Lovecraft at 124

On this day in 1890 H. P. Lovecraft was born.  Here are 10 things to know about the creator of the Cthulhu Mythos.

Dark Dungeons, the Movie

Back in my high-school days, my friends and I used to find endlessly amusing the Jack Chick comic, "Dark Dungeons."

Now, much to my amazement, there is a film based on that comic!

(A very realistic portrayal of a typical RPG session.)

I watched the eight minute preview here, and it looks quite funny.  I plan to watch the full version, available here, in the very near future.

Certainly its portrayal of the popularity of RPGs and the people who play them is extremely realistic!

Free RuneQuest 6 adventure: Sariniya's Curse

The good people at the Design Mechanism have made available a free adventure for RuneQuest 6 entitled 'Sariniya's Curse' (available here).  It is set in the same region as the city of Meeros, as described briefly in the (also free) Game Master's Pack.  Thus 'Sariniya's Curse' can be combined with the adventure 'Meeros Falling' (from the GM Pack), providing starting RQ6 GMs with two free related adventures with which to start a campaign.

And of course RuneQuest Essentials also is free.  (But you really should buy the full RQ6 book, as it's the best FRPG published in recent decades.)

Grubb reviews the 5e D&D Player's Handbook

Jeff Grubb has posted his review of the new Player's Handbook (5th edition Dungeons & Dragons) here.

I don't have this yet myself, but it increasingly is my impression that 5e D&D will not be too bad...

Call of Cthulhu 7th Edition Proofs

Folks who backed the Kickstarter for the seventh edition of The Call of Cthulhu RPG can download the proofs of the two main books now.  (The proofs are free for backers, not $499.95!  You need to provide a code to reduce the price to $0.)

After a quick skim, I think that the PDFs look quite attractive. I'm not a fan of all of the art pieces (unsurprisingly, they range in quality), but the overall appearance of both books is very impressive. 7e is definitely the most attractive version of CoC yet produced by Chaosium.

Also, it's worth noting that the Keeper's book includes all of the rules, so CoC remains a 'one book' RPG.  The Investigator Handbook includes only the information relevant to players.  I rather like that this option is available, as it keeps all the important Mythos 'secrets' exclusively in the hands of Keepers (at least in theory).

Right now, I find the shift to % abilities the most distracting change in 7th edition.  And I remain uncertain about many of the other changes in this edition.  However, I'm going to try to keep an open mind about 7e, and will be giving it a shot in September to see what I think of it in practice.

Party off the chain with Lovecraft

This Clickhole article, "Saturday's Party at H. P. Lovecraft's Pad Was INSANE," is quite funny (IMHO).

And I think that the author did a pretty good job in emulating HPL's style (albeit updated with some contemporary terms):

The impression the scene generated in my consciousness is so enduring and frightful that it shakes me to recall it now. And lest I burden you with offensively irrelevant and dangerous speculation, I shall leave unsaid what else transpired that night in H.P.’s baroque, Cyclopean abode, and simply say that it was off the chain, indeed, off any chain conceivable to the foremost minds of our time.

Happy 60th Anniversary to The Lord of the Rings

The Lord of the Rings was published on July 29th, 1954.

(Okay, I’m two days late.  *sigh*)

Here is a nice piece on its 60th anniversary by Ethan Gilsdorf.

5e Players Handbook Preview

Here is a preview of some of the art that will be in the 5th edition D&D Players Handbook.  It also includes the pages from that book that present the ‘Warlock’ class.

Overall, I think that the art is solid.  I love the scene of the wood elf forest city.  I dislike the pictures of the two wizards, both of whom are striking rather silly ‘action poses.’  The other pictures are fine, in my view, and have the virtue of portraying adventure scenes rather than adventurer poses.

On balance, based on what I’ve seen so far, I like the art for 5e a lot more than that of 3e (and, based on my limited exposure, 4e).  I never cared for the ‘dungeon punk’ look that was introduced with 3e, so I’m glad to see that it has been purged, for the most part, in the new edition.

The Warlock class looks interesting, but I’m puzzled as to why it is an ‘arcane’ spell casting class as opposed to a ‘divine’ class, given that it receives its powers via a ‘pact’ with a ‘higher-power.’  Nonetheless, the Warlock seems quite flavourful.

At some point (hopefully this summer) I’ll sit down and read through the Starter Set and the free Basic Rules in order to arrive at a judgement concerning 5e.  However, based on the snippets that I’ve read so far, I think that I like it much more than I ever did 3e (and 4e, of course, is simply beyond the Pale).

Kane and Crypts and Things

I’ve been reading the ‘Kane’ short story anthologies by Karl Edward Wagner over the past few weeks.  So far I’ve finished Death Angel’s Shadow and The Book of Kane, and presently am in the midst of Night Winds.  I eventually plan to read the Kane novels as well – Bloodstone, Dark Crusade, and Darkness Weaves – though I likely will take a break after I finish up Night Winds, and so probably will not complete the entire Kane series until sometime this autumn or winter.  Based on what I’ve read so far, however, I recommend these stories to any fan of ‘swords-and-sorcery’ fiction.

Wagner is a solid writer who describes his scenes in an economical but evocative manner.  The stories generally are engaging, and sometimes have genuinely surprising twists in them.  The world in which the stories take place is a classic swords and sorcery one.  There is magic in the world – indeed, Kane himself practices sorcery at times, such as in the story “Undertow” – yet it is generally subtle, dark, and eldritch.  

Kane himself is an unsympathetic yet strangely compelling character.  He does a lot of very evil and savage stuff, yet nonetheless comes across as intelligent and even charismatic.  Evil as Kane frequently is, his enemies, including putative ‘heroes’ like the band that hunts Kane in the story “Cold Light,” often are no better, and frequently quite a bit worse.  The world of Kane is a morally grey one, with the darker shades predominant.   

I had a hard time finding any maps of Kane’s world online.  The one below is the best one that I could find.  I also could not find much information on the world itself.  It seems to be inspired by Robert E. Howard’s Hyboria, insofar as it is a mythical ‘pre-history’ version of earth.  (Wagner himself was a great Howard fan, and helped publish three anthologies of the original, unmodified versions of the Conan stories.)  

The character of ‘Kane’ seems to be based loosely upon the Biblical ‘Cain,’ though with some noteworthy differences.  For instance, in “Misericord” Kane claims that Adam was his father and that Eve was his stepmother (thus implying that his actual mother was Lilith?).  Part of Wagner’s fictional history, I suspect, is the idea that later myths concerning Adam, Eve, Cain, and Abel were based roughly upon the ‘real’ Kane and his origins.

Anyhow, I’ve found myself thinking repeatedly, as I’ve been reading these stories, that the world of Kane would make a great setting for Crypts and Things (my favourite OSR ‘near-clone’ FRPG).

New York Times and Guardian articles on Dungeons and Dragons

Related to the release of the 5th edition of Dungeons and Dragons and the game’s 40th anniversary, there were two articles on D&D in major publications yesterday: one in the New York Times, and one in the Guardian.