Betrayer

There is this tendency, that I tend to play video games mostly during times when I'm SWAMPED with tons of IRL stuff and work... They are a great way to relax and to procrastinate. To write tabletop RPG-related stuff or to play, you need to be able to concentrate more; while computer games can be played for full effect even when tired.

Lately, I've been playing a game called Betrayer.

It's a first-person action/RPG hybrid, set in 17th century Colonial Virginia...

The whole game is presented in grayscale, with red accents. It seems kinda gimmicky, but it really adds to the whole atmosphere. There is an option to colorize the graphics, but I prefer the original b&w world (you can tune the dark & light balance, contrast, so it's not as heavy on the eyes as you would expect).

You fight using period weapons: bows, crossbows, pistols and muskets - these last two deal high damage, but reload times are very long, a nice realistic touch. Usually you only get to fire each gun once per combat...

You slowly work your way through the game world, fighting possessed Spaniards and flaming Savage Braves (this game is 'colonial' in many ways...), investigate clues scattered around the map, try to learn what kind of evil possesses the land. Sometimes you have to enter into the shadow worlds, a dark parallel dimension, which allows you to interact with the flipside of this horrorshow. In this mode, you can cleanse objects and chat with the spirits of the deceased.

Quite an engaging game, overall, so I really recommend it.

[Swamp '70] Swamped in pictures

Panoramio, the amazing photo sharing site, closed own on 4 November 2016. I really liked browsing it, seeing all kinds of places around the world, and it was also great for inspiration. Before it's closure, I went on a manic downloading spree and amassed some very nice photos of nature and buildings in Florida, for later use with my Swamp '70 project. Unfortunately, with Panoramio now offline, it's hard to trace back some of the authors. I can only hope that most of them will use the tools provided by Google to save their archives!

Also, it seems that direct links to user profiles are still working (although not accessible through the main site).

One of the best collections of photos of rural Florida were taken by Ken Badgley, and I cannot thank him enough for sharing his unique shots of decaying houses and old buildings. Some of this shots have this eerie-even-when-the-sun-shines quality, which I'm aiming for.

I was also able to pull some GREAT historical photos from the The National Archives.

 

[Bloody Basic] Weird Fantasy Edition review/overview

I've been aware of John M. Stater's work for some time, but never got around to actually check out anything. His main design is the OSR title Blood & Treasure, for which he created a basic version, called Bloody Basic. Bloody Basic is a whole line of shorter books, each containing the essential rules for character creation and playing with slight variations, but presenting a different setting and race/class choices. There's a book for classic fantasy, a "contemporary" edition (contemporary meaning something like steampunk? I haven't read this one, it has "automatons, drakkens" etc, but also "fighters, sorcerers, clerics and thieves", so I don't know how different it is from the classic book), a fairy tale supplement (the brilliantly titled "Mother Goose Edition") and Sinew & Steel (promising a more realistic medieval setting). And there is a last one, which I have:

Bloody Basic: Weird Fantasy Edition

What I like about this book is that it strives to capture the atmosphere of weird fiction without or even before pulp. The short two-paragraph preface is wonderfully dense, evocative, and it provides a very strong statement. Stater stresses the origins of the weirds in the Romantic Movement:

"[Weird fantasy] has in its genes both pseudo-historical romances, Orientalism and fairy tales, though not fairy tales fit for children. The fairy tales that parented weird fantasy were never stripped of their violence or their erotic overtones.

Weird fantasy is both steeped in meaning and bereft of it. It is quiet and noisy and ridiculous and sublime."

His main touchstones are Lord Dunsany and Clark Ashton Smith, although I feel Dunsany is the stronger presence here. At the visual side of things we get Beardsley and Sidney Sime, who are not just "public domain illustration sources", but major influences.

Sidney Sime. Hothrun Dath.
For Lord Dunsany's "Gods of Pegāna"

So in the end, we arrive at a game of Donjons & Decadence.

Yes, Stater substitutes "donjon" for "dungeon". And there are many-many more quirky words scattered around the book. There is even a handy Thesaurus so that you can spice up your language with appropriately archaic words. "You can call a gemstone blue, but there are many other fine words to use in its place," including, but not limited to "aqua, azure, beryl, cerulean, ceil, cesious, chalybeous, cobalt, cyan, ecchymotic, gentian"... Why call a temple simply a temple, when you can instead refer to the local "chantry, chapel, church, cloister, convent, conventicle, dagoba, deanery, dewal, dogobah, fane, fold, friary, glebe, holy place, house of [god], house of prayer"... This is all quite hilarious.

The game rules are OGL-based, with the standard six attributes. There are only three types of modifiers, 0, -1 and +1, for average, below average and above average ratings. These apply to "tasks" (tests rolled with 1d20), attack rolls, etc.

I love how the description of polyhedral dice is illustrated by Bragdon's "Sinbad, in the desert, discovers the Five Platonic Solids"!

Things get more interesting with Races! Humans are humans (although their appearance in a fantastic world can differ from ours). Elves are graceful, soulless and hedonistic. Grotesques are humanoid with one or more exaggerated or bestial feature, eccentric loners who are often slaves to their passions. The fourth available player race is Satyrs from the Greek myths. The difference between a Grotesque and a Satyr probably lies in their perception of their own "deformities" - a Grotesque wants to be a human (I'd totally go White Wolf with this race), while a Satyr is just fine, pass on the wine.

The Classes are re-skinned and slightly modified versions of the classics. Clerics become Idolators. "Turn Undead" is now "Shunning" (and can be used against any enemy of the idolator). Spells are called orisons and are gained by becoming initiated into one or more of the nine mystery cults (each initiation comes with an extra taboo!). Overall, there aren't many such orisons: a total of 30 (10 per level), and each cult gives access to basically just one spell in each tier.

The Magic-User class is renamed Magus, who cast "cantraps". As usual, the magi get a significantly wider array of spells: a total of 52 cantraps. Stater's love of new names is in full swing here as well: "Ken Gibberish" for "Understand Languages", "Eldritch Bolts" for "Magic Missile", and so on.

The Fighter is called the Puissant. They get feats and the usual combat bonuses. It comes as a surprise to see the simple Thief as the last class... :) Their lowly designation is spiced up by two possible subclasses, the Demimond and the Odalisque.

The Three Witches from Orson Welles' "Macbeth" (1948)

The Game Master advice section is generic, but the Monsters return to the flamboyant style. The Weird Tales rule supreme here: there are tentacled aberrations, gibbering mouthers, but also standard fantasy and old-school RPG beasts. Stater, obviously, uses the authentic spelling of "gnole". There are also listings for scrolls and magic items (including the "Masque of the red death" and the "Silver key" for breaching dimensions).

Overall, this is a wonderful little game. The use of archaic words might not be everybody's cup of tea... But I have to point out, that when it's needed, Stater writes in a comprehensible way, rules are kept clean & clear, they are easy to learn.

Personally, I think this game would be even better if it relied less on the old-school RPG canon! I would love to see more interesting "cantraps" and "orisons" which are not just renamed D&D spells. 

[LotFP] Cunning Folk, WIP

The setting document on "A Field in Lorraine" keeps on growing and growing -- one day I will put up the extended version. I keep adding stuff that I find as I go, so right now it's a bit chaotic, but with some editing it can be turned into a supplement that others can use as well.

I like Clerics in fantasy games, but in a 17th century weird horror fantasy they seem a bit out of place. "Divine spells", as described, are too "clean". The modus operandi, so to speak, of Catholic exorcists, Jewish cabbalists (as I see, they are best described as a mix of Magic-Users and Clerics), Protestant witch hunters are very different.

And then there are the Cunning Folk, the practitioners of all sorts of witchery and popular magic. This term, although it originates from English culture, can be used as an "umbrella term" for the entire phenomenon (see the entry on Cunning folk & the literature listing in Wikipedia for starters).

English	cunning folk, wise men and women		French	devins-guérisseurs, leveurs de sorts
German	Hexenmeister, Kräuthexen		Slavic	vedmak
Dutch	toverdokters, duivelbanners		Danish	kloge folk
Italian	benandanti		Spanish	curanderos
Swedish	klok gumma (“wise old woman”), klok gubbe (“wise old man”)		Portuguese	curandeiros, benzedeiros, mulheres de virtude (“woman of virtue”)

Cunning Folk are definitely something I want to include in my Early Modern Weird Europe. That's why I included in the first version of "A Field in Lorraine" various ideas and folk magic spells. But now I think this can be made into a class.

Instead of working from a set spell list, the Cunning Folk would rely on two types of manipulations:

1. "Folk magic", encompassing everything from folk medicine recipes to love charms and various practices to help out "around the house". These "spells" are part of an extensive and very convoluted oral tradition. Christian prayer and pre-Christian beliefs are intermingled. Although they are considered to be tried and trusted, there is only a limited chance that any given superstition or cantrip really has a magical effect.
   
   I included a list of such spells in the first version of "A Field in Lorraine".
   
   
   A great variety of spells can be culled from "Long Lost Friend" (or "Long-Hidden Friend", "Der Lange Verborgene Freund"), a collection of pow-wow spells compiled in the 1820s by the Pennsylvania Dutch healer John George Hohman (see the text here). These practices are clearly based on tradition brought along from Europe; mixed with Christian prayer. Includes three folk variants of Hold Person, "Immobilize a Thief": "How to cause male or female thieves to stand still, without being able to move backward or forward?"
   A great read.
   
   But there is also...
2. Magic done with the help of a Familiar.
   Now this is a very different can of worms. A Familiar spirit is low-tier supernatural entity, a small demon, which assists the practitioner. 

These two types can overlap, and the assistance of a Familiar greatly increases the chance of a traditional folk spell to take effect.

An image of a witch and her familiar spirits taken from a publication that dealt with the witch trials of Elizabeth Stile, Mother Dutten, Mother Devell and Mother Margaret in Windsor, 1579.

There is an eerie passage (Q. 4) in "The Discovery of Witches" by Matthew Hopkins from 1647, in which the familiars of a witch are described. They materialize in vaguely animal forms:

"1. Holt, who came in like a white kitling. 

2. Jarmara, who came in like a fat Spaniel without any legs at all, she said she kept him fat, for she clapt her hand on her belly and said he suckt good blood from her body. 

3. Vinegar Tom, who was like a long-legg'd Greyhound, with an head like an Oxe, with a long taile and broad eyes, who when this discoverer spoke to, and bade him goe to the place provided for him and his Angels, immediately transformed himselfe into the shape of a child of foure yeeres old without a head, and gave halfe a dozen turnes about the house, and vanished at the doore. 

4. Sack and Sugar, like a black Rabbet.

5. Newes, like a Polcat."

I hope I will be able to find time to turn this into something.

Ideally, there should be a nice random table for Familiars (maybe taking ideas from the LotFP Summon spell?); some rules that govern the "working relationship" of the Cunning Folk and their Familiars; and ideas for the GM about "Familiars gone bad".

[LotFP] A Field in Lorraine

I've put together a short document with my ideas for a weird & nasty & dark fantasy game set in the aftermath of the Thirty Years' War. This is not a scenario or adventure, but rather little atmospheric pieces that help to show the world of 17th century Weird Europe.

I've also included a list of "folk magic" spells. And mushrooms.

Here's the link to the .pdf:
https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B2c4f45yVNuOa3R3X2pkVVg1NVk

"This is not a “historical” game. The Thirty Years’ War and other events are used as a backdrop, but their importance or overarching role is only understood in retrospect. People who are in the middle of it do not know whether the war and wars have ended or not. They do not have up-to-date information from the frontlines. News travel slowly, deception and rumors are abundant.

Lorraine is defined as the general area of events, but it is important for the tone of the game to keep the setting vague, regarding both chronology and location. Maps and timelines are only known to strategists and annalists. Player characters and the everyday people they encounter are utterly, hopelessly lost. Locals know their own village, maybe the road to the next hamlet. Superstition warns against going to certain areas, and for a good reason. Bands of marauders and deserters are menacing the lands. Many villages are completely abandoned; most of them are only inhabited by women, children, and the elderly.

The player characters are soldiers, mercenaries heading back to their villages. They served their time, their battalion was re-organized, or, more likely, destroyed. But they are not in a hurry… For they know that their “home” is not the cozy place it used to be. The player characters fear that the same atrocities they committed in foreign lands were carried out against their own villages by other soldiers."

(c) Simon Marsden

This was all created with Lamentations of the Flame Princess on mind, but can be used with any system. I hope to run this game soon for a couple of friends.

Infra Arcana

I was sick this whole week, couldn't concentrate to post anything worthwhile... Hopefully, more Swamp '70 ideas will come soon. I'm also working on an adventure framework for Apes Victorious.

"Cultist with artifact", by JMD3

In the meantime, I'm playing Infra Arcana, a roguelike dungeon crawl with occult / Lovecraftian themes. Despite the ASCII-style graphics (although not true-ASCII, but still minimalistic) it is a very immersive and atmospheric game. The music and sound effects help with this a great amount.

You can play as four different classes. The Rogue is good at sneaking around, and you can pick the "Treasure Hunter" trait as starters, which gives you a greater amount of loot. Playing as the War Veteran is probably the easiest, but they go insane much quicker than the rest... The Occultist is a tough choice: they can study spells from scrolls, but have a lower HP and combat ratings. And, finally, the fourth playable class is the Ghoul: a rather interesting addition, it can heal by chewing on fallen enemies, has some unique traits (e.g. "Foul" - there is a chance that maggots spring out of monsters killed and attack other enemies).

As for enemies, you get standard beasts / animals (wolves, various spiders), the undead, cultists, ghastly abominations. There are "mini bosses" appearing from time to time: powerful named characters with special abilities, like Keziah Mason...

You are low on health and encounter a huge group of zombies. You flee back to the closest junction, jam the door shut and try to heal up -- while the zombies are trying to break through the door. You shuffle for ammunition, but only find a scroll of teleportation: will the eldritch incantation take you to a safer segment of the dungeon or throw you straight into the mouth of an unknown abomination?!

As most roguelikes, it's punishing and hard, but not unfair, I highly recommend it.

[Swamp '70] The Spirit of Dark and Lonely Water

"Swamp '70" is the tentative working title / tag I've given to the 1970s occult game I'm brainstorming.

So, do you know this classic public information short from 1973? Pure genius. And it is a perfect creature or plot hook for the Swamp '70 setting.

"Do not play near the swamps, Hannah!" "No, Collin Smith Jr., you definitely cannot go fishing at the old pond!" "Don't go into the woods!" "Be careful, Jeffrey!" -- but the warnings and cautionary tales of parents are lost on the children... Kids keep disappearing under mysterious circumstances. Is it possible that a malevolent being is preying upon the children of the town? A serial killer, a twisted pedophile? Or maybe...

The Spirit of Dark and Lonely Water?!

The Spirit of Dark and Lonely Water is a disembodied entity that can form an empathic link with a sentient being and amplify in its victim such characteristics as unwariness, show-offishness, foolishness & carelessness. It inhabits perilous abandoned places. Typical examples include quarry lakes, junkyards, desolate buildings or even a poorly maintained playground. Dangers are plenty, yet subtle: slippery mud, crumbling concrete, loose stones, corroded iron. The Spirit is like the Imp of the Perverse: its influence leads the victim (most commonly, a child) to death. This is the only thing that can satisfy the Spirit's cravings.

"When the quarry operations stopped, the original quarry pit filled with water.
This was used for a "swimming hole" by local folks but it was dangerous.
Several people were drowned in the old quarry..."

The exact origin of the Spirit of Dark and Lonely Water is unknown. One possible explanation that it is the hungry ghost of the first victim of the place, damned to haunt it for eternity, replaying the events of its own death over and over again. Another explanation is that once people retreat from a place, it slips into abandon, and otherworldly forces claim it as their own... 

Ancient Thracian tombs as mini-dungeons (Part 2)

The nature of Thracian religious beliefs concerning death and afterlife is subject to much scholarly discussion... What follows are a few snippets that can be used as inspirational material for a sword & sorcery-type game, especially in conjunction with the tombs from part 1! As illustrations I will just use some pictures of archaeological finds from Thrace.

The ancient historian Herodotus gives us information about one of the Thracian tribes, the Getae (who were also, by accounts of other authors, connected with the Dacians).

The gilded silver helmet from Agighiol. 5th century BC. Don't look in the eyes.

In Book 4 of his "Histories", Herodotus describes the Getae as warriors, "the bravest and most just of all Thracians", who "pretend to be immortal" [4.93].

"Their belief in their immortality is as follows: they believe that they do not die, but that one who perishes goes to the deity Salmoxis, or Gebeleïzis, as some of them call him. Once every five years they choose one of their people by lot and send him as a messenger to Salmoxis, with instructions to report their needs; and this is how they send him: three lances are held by designated men; others seize the messenger to Salmoxis by his hands and feet, and swing and toss him up on to the spear-points. If he is killed by the toss, they believe that the god regards them with favor; but if he is not killed, they blame the messenger himself, considering him a bad man, and send another messenger in place of him. It is while the man still lives that they give him the message. Furthermore, when there is thunder and lightning these same Thracians shoot arrows skyward as a threat to the god, believing in no other god but their own." [4.94]

In this one passage there are already plenty of ideas! The cult of Salmoxis (or Zalmoxis, or Gebeleïzis, etc.) is a cruel one, with human sacrifice (by lottery, none the less), but it is also a rewarding one, promising eternal life.

Deer-shaped rhyta, from Thracian tombs, 4th century BC

Who was this Salmoxis?

As told by the Hellespontian Greeks,

"...Salmoxis was a man who was once a slave in Samos, his master being Pythagoras son of Mnesarchus; then, after being freed and gaining great wealth, he returned to his own country. Now the Thracians were a poor and backward people, but this Salmoxis knew Ionian ways and a more advanced way of life than the Thracian; for he had consorted with Greeks, and moreover with one of the greatest Greek teachers, Pythagoras; therefore he made a hall, where he entertained and fed the leaders among his countrymen, and taught them that neither he nor his guests nor any of their descendants would ever die, but that they would go to a place where they would live forever and have all good things. While he was doing as I have said and teaching this doctrine, he was meanwhile making an underground chamber. When this was finished, he vanished from the sight of the Thracians, and went down into the underground chamber, where he lived for three years, while the Thracians wished him back and mourned him for dead; then in the fourth year he appeared to the Thracians, and thus they came to believe what Salmoxis had told them." [4.95]

What we have here is a mortal man, a former slave, trained in the Pythagorean way, who becomes immortal and is, therefore, worshiped as a god by his kin. Salmoxis' disappearance into an underground chamber can be interpreted as a rite of renewal or rebirth; his way of attaining immortality.

Strabo tells the same story, although with some variations and additions:

"...when [Salmoxis] came on back to his home-land he was eagerly courted by the rulers and the people of the tribe, because he could make predictions from the celestial signs; and at last he persuaded the king to take him as a partner in the government, on the ground that he was competent to report the will of the gods; and although at the outset he was only made a priest of the god who was most honored in their country, yet afterwards he was even addressed as god, and having taken possession of a certain cavernous place that was inaccessible to anyone else he spent his life there, only rarely meeting with any people outside except the king and his own attendants; and the king cooperated with him, because he saw that the people paid much more attention to himself than before, in the belief that the decrees which he promulgated were in accordance with the counsel of the gods. This custom persisted even down to our own time, because some man of that character was always to be found, who, though in fact only a counsellor to the king, was called god among the Getae." [7.3]

A coiled snake figure found at Seuthopolis

If you connect these stories about a man vanishing into an underground chamber and thus becoming a god with the peculiar features of the Thracian tombs described earlier, these "mini-dungeons" become small sanctuaries for attaining immortality or, at least, temporary renewal. It can also explain the various chambers of special shape or configuration inside the tomb. The king or noble warrior or tribe priest for whom it was built from time to time entered it and emerged reborn; and used it as a burial place after a long and fulfilling earthly life, when he moved on to a different plane of existence, practically as a god.

So... are the adventurers ready to face a chthonic warrior priest god for a couple of pieces of gilded armor? Or do they want to become immortal themselves?

James H. Wilson: Zalmoxis (from "Zalmoxis and Other Poems", 1892)

Ancient Thracian tombs as mini-dungeons (Part 1)

The ancient Thracians are as sword & sorcery as it gets. Barbarians, occasionally united into kingdoms under the leadership of the strongest tribe, fierce warriors, hunters, connoisseurs of fine golden jewelry, but also with a deep interest in the mystical side of things - without going into scholarly details, this is the simplified picture you can paint of them.

And they built awesome tombs. Which you can easily turn into mini-dungeons for basically any dungeon-centric game. I'm breaking this down into two parts. Here, in Part 1, I will just provide a basic physical description of these tombs, their configuration; and in Part 2 (coming later) I want to talk about using some passages from ancient texts as additional inspiration.

The dromos of the tomb at Mezek

Most of these tombs feature a sequence of corridors and chambers, built on one axis, covered by an earthen burial mound. For example, here's the plan and section of the Mal-tepe tomb near Mezek:

This tomb features an unusually long dromos, a corridor/passageway (~ 20m). This is followed by two rectangular antechambers. The complex terminates in a tholos, a circular domed room (sometimes referred to as a beehive tomb). This has a burial couch on an elevated platforms and two pedestals, all hewn from stone.

Most tombs follow a similar pattern, with variations. For example, the tomb at Kazanlak (famous for the painted scenes adorning it) has a significantly shorter dromos and only one chamber preceding the tholos.

Tomb at Kazanlak

The Golyamata Kosmatka tomb also has a tholos, but it is placed before the rectangular burial chamber.

Golyamata Kosmatka

The passage between the various sections was often closed with elaborate stone doors. This example from Golyamata Kosmatka has two relief medallions, depicting two heads: of Apollo and of Gorgon., religious and apotropaic symbols.

And this is just the tip of the iceberg. There are many more Thracian funerary / ritual complexes. Some of them feature unusual sculptural elements (e.g. the caryatids at Sveshtari, half-woman, half-plant figures supporting the ceiling). Some of them are not only underground crypts, but have edifices on the outside of the mound as well (e.g. Starosel)...

So there is a lot to work with! 

Warren Publishing comics & mags online

Just sayin'... Countless issues of Warren comics and magazines are up in the repository of the ever wonderful archive.org... Mostly 70s & 80s stuff, Vampirella, Creepy and many more!

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