wearestormcaller

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.

More monsters, can you believe it? It’s like I have shelf after shelf of monster books or something.

This is The Beasts of Never (1968), by Georgess McHargue, and, to my knowledge, it’s her first published book. It’s illustrated throughout by Frank Bozzo in expressionistic watercolors that I quite like but would probably not cut it in terms of preconceptions about quality in a similar sort of book today (more’s the pity about modern publishing, honestly). There’s a second expanded edition from 1988 that got nominated for a National Book Award, but there is something about the look of this edition that I prefer. Perhaps it was the fact that it was on my library shelf, though when I was a kid, I wasn’t super interested — that “Never” business was too contrary to my deep wish for monsters, even something like Bigfoot or Nessie, to be real.

She covers Nessie, though, at the end of the book, as a way to suggest perhaps there are monsters out there. Along the way, she also devotes time to dragons, both Eastern and Western, the Phoenix, the Basilisk, the Unicorn and a myriad of creatures of the sky and sea. She is most interested the meaning of the monster, not necessarily in the context of myth or legend, but what it might have meant to a person telling the tale beside a campfire. She ruminates and the book is poetic, even if it isn’t poetry. Speaking of the Phoenix, she says, “We will never find answers which are true in the same way the answers to mathematical problems are true.”

In Search of Kelandor’s Gold (1982) is a gigantic funhouse dungeon from Judges Guild that uses a peculiar universal system. Castle Kelandor has been empty for years, but the king’s treasure is in there still and the current Kelandor wants you to clean it out except, surprise, he’s an evil wizard and the castle is a trap for doing away with powerful adventurers who might rival him.

This is Chaos in Kansas (1989), a scenario for GURPS Cliffhanger or GURPS Horror, depending on how you’re feeling. The cover doesn’t even come close to telling you what amazing things lie in wait inside, but it’s a start. In truth, the title alone is gold. Say it with me, Chaos in Kansas, Chaos in Kansas, Chaos in Kansas.

There are two scenarios and some source material on the setting, a town called Liberty. The first involves a kidnapping by a coven of witches who worship the horrible sorcerer monster that’s trapped in a cave outside of town. They’re led by a teen flapper, the girlfriend of the kidnapped victim, who she intends to use as a human sacrifice to free the Dire Dreamer. She has a goat mask with crystal eyes in the trunk of her car. The cave is guarded by a horrible humanoid spider creature. The Dreamer itself is a mummified head on top of a pile of human intestines. I suspect that the phantom on Miro Sinovcic’s cover is meant to be the Dreamer, but good taste prevailed against depicting the pile of intestines. When the players defeat the Dreamer, the head explodes in a splash of goo, which should happen at the end of more RPG boss fights if you ask me.

Did I say The Future King was the WTF-iest of this week’s posts? I lied. Pacesetter’s Sandman: Map of Halaal (1985) is by far the WTF-iest thing you’re going to read about this week. It was Pacesetter’s last publication, which sucks, because it was the first of a projected series of three box sets, so as batshit as this box is, it is also deeply frustrating that the story never resolved. Goddamn the Volume One curse.

In terms of system, we have a genuinely interesting light weight, skill-based system with a narrative focus. They run about two and a half pages, total. Rule number one is to pitch any rules that diminish the fun of the game. Characters have a flat 40% chance to do things, 60% if they are trained. Often, a table is consulted to determine the quality of the success, which adds a bit of unpredictability to the system. Wounds are a series of check boxes of increasing severity (this mechanic in particular is very modern, showing up later in Tales from the Loop and other places). Overall, it’s years ahead of its time and genuinely exciting, which is something I can’t believe I am saying about a Pacesetter game.

On the GM’s side, scenarios are meant to be played in single four-hour sittings and are broken down into acts and scenes (there is also a visual version of each scenario, which is bizarre, but also cool). In practice, this reminds me a lot of the Choose Your Own Adventure board game, or Parsely, which reconfigures interactive fiction for group play. The designers question whether this was technically even an RPG by the definition of the day, preferring to call it “dramatic entertainment.”

And the plot. Folks, this game is weird on the level of Lords of Creation. The introductory scenario has the players waking up on a train with amnesia, though they have credentials from Ohio State University. They are on a train in Morocco. World War II is going on. They wind up interfacing with character from the film Casablanca before going out into the desert to retrieve a wishing lamp and the titular map (which, weird to use a name that is one letter away from halal, the term from Islamic dietary law which means a given food is allowed).

The second scenario moves the action to a medieval fantasy land (sorta) where they need to deliver an amulet to the correct blind man. This one features that terrifying jester on the screen. There is also a biker gang and the climax takes place in a parking garage. The third scenario recasts the players as bank robbers working with Bonnie and Clyde; eventually they wind up in Neverland. There is a dance-off with Tony, the Italian-American prince of disco (a tie is broken with a knife fight). The final scenario involves the Arab pirate Halaal (Sinbad, basically) and Dionysus’ rocket ship (which is piloted by Albert Einstein, who explains the wine god’s scheme to hang mirrors at the edge of the universe to…do something I don’t quite understand). The sustained atmosphere of dreams, or hallucination, is really something.

Vampire: The Masquerade—Bound by Blood is an officially licensed supplement created by Ghostfire Gaming that brings a Kindred (VtM‘s name for vampires) class to Dungeons & Dragons 5.5e. According to the product description on D&D Beyond, Bound by Blood is a “full vampire class powered by Blood Points, Disciplines, and the ever-clawing Beast inside! Included in this release is a heart-pounding Dark Ages adventure.”

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.

Rivers of London (2022) was a complete surprise for me. I heard Chaosium was developing a new game of that name, but I had no idea what it was about beyond involving magic, nor did I know about the Ben Aaronovitch novels it was based on. It came out, my wife got it for me for Christmas and I entered sans preconceptions. That’s sort of an unusual state for me and an RPG to meet in!

What we have system-wise is a very light weight version of BRP, with room for learning magic and a common skill aimed at detecting the supernatural. It’s all very smooth and welcoming and I daresay…cozy? This is not Call of Cthulhu, where the stakes are high and solving the mystery will send you around the bend. Players are meant to get the clues and push the story forward. Aaronovitch titles his introduction “An Introduction to Collaborative Storytelling,” and I think that says quite a bit about the game’s priorities. Another: combat is just one part of the “Basic Rules,” taking up about 18 pages of 60 (an additional five pages later on introduces some optional rules to give it a bit more tooth, if that’s desired). The next 100 pages deals with magic, lore and all the sort of stuff you need to know about the world in order to properly run the game. In reading that material, I eventually decided to put the RPG aside and read the first Rivers of London novel, titled Rivers of London, or, in the US, because we’re dreadfully dull, Midnight Riot.

Right, where to start with Eco Mofos (2023)? Let’s do: it looks fucking great. The layout is warm and bright. Daniel Locke’s intricate art just refuses to stop grabbing my eyes. It’s all great, but my favorite bits are the end papers — little wilderness and dungeon tiles in the front, a spread of improvised weapons in the back. They could have done the whole book illustrated just with spot illustrations of weird junk and jury-rigged items and I’d have pored over them forever. It’s a lovely looking book as it is, though, and lines up nicely with the theming.

Which, right on the cover: Weird Hope. Two hundred years ago, everything went to shit. The world is still a scary, dangerous place, but it’s getting better. The vast majority of game worlds are in decline and I cannot express how refreshing it is to have one coming around this time. The influence of post-apocalyptic fiction is here, but it isn’t overwhelming. You and your fellow mofos are a force for positive change, traveling through the wilderness to find a new haven to call home.

System-wise, we’re looking at a game built out of Into the Odd and Cairn, but with many tweaks and customizations. The gist of the rules fits front and back on the included bookmarks. It’s D&D-ish enough for anyone to pick up. There’s a Luck attribute that’s also a meta currency for getting out of trouble. Combat is deadly and thus to be avoided. It’s a game about meeting people, seeing strange sites and scavenging. Randomness is a key feature, right down to character generation. There are no classes, but characters can get appropriately post-apocalyptic Adaptations, like the Fungalist, who can turn into a silent, ambulatory mass of fungus.

The goal is to get this thing to the table and play it on the fly. When you need something, there is inevitably a random table for it. A single page table provides procedural maps to hang whole sessions on (the front end pages illustrate this in detail with the map tiles). There are a lot of cool, thoughtful bits in here, but the procedural maps are maybe the big Thing. I want this in every game, forever. I might just take this and use it in every game forever.

There are two Free Leagues, the one that makes games I love, and the one that makes games I don’t care about in the least. There is not a whole lot of middle ground (the middle ground is Coriolis, which I love as a system and an idea but am a pass on the campaign materials). Mutant: Year Zero, Symbaroum, Twilight: 2000, The One Ring and The Walking Dead lay abandoned in the Shrug pile; Alien, Dragonbane, Vaesen, Blade Runner, Forbidden Lands and Tales from the Loop live in the Hug pile. I think there is an inner logic there, and I also think you will now have a pretty good idea about where I fall with The Electric State (2024).

Based on the narrative art book of the same name (no, there is no movie with that name, why do you ask?) and its overall action, players take the role of characters on a road trip through a strange version of 1997, in the aftermath of a war fought primarily through the use of gigantic drones and further polluted with obsession-inducing virtual reality derived from the drone piloting tech. Some of the drones look like terrifying machines of war, others look like brand mascots. Sometimes masses of people in the VR network and enter into symbiosis with drones, creating a new kind of hybrid life? It’s a lot. All the while, something similar to everyday life continues apace. There are plenty of stories to tell on the road. 

A love a road trip game. One car, a bizarre landscape, stops along the way. It’s a Simon Stalenhag jam, so you know that the journey is internal as much as it’s on the asphalt. Much of that, I think, is expressed through the variable Tension mechanic that develops between the players. You can’t stay in a car together that long without nerves getting raw. The game also provides a solid methodology for designing the events that transpire at the Stops along the way. Best of all, every journey comes to an end eventually. I like an open-ended game, but one with a natural ending built in is a rare treat.

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, Olivia 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.