums, which 15 years or so ago I was finding out about because they were for sale in Halloween stores. At the time, there were only about four or five Nox Arcana albums, which are now up to a good three times that many or more. They mostly sound the same; when Joseph Vargo split and formed Nox Arcana, he started making his own versions of the exact same type of music. In fact, he’d often seem to piggy-back on what Midnight Syndicate were themselves doing—responding to Midnight Syndicate's Dungeons & Dragons album with Blood of the Dragon on the same themes, and MS's Vampyre with Transylvania, etc. 

It seems like there was a lot of drama between them; lawsuits and all kinds of things. It’s clear that Vargo was the talent and direction that made Midnight Syndicate what they were, but it also seems clear that they quickly tired of him personally and wanted to keep doing it without him. Like many modest talents, I presume that he was kind of a prima donna or narcissist. They seem to have been content, more or less, with doing what they were doing for a while without reference to him, except that of course they were continuing the direction that he set them on. Vargo’s own band, Nox Arcana, which is now a band of just him, was much more prolific over the years, easily doing three times the output of MS. To be honest, I’m not 100% sure that this is all that impressive, as one thing that you will pretty quickly notice if you listen to a lot of this stuff is that it all kind of sounds the same and is very repetitive. His attempts to make thematic distinctions between albums are somewhat half-hearted; no matter what they all kind of have the same synthesized beat, in varying tempos, a lot of ghost choral effects and Gothic haunted house organs, and music boxes and out of tune pianos, etc. Your very typical Halloween music sounds. There’s some real gems in the collection, but mostly they all run together. When I listen to too much of either of these guys, my mind just wanders. Which is fine; actually, probably that’s its whole purpose. Maybe you’re not really “supposed” to listen to the music so much as soak it in as ambiance while doing something else, like reading, writing, or walking through a haunted spook alley attraction or Halloween party or something. 

Except that, curiously, Nox Arcana’s works aren’t often very good for that. He has the annoying habit, at least to me, of including a few tracks where he recites this pretentious and kind of hoaky poetry or other “moody” spoken parts, which really make it difficult to focus on what you’re reading or writing when they start. If I can remember which ones they are, I remove them from my playlists. 

There was just a brief window where such stuff had a place in the market, I think; but now there are so many talented people putting their stuff out there on Youtube and Spotify that these guys now seem kind of quaint in comparison. And, of course, if musicality is important to you, you'll do better listening to scary movie soundtracks like the one for Woman in Black or End of Days or Alien: Covenant. I don't recommend any of those as movies, per se, but I certainly recommend their soundtracks.

Anyway, I’ve been listening to some of this stuff, as we approach the Halloween season. Like Al Jourgenson says, though for me every day is Halloween. I’m always in the mood for creepy, melancholy music, veiled, or not so veiled horror themes and ghost stories, and spooky décor. I don’t intend to stop just because November 1st rolls around. 

Also; after coming up with my titles for the modules yesterday, I decided I didn’t really like a lot of them. Cthulhu X is not supposed to be just be for Lovecraftian horror; in fact, I’m more likely to do ghost stories and other more “Gothic” horror, so I want to rename that. Not sure to what. Bloody Horror X? Macabre Horror X? Macabre X? Eldritch Horror X?

I’m going to change Old West X to Weird West X or Dark Frontier X, and probably change Espionage X to Spy Craft X, Spy Hard X, Techno Thriller X or License to Kill X. I’ll add banners for these; once I see them, it might be easier to decide which titles I like. The horror one is the one I’m struggling with the most. Horror X just isn’t enough, but I’m not sure what to add to it. Maybe simply Dark Horror X, although that seems kind of superfluous, since horror is by definition a dark genre. I dunno…

In any case, for most of these modules, I mostly just need to reorganize and scan/edit stuff that I already have in order to do this, so this is a relatively easy task. It’ll take some time, but it won’t be difficult. I’m excited about the possibilities.

Also, since I adopted the X moniker, partly because X is your typical variable in algebra, partly because of the connotation of the X-files and the old 90s game Conspiracy X, and partly because of Racer X, the mysterious character from Speed Racer who I thought was really cool when I was 6-7 years old, I adopted a new Spacer X image for my youtube channel and stuff generally. I’m going to use at least one of these as the cover image for Modular Game X too.