Winged Death

I just read "Winged Death", a Hazel Heald story that was clearly written almost entirely if not actually entirely by Lovecraft himself, while at lunch (sitting in my car, listening to White Bat Audio.) I was struck by this, as well as in "The Mound", that Lovecraft had oddly spelled yet obvious references to some of his  Yog-Sothothery names. "The Mound" makes numerous references to Tulu†, for instance, and is one one of the many stories Lovecraft wrote which references Tsathoggua; clearly his favorite of all the entities that he didn't create/name himself. "Winged Death" also references both of them, the the diary/narrator refers to Cyclopean ruins deep in blackest Africa that are associated with Tsadogwa and Clulu. "The Horror in the Museum" also references two elder evils that I don't believe have been used anywhere else; Noth-Yidik and K'thun. I'm not a fan of apostrophes, so if I used that name, I'd change it to Kathun or Kathuun even. Clark Ashton Smith often liked to spell Tsathoggua as Zothaqquah. He also used Yog-Sothoth and Cthulhu with his own spellings; Yok-Zothoth and Kthulhut respectively.

I think it's pretty cool to have vague references to these guys, which is honestly mostly what Lovecraft does; they rarely star in any stories. Tsathoggua, Cthulhu Yog-Sothoth himself, and maybe Shub-Niggurath seem to be the ones most likely to get this treatment by Lovecraft. Smith and Howard sometimes used others. I like throwing in an obscure one now and then. Yogash the Ghoul or Yogash the Black are vaguely referenced Lovecraft creations with a cool name, as is Ghoth the Burrower. "The Doom That Came to Sarnath" references three gods worshipped by the ancient Sarnathans; Zo-Kalar, Lobon (and Tamash. Great (and obscure) names. I think I'll use Zo-Kalar as a replacement name for Zargon of B4 The Lost City fame because he's a cool Lovecraftian monster but has a bad b-movie name. Yhoundeh is another obscure one from Clark Ashton Smith.

Rhan-Tegoth and Ghatanothoa are two other more obscure entities Lovecraft created, and Chaugnar Faugn is mentioned by him, although created by Frank Belknap Long, another of the five individuals (which includes Howard and Smith as well as Robert Bloch and August Derleth) traditionally considered the Lovecraftian Circle. Gol-Goroth is one created by Howard which has a perfectly Lovecraftian name. Bokrug is another obscurish one, but I'm already using him extensively in CULT OF UNDEATH.

Other than Zargon of the profoundly bad name, D&D has actually given us some elder evils with some cooler, Lovecraftian-sounding names. Bolothamogg, Shothotugg and Y'chak, for instance. Zhudun, Prukal and Zurguth. Sertrous is—as far as I'm concerned—another name for Yig, and Dagon in Lovecraft and Dagon in D&D is essentially exactly synonymous. Paizo's gotten in on the action too; adding monsters/gods like Rovagug and Tychilarius, while their Aucturn the Stranger is a great place to put stuff if you don't want everything to come from Yuggoth. Frankly, Yuggoth works better as an extraplanar destination than a planet far out in the solar system where my scientific minded side can't get over the fact that it should be cold enough to freeze nitrogen and other gases solid; like we see in the outer solar system in reality. Seeing Yuggoth as an actual planet in the scientific sense probably is foolish. The same would be true for Cykranosh, Yaksh or Kynarth/Kinarth.

Of course; I could make up my own. But really; I'm not 100% sure what the benefit would be. Most of those entities are little more than names and vague hints as it is, and are used to fill in the gaps when you want to just make reference to occult-sounding names. For that, the familiarity of repetition from tale to tale is part of the point. 

† In "The Mound" Lovecraft also called R'lyeh Relex, which I thought was an interesting spelling. Considering it was supposed to be a transliteration into Colonial Spanish, the X is probably pronounced like the current Spanish J or the Scottish CH in loch. Which means that R'lyeh can be spelled and pronounced more "sensibly" in English, perhaps as Relyeh. Tulu and Clulu clearly show that the TH in Cthulhu is not meant to be pronounced like þ at all, which is mostly how we do pronounce it, but rather as T and H separately but jammed together. In fact, C-T-H is all supposed to be pronounced together as three separate consonants, which is of course kind of unpronounceable. That's supposed to be the point, but even Lovecraft knew that people actually using the name would wear it down to something that they could say, so he had the alternatives Tulu and Clulu in the stories I recently read. Of course, Howard, in "Skull-face," used Kathulos, so that would lean towards Cthulhu as most people actually pronounce it.

Carrion Crown

So, in addition to reading Horror in the Museum, a Del Rey collection of the Lovecraft ghost written and revised stories that I've had for many years (and should have read years ago) I'm also listening to the Hideous Laughter podcast of Carrion Crown, the original horror campaign for Paizo's Pathfinder Adventure Path series. While the problems I have with Carrion Crown are legion (1. too D&D; not enough horror, 2. way too railroady, 3. too proto-woke) it's still probably my favorite of the adventure paths, at least in concept (I can't claim to be overly familiar with all of the actual details of most aps) and I think that there's a lot of good to be mined out of it. 

Although there are some specifically Cthulhu or Yog-Sothothery elements to Carrion Crown, especially the Wake of the Watcher episode, which was designed specifically to be a kind of "reverse Shadow Over Innsmouth" in concept, it's really more Gothic horror most of the time, with things like liches, vampires, Frankenstein's monsters, werewolves and, of course, especially early on, lots of ghost stories. Strange Aeons is the more explicitly Lovecraftian adventure path, and yet with its focus on the Dreamlands, it's less horror focused than Carrion Crown in most respects. I never did finish my DUNGEON YOG-SOTHOTHERY review of that adventure path, but it was, I admit, kind of a disappointing one for me. But now that I'm overtly reading much more because I stopped frittering away so much time on YouTube, I actually want to try and read these more and get more caught up on what Paizo has done. My general feel for Paizo adventure paths is that they're not really at all what I would want to play or run, but they have (some) good art, and generally some decent concepts that I can loot and raid and use in a different context where they work again.

Curiously, the very first AP, Rise of the Runelords, has quite a bit of Yog-Sothothery in it too. It features the Plateau of Leng, an earthy mountainous analog to Cthulhu himself (albeit in a kind of tangential role) and more. And two of the earlier adventures, The Skinsaw Murders, and The Hook Mountain Massacre are as overtly horror-themed as anything in Carrion Crown. In fact, in many respects, I like them better as horror-themed modules than any of the content in Carrion Crown. I love the idea of integrating them into a Carrion Crown "interpreted" campaign. Although neither of those two are the Lovecraftian ones. Lovecraftian fiction isn't always horror, to be fair. In fact, many of his most memorable and longest stories aren't really horror, although they do have something dark and macabre about them, even when they're more like science fiction or weird Dunsanian dream-fantasy. 

The first Carrion Crown story is very ghost-heavy, though, and I love a good ghost story, even if Lovecraft disparaged the type. 

The Hideous Laughter podcast version is pretty good (so far.) I listened to several episodes of it a couple of years ago, but that was when I was spending a lot more time at home (although I think it was after the lockdowns) and I don't do well listening to podcasts when I'm at my desk, because I get way too easily distracted. Downloading the episodes and playing them while commuting works much better. I'm also not a huge fan of actual play podcasts or youtube series; I've tried to get into them but few of them work for me. This one is pretty good, though. It probably helps that they keep the episodes to a reasonable length, they're well edited so that a lot of the fluff is removed, they're reasonably charismatic players to listen to, and the tone is my favorite type of tone anyway. I typically join Black Lodge Games in saying that RPGs aren't really a spectator sport, but as always, there's a few exceptions here and there, and the Hideous Laughter Carrion Crown is one.

However, I don't think that they play in a way that's wonderful. Pathfinder 1e isn't really the best game for podcasts (or for my playstyle, although they do seem to be aligned with me there, just using a bad game for it). The GM is frequently calling for rolls that he shouldn't bother with, and which usually have no impact. If he calls for a perception check and then tells them what he wants to regardless of what they roll, for instance, then why is he calling for it so often? I've decided, after some trial and error, that unless a check is opposed or obviously risky, there's no reason to call for them. Perception type checks in particular should really only be made against an opposed Stealth type check, not just passive "did you see that?" kind of things. 

One other extremely minor detail that I dislike is the pronunciation of Ravengro as Raven Grow. I read it as a Romanian/Transylvianian name, with a short ă sound an emphasis on the second syllable. And, at the beginning, he called Ustalav a "fantasy Russia" which is obviously untrue; it's clearly meant to be fantasy Transylvania. I guess the fact that Dracula speaks with a somewhat Slavic accent was the source of the confusion? Either way; odd take.

But it works for me. And the fact that it's a podcast designed for audio, not video, means that I can listen to it in the car, which means that I can actually listen to it period. Plus, I like it better than most that I've tried. Like I said earlier, RPGs aren't normally very good as a spectator sport, and this is one of the exceptions. Curiously, one of the other exceptions which I tried previously and will load up when I'm done here is Red Moon Roleplaying's Enemy Within playthrough, which is also an audio podcast... although they also loaded it up on YouTube, which is where I sampled it previously. But the video is just a still of the book's cover art.

That's a lot of actual play podcasting; an entire 250+ episode Carrion Crown followed by 120+ episode Enemy Within may well be more actual play podcast than I can stand.

Deadliness in RPGs

Let's talk about OSR games vs "modern" D&D games, whatever exactly that means (it's worth noting that the OSR is itself ~twenty years old, depending on exactly when you consider it to have started, and 3e is often considered a "modern" D&D game, even though it's now at least two (again, depending on how you count) editions and twenty-five years old itself, and has been out of print for over fifteen years. The OSR could maybe have been considered to have started with the publication of Castles & Crusades in 2004, but certainly by 2006-7 as Basic Fantasy, OSRIC and later Labyrinth Lord and Swords & Wizardry were published, the OSR was in full gear. No wonder there's so much confusion as to what exactly the movement even is; it's aged quite a bit, and there are people who were just little kids when it started who are now participating in it. 

One oft-referred to perception is the lethality or deadliness of old school, and the supposed occurrence of PC death. Perception isn't always reality, so it's worth exploring a few points about this.

Professor Dungeon Master made an interesting video a few years ago about Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, which has a reputation as a very deadly game, but he also pointed out that much of that reputation was based on the art and the tone of the text rather than on the reality of how deadly it actually was. In fact, he pointed out that B/X D&D was considerably deadlier in reality especially with Fate points and other get out of death free cards that Warhammer includes. Well... I'm not sure that there's any other such thing, other than some GM fiat in other games, but having just read the Enemy Within (Director's Cut) it's clear to me that there is at least some expectation that in in this campaigns there's character continuity. Warhammer FRPG was specifically designed to be a Call of Cthulhu in fantasy with urban investigation replacing dungeon-crawling, which was very passe in the British market in particular at the time it was published, so it is very trad style. 

But a lot of that perception of lethality in ye olden dayes could be how the games were actually played rather than anything inherent in the mechanics themselves. To some degree, early gamers, especially in the northern Midwest crowd of Arneson and Gygax, didn't particularly care about PC death, because roleplaying was a new innovation to their wargaming hobby, and they weren't really roleplaying all that much yet as we understand the concept now. Player characters were still mostly seen as game pieces in an unusual wargame where you ran a single character instead of an army or skirmish force of some kind. If your character died, well you rolled up a new one and tried again. No big deal. However, it didn't take too long for this to evolve. By the time Tom Moldvay wrote the Basic set, he said, for instance, "Sometimes I forget that [D&D] is a game and not a novel I’m reading or a movie I’m watching... A good [D&D] campaign is similar to the creation of a fantasy novel, written by the DM and the players as the adventure unfolds." The perception of the game as something other than an avant-garde spin on a wargame had set in, and it truly became a roleplaying game, at least for some groups. I'm quite sure that early gamers didn't really think too hard about lost characters, and it happened more frequently. At least, frequently relative to what came later. Not necessarily later as in "modern" rulesets, but later as in trad style gameplay, where people roleplayed their characters more, and that became the prevailing reason to play in the first place. 

I suspect that a lot of the expectations of lethality are overstated, or at least it wasn't the designers' intentions, except in some tournament or deliberately meatgrinder style modules. Many of them refer to the idea that the expectation is that the game was for a larger group than most people probably actually played in. Certainly, a module will be pretty lethal for a group of 3-5 characters if it was calibrated and designed for closer to ten.

I think once again, the OSR has taken an element that was more common in the past than it is now, taken it out of context and pinned it in opposition to "modern" games rather than to the rise of trad playstyle, which predated "modern" games by the better part of twenty years or more (depending on the group). They've also exaggerated the old school position to a caricature of what it once was in a some games and declared that this caricature is The Way Things Were and The Way Things Ought to Be™. 

It is, of course, the neo-trad style that is closer to what OSRians think "modern" games are like; the online Sims-like power-fantasy where you just noodle around with a character that's an idealized personified avatar of the player, and they don't even want to be challenged, just to experience the setting like a tourist. I've had characters die, or at least seen them, in modern games. I'm not a huge fan of plentiful character death, because I am, after all, a trad-style player who likes the whole experience to resemble a novel, like Tom Moldvay said in the intro pages of Basic, but I am old-fashioned even when I reject the precepts of "old school", and the risk of death is still important. I am, after all, also a fan of the Call of Cthulhu play paradigm. (Which also isn't as lethal as its reputation, I don't believe, but y'know. It's still considerably moreso than D&D of any version.) But as a trad player who utilizes what is, essentially, a rules-lite extreme derivation of 3e, a "modern" game, I find the neo-trad position to be just as radical and unlike what I want as the OSRians do.

I'm not sure how prevalent that style really is anyhow, or how closely tied to 5e it really is. The OSR's perception of this vast gulf of expectation between modern and old school here was, I think, pretty overstated.

As an aside, jumping back to the Warhammer reference above, I just finished reading the Enemy Within Director's Cut, including the Companion books. I have literally about 10-15 pages left in the last book, which I'll finish tonight. It's hard to take it seriously as a grim and gritty setting when they're so woke. They've obviously swapped what were originally a lot of male NPCs for female ones, who are supposed to be just as big, tough and masculine as the males. But they were a little sloppy sometimes in their editing, and occasionally the original name or pronouns will still poke through. I would never consider limiting PC choice by sex, or penalizing players for wanting to play a girl, but let's be real; women are not men, and it is really off-putting to see them treated as if they were. Just a few months ago, we had the fiasco of Olympic boxing where some men dressed like women swept the awards and actually seriously injured a few women boxers. Women are neither psychologically nor physically equivalent to men. And like I said; PCs are PCs; they're always special anyway, but if treating men and women as equivalent is prevalent throughout the setting, it seriously undermines its ability to be taken seriously. This is especially important for a setting like Warhammer which is meant to be grim, mostly serious (barring the puns) and as much of a horror/Cthulhu like setting as it is a fantasy/Tolkien like setting.

A Weird Tales punt...

I have been completely slammed both at work and in my personal life, and don't expect that to clear up for at least another week and a half or so.  So, rather than simply not post anything at all because I didn't have time to write up something meaningful, I'm going to highlight three blog posts on another blog that give one a great place to start exploring the corpus of Weird Tales beyond the basic collections of Lovecraft, Smith and Howard that are readily available.

http://www.castaliahouse.com/building-a-weird-tales-library-part-1/

http://www.castaliahouse.com/building-a-weird-tales-library-part-2/

http://www.castaliahouse.com/building-a-weird-tales-library-part-3/

And I should note that despite a superficial similarity of sorts between our surnames, I am no relation at all to Nictzin Dyalhis.

Call of Cthulhu update

Our Horror on the Orient Express had its third session this last weekend... and it was really, really interesting.  We spent the entire session in a "flashback scene" with characters that the GM gave us.  We started that about halfway through the second session, so we've now spent about as much time in our flashback in the 1890s as we have in our "normal" campaign with your normal characters in the 1920s.  To be honest, I'm enjoying the latter more than the former, and the "Blood Red Fez" side-story is a fascinating one that I think I like better than gather and assemble (or destroy) the various components of the MacGuffin quest that we're on the verge of starting with our normal characters.  Maybe the scenario just feels a little more tight and compelling; the main storyline seems to suffer a bit from reaching; I'm not quite sure why we're all doing this other than that the module requires it.

A handful of notes about our play:

• Interacting with compelling NPCs is always one of my favorite parts of any good campaign.  And a GM that's willing to roll with what you're trying to do in this interactions rather than simply shut them down just because makes the game a lot of fun.  This may be part of the reason why I'm finding this flashback module within the module a lot of fun.
• There comes a point in every session (at least with our group) where we get tired of careful pacing and talking, and something... rash happens which has the potential to turn the module on its head.  The recovery from the consequences of something rash is another one of my favorite parts of any session.  We've got some great stories from past campaigns about something that seemed really stupid, but which ended up being really awesome.  Added another notch to that particular belt this last weekend.
• Some players struggle with the role-playing meta-concept of knowing things that your character doesn't know.  Getting a mental whammy "Jedi mind trick" pulled on you and having to accept that your character believes something that you as a player know to be untrue can be hard.  Even if it only lasts about an hour or so of real time before its sorted out.
• Similarly, it can be hard to get your head around concepts that are separate from us in time and culture; even as some of them are coming back around again.  Watching too many spy movies can leave one with the assumption that there are resources and infrastructure to do things that in the 1890s you simply can not do (but nor can your opposition.)  Decades of multicultural indoctrination make the notion that Westerners traveling on the Orient Express would be wary of dealing with Turks, and could use that innate wariness to their advantage was another hard thing for our group to really wrap our heads around to some degree.  Most, even, of the authors working in the genre have a hard time getting this into their heads (I actually think our group was better at it than the authors would most likely have been.)
• Some in the group drew (obvious) parallels between the blood red fezzes and the whispering, biting sword that was needed to get past undead DR in a dark fantasy game I ran in a Mk. II version of DARK•HERITAGE (we're now on Mk. IV, so it was significantly different.)  I do love the notion that "magic items" are, by default, cursed items from the perspective of reasonably normal people attempting to use them—that sword was necessary to fight a particular monster; but it also actively and aggressively attacked both the body and the sanity of anyone who used it.  I borrowed the concept of my sword from my friend "barsoomcore"'s past setting, but I've also had analogs of other cursed/magic items that I've borrowed, including "the Colt" from Supernatural and now... I can add the Blood Red Fez to my repertoire.  After changing it to some other kind of hat, no doubt.

Cthulhusaurus rex?

I'm not quite sure what to do with this image, but it's so cool, that I oughtta be able to think of something!

The old "pseudonatural template" applied to a T. rex seems a little pedestrian.  Then again, that's pretty much what it is, I suppose.  I've gotten away from the fiddly details of d20 creatures and templates, but mining the data there is probably fruitful even if applied to a stripped down m20 paradigm.

Cthulhu as a D&D demon-lord?

As part of my discussion on the iconic picture of the 3e iconic D&D party getting their tushes handed to them by Cthulhu (albeit a small-sized one) there was some discussion about whether or not Cthulhu is "deity level" in D&D, or what, exactly he is.  My own point of view is that assigning this kind of heirarchy is antithetical to Lovecraft's design (although it was done by Derleth, and followed by every RPG company that ever featured any kind of Lovecraftiana since.)  But if you have to do it, the only deities are really Yog-Sothoth, Shub-Niggurath, Azathoth and Nyarlathotep.  Guys like Cthulhu, Tsathoggua or Hastur are better represented as equivalent to the archfiends, if you will.  Demon-lords.

But let's look at his stats in the various D&D versions over the years.

Cthulhu infamously showed up in the first printing of 1980's Deities & Demigods, where he was inexplicably called a Greater God, on par with Azathoth.  This is clearly in contradiction to Lovecraft's own text, where he's often called the High Priest of R'lyeh.  Whatever.

In the d20 Call of Cthulhu book, he's a CR 34 monster, although it was an early 3e era book, and I'm not sure that I'd consider that CR to have been "trued up" very well.  However, for the sake of argument, let's say that it's more or less accurate.  If so, the Demonicon of Iggwilv gives demon lord stats of high twenties to low thirties--Demogorgon himself showed up as 33.

In Paizo's Bestiary 4, they included Pazuzu, a demon lord, and Cthulhu.  Both came in at CR 30.

I think these latter stats are about right, and the perspective of Cthulhu as a "peer", if you will, of guys like Dagon, Orcus, Demogorgon or Pale Night is about right.  Given the overtly Lovecraftian description of the obyriths anyway, this is a good fit.  There's actually a case to be made that Dagon and Cthulhu are the same, as it turns out.  Dagon, of course, has a former mythological life of his own as a Philistine god, as well as the "star" of two of Lovecraft's stories, his early effort "Dagon" and his masterpiece "The Shadow Over Innsmouth."  There is a great deal of overlap in terms of how Dagon and Cthulhu are presented in the Mythos, and there have been several postulates that "The Call of Cthulhu" was, in fact, a rewrite and reimagining of the earlier story "Dagon", and the two of them are in fact two names for the same being.

In the d20 Call of Cthulhu book, of course, Dagon and Cthulhu have separate write-ups.  But, by definition, all of mankind's attempts to characterize the Mythos are incorrect--the only reason we can't correct it is because we don't know where its incorrect.  As it happens, I think the conflation of Dagon and Cthulhu makes a great deal of sense.

And since Dagon of D&D is overtly the same as Dagon of Lovecraftiana (complete with the worship of kuo-toa "Deep Ones" in weird seaside towns, riffed almost word for word from "Shadow Over Innsmouth") that means that the CR 30 (or 32, or whatever it was exactly) Dagon from the Demonomicon of Iggwilv series of articles in Dragon Magazine can be stand-in stats if required.  And if you want a lower CR version, for whatever reason, there's one in the low 20s in Fiendish Codex I: Hordes of the Abyss.

In the end, though, what does all this matter?  It doesn't, except as an interesting point of reference.  I can't imagine that I'd ever really have my characters "fight" Cthulhu or Dagon, or any other demon lord, archfiend or god.  That's simply not the kind of game that I'm likely to run.  If I use d20, then I also use E6, which means that even the low-CR version of a demon lord, at over CR 20, is way out of the league of the most powerful characters imaginable.

Cthulhu in popular culture

One of the most curious bits of random Yog-Sothothery was in the d20 Call of Cthulhu book.  In the appendixes, Monte Cook (or whichever of the writers wrote this section, but I'm pretty confident in that call that it was him) talks about doing the obvious--importing Cthulhu and other Mythos monsters directly into D&D, because after all, any iteration of the d20 system back then was still sufficiently similar to any other iteration that it was really easy to do so.  There was a bit of Wayne Reynolds artwork of the early 3e iconics getting trounced by a little Cthulhu cub or something.  This bit of art has become quite popular amongst gamers, and I've seen it reposted numerous times over the years since.

However, I think a lot of gamers just really don't understand Lovecraft, to be honest with you.  In the most recent posting of it, someone posted that picture and the question: have you ever had a team of high level characters fight Cthulhu, and if so, what was the experience like?  One guy responded immediately that if the players won, then something was certainly wrong the system used to run that combat.  And then a moderator on the site, one who's usually fairly intelligent, and who usually posts from a position of knowing what he's talking about, added to that that maybe there's nothing wrong with the system, but it clearly didn't match Lovecraft's writing.

Wait, what?  Says who?  Are you suggesting that high level D&D characters aren't likely to have access to junky old boats?  Because as I recall, what would have been the equivalent of a low-level Expert class NPC bumped Cthulhu on the head with a boat, and sent him packing.  High level D&D characters shouldn't have found that any kind of challenge whatsoever.

This was not unique to Lovecraft's writing.  A posse of federal agents put a decisive end to the lair of the Deep Ones in Shadow Over Innsmouth.  A handful of old professers with access to a banishment ritual of some kind put a decisive end to the monstrous "half-brother" of Wilbur Whateley in The Dunwich Horror.  Randolph Carter flouted the designs of no less a villainous team-up than Nyarlathotep and Azathoth simply by waking up in The DreamQuest of Unknown Kadath (although, sure, I'll concede that he didn't kill them in mortal combat, exactly.)

Who says that defeat of the Cosmic Horror is not in line with Lovecraft's writings?  This leads to some of the same inane problems that Cthulhu games inevitably have--unskilled or inexperienced Keepers (or whatever they call Cthulhu GMs) think that if they're not chewing through characters 2-3 or more per session, then they're somehow doing it wrong.  This means that, in my experience, Cthulhu is often viewed as a campy one-shot or convention type game, completely unsuitable for campaign style play.  What a sad state of affairs!  Cthulhu can and should provide some of the best campaigns you can get.  But not if the GM and players don't really "get it."  And part of "getting it" is 1) actually understanding Lovecraft's writings, and not going on a half-baked, second hand interpretation of them, and 2) recognizing the nature of Yog-Sothothery and what it is supposed to be.  Heck, Lovecraft himself expected that his Yog-Sothothery circle would do different things with the themes and memes of the Mythos.  Robert E. Howard wrote all kinds of Mythos stories in which the Mythos was rather heroically handed its rear end by a two-fisted, gung-ho type guy (like Solomon Kane, for instance.)  And Lovecraft thoroughly approved.

The idea that Lovecraft wrote only about shy, retiring characters who were doomed to failure is not supported by "the primary sources."  It's really an artifact of what's come after--long after, in many cases--Lovecraft himself had died.

Lies of Solace

Just finished Lies of Solace last night, a rather shortish (300 page) book of the Arkham Horror line, which is second in the so-called Lord of Nightmares trilogy (although I'm seeing few if any ties to the first novel in the series--although granted, its been many months since I read it, and my memory of the details is hazy.  That will be a problem going forward too, since the third book in the trilogy isn't even announced yet, as near as I can tell, much less available for sale.)  Different author, but similar feel to the earlier novel in the series.

There was quite a bit less of the noirish feel than in the earlier book, and more of a traditional Cthulhu-ish vibe, although "updated" to a slightly more action/pulpish feel.  Like the prior novel, it bounces back and forth chapter to chapter between different points of view; in this case, we have Dr. Fields, a man of science (and an elderly guy who feels much like a Lovecraftian "hero" in many cases, since he's skeptical of any weirdness or supernatural, and is hardly a man of any kind of action.)  Raker (no first name given) is a man who's fallen on hard time--to afford the lifestyle he feels he needs to for his fiance, a woman of some means from Arkham, he's given in to crime and bootlegging, but has now found himself on the wrong side of the mob.  And Jacqueline Fine is the fiance of another man of means and station, although she is a fraud, who's faking her own family ties, and lives with the fear of discovery over her at all times.

Under-cutting all of this is a cult called the Hand of Solace, where a body-hopping immortal is manipulating the grief of others to summon some kind of Lovecraftian entity for reasons that are not really very clear (until the end of the novel.)  Like the prior novel, it ends on a cliff-hangerish finale, the main characters are broken, killed or corrupted, and... well, in many respects it feels much more like a Call of Cthulhu game than an actual Lovecraft story.  That's not a point against it--in fact, I'd argue that it's a point in its favor in most respects, but there you have it.

Of course, it isn't technically Call of Cthulhu fiction, it's Arkham Horror fiction, although the difference is strictly academic and technical--it makes no difference to the content of the novel itself, and only minor difference to the trade dress of the novel's cover.  It doesn't necessarily feel like mainstream horror; it feels like tie-in fiction for a game that's loosely based on really old horror--which it is.  So, when I call this a horror novel (a claim that the book cover makes, by the way, although in my bookstore it was filed with the rest of the sci-fi/fantasy tie-in fiction) I mean that in a somewhat loose way.

Like many horror novels, however, it's a little slow getting moving.  Not so slow that it's boring, but definately so that when finished you can see momentum gathering until a point roughly two-thirds of the way through, at which point time kind of compresses and the last third is a non-stop, panicked run through a gallery of Lovecraftian nightmare.  Or rather; pastiche nightmare.  It is maybe much less subtle than an actual Lovecraftian stories, but I've often thought that the brilliance of the philosophy and approach of Lovecraft is maybe somewhat overstated--or at least his execution of it--so that although this feels different than Lovecraft, I hesitate to call it worse of inferior.

I quite enjoyed it, although again--I'm scratching my head a bit trying to figure out how this trilogy is anything other than unrelated stories with a handful of recurring ancillary characters (a woman in the Miskatonic University library comes to mind) and similar setting.  Maybe the third book will bring that together more?  Because of the disconnectedness of this "trilogy", I thought about picking up the second trilogy, Dark Waters, that FFG has published under the Arkham Horror name (which also has only two books so far) but I've got a library book from ILL that I have to read while I have it, and after that, frankly, I'll have lost my Cthulhu momentum... I'll probably turn to the Warhammer Nagash trilogy or something.  Either that or continue my Dave Gross Pathfiner books (I've got two more in my possession still that I need to read.)  Or start the Abyssal Plague trilogy for "generic" 4th edition D&D tie-in fiction.  Or maybe I'll finally read my copy of The Lies of Locke Lamora.

*sigh*

Dance of the Damned

Last night I finished Alan Bligh's Dance of the Damned, a "Lovecraft Country" pastiche published by Fantasy Flight Games as a novel spin-off of their Arkham Horror board/card game line.  And it clearly is a pastiche.  Making almost gratuitous references to "the terrible old man", Professor Armitage, and the entire Dunwich Horror incident, and other Lovecraftian tidbits here and there.

I also discovered--after I had paid for it, sadly (that'll teach me to pay attention) that both this book and the other Arkham Horror novel I picked up, Ghouls of the Miskatonic, are billed as the first book in a trilogy.  Which, naturally enough, only have their first books released so far.  Blegh.

That said, other than a slightly unresolved and rushed ending, Dance of the Damned is pretty stand-alone, and I don't hesitate to recommend it to fans of Lovecraftian fiction.  Indeed, it's a great deal better than a lot of the pastiches I've read over time (sadly.)  Before becoming too overtly Lovecraftian, it channels a strong noir vibe, which is kinda fun.  When the majority of the action leaves New York to decamp to first Arkham and then Kingsport, it becomes much more "Weird" however.

The action follows two independent though related storylines, headed by two independent point of view characters, Tony Morgan--hard-bitten Sam Spade type, and Daisy Walker, a tougher than she seems dame who works at (no less than) the Arkham University library.  Both of them are independently involved in a manhunt--Morgan because he's hired to and Daisy because her finishing school chum and former room-mate is kinda sorta engaged to him.  A lot of rather predictable Lovecraftian elements are involved--sorcerers, cults, weird books and artifacts, the opening of a gate to another dimension, etc.  But they're rather deftly woven together to craft a story that sparks of a more involved and involving intrigue than your typical actual Lovecraft story would.  And if the elements are familiar, it's long been my opinion that that's part of what many Lovecraft fans come to the party for anyway--without the tour-guide like author pointing out familiar Lovecraftian elements, they'd feel somewhat cheated, I think.

The hints of weirdness early on are not particularly subtle.  If the rule of good fiction writing is to show rather than to tell, Bligh fails in the first act of the book.  Apparently eager for us to know right away that this is a Lovecraftian horror story, his somewhat ham-handed "look, guys, this is really scary--I promise" moments at the beginning don't really have the desired effect.  Luckily, they peeter out after a short while, and the book hits its stride.  In spite of my initial scepticism, I ended up quite enjoying the novel and wishing that I didn't have to now wait around for the rest of the trilogy to come out.

That said... I do.  So, rather than starting the other Arkham Horror trilogy, I'm going to sit on it for a little while and have a look at some other books in my lengthy "own but haven't yet read" list--starting will fellow Michigan resident Jim Hines' The Stepsister Scheme, which bills itself as a kind of fairytale meets Charlie's Angels with Sleeping Beauy, Snow White and Cinderella as the main characters.  Although Hines is more well known for his (I haven't read them; I'm going on reports here) goblin books, which are outright parodies or comedies at least, this series purports to play things fairly straight and in fact delve a bit into the darkest versions of the fairytales that are out there, along with references to mutilation, rape, cannibalism, and more.  Which seems to be all the rage these days when referring to fairytales anymore.  We'll see how I like it.  If I do, there's three more where it came from so far.

Pathfinder + Cthulhu

Check it out!

Paizo has elder things frozen in ice, and Cthulhu attacks a coastal town. Paizo's also already given us a lot of Lovecraftian things--serpentmen and gugs in the underdark, the Plateau of Leng, hounds of Tindalos, etc. It's strongly hinted at that the ominous and strange deities Zon-Kuthon and Rovagug (the "Rough Beast") are Lovecraftian entities. But those two new pictures are a new level of Lovecraftianism in Pathfinder.

Pretty fun. Thanks, Paizo guys!

Threshold

I just finished Caitlin Kiernan's shortish novel Threshold, which was a very intriguing, intriguing book. I'm not sure that I can recommend it or not, or even if I liked it, but it certainly very much intrigued me.

In fact, my overall impression is uncertainty, and that's also my reaction to the novel. While not exactly a Lovecraftian story, at the same time, it's almost quintessentially Lovecraftian. It features impossible geometries, characters who's lives are broken by their encounters with "the Mythos" (including two suicides, several other suspicious deaths, a descent in alcoholism, and the book's final scene is set in an insane asylum), horrors that predate humanity by hundreds of millions of years (and seem to be chronologically associated with various trilobites; the first time I've ever heard of them being used as an icon of horror) and seem to come from elsewhere than our earth.

Yet despite all this, like Total Recall or Inception, at the end of it, you wonder if perhaps the whole thing was a hallucination of characters who's elevator don't go all the way to the top floor, if you know what I mean. There's little that's explained satisfactorily, no evidence left behind to corroborate the beliefs of the characters, and perhaps most frustrating of all, a seminal plot point that takes place in the prologue is never actually described; characters refer to it obliquely while Kiernan refuses to ever tell us what happened to them exactly; both to the frustration of some other characters and to the readers.

I've said before and probably will again, that there's a fine line between holding back information about your monsters and revealing them. Reveal them too soon and too clearly and you manage to deflate much of their ability to actually cause any fear; refrain from doing so at all, and you've managed to pull a bait and switch on your audience, who comes to supernatural horror fiction precisely because they want to be exposed to supernatural monsters, and they want to see them and understand them, and be goggling at how cool a concept they are. Lovecraft himself frequently botched this execution; he overexposed some monsters (crinoid Elder things most spectacularly), never really exposed others at all, so that we're not even really sure that they're supposed to be scary or not (whatever's at Kadath in At the Mountains of Madness) and frequently revealed creatures that were underwhelming when their big reveal actually happens (ironically, Cthulhu itself, and shoggoths, among others.) Kiernan both does and does not fall into this trap--her horrors are shown and described, but never explained, and their nature is nearly as mysterious at the end of the book as it was at the beginning. And much like with Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness, I think the end suffered from rushing breathlessly through a conclusion that is vague and suggestive without actually satisfying the readers very much.

One thing I'll give Kiernan--we're never supposed to believe that Threshold is scary because she tells us that it is--she very effectively does cultivate an atmosphere of dread. Well; two things--although I'm still not sure that I even liked this book, I can't deny that it lodged itself in my brain quite well and inspired an awful lot of thinking about things; about Lovecraftian horror, how to do it correctly, about weird extradimensional creatures outside of time and space and what their relationship to humanity might or might not be, and about freaky teenaged girls that might be heroes of a secret war that most of humanity is protected from for its own good, or might be merely insane, psychotic murderers. While I don't know that any fan of Lovecraftian horror would necessarily like this book just like I didn't necessarily like it, I'm confident that any fan of Lovecraftan horror will find it fascinating nonetheless.

Dark Wisdom

I have an interesting relationship with the works of H. P. Lovecraft. Along with Glen Cook, I sometimes refer to him as the worst writer that I love to read. Lovecraft's "sins" as a writer are numerous, and mostly fairly obvious. He used an over-wrought, affected, dry style for most of his stories. He didn't show, he told. (Horror in particular doesn't work this way. I don't think something is scary just because you tell me that it is.) He often sabotaged his own works by humanizing his monsters (At the Mountains of Madness), dallying with anticlimactic or silly climaxes ("The Call of Cthulhu"), or confusing and bizarre ones (Mountains again), or sometimes failing to even provide a climax at all by refusing to let us even know what exactly happened, what the monsters were supposed to be, or what in the world was going on ("The Colour Out of Space", "The Dunwich Horror", and again, Mountains.) His supposedly awe and terror inspiring villains are bested in surprisingly banal and anticlimactic ways (Wilbur Whateley is killed by a dog, Cthulhu is sent packing after getting bumped in the head with a sluggish old fishing boat.)

I love reading Lovecraft anyway, though, because he has some great ideas and concepts "underwriting" his stories (despite the fact that a huge portion of Lovecraft's work is written in open and frank imitation of other authors: Edgar Allen Poe, Lord Dunsany, Arthur Machen and others.) The idea of a secret history, monsterous threats lurking just below the surface that are beyond the ability humanity to understand, much less oppose, etc. I've said before that what I like most about Lovecraft is often the story that I can read between the lines, not the story that we actually got. Those stories, those hints of stories, are what is so intriguing. And therein, I believe, lies the longevity of the Lovecraftian style, and my own personal fascination with it as well.

Gary Myers' short story collection Dark Wisdom almost became my fourth casualty in a row; a book that once started, I found myself with little motivation to finish. Because it was so short; just over 100 pages, I forced myself to keep going and read it anyway. This little over 100 page book has twelve extremely short short stories (averaging, I think, about nine pages each, when you account for the poor yet space-occupying illustrations that pepper the book.) Myers has many of the flaws of Lovecraft, and yet few of Lovecraft's strengths.

In particular, he just tells us stuff. Even these short, short stories are littered with needlessly clunky exposition. Literally every single story is so flawed. Few, if any, of the characters is fleshed out, or even given a believable motivation; the point of view characters are transparently merely plot devices, driving on autopilot through the plot as quickly (and unbelievably) as possible. And rather than Lovecraft's antiquated and stylized prose, Myers writes with such simplicity as to almost approach a juvenile style. By the end of the collection, I was almost hoping he'd finally break out in a string of descriptive words like foetor, eldritch, maddening, blasphemous or Cyclopean.

That said, there are some pretty cool ideas nestled here and there in these stories. The idea of a Deep One being an emergency understudy on a filming of a 50s b-movie knock-off of The Creature from the Black Lagoon, for instance. The young pregnant girl trying to run away from her fate as the mate of the leader of a cult of Shub-Nigguruth, not knowing that the unholy life within her womb was destined to end hers in the pangs of birth. The testimony of a policeman who, while investigating a serial killer, discovers a brood of ghoul puppies. The two kids who find the real Necronomicon, with working rituals, on the internet. And so on, and so on.

But, as I said, none of them were developed or executed well enough to make reading them really worth it. I got the book for free from the library, and it only took me a few hours to read it. That was already too much of an investment for what I got back from it. If I'd actually bought this book, I'd be extremely disappointed. As it is... well, frankly, my expectations weren't all that high to begin with.

Giving up

Although in general, I hate giving up on books that I'm trying to read, I've also decided that after a reasonable chunk into a book if it's showing no sign whatsoever of being any good at all that life's too short to keep reading it.

So, not exactly reviews per se, but the lack of reviews is, in essence, a review, and it's a bad one. The graphic novel Cthulhu Tales is poorly executed. It has a lot of stories, but each story is only a few pages long. In graphic novel format, that amounts to something that could be translated into about half a page of text, or less. These are not stories. I read about 60-70% of the book, and flipped through the rest. It's not worth the trouble. Most of the stories are rehashings of extremely predictable and cliched horror moments, and a few are jokes. The art quality is very variable, with few that stand out as pleasant to look at in any sense of the word. And, oddly enough, most of the stories aren't really overtly Lovecraftian; a lot of "generic" horror finds its way in here, poorly labeled. In any case, I had thought to finish this last night and review it today; it won't be happening.

The same is true of The House of Cthulhu by Brian Lumley. I've read about 40% of that book, and I'm putting it down and taking it back to the library. It's not actually a novel, although it masquerades as one. Rather, it's a collection of short stories that take place in the "Primal Lands"; a putative prehistoric continent. The adventures are old fashioned sword & sorcery; in fact, in premise and set-up, this book reminds me strongly of Clark Ashton Smith's Hyperborea cycle of stories. Sadly, Lumley's cleverness, writing craft, and ability are far below that of CAS (at least, as demonstrated here,) and this collection started (and I presume remains) banal, stilted, and frankly, quite boring. Lumley really got off on the wrong foot when his framing device, the idea that this was a translated set of documents mocked by the scientific establishment and therefore published as fiction, is overly long and boring, and begins with a long-winded geographical survey of his fake continent. Following that extremely slow start, I read the next three stories, through "The House of Cthulhu" which gives its name to the whole collection. I found none of them very intriguing. I've also got Lumley's Necroscope coming via Interlibrary Loan; I hope that he can deliver better there than he did here.

I started these two in the hopes that I could discover some new Mythos writers of some talent, but both of these fell quite flat and disappointing with me. I've got another collection (by Gary Myers, I believe) on the way, and I picked up another paperback collection recently that's somewhere out there on my "to read" list. But I have to say that my initial foray into "modern Mythos fiction" has not been a positive one.

Yog-Sothothery: Prophecies of the Daemon-sultan

Although monsters are, of course, at the heart of every good Lovecraftian story, they actually don't take up much "screen time" if they're going to be effective. The hallmark of a good Lovecraftian story is the atmosphere; the tone of creeping dread, of gradually stranger and more unnatural things, until finally the story climaxes with a monstrous appearance of some kind. For that reason, you need a lot more in your toolkit than monsters, and in fact, you need more of the other things besides monsters. So for today's Yog-Sothothery, I'm going to create another eldritch text of forbidden and blasphemous lore; one of the standbys of any good Lovecraftian effort, and always one of my personal favorite Lovecraftian elements.

I need more of this than some writers would, remember. Although clearly Lovecraft's ideas (and his tone) are important to me and my creation, I can't use them exactly as is. I can't use the Necronomicon, for instance, because it was written by the mad arab Abdul Alhazred in about 700 A.D., whereas my setting is not our world, doesn't have any actual arabs, and the timing would be wrong anyway. Granted, I do have Qizmiri, who are Arab-like in many ways, but still; in order to use most Mythos elements, I'd have to modify them. Which is fine, but if I'm going to go to that much trouble, I'd like to invent a few of my own. Plus, that way I can tailor them to my setting, which possibly (not likely) you'll remember as described as equal parts sword & sorcery slash Arabian Nights, Sergio Leone western, and the Golden Age of piracy (probably more like the Pirate Round and Barbary corsairs in nature than the Spanish Main... but it was all pretty similar anyway.)

And, of course, Lovecraftian horror, borrowing more on the occult/black magic stories of Lovecraft than on the later more science fictional stories. More of Lovecraft imitating Arthur Machen and Lord Dunsany, if you will, than some of the other Lovecraftian modes. My own tastes run along those lines; I find much of Lovecraft's work to be lacking in horror. His dry, scholarly tone, and his insistence on trying to make weird things like angles, geometry, seafood delicacies and slime into things of horror lacks the visceral appeal of some more traditional horror elements. I suppose that, unlike Lovecraft, I'm not yet tired of the more traditional ghost story, the vampire tale, or other staples of supernatural horror... as long as they're well executed. So when Lovecraft hies closest to those elements, in stories such as "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward" or "Haunter of the Dark" or "The Outsider" or "The Hound" is when I enjoy his writing the most. Certainly it's that grouping of related stories that I wish to borrow from for this setting.

So, today's grim book of forbidden and forgotten knowledge is Prophecies of the Daemon-sultan. By... jann author Abdullah al-Azrad, frequently mis-transliterated into Abdul Alhazred in Terrasan circles. Looking behind the curtain just a little bit, this is hopefully very transparent to Lovecraftian scholars. My Abdullah al-Azrad is a jann from across the ocean, and at least one copy of his book was brought by one of the jann that later became the ruling caste of the new nation of Qizmir. A few copies of it have since made their way throughout the Mezzovian Sea region, to the great sorrow of its inhabitants. He's clearly meant to hark back to the "mad arab" Abdul Alhazred, who wrote Al Azif, the original version of the famous Necronomicon, before it was translated into the Greek. While my own book, Prophecies of the Daemon-sultan isn't meant to be a version of the Necronomicon per se, the Daemon-sultan is a title frequently given to the Blind Idiot God, Azathoth himself.

The Prophecies don't concern the so-called Forbidden Lands, and were written across the ocean in lands with names that have no meaning to Terrasans, and have only little meaning even to the Qizmiri, who originally hailed from those regions many generations ago. Mostly, they concern themselves with places that are either long vanished, and predate humanity completely, or places that have not yet come to be and will postdate humanity by eons. Despite this, many occult scholars have remarked that some of what the Prophecies relate are too similar to accounts of places like Leng and cold Kadath, high in the mountains, and others in the Forbidden Lands to be coincidental, and theorize that whether al-Azrad knew it or not, he was referring to those places too. While the text is rambling and insane, and contradictory and stream of consciousness at times, it recounts relatively clearly one myth passed on for centuries; that of Huudrazai, the Daemon Sultan, the Blind Star-God, the Eye in the Waste, who is prevented from destroying all creation in an orgy of entropy and destruction only by the constant sound of drumming and abhorrent, sibilant flute-sounds produced by inhuman voices which keeps him somnambulant and torpid. Some day, though, "when the stars are right", the piping and drumming will stop, and Huudrazai will startle into full wakefulness, at which point he will destroy all of creation.

Successfully reading the Prophecies will gain you 1d4+1 ranks in Knowledge (Forbidden Lore) and an equal number of Madness points. It will take 4d6 weeks of near constant study, and the DC to do so is 25. The book contains 4d6 incantations.

Into the Darklands

I just finished Paizo's sourcebook Into the Darklands last night. The Darklands are the Paizo folks' equivalent to what Wizards of the Coast and D&D in general calls the Underdark. Frankly, I think Darklands is a better name, although that's neither here nor there. I actually quite liked this book. That may surprise some readers, since I've previously expressed a dislike and distaste for things like dungeon-crawls, and the Underdark has often been presented as the ultimate dungeoncrawl.

However, it doesn't have to be, and one of the things that Paizo's book helped to highlight is that the Underdark is a wilderness. Sure, it's an exotic wilderness, with hazards that are quite a bit different than wandering through a forest, desert, or tundra, but it clearly presented the Darklands as a relatively wild place; a wilderness, punctuated by points of civilization here and there.

Cruel, sadistic and unfriendly civilization, but civilization nonetheless.

Anyway, this approach certainly helps to make the Darklands much more palatable to me, and in fact fairly interesting. The other thing that Paizo did was acknowledge the roots of the Underdark concept and return to something more like it. In James Jacobs' Dragon Magazine article "The Shadow over D&D", he acknowledge H. P. Lovecraft's Underworld as one of (if not the singular) influence on the concept of the Underdark. This is primarly (although not exclusively) explored in two of his stories, The DreamQuest of Unknown Kadath, a novel or novella set in the overt sword & sorcery fantasy realm called the Dreamlands, and "The Mound" a longish short story that Lovecraft ghost-wrote for Zealia Bishop.

Besides that, there are obvious nods to other famous underground/hollow earth stories, including Edgar Rice Burroughs' Pellucidar books, Jules Verne's Journey to the Center of the Earth and even H. G. Wells The Time Machine (notably in the inclusion of the morlocks. I've included a picture of a morlock from the recentish movie, just for the heckuvit.)

Paizo were quite upfront about this influence, spelling it out explicitly in sidebars. Some obvious Dreamlands influences include the use of gugs, a ghoul kingdom, giant worms that resemble the bholes (although that's not what they're named here) and a lot of details of the geography in general, like gigantic underground mountain ranges (not called the Peaks of Thok, sadly.) Their Darklands ghouls even hate ghasts, contrary to most D&D implied setting stuff (but consistent with Lovecraft, where the ghasts are totally different creatures that the ghouls hate.) The concept of underground serpent people empires is also borrowed wholesale from "The Mound" (although Paizo serpentfolk don't worship Yig) and there's even a mention or two of a shoggoth.

Paizo's Darklands are divided up into roughly three "layers"; the first being the one closest to the surface, which is very much a wilderness of savages and monsters. The second is the home to various civilizations, including the drow, duergar, the ghouls and others. The third layer isn't so much a layer as it is a collection of gigantic underground "worlds" magically sustained. Some of them resemble Pellucidar overtly (including a false sun, jungles, and dinosaurs all over the place) or other interesting high concepts (the land of black blood, for instance, which oozes a freezing, tarry substance that facilitates various necromantic rituals, or the land of the undead outcast drow house, or the lands of the various worm creatures, or gigantic underground oceans, daemon-worshipping monstrous humanoids, etc.)

One curious observation; the book refers very frequently to Necromancer Games' Tome of Horrors, Revised. I've noticed before that Paizo really like this book and refer to it a lot, but in this book they really outdid themselves to the point that it's almost a required supplement to use this. Not quite, but some of the material would be pretty tricky without it, especially a lot of the random monster tables. I actually don't have that book, although I do have the original Tome of Horrors, done in 3e rules (not 3.5) so I figure I'm covered. Frankly, I'm not a huge fan; it seemed like the book's main raison d'être is to stat out monsters that were deservedly left behind by Wizards of the Coast. It's not quite that bad, as they also included a bunch of new material, but I always found the book to be superfluous at best. Clearly Paizo disagrees, but with their focus on old-school D&D flavor, that's not surprising to me.

Especially for a guy like me, who really quite enjoys seeing Lovecraftiana incorporated into fantasy gaming, but for anyone who has any interest in the concept of the Underdark at all, I can unreservedly recommend this book as a pretty fun one. It's a bit on the slim side, so most of what it details really needs further detail to be useable, and you can get some of that in places like the various Second Darkness adventure path materials (including details on drow society in volume 3, details of drow and serpentfolk cities in volume 4, and details of the land of black blood in volume 6.) But there's enough here to keep me happily exploring, if I'm so inclined, for a long time to come yet.

Sword & Sorcery meets Yog-Sothothery yet again

I've already posted a link to Swords Against the Outer Dark, described by its author as "Where Sword & Sorcery Gaming Meets Cthulhiana and Yog-Sothothery." Because that's, in many ways, exactly the vibe I've been gravitating to for some time. Heck, it's been almost ten years now since I've heard Warhammer Fantasy Roleplaying described as, "You start off thinking that you're playing Dungeons & Dragons, but before long you realize you're actually playing Call of Cthulhu." I found that notion completely insane in a great way, and my own gaming tastes have been at that intersection ever since (although ironically, I've only ever been passingly curious about Warhammer Fantasy roleplaying itself.)

I just discovered another blog that is also dedicated to that particular vibe, The World of Xoth: Where Cold Iron meets Non-Euclidean Geometry. There's not a lot of content there, really, but it's still encouraging to encounter someone who's working in the same medium, so to speak. In fact, the author of The World of Xoth (who posts under the handle of thulsa, but who appears to actually be named Morten Braten) even uses a d20 variant, which is cool. As an aside, he's also the host of the long-lived Hyborian Age website, which was meant to facilitate the use of d20/D&D with the old Robert E. Howard Hyborian Age setting; the setting of Conan the Barbarian, for those Philistines who didn't already know that.

Imperial Age

I love alternate histories. I'm always playing around with them. I'm not often clear on what exact purpose they serve, but I enjoy them for their own sake. I frequently like postulating them, and sometimes I even like incorporating weird or supernatural elements into them to see how things might have been different. One recent alternate history novelette by Charles Stross is "A Colder War" which postulates that Nazi Germany found R'lyeh on the bottom of the Baltic Sea and the Cold War, rather than being nuclear deterence in nature, was based around attempting to harness (or to counter) the influence of various Old Ones in the world. In practice, this is not too unlike the setting for the board game Tannhäuser in which the Union, British and American troops utilizing reverse engineered technology cribbed from crashed UFO's at Roswell fight the Kaiser's demonically summoned forces and Russia's Tesla and Slavic mysticism fueled armies in a World War I conflict that never ended.

I quite like this idea. The reason we had a Cold War throughout much of the 20th century instead of yet another World War was largely, in my opinion, because weaponry had advanced to the point that everyone was afraid to actually use it (it could also be attributed to the reduction of superpowers from about half a dozen to just two, but let's ignore that for the time being.) What if this happened earlier? What if it happened a hundred years ago in the early 1900s, before World War I was even fought? And yes, what if the nature of those weapons that everyone was too afraid to use was Lovecraftian?

Could the Empires of the early 20th century survive in a prolonged Old Ones related Cold War? Could Tsar Nicholas have fended off the Bolsheviks who overthrew his state in the midst of World War I in real life? Could the Ottoman Empire have survived? The Austro-Hungarian one? Kaiser Wilhelm's Germany? The British Empire? The American Empire? Would the Japanese Empire have continued to surge? What else would have changed between now and then if Imperialism had managed to survive for another 100 years longer than it really did? How would these nations evolve for an additional 100 years scared to death not only of their enemies but also of the very weapons that they themselves were developing?

Feel free to comment. I'm not exactly sure myself what all this would mean, but I'm thinking it through, and wondering what to do with it. Some short fiction ventures? One-shot gaming? I'm undecided. Maybe both. Possibly neither.

Stages of Lovecraftiana

While my readings of Lovecraft's work (and I certainly haven't read everything he wrote, although I've read all of the "major" works and many of his "minor" works as well) made it obvious that Lovecraft didn't necessarily write with the same theme all the time. Reading retrospectives of Lovecraft will lead you to believe that Lovecraft's cosmic nihilism was his defining theme, but that was clearly not the case. In his own lifetime, Lovecraft's stories frequently fall into three "camps" or classes, if you will--this Dream-lands fantasy stories, his cosmic horror stories, and his weird science fiction stories. Many later commentators, collectors, publishers (and gamers) blur these distinctions and don't recognize them at all, resulting in the unfortunate mix-up of science fiction elements and black magic occult elements in the same body of work when really they don't belong together very well at all.

In a way, Lovecraft enabled this somewhat, by utilizing a lot of familiar backdrop details. This is the so-called "Cthulhu Mythos." In reality, it wasn't anything like a Mythos at all; it was a bunch of evocative names that Lovecraft recycled frequently, but not in any way consistently--for example, is the dreaded Plateau of Leng in Tibet, Antarctica, or not even on this earth at all? Some have tried to reconcile these three locations via bizarre theories, but really best (and in fact only reasonable) solution is that Lovecraft didn't really care where it was; it was a recycleable element that could be wherever he needed it to be for any given story.

Later Mythos writers--at least some of them--exacerbated this problem by trying to create fixed categories, organization, and logic to the "mythos." August Derleth was the first to try this quixotic attempt, which arguably misses the whole point, and since Derleth was also the co-founder of Arkham House, the publishing arm that kept Lovecraft in print over the years, his view waxed and the point of view of other mythos writers, who gradually moved on to other things, was eclipsed. Lin Carter's additions to the Mythos via the Xothic legend cycle even further bastardized Lovecraft's original intention, creating bizarre familial relationships between Great Old Ones (Hastur and Cthulhu are brothers? What?!)

Sandy Petersen, much as I love the guy, inadvertently didn't help at all either with the Call of Cthulhu roleplaying game which attempted to fit various entities that showed up in some of the mythos stories (confusingly, using anything that came along written by nearly anyone that mentioned a Great Old One or used the word blasphemous or eldritch too many times in its text, regardless of how tenuous its connection to actual Lovecraftiana sometimes was) into categories, like servitor races, Great Old Ones (which were opposed to Elder Gods, etc.)

Somewhere in this rush to categorize and systematize was lost the original vision of Lovecraft's Yog-Sothothery; that it was really just a bit of an in-joke to him; a chance to recycle and re-use names that he liked that gave his stories an air and tone that he was trying to cultivate. Not that it's necessarily lost; Stephen King certainly got it when he referred obliquely to the plateau of Leng, rats in the walls, and other bits of esoterica, Neil Gaiman and Mike Mignola certainly know how to play along in the original "Lovecraft circle" way of doing things. But for whatever reason, gamers have tended to do the opposite; to take August Derleth and Lin Carter's direction and magnify it, almost.

Anyway, I'm just thinking Lovecraft lately, and am in the midst of reading (for the first time, actually) his story "The Mound" which was credited to Zealia Bishop, but ghostwritten by Lovecraft himself. This story is odd, because in many ways it uses elements of the Cthulhu mythos in unusual ways that are not always consistent with how they're otherwise presented... which is really my whole point anyway. Mythos elements were never meant to be fixed and categorized.

In any case, the section of my campaign setting called, unremarkably, the Forbidden Lands borrow a lot of names from Lovecraft; but for the most part, I'm only loosely using them as written. For instance, I have a Plateau of Leng, a Lake Hali, a Vale of Pnath, etc. in my setting, but they only vaguely resemble their Lovecraftian prototypes (well, those Lovecraftian prototypes were kinda vague themselves, anyway.) But the names are so evocative, and using them firmly establishes the tone that I'm looking for that I can't resist.

Cthulhu runes

Everyone likes props for their games, right? Especially if they're easy to construct. One tool that I've found very helpful is the font listed above and downloadable here: Cthulhu Runes. The text above actually reads Iä! Iä! Hobo fhtagn! Hobo being a common online nickname of mine. Although the font doesn't include capital letters or punctuation marks, so it literally just reads ia ia hobo fhtagn.

Naturally anything written in this font won't be readable, but it's still a nice decorative element, and it has just the right alien and primeval feel that any game looking to incorporate that "Mythos tone" could make some use out of.