wearestormcaller

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.

I picked up Triangle Agency (2024) at PAX Unplugged 2024, seduced in part by the graphic design, in part by the promise that someone uttered that it was like Delta Green, but funny. This is only nominally true. I think what it has most in common with Delta Green is that it was fun to read, in a way very few RPGs are. A lot of folks also reference the videogame Control and the TV show Severance, but mostly what I came away with was Paranoia, to the point that the fact that no one else seems to be reminded of Paranoia actively bums me out.

System first, because it is genuinely interesting. Dice pool, using D4, every 3 is a success. All rolls are 6D4; with only one 3 needed to succeed, this puts the base chance of success pretty high. This is mitigated by burnout and other attribute and situation-based modifiers that both add and remove successes. These toe the scale so thoroughly that the game assumes most attempted rolls are going to fail, which pushes players to either use their Anomaly powers or call in help from the Agency (both of which play into the desires of the Agency). Side note: Mörk Borg gets a lot of shit for its graphic design being hard to parse, but lemme tell you, this RPG is easy to read and still needs a systems reference document, stat, because extracting the system from the chatty text is a chore and a half.

Players take the role of characters who have special anomalous powers who are employed by the Agency (a privately owned corporation with no government affiliation). In an unexpected bit of meta, we, the players and the world we live in are actually hallucinations of the characters used to cope with their broken perception of reality, so when we come together to play the game, the results are real and tangible in the “actual” world. In play, scenarios are basically an X-Files-style monster of the week formula.

But all is not what it appears! Of course. The Agency has this all rigged (taking the same essential role as the Computer in Paranoia) and many mechanics for the game are “playwalled” meaning players only get access to them once specific things happen in the game, meaning A. They have to make a lot of decisions without understanding the consequences or B. They have to cheat and read the sections they aren’t supposed to read. I find this both delightful and irritating, waffling between both extremes basically moment to moment.

Like World of Greyhawk, Greyhawk Ruins (1990) is a bit of a half-measure.

The ruins of Castle Greyhawk were the under-construction megadungeon where Gary Gygax playtested Dungeons & Dragons (there are actually two, Rob Kuntz developed and ran the second version so Gygax could play). This haphazard thing, created at the frantic rate of one level a week, was never published and, even if Gygax wanted to, was likely unpublishable as a game resource (it would be nice to have it as a historical document, though). Gygax mentioned the dungeon every so often, but obliquely. Three modules — Dungeonland, The Land Beyond the Magic Mirror and Isle of the Ape — take place on demi-planes that were accessible to Gygax’s players via portals contained in the dungeon, but the published versions downplay that connection. After Gygax left TSR, the parody of the dungeon, published as Castle Greyhawk, emerged, to the satisfaction of no one.

Greyhawk Ruins is the first serious attempt at creating a playable version of the legendary dungeon and, even though it has been mostly overlooked, I think it does an admirable job cobbling together the many hints Gygax made about its contents into a workable whole. There are really three dungeons, one underneath the ruins of the castle’s three partially remaining towers, though there are plenty of connections between the three shafts. To cram all the detail into 86 pages, the text is vanishingly small; a heap of color-coded map (each shift denoting a 5’ decrease in elevation) and some new monster sheets rounds it out. I quite like the clarity of the maps.

The thing I find most interesting about this whole thing is that in this moment, Greyhawk was getting more serious, with modules incrementally paving the way to From the Ashes, the setting’s grimmest point. The thing is, the old school Castle Greyhawk, which this module is at pains to emulate, is not serious, at least, not in the same way. Rather, it’s rather unhinged, with bizarre spaces and incongruous situations. It doesn’t have groaner jokes, but rather, as I mentioned yesterday, it leaves plenty of joke material laying around for the players to do with what they will. It doesn’t really surprise me that this book didn’t get much attention at the time, because it was so out of step, but it does make me a bit sad.

WG12: Vale of the Mage (1989) is a jarring return to form after the three previous modules. The difference is immediately apparent just in the heft of the book — this is a 64-page booklet, a big full color map and a cover screen. Compare that to the 32 pages and nothing else of the “funny” scenarios.

The first chunk of the book is a sourcebook for the title region, one of the few spots mentioned in World of Greyhawk that was mysterious enough that I recall folks being excited when this showed up on shelves, though some material on the Vale and its inhabitants appeared in Greyhawk Adventures. The titular mage is a somewhat evil but reasonable fellow who is working toward becoming a shade. His best (only?) friend is Tysiln San, the drow woman on the cover. She hails from the Vault of the Drow and it is interesting how different she is both from the original (cartoonish) depiction of Drow and the newer, more elaborately developed Drow of Forgotten Realms. Chaotic Neutral and loyal and loving to the Mage, she seems more of a cultural outlier than Drizzt.

The rest of the book is the scenario, which is basically a hexcrawl through the Vale hunting necromancers who failed in a coup attempt and fled. The idea is to either eliminate them or beat them to the Mage and convince him to deal them justice. This is mostly an excuse to get entangled in emergent adventures in the Vale.

One of my favorite bits is a new monster, the Grist, also called a True Gargoyle, immediately recognizable because they have four arms and permanently attached wings. They feel like a direct refutation the dopey gargoyles of Gargoyle.

WG11: Puppets (1989) is another painful “Greyhawk” scenario that adds nothing to the setting and is filled with groaners. There is a leprechaun named Freddy McKruger who is looking for his friend Jason. That’s about the level of humor we’re looking at here.

This thing is cobbled together from two RPGA tournament scenarios, one of which was originally set in Ravens Bluff (which would eventually be incorporated into Forgotten Realms, not Greyhawk). I think this is also true of Child’s Play and Gargoyle, and probably goes a long way toward explaining why these are trying so hard to be funny and feel so out of place for the setting. Honestly, the second half of this one, which involves animated Puppet Master-style puppet thieves, could maybe be worked into something decent. But out of three modules, that’s honestly all that’s worth mentioning.

The thing with jokes in games is that you can’t write them down and expect them to land. Freddy McKruger was possibly a funny quip on the fly at a convention game, but as soon as it got written down, it became the stupidest parody joke ever. Laughter is a staple at the table, but you have to let it be free. I am always trying to incorporate the stupidest stuff to get laughs, but it’s for the table, not posterity. All these joke scenarios are trying so hard to be funny when what they should be doing is trying to give the players the material they need to be funny.

Pisgah National Forest

Last up this week is The History of Hell (1993), by Alice K. Turner, the former literary editor at Playboy Magazine. I distinctly remember buying it on a trip to The Cloisters, a museum dedicated to Medieval art in upper Manhattan, while in high school (just in case you doubted that I’ve always been like this).

It’s a wonderful, heavily illustrated book that walks the reader through the development of the underworld, starting in the Mesopotamian netherworld of Queen Ereshkigal, the Classical Hades, then into the muddy waters of Sheol and the early Christian Hell and Dante and Milton and so on, all the way through to the multitude of hells that have developed since the 1800s — cartoonish ones, decadent ones, fundamentalist ones, psychological ones. Laid out in chronological order, these strung together afterlives seem rather silly, and Turner recognizes that fact by taking a pleasant, irreverent tone the whole way through. It becomes clear that Hell is for other people, not me, never me, an ever-changing, ever-evolving punishment for the folks over there who deserve it; a sort of ancient version of the “I’m built different” meme.

Dealing with the Devil (1979) is Daniel Cohen’s entry into the diabolical catalog. It’s one of his books written to more of an adult level, but his ability to plainly explain complex topics, his enthusiasm for the subject and his reasonable skepticism make it fit for any age reader.

More than anything, he presents the Devil as a ridiculous figure. Sure, he can be fearsome in some legends, but he is just as often an easily duped dope (Saint Dunstan grabbing him by the nose with a smith’s tongs is really just the tip of the iceberg). Much of the book is dedicated to charting the origins of the figure, who is notably absent for much of history and only appears as a dealer in souls and pacts relatively recently, in the last four or five centuries. There’s a lot to be skeptical about and Cohen ends by expressing the concern that we’re taking the devil too seriously. By 1979, the Satanic Panic was bubbling up and Cohen’s own Curses, Hexes and Spells had showed up on banned book lists two years earlier.

As if to underline his point, Cohen serves up the best author photo of his career, dressed in a Halloween costume consisting of a long black hooded cloak, with a miniature skeleton dangling from a cord around his neck. He’s the very picture of a nefarious Satanist!