wish I was in the abyss vibin rn

When my crowdfunding copies of Stillfleet (2022), Qadida and The Rain Thieves arrived while I was at PAX Unplugged 2024, I immediately set about ignoring them in favor of practically everything else and then some. This was mistake.

Stillfleet is fucking weird. Something about that weirdness made it difficult for me to crack it open — perhaps the fact that it takes place 100 million years in the future. Something about that feels so remote and hard to handle (I have a similar issue with the gigantic time jumps in the Dune novels), especially in comparison to something so legible as, say, Triangle Agency. Which is kind of ironic, considering how much the two games have in common — they’re both fucking weird, they both have players working for a powerful corporation, they both feature conspiracy and redacted text and horrible cosmic entities while maintaining a sense of humor. For whatever reason, Stillfleet clicks better for me.

I think part of it is the touchstones. I don’t think anyone has really pulled of a Control-style story in a way that has knocked my socks off, including Control. Here, though, are bits and pieces drawn from Dune, Warhammer 40k, Le Guin’s Hainish stories, Douglas Adams, Octavia Butler and others and I genuinely enjoy those touchstones more, I think. The visual aesthetics of the game (primarily by Ethan Gould, but supplemented by a number of others) are more challenging as well; at first glance, I didn’t want to do the work, but now I am glad I did.

Anyway, the Grit system is pretty straightforward (the SRD is one page!). Five attributes (Combat, Move, Will, Reason, Charm), each gets a dedicated die assigned to them, which is rolled to check all associated tasks. Success is beating a target difficulty, 6 being the baseline. Fighting pits the Combat attribute against the Move attribute (only two of the base classes focus on violence, which is nice). Grit is a meta currency that can be spent to adjust rolls up on a one-to-one basis, but it is also used to activate class-based powers. Rolling dice doesn’t have great odds in aggregate, so the game is always pushing players to spend Grit. It feels tense without going overboard into straight-up horror a la Mothership.

The point of the game is to explore derelict space ships and exoplanets from which contact has been lost for millennia in order to get stuff. It’s a bit D&D in this regard, except your expeditions are funded by a far future version of the Dutch East India Company. What you do in the field can serve your interests, or theirs, but rarely both. And you need to be careful because fuck the moon, all of space is haunted.

When I saw Chaosium was doing a new King in Yellow themed campaign, I sorta shrugged. I have a lot of love for the King, the Chambers book was an obsession of mine when I was in high school in part because it was impossible for me to find a reprint (I did, eventually), until I found my strange, probably rebound first edition in yellow boards, which I then carried around with me everywhere. The mention of Carcosa in True Detective set my brain on fire. But in a lot of ways, my relationship with the Carcosa mythos culminated with the Delta Green campaign Impossible Landscapes. I think maybe Delta Green culminated along with it in some ways. It’s just one of those things were its greatness and the way it transcended its form was immediately apparent and largely beyond debate. So, no shade, but that’s a hard act to follow.

And then I read The Sutra of Pale Leaves: Twin Suns Rising (2025) and was impressed despite my expectations. Spoilers ahead, so let me just say that I think this is worth picking up and checking out, especially if you’re intimidated by Impossible Landscapes (which is a fair reaction). But for real, if you think you’re gonna play this, stop reading.

This book, and its companion, are set in Japan during the 1980s, which is right out of the gate a dramatic shift. The way in which the authors intertwine Japanese folklore and pop culture with the tropes of the King in Yellow mythos is impressive in its own right. Two of the scenarios here use Yokai in ways that cleverly nest with themes from Chambers’ original stories. The third scenario features manga subcultures, a comic convention and cosplay and is really rather brilliant. All the themes and topics are reinforced by art in a complimentary style, so, the character portraits in the manga scenario all look like manga.

The Sutra of Pale Leaves: Carcosa Manifest (2025) is the follow-up to Twin Suns Rising and contains four additional scenarios. Two are directly interconnected but the rest standalone more or less. They are presented across the two books in chronological order and work as an interconnected campaign that way.

The two-parter is the centerpiece of the campaign, with the primary cult going all in in an attempt to bridge our world to Carcosa in order to allow the Prince to physically manifest here (instead of only within the minds of his thralls). I don’t love the way the first part ends (a central NPC’s fate is sealed no matter what the players do) but otherwise I think it’s a gripping yarn with plenty of ways to lose. And win, but I’m not here for the winning in Call of Cthulhu, come on now. These are probably the most conventional CoC-style scenarios in the campaign though, for better or worse.

The other two scenarios are more interesting. One involves stopping the release of an Alice in Wonderland-themed videogame that is a vector for infection by the Sutra. It has a tight narrative and the videogame stuff works gangbusters. I particularly love the lo-res character portraits. Of all the scenarios, this one feels like maybe the scenario idea that spurred all the others on. It marries theme, setting and cultural context really well. The last adventure is sort of an unhinged riff on “The Repairer of Reputations” meant to be deployed when the players are at their lowest (it begins assuming they’re living on the street in disgrace) and gives them an opportunity to sink even lower. It’s very weird and casually deploys some of its most bizarre material in way similar to the original tale. It’s a great homage.

Now, unlike Michael Newton’s book of hope, I appreciate the clarity of this book’s title: Encyclopedia of Things that Never Where (1985). Stating that definitively really gets all that belief malarkey out of the way and lets us appreciate these things on their own imaginary terms (as Georgess McHargue encouraged us to do on Monday).

This book is more like a collection of several small topical encyclopedias, each discrete from the others and in their own alphabetical order. Nor do they necessarily make a perfect or intuitive sense all the way through. Things of the Cosmos is mostly gods of major mythologies, but also King Arthur and his knights. Things of the Ground and Underground collects faeries and tree spirits, but also the manticore, Minotaur and Sphinx. Things of Wonderland seems to imply things from literature, but really it collects all manner of fantastical places, from fiction, but also from legend. Things of Magic, Science and Invention could just as well have been called Things and left it at that; it collects notable items, from Thor’s hammer to Jekyll’s potion to the many unusual uses for nails. Things of Water, Sky and Air covers all the creatures not detailed in Earth chapter — Grendel is here, griffins, too, and all the sea serpents. Finally, Things of the Night details the undead and other creatures who hide from the sun, whether they go bump or not.

DREAMERS OF THE DAY ARE DANGEROUS MEN

THE TRICK IS NOT MINDING THAT IT HURTS

MY FEAR IS MY CONCERN

THE DESERT IS CLEAN

I SHALL HAVE MY RATION OF COMMON HUMANITY