#max moon

Photo credits to: Mal Lewis (AMLfilms)

Back in Philly. Made it to Harrisburg a couple days ago.

I love the handful of zines I own that embody not only DIY RPG aesthetics, but also “weird literary chapbook” and also “mysterious occult booklet.” I have many that do each individual flavor well, but a combo of all three is rare indeed. Such is Dungeon Divinations (2021), by Max Moon. It is one of only perhaps three zines in my collection that has a dustcover, which is neat. The art (which, I lament, greedily, there is not nearly enough of) by Luciana Lupe Vasconcelos also sits at a pleasing crossroads between RPGs, literature and the occult. The whole book is sharply designed and feels formidable in the hand.

But what is it? It is a method for generating dungeons for RPGs through the use of Tarot card spreads. Those spreads aren’t arranged, necessarily, in a way optimal for dungeons, but rather derived from the practice of using Tarot for divination. It turns out that there is considerable overlap between “good dungeon” and “effective fortune-telling” design. Does this speak, at last, to the fabled and feared conduit from D&D to the occult? Perhaps it reveals something fundamental about the ways we find patterns of meaning in the meaningless when we’re creating. I tend to mostly agree with Max in his introduction, when he describes the book in his introduction as both “absurd and earnest.” Honestly, its probably best that interested parties judge for themselves, if they can secure a copy.

Abyss of Hallucinations (2021) is, like most of Max Moon’s work, a fusion of occult themes and solid RPG design. In this case, a heremetic setting for MÖRK BORG that draws heavily on the work of Aleister Crowley, particularly The Book of Lies (which Max reprinted as a zine in the same trade dress, as an accompaniment).

The mixture is a little less than 50/50 here, I think, with RPG elements (60ish percent?) necessarily overwhelming the magickal elements (while Max does get it to more of a 50/50 mix in other projects, this volume at least perhaps illustrates how the precision of RPG writing is at odds with the obscurity of the occult).

There is a sort of phantasmagorical wilderness, populated by features derived from The Book of Lies, but only tersely described. This gives way to three character classes that each reflect some core aspect of Crowley’s personality (Seeker of the Left Hand Path, Offspring of Pan and, humorously, Mountaineer). Following that are several entities one might encounter, including Baphomet, Babalon and mystical Dinosaurs.