Gameholecon 2023 Rogues Gallery

 Here is the Rogues Gallery of people I played at Gameholecon 2023, in no particular order:

My first game of Vaesen, which I quickly fell in love with, I played Father Art Nilson, a preacher (of rather liberal values). He took a rather "universal" approach to theology.

Once in a while I steal a real name. I did so for my Blade Runner RPG character. This name is that of an old friend from high school many, many years ago. Hopefully, he won't sue me. First time playing Blade Runner, which is, like Vaesen, a Free League publishing game with very similar mechanics. Lots of ethical grey areas in this game, which I like. 

This is Hayu, a servant whose name actually comes from the waking world ("Hey, you!"). This was for the excellent Dreamland RPG, which is in development now. The setting is H.P. Lovecraft's Dreamlands and, particularly, author/artist Jason Thompson's visionary graphic novel The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath and Other Stories. The system is very unique, utilizing word-cards as prompts to creating sentences that mold actions or even the environment itself. Also a first-time play for me (noticing a theme here?). I loved, loved, loved this game. The system is very different from any other RPG system I've played, and lends itself to really digging in on the creative side. I will definitley be buying and running this one when it comes out of development. I was blown away by it!

My second game of Vaesen was actually an introductory adventure, but I don't mind that I played "out of order," so to speak. Here I played Soren Neilgaard, a social media content creater. The overall mood in this session was VERY different from that first game of Vaesen, which speaks to the versatility of the setting, I think. In terms of play style, the game reminded me just a titch of Trail of Cthulhu, though it's far more stripped down than TOC. Simpler, faster, slicker. I really do like Vaesen a lot. Can't wait to play it again! Maybe there will be a session at Garycon next spring?

The character for my first session (yeah, yeah, I know) of Never Going Home was named after an author I know. This session was set in Serbia pre-World War I, before the machinations of the Black Hand which led to the war (and the subsequent breach in reality posited by the setting of Never Going Home. This was a heist story set on a train, but with long-lasting consequences. The game uses a simple system of skills, with playing cards as a part of the resolution system. I like the way it played, but loved the scenario. It's one I could see playing in any number of other systems, but it hews thematically quite closely to the setting paradigm of the game itself. Stripped to the bones, though, this scenario could easily port to other systems. I'm going to keep it in my back pocket for off-books games at stupid o'clock at cons. 

Every con I attend, I try to get into one of the You Too Can Cthulhu sessions. This was a "black letter" event, which means it was extra special. I believe almost the entire YTCC crew was involved in one way or another in this massive game. I think we had something like 16 PCs in this game? Something ridiculous like that. We were all gangsters, more or less, from Chicago who were trying to expand our family "business" in and around Kansas City or Saint Louis (I forget which now). Of course, this is a Call of Cthulhu session, so it's not a question of if things will go horribly wrong, just a question of when and how. Well, we found out. Another fantastic production by You Too Can Cthulhu. Here's a photo of the crew. These guys are amazing. If you've never played in one of their games, you must. Just make sure you leave a slot open for me!

This was NOT my first game of Empire of the Petal Throne. But it was, by all means, the best one I've played in yet. It was an open exploration, by tube car, of the planet of Tekumel. It was great playing a higher-level EPT character after having trudged through some requisite lower-level adventures over the years to really familiarize myself with the setting. The setting is . . . challenging for people who have notions about what fantasy should be. Tekumel is absolutely unique and rich. One must give onself up to the cultural norms of the planet, and they can seem rather strange at first. But once one allows oneself to dive in, there are few settings that can match it in grandeur. If you haven't played EPT, but remember seeing those old adds in Dragon Magazine so many years ago, maybe it's time you gave it a try?

Now, while I've played many, many games of Classic Traveller, this was my first game of Mongoose Traveller. The systems are really quite similar. Yeah, Mongoose Traveller does flesh things out a bit more and maybe provides a little more breadth in character creation, but at it's heart, I didn't see much difference betweeen it and the Classic Traveller I know and love. So, while it was my "first" time, it really wasn't. Though it WAS my first time playing a Vargr. We all played Vargr, in fact, which was pretty cool. This was a very Indiana Jones-style adventure. Set in a pyramid, even. I liked that none of us were good combatants. We were just a bunch of scientists and archaeologist. My character was, in fact, an expert in paleolinguistics. If you're familiar with Traveller, you'll know that the combat system is downright deadly. So when you get a bunch of nerds trying to use weapons . . . well, hijinks ensue. But we, through a couple turns of raw good luck, prevailed, defeating our rivals and preserving cultural integrity and good inter-planetary relations the whole time. 

One last thing. I've mentioned before how much of an influence Marc Miller has had on my life. He put on a couple of seminar sessions, one of which I attended. He said to us there "when you have a moment, stop by my booth, I've got something for you". So I did. And he did. I won't say what it was that he had for me, but let's just say Marc is as generous as he is intelligent. Here is a picture of me with one of my childhood heroes, one who turned out to be every bit as good as I pictured in my eleven year old mind back in the early '80s.

As always, I'm looking forward to my next Con experience at Garycon in the spring. I hear it's sold out! I guess the 50th anniversary of D&D will do that to a convention named after Gary Gygax. See you there!

________________________

If you like my writing and want to help out, ko-fi me at https://ko-fi.com/forrestaguirre. Every little bit is seen and appreciated! Thank you!

A Man Worth Killing

 Oh, what an existentialist web Douglas Thompson has created here in another volume of Mount Abraxas press's series The Old Ways Remain. In this short decadent novella, one sees, as the opening remark claims, "a forensic record of an ordinary man's descent from staid normality towards a moral void". We begin, as one does in this sort of story, with a murder, then work our way back to the initiation of the abandonment of morality that eventually leads to the trap of an inescapable conscience wherein one cannot even confess the truth to find some absolution in guilt. It truly becomes a "moral void". Debauchery may be fun, and the discovery of guilt might offer a cathartic, if terrifying relief of tension from holding guilt within. But what if one is trapped in an in-between state, a static purgatory that promises neither punishment or salvation. This is the conondrum we are presented with here. It is every bit as horrible as it sounds: a certain kind of undeath of the moral being, forever hungry, never satisfied, but never released from bondage. There is no resting in peace for that sort of psychological noose. It ever tightens, but never strangles, Tantalus unleashed.

Did I mention a lost Scottish village reappearing in a time-slip that seems to mirror the moral entrapment of the narrator? There's that, too. It's a nice piece of psychogeography, a form that I don't see often enough in weird fiction. If you've ever wondered what it might be like to be trapped by the fey, this might be your tale. It's not all magic dust and laughter, though. Far from it. It's an uncomfortable slippage into some sort of liminal hell, if anything. Venture forth, if you dare.

________________________

If you like my writing and want to help out, ko-fi me at https://ko-fi.com/forrestaguirre. Every little bit is seen and appreciated! Thank you!

The Hellebore Guide to Occult Britain

 

The Hellebore Guide to Occult Britain by Maria J. Pérez Cuervo
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Next time I'm in the UK, this book is coming with. The unstoppable crew at Hellebore have created a mostly (though not completely) comprehensive guide to magical places in teh British Isles. Sections are divided geographically, so you can pull this Baedeker of the bizzare wherever the ley lines have taken you and have a Virgil to your Dante.

The book itself is a handy size and seems well-constructed, which you'll want if you're taking it with you. Most of the place entries have a postal code listed, so if you can interpret that (or ask a local postmaster), you'll be good to go. Entries range from megalithic tombs to occult bookstores to locales tied to famous practitioners of magic (though one should take any location related to Aleister Crowley as questionable because, you know, Crowley).

Now, I have two slight complaints. First, and this one is small . . . too small . . . the print is too small! This is the case especially in some longer, colored text blocks. Pardon the old guy with eyes that are going bad who are interested in this subject matter. There are thousands of us, I'm sure. Might want to consider bumping those fonts up a point and doing a slightly longer book.

Earlier, I said that this book was mostly comprehensive. Of course, not everything can be covered in an almanac such as this, but I noted two glaring ommissions of which I am personally very aware. I won't go over details in this review, but if you read my blog post on The Priory at RAF Chicksands and The Devils Quoits, you'll see exactly what I mean. The weird thing is that Clophill Church, which I mention in my blog post, and which is DIRECTLY tied to the Chicksands Priory (albeit by an undergroudn tunnel - I kid you not; I've been in that tunnel myself) is mentioned, while the priory is not. I don't get it. The very reason that people went to Clophill Church to put up satanic graffitti and sacrifice animals was because the church was physically tied to the alegedly haunted priory. So why no Chicksands Priory? It's not about accessibility. You can arrange a tour of the Priory with the non-profit that cares for it. I don't get the ommission.

I won't spend much time on the other one, The Devil's Quoits, in Oxfordshire. Sure, it's hard to find (my wife and I got lost looking for it at first), but it's a beautiful megalithic structure that has been researched rather well. maybe it's because the archaeological dig that revealed the full scale of the Quoits was only done in 1945, so it doesn't have the old magical associations that, say, the Rollright Stones do? Again, I don't fully understand.

Perhaps one can slip index cards in with one's own entries where the Hellebore guide is missing them?

Still, it is enough. Not complete, but enough. If you are lucky enough to live in the UK, you really should buy a copy. And if you're visiting and looking for the magic of the isles, you definitely need to take this with you to read on the plane flight over. It's a long flight, trust me. Be prepared.



View all my reviews

________________________

If you like my writing and want to help out, ko-fi me at https://ko-fi.com/forrestaguirre. Every little bit is seen and appreciated! Thank you!

The Castrato of St. Petersburg

 

The Castrato of St. Petersburg, by Stephan Clarke, is another in the Mount Abraxas series of booklets The Old Ways Remain. If the quality and tone of the other books in this series continue as they have with this book and The Tome of Ravass Bhavatan, we might have here a fine, fine series from Mount Abraxas, yet again. 

This novella traces the somewhat excrutiating, but at times triumphant history of Norcinelli, a castrato from rural Italy who finds his way, eventually, into the court of the Tsar. And by "triumphant," I mean triumphant in a banal way that celebrates small victories, or the avoidance of horrid tragedy. That's not to say that Norcinelli avoids all tragedy, least of all the circumstance which led to his "operation" at the very beginning. There is a modicum of hope in every forlorn circumstance, always driven by his delcaration "I will sing for the tsar". 

The writing in this volume is not flowery, and I think this might have something to do with being told in the first person, which lends itself to a more conversational tone. I've recently read some older murder mystery stories where the first person perspective it sold with purple-prose, and it comes off as disingenuous. Clarke's prose here is conversational, but at times "jerky" with little oddities. It doesn't happen often, but when it does, it's noticable. Or maybe I'm just overly sensitive given my recent readings. This doesn't take away from the overall telling of the story, it just introduces some "hiccups" here and there, nothing jarring enough to throw one out of the tale. 

The tone here is a strange one. Some might incorrectly consider this a work of "weird" fiction, but there are no supernatural elements and no breach of reality. Still, the nature of the story, that of a young child wiht very strong religious propensities who must negotiate the disappointments of learning that humans are humans, and sometimes despicably so, along with the rarefied environments in which these different experiences are set, make for a strange feel. The theme of loss and longing intensify this feeling, making for a contrast between ethereality and grit that gives a dream-like quality. 

________________________

If you like my writing and want to help out, ko-fi me at https://ko-fi.com/forrestaguirre. Every little bit is seen and appreciated! Thank you!

Decasia: The State of Decay. A film by Bill Morrison.

 

My first forays into "experimental" film were courtesy of the International Cinema at BYU when I was an undergrad. Though not as highly-experimental as Morrison's Decasia, my early exposure to such films as Svankmajer's Faust and Wender's Wings of Desire whetted my appetite for more. When a friend of mine, who shared a shift as a security worker at night on campus, invited me and a few others over to watch Lynch's Eraserhead, I was hooked. 

I stumbled on Morrison's work while searching for clips from my favorite directors, The Brothers Quay (if you don't know how much of a Quay fanboy I am, you obviously have not been reading my blog for long). Morrison's Light is Calling came up in my search, and my interest was piqued. I watched it and was entirely blown away. 

Now, while Light is Calling is done in a warm sepia-tone, Decasia is purely black-and-white, which suits my (very mild) hue blindness just fine. Like any experimental cinematic work, this one takes patience and, in places, pure endurance. I admit to nearly shutting the whole thing off during a sequence in which an anonymous diver is climbing a ladder up to a high diving board (at least that's what I think was happening). Everything is in fairly slow-motion. Not super slowmo, but slow nonetheless. Morrison is willing to make you work for your insights. 

What we're given is a series of black-and-white films damaged by time either by smeared development fluid or outright disintegration of the cellulose acetate medium. The images are often difficult to discern, sometimes inscrutable. At other times, there are moments of relative clarity - the many cuts of whirling dervishes that seem to thread the sparse motifs together are decidedly old and far from perfect, but they offer the eyes a bit of a rest from the more challenging segments. 

I find it interesting that so much of Decasia is set in, well, Asia, whether Asia Minor or the Far East. Though Morrison has said nothing of colonialism that I can find in his interviews, a fair amount of footage is taken from documentary film of the middle east and Japan, among other locales. One of the more haunting segments is that of a pair of Catholic nuns standing as sentinels as a group of young uniformed schoolgirls, likely Vietnamese, if I am correct in my surmisings, marching past into what I presume must be a Catholic mission-school, probably in French Indochina. In one particularly attention-grabbing moment, one of the girls looks back at the camera and we see her full face for the first time. There is a strong look of suspicion in her eyes. It's probably just childhood curiosity for seeing a film camera for the first time, but I like to think of her as telepathically saying "I will be freed from this. If not me, then my children, or my children's children. We won't tolerate this forever."

Other segments are mostly banal documentary pieces, with a few bits from dramatized silent movies scattered throughout. I didn't recognize any of them, but my silent movie mental catalog is quite minimal. When such dramatized performances were presented, there was, for me, a mixed tale of the wonder of acting with th tragedy that, while these images survive, the actors clearly did not. It didn't help that there were, in close proximity to these sections, film of underground miners' bodies being dragged out from mines. A strange contrast. 

The music for the film was originally the film for the music. The initial performance of Michael Gordon's composition was the occasion for which the film was initially created. The music came first, then the film came as a reaction to that music. It's obvious that Gordon and Morrison played off of each other, though, to produce the "final" version that appears in Decasia. Gordon's atonal, intentionally de-tuned avant-classical orchestral piece and Morrison's abstract, surreal imagery play well of of each other.

A PRI interview on the DVD provides some insight into both Morrison's motivations for creating the movie and Gordon's thought process behind the music. Though the interview claims that you can't have one without the other, I'm willing to accept that as a challenge and watch Decasia muted with, let's say SunnO))) playing as musical accompanyment. Actually, I can think of a number of bands whose work would compliment the visuals. The Kilimanjaro Darkjazz Ensemble jumps right out front. Much of Wagner Ӧdegard's work would work, as well.

Morrison claims that the work is both existential and life-affirming. There is no doubt about the former. The film throughout evokes an existential dread through a two-fold process of obscuring and revealing, forming a sort of pulsating rhythm between the eerie and the weird. The viewer often feels trapped between several worlds at once: The world from which they are viewing the movie, the world in which the film was initially captured, and the world that some of the captured film is trying to portray (this is particularly true of pieces that show actors from the 1920s or '30s portraying scenes in historical costume).  Decasia is not only a film, it is a place, its own strange world of mixed up timelines bubbling in and out of perception. Needless to say, it is a very strange place to inhabit, even if only momentarily, a discomfiting space that reminds one of one's mortality in the strongest of ways. 

On the flipside, there is a strange element of hope throughout, as well, that maybe something of us can survive that change called death and still affect the world. It's not an overtly spiritual plea by Morrison, but a little whisper of what might possibly be. Just maybe. Time will truly tell, right?

________________________

If you like my writing and want to help out, ko-fi me at https://ko-fi.com/forrestaguirre. Every little bit is seen and appreciated! Thank you!

The Tome of Ravass Bhavatan

Once again, Mount Abraxas press churns out an amazing set of booklets, this time in the series The Old Ways Remain. These are a similar format to The Doomed House of Abraxas series, one of which I penned myself. These are short, very-limited editions of weird/dark/doom-laden stories by various authors, printed on heavy cardstock and illustrated with some of the best dark artwork out there. This one is illustrated by Vhan.

The Tome of Ravass Bhavatan is an existentialist occult work by Christian Riley. Riley's work is new to me, and a pleasant surprise. I find his prose . . . let's call it "Indigo". It's not quite purple, but it's on the far end of the spectrum from bland. There's a reverent, telestial quality to the writing which takes a second to shift into, but once you're in, you're in. In tone, it's highly redolent of the French decadents. 

The story itself focuses on the discovery (and repeated rediscovery) of the titular Tome. It's a dark academic's dream, the find of a lifetime, and one that promises previously obfuscated secrets that have been hidden for centuries. The strange and twisted history of the book is presented when Harold, the protagonist, discovers a copy of the exceedingly rare work in a place he never expected to find it. As the story goes on, one wonders if he found the book, or the book found him? We see his immersion in the work and its workings in a clever literary trick that results in . . . well, a trick. The sort of trick that a god of mischief and chaos might play. It's a wonderful ending that subverts previous dominant narratives, leaving the reader a bit of a sting, but a sting worth taking.

 

________________________

If you like my writing and want to help out, ko-fi me at https://ko-fi.com/forrestaguirre. Every little bit is seen and appreciated! Thank you!

Swann's Way

 

Swann's Way by Marcel Proust
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

It is impossible to capture all the splendor of this book in a review. That's not an excuse, it's the simple truth. Swann's Way is one of the most beautiful, most human novels I've read, and it's only the first in the epic In Search of Lost Time. Will I read the rest? Unlikely. Ironically, there's just not enough time.

However, this was anything but a difficult read. It's nothing like Joyce or Beckett or Melville, for example. Yes, the sentences notoriously go on and on (in once case, I seem to remember one sentence going on for three pages straight, maybe more), but once the reader gives themself up to the rhythm of the novel, one becomes enfolded in it. It is an easy read, easy on the brain, easy on the soul.

The only way I can describe Proust's prose is to use the analogy of natural pearls on a string. Each is different from one another, each shines with the same lustre, and all together they compound delicately accrete into something even more beautiful as a whole. One has to read the whole work, studying each sentence on its own merits. I could provide inumerable quotes that illustrate the beauty of the prose, but then I would be quoting nearly the entire book. Suffice it to say that Proust out-Huysman's Huysman by turning the seemingly banal into a celestial scene without succumbing to the temptation to bejewel the prose with gaudy embellishments. Take, for example, part of the account of Odette sprucing up the room into which she had invited Swann:

But when her footman came into the room bringing, one after another, the innumberable lamps which (contained, mostly, in porcelain vases) burned singly or in pairs upon the different pieces of furniture as upon so many altars, rekindling in the twilight, already almost nocturnal, of this winter afternoon the glow of a sunset more lasting, more roseate, more human - filling, perhaps, with romantic wonder the thoughts of some solitary lover wandering in the street below and brought to a standstill before the mystery of the human presence which those lighted windows at once revealed and screened from sight - she had kept a sharp eye on the servant, to see that he set them down in their appointed places. She felt that if he were to put even one of them where it ought not to be the general effect of her drawing-room would be destroyed, and her portrait, which rested upon a sloping easel draped with plush, inadequately lit. And so she followed the man's clumsy movements with feverish impatience, scolding him severely when he passed too close to a pair of jardinieres, which she made a point of always cleaning herself for fear that they might be damaged, and went across to examine now to make sure he had not chipped them. She found something "quaint" in the shape of each of her Chinese ornaments, and also in her orchids, the cattleyas especially - these being, with chrysathemums, her favourite flowers, because they had the supreme merit of not looking like flowers, but of being made, apparently, of silk or satin. "This one looks just as though it had been cut out of the lining of my cloak," she said to Swann, pointing to an orchid, with a shade of respect in her voice for so "chic" a flower, for this elegant, unexpected sister whom nature had bestowed upon her, so far removed from her in the scale of existence, and yet so delicate, so refined, so much more worthy than many real women of admission to her drawing-room. As she drew his attention, now to the fiery-tongued dragons painted on a bowl or stitched on a screen, now to a fleshy cluster of orchids, now to a dromedary of inlaid silverwork with ruby eyes which kept company, upon her mantelpiece, with a toad carved in jade, she would pretend now to be shrinking from the ferocity of the monsters or laughing at their absurdity, now blushing at the indecency of the flowers, now carried away by an irresistible desire to run across and kiss the toad and dromedary, calling hem "darlings". And these affectations were in sharp contrast to the sincerity of some of her attitudes, notably her devotion to Our Lady of Laghet, who had once, when Odette was living at Nice, cured her of a mortal illness, and whose medal, in gold, she always carried on her person, attributing to it unlimited powers.

Analysis of this passage seems to me a petty blasphemy. This book is to be read. It is, more than any other book I can think of, a reader's book. I have absolutely no desire to dissect this book (I'll leave that to the professionals, such as Roger Shattuck). I enjoyed it, and I just want to leave it that way. And that might be just about the best compliment I can give a simply beautiful work of fiction. Maybe the simply beautiful work of fiction.






View all my reviews

____________

If you like my writing and want to help out, ko-fi me at https://ko-fi.com/forrestaguirre. Every little bit is seen and appreciated! Thank you!

The Ring of Truth

 Fiddler's Green Peculiar Parish Magazine has been producing a wonderfully elegant, downright enchanting series of zines, of which The Ring of Truth is the most recent. 

Yes, this "zine" is not your common photostatted punk zine. Far from it, in fact. This really is a piece of art - and it is beautifully illustrated by Alice Cao's fine linework. 

The text itself is composed of a wistful literary reminiscence, extremely well-written, about Marsh's first childhood brush with the magic world and his later (succesful) attempt to invoke a window to that world by means of a magic circle. Following this is a practical guide to creating a sacred space AKA a magic circle (which really need not be a physical space at all). A "Further Reading" section provides a brief, but focused bibliography on the subject matter at hand.

Saying much more than this would spoil your enjoyment of the book and some of the little discoveries to be made therein. The magic is there, but you need to find it yourself. I suggest drinking some Ginger Beer out of one of Trevor Foster's wonderful skull mugs as the perfect, almost magical, complement.

____________

If you like my writing and want to help out, ko-fi me at https://ko-fi.com/forrestaguirre. Every little bit is seen and appreciated! Thank you!

The Book of Antitheses

 

The Book of Antitheses by Jobe Bittman
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Massive trigger warning: If the practice of magic, extreme violence, and/or strong sexual themes offend you, skip this review and never, ever read this book. Now that that's out of the way . . .

Lamentations of the Flame Princess again presents one of the more obscene and transgressive roleplaying game works out there. Say what you will about LotFP, they have a brand identity, and they unapologitically stick with it. This is not a book for children or the easily offended - not. at. all. If you're looking Saturday morning cartoon Dungeons and Dragons, this ain't it. Now, I'm guessing that if you read this far, you are not easily offended. But you might be a child. After all, I started playing D&D when I was 9 years old . . . a long time ago. As a preteen and early teen, I was enamored of the game. And, yes, it did introduce me to some . . . alternative ways of thinking/viewing/believing. And, yes, the bare-chested illustrations of the harpy, sphinx, and others were *ahem* attractive to this young man and, I'm guessing, just about every other young man out there.

So, while the Satanic Panic was overblown, there were some elements of truth to it. The original D&D game was filled with Devils and Demons (sanitized into "Tanar'ri" and "Baatezu" in some later editions) and there were, occasionally, straight-up occult elements in the game (c.f. the booklet of monsters and magic items module S4: The Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth - which is, incidentally, my favorite module of all time).

In The Book of Antitheses, Jobe (yes, I know him - more on that later) fully embraces something that I've realized in my later years - the ritual nature of roleplaying games. Whether you believe in magic or not, you must admit that playing RPGs is highly ritualized. Gaming groups typically meet at a set time and place (even if said place is virtual), surround a table (again, sometimes virtual) and delve into a realm of imagination, fate, and, (dare I say it?) faith. We create alternate personas, much like an initiate into magic arts, we oftentimes concentrate to a state of near-meditation, we use dice as divinatory or soothsaying tools and bind our characters (a piece of ourselves?) to the results. Often, we laugh and joke, which seems to contradict my argument until one notes that magical practice, by and large, is ended by "banishing" the ritual space so that the things summoned there don't creep into everyday life. Magicians engage with the demons, get what they want (or not), and banish the entities at the end of the ritual.

A few years back, these commonalities struck me quite profoundly. If I recall correctly, this thundering revelation took place in 2019. I was so struck by the thought that I immediately contacted several people who were gamers and who had a deep understanding of magic and the occult and set up an improptu online meeting. Two of the people who came into the discussion (I think there were seven of us total?) were Jobe Bittman and the person who would later write the profoundly-insightful foreword to this book, JF Martel (who is the co-host of my favorite podcast, Weird Studies). In fact, I like to think that I facilitated Jobe getting in contact with JF and having him write the foreword. Then again, maybe I am deceived by some whimsical spirit.

I also sat at the gaming table with Jobe at Garycon one year and played through a game he ran. Well, partially, I had to leave about halfway through, unfortunately. He began the session by letting those at the table know that they would be participating in a ritual exercise and that any who wished to not participate should leave. He then rang a clarion, a singing bowl, and effectively invoked and opening to the session. We then played an RPG with Jobe randomly determining how encounters would go, not by rolling dice and consulting tables (the "normal" way one would), but by casting a number of small objects ("charms," if you will) and "reading" the results to determine what would happen during the encounter we were involved with by examining the relation of the objects (each of which represented different persons or elements) to (or against!) each other. These seemingly strange methodologies really helped immerse us into the game and the imaginal plane (though he would argue that this "imaginal" plane was an actual real place, though it is only visible in our minds). We felt that we were a part of something, much as one normally does while playing an RPG, but more intensely, in this case. We had more "buy in," all-in-all.

And this is one of the techniques that is outlined in The Book of Antitheses, a step-by-step guide to gaming-as-ritual. Jobe claims that the book is a real book in a real place as real as the book you hold in your hand. In fact, one of the adventure threads involves characters seeking and finding The Book of Antitheses, which is, in reality . . . well, The Book of Antitheses!

Several other techniques are outlined here, as well. The thrust of all of these is this: When running a roleplaying game, don't use pre-existing structure as a crutch. Toss aside those adventures that have a numbered encounter that shows exactly what is "in the room". Let fate decide for you! You'll never have to prep again, so long as you have a good grasp of setting, non-player character personalities and motivations, and "resonances".

This last piece is important. A resonance can be anything from a rumor to an event. The gamemaster should have several one- or two-sentence descriptions of possible or even probable encounters for a given area. This doesn't mean the old "wandering monster chart," though monsters can be a part of the lists. It is important that these lists are NOT numbered, like the wandering monster charts of yore. The gamemaster needs to decide which element presents itself to the party based on intuition and, potentially, casting the charms as outlined above. The presentation is much less proscriptive than say, rolling a "4" on the chart which gives "1d6 ogres," which sometimes gets ridiculous, even when such charts are tailored to the environment in which the encounter takes place. Resonances are much more loose and free than this, allowing the gamemaster to divine which of the potential events, rumors, interactions, etc., will happen at any given time. it's a much more nuanced approach than the old tables.

The last half of the book is composed of an "adventure," though I hesitate to use that term. There are several locations, several non-player characters with strong motivations, a cultural milieu with conflict brewing just under the surface (waiting to explode at any moment), and a couple of potential "problems" that the party of adventurers can try to resolve. There are multiple possibilities here that can only be explored at the table. No need to worry if your players have read the adventure ahead of time - it won't help. There are just too many variables and the stochasticity of throwing and interpreting the charms ensure that you will never run the same adventure twice, even if nothing has changed with the book itself.

There is also a section on monsters that give more insights into their motivations and ambitions, along with, yes, a stat block (LotFP stats).

I'll end on a side note. In my Dungeon Crawl Classics game this morning, one of the players' characters spun some crazy yarn (this happens every time we play) and one of the other players (but not his character, this was an "out of character" comment) said "I think you're just making crap up". To which the response was:

"Dude, it's ALL made up!"

et sic est


View all my reviews

____________

If you like my writing and want to help out, ko-fi me at https://ko-fi.com/forrestaguirre. Every little bit is seen and appreciated! Thank you!

Being and Time

 

Being and Time by Martin Heidegger
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"Did I learn?" This is the only possible question I can ask about my reading experience with Martin Heidegger's notoriously difficult tome Being and Time. I would be lying if I said I clearly understood more than 25% of this work. Warning: unless you are a trained philosopher or a genius autodidact, you will find within these pages a long stretch of imposter syndrome waiting for you. I cannot rightfully or accurately assess whether I "got" this book. Some of it, sure, but I don't know enough here to assess what I really, really know about Heidegger's philosophy.

But did I learn? Let's find out. Below, I've cut and pasted the notes I've taken along the way. Immediately following each self-quotation, I will assess whether, at the end of it all, I learned anything in relation to these initial impressions. Let's go:

Well, the foreword and translator's notes successfully put me to sleep. Hoping that the actual text is a little more engaging.

This did get better. As I crawled along and picked up an occasional idea here and there, along with bolstering my knowledge by watching very specific youtube videos on particularly difficult passages, I found myself more and more engaged because I understood more of the previous groundwork as I went along.

Heideggering is hard work. I'm glad I know some German or the footnotes here would be mostly nonsensical. Or at least misleading.

Yes, Heideggering is hard work. That did not change. Knowing German helped quite a bit, but sometimes my knowledge of German actually got in the way because of the way that Heidegger uses the German language. Some of his wordplay is incredibly subtle and I suspect that even native speakers with a high level of academic training need to use the footnotes as a crutch to help understand the precise way in which he uses specific words with specific nuances. The footnotes, along with having German "at hand," so to speak, were extremely helpful.

My brain hurts.

This was true throughout.

That Philosophy 101 course I had 27 years ago isn't helping me much here, for some reason. I want a refund on that portion of my tuition!

It actually came in handy later, when Hegel and Aquinas came up I had a comparative framework to diff off of Heideger's ideas, which gave me an unexpected and needed context. But I still want that refund!

I cheated and watched a youtube video or five to get some grounding. Glad I did that.

Essentially, Heidegger is rewriting Philosophy 101 as it relates to ontology.

I'm still glad I "cheated". That helped things immensely. And I STILL want that refund!

Hmm. About 10% of the way through the book and I understand about 25% of what I've read.

This proportion of understanding proved true from the beginning to the end. I understood things well about a quarter of the time. Truth be told, I *somewhat* understood other things maybe another 15-20% of the time. Not bad for an imposter.

Page 65 . . . and I'm just at the beginning of Part 1?

Yes, I was. But that preamble was necessary not to set the stage, but to strip the stage down to it's loose wooden planks and rebuild philosophy. Heidegger was a philosophical marine drill sergeant. He destroys you, then builds you up again.

We're going on a cruise in a couple of weeks. I strongly suspect this will NOT be a book I take with me. Sorry, Heide.

Well, that cruise didn't happen. My wife got a blood clot the week before we were supposed to leave, and with here then-recent cancer scare, we couldn't take a chance. Good thing, too, as we would have likely ended up in a hospital somewhere in Anchorage. We still plan on taking the cruise, but it's probably going to be a year or two. 2022 was pretty brutal.

"Linguistic gymnastics" is the phrase that comes to mind when trying to describe what my brain is doing now. And I've fallen off the balance beams more than once here.

See my comments about German above. Lots of linguistic gymnastics in this work.

I'm glad I don't *have* to read this. It's one thing to discipline myself to read something inscrutable; it's quite another to have it assigned to you.

In the end, I'm glad I read it. But I could easily see a huge number of philosophy majors going to the counselor's office to change their majors after this. Easily.

Every two pages I spend on Heidegger is a hard-won battle. Most of the time, I lose, but I'll hold onto my feeble victories and improve upon them. Slow and steady wins the race.

It wasn't *always* torture, just most of the time. Slow and steady did win the race, incidentally. Or at least I finished the marathon.

This text can feel so mechanical at times that one forgets it is about human beings. Then, occasionally, one slips past the strictness of the language and realizes that not only is Heidegger not philosophizing about an "ideal" human being, but that he is sympathetic to humans in their weaknesses, even when they don't reach their full potential.

This was a surprising revelation that became more and more clear the more I read. Heidegger's primary concern was the inner life of an individual human being, replete with its faults and foibles.

Any review I do for this book can only scratch the surface.

c.f., this pithy review.

Back to the philosophical salt mines . . .

Looking back on this phrase, it was definitely ill-advised and I didn't even think about the implications at that point, given Heidegger's overly-problematic political leanings. It was not intentional, but I suppose it might have been subconscious. My apologies for the "bad optics". I suppose I could redact this note altogether, but that wouldn't be intellectually honest.

I'm not sure if Being and Time is considered "analytical philosophy," or if I'm even using the right term, but this sort of Definitional work seems like definition for the sake of definition. It's academically interesting, but emotionally flat and intellectually tedious. But I will press on and finish. I'm learning things, but it's not particularly enjoyable.

Obviously, from my earlier comments, this feeling came and went. But when it came on, it came on strong. Reading more slowly helped me to cut through this academic wall and get to the actual "soul" behind it. I do believe the book has "soul," but it takes some digging to get to it.

The whole notion of death in this book is utterly fascinating. While acknowledging the cessation of being in this world, and thus no longer being a Dasein, Heidegger hints that there is a sort of existence of one, even as that one has ceased being in the worls as Dasein here. But the Being of that being is unknowable by Dasein.

This actually helped me connect with this work in a way I hadn't up to this point. This probably has to do with my admiration for Existential philosophy in general. The seeming paradoxical nature of Heidegger's statements in relation of Dasein to death actually tied things together quite nicely for me. Your mileage may vary.

Death enters the picture and suddenly all that came before in this tome makes much more sense. Existentialism instantiates clarity!

As I just said . . .

317 pages in, I feel like I'm beginning to grasp what Heidegger is on about. Call me ignorant. But I am starting to put two and two together.

Mmmmmaybe I was learning something?

There is something fundamental about the call of conscience, an irreducible something that is at the core of Dasein's Being. There is no good answer to "where does it come from?", it is intrinsic to Being. So far as I can tell, this is the closest Heidegger gets to some notion of "spirit," "soul," or "essence". But what do I know?

This, I think, is where Heiddeger's view of some sort of "soul" became more clear. I went back and scanned throughout the book, and one can find ghostly whispers, very faint, of this feeling, here and there throughout. Perhaps this is inevitable when one is talking about the inner life of a human?

There's something a bit Ayn-Randian about the concept of conscience here, but it seems less mercenary. Self-serving? Yes, more a focus on authenticity, to being true to one's self, than just snubbing every other human being around you without mercy for the sake of the argument.

Heidegger's ties to nazism are fairly clear, from what I understand. Though Ayn Rand wasn't a nazi, per se, her individualism-to-the-point-of-extreme-selfishness rings with some of the same echos, albeit on a personal, rather than national scale. I find Heidegger much more kind (if that's the right word) than Rand, but still adamant about the individual need to be oneself, despite what society as a whole thinks. Of course, if you get a whole bunch of people who think they are being individualistic, while they are merely all following one person's individualistic personality, well, you get facism.

I'd love to be able to state that I understood thus and such percentage of this book. But that would imply a continuous "block" of understanding, and that's just not true. It's more like a journey where certain points were more lucid and memorable than others, like pearls unevenly distributed along a string.

This notion also held through, especially in hindsight. And this is the most corect summation of my reading experience with Being and Time. Will I read it again in full? Probably not. But I will dip into sections from time to time in order to both build my understanding of this work and to provide context when other philosophers refer to Heidegger.

So I feel that I did learn from the book. And i will keep on learning. Some of the ideas herein and some of the structures have provided glimpses for me into the workings of philosophy, even if uneven and obfuscated by my own ignorange. Gradually, though, I'm hoping the light seeps in and grows and I can use this as a springboard into other, perhaps equally difficult, works. My intellectual muscles have been strengthened, though I have yet to understand how to integrate the whole body of work into my philosophical routine. That, I think, is a lifelong pursuit.






View all my reviews

____________

If you like my writing and want to help out, ko-fi me at https://ko-fi.com/forrestaguirre. Every little bit is seen and appreciated! Thank you!

The Veneration at Polwheveral Manor

 The Veneration at Polwheveral Manor by Benjamin Tweddell

For the uninitiated, Mount Abraxas produces some of the most beautiful books out there, featiring dark, "weird" fiction in very limited editions unlike anything you will find anywhere else. I've had a few of my novellas published by Mount Abraxas and I am continually amazed by the quality of physical artifacts that they produce. Getting a new Mount Abraxas title never gets old. 

The auctoral lineup for Mount Abraxas titles is one of the best-kept secrets in the weird fiction world. One will frequently find books featuring the work of some of my favorite contemporary authors, including Damian Murphy, Mark Valentine, John Howard, and Adam S. Cantwell. They are always beautiful books, exquisitely written, with strange twists and turns of an almost reverential quality. The Veneration at Polwheveral Manor holds this standard high. 

The story takes place sometime in the mid-20th Century and considers the retreat of Jacob Thurman, an ex-military medical man who is stricken with bouts of blindness, into a dreary cabin away from civilization. Here Jacob hopes to retreat from society, dreading the inevitable next fearful attack of blindness and, eventually, the permanent loss of vision. Here he discovers Polywheveral Manor, an old manor house whose caretaker, Julius De Monte, is a scion in a long line of guardians of a holy (or unholy?) relic: the remains of the Blind Seer, Saint Eusebius. De Monte, it is rumored, was once blind, but now cured, though doctors have no explanation for how the cure took place. 

Going into more detail than this will spoil the story, so I shall forbear. 

The atmosphere and mood of the piece is a throbbingly dark, overhanging cloud until the revelatory end. I'll be honest that I found some of the emotional turns just a touch disingenuous, but this is only because we are given such a short time to know, to really know, the main characters. The characterization was not bad, not by any means. On the contrary, it was quite good, yet seemed a bit sudden at times. This is my only complaint about the book, and it is only slight. The work is brooding, which one might expect, given the subject matter, and one can find themselves easily immersed in the depths, particularly with Jacob's plight and the grim prospects for his future. If you appreciate a frisson that can border on claustrophobic, you will appreciate this. 

Tweddell's style throughout is, as usual with his works, exquisite. His delivery is smooth, transparent when it needs to be, and drawing attention to itself when it needs to do so. The cover art, by Mysterious Four, adds to the mystery by evoking, quite intentionally, I believe, the cover of the first Black Sabbath album. "The Wizard," indeed!

____________

If you like my writing and want to help out, ko-fi me at https://ko-fi.com/forrestaguirre. Every little bit is seen and appreciated! Thank you!

The Science Fiction in Traveller

The Science Fiction in Traveller by Shannon Appelcline
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I've spared no praise regarding what is one of my favorite roleplaying game systems, even claiming that it is The Simplest RPG System Out of this World, and by "Simple," I really mean versatile. But this review isn't about the game itself, it's about the book The Science Fiction in Traveller: a book about books about the game which is contained in books. Let's go down the rabbit hole.

The title might as well have been "The Traveller in Science Fiction". While the first section reviews books that Marc Miller claimed were inspirational to him (some of which I also thought were good, some not so good), this section is actually quite short. This isn't Appendix N, by any means, and I was honestly surprised by the scantiness here. But Appelcline is careful not to impose his own thoughts of what might have influenced Miller. Rather, he defers to Miller's own claims on the subject. As a strict exercise, I see why Appelcline did what he did, but I would like to have seen more of his insights into what might have influenced traveller. I think there's a lot more that can be seen between the lines of the published game material itself.

The vast majority of the book is taken by reviews of books and stories either influenced by Traveller (Jefferson P. Swycaffer's Condordat series, derived from Swycaffer's Traveller campaign, has an entire section dedicated to it) or written for the actual Traveller universe. Or universes, if I'm being proper, as the fiction reviewed here covers the breadth of all eras of Traveller (Classic Traveller, Megatraveller, The New Era, T4). Appelcline rates all of the works here by their literary merit and their applicability to the Traveller game (whether in terms of direct gameability or just inspiration/atmosphere). I've learned that there is a lot of really bad fiction associated with Traveller, most especially the "gaming fiction" that seems to compose the majority of the work. There are also a few titles that I will likely pursue for a read at some future date.

I wouldn't call The Science Fiction in Traveller "essential" reading for players or referees of Traveller. But sifting through the titles and using Appelcline's ratings as a guide is . . . an okay idea. I hestitate because, at times, I feel he contradicts himself. The ratings, as with any person rating books (myself included) are subjective and inconsistent with one another. I also noted several editing errors throughout the book, which gives me pause because I have copyedited several books and am particularly bothered by lazy editing, which is evident here. So don't take the ratings as gospel-truth. Your opinions may vary wildly from Appelcline's, but I feel this is a good starting point for your explorations into science fictional work associated with the game.

View all my reviews

____________

If you like my writing and want to help out, ko-fi me at https://ko-fi.com/forrestaguirre. Every little bit is seen and appreciated! Thank you!

The Impersonal Adventure

 

The Impersonal Adventure by Marcel Béalu
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

First off, a huge thank you to Goodreads friend Nancy Oakes for gifting me a copy of the book. It was an incredibly kind gesture. Please go take a look at her blog, Reading Avidly!

Wakefield Press continues to do the (insert your favorite deity here)'s work, especially with their sub-series "The School of the Strange," a series of possibly forgotten novellas and collections by some of the 20th-Century's most under-rated and lesser known European writers in translation. Through the books I've read in this series (Malpertuis, Waystations of the Deep Night, and now this) and several other gems from other publishers, I've developed a strong taste for continental European works in translation. I suppose having spent half my childhood in Europe has something to do with it, but I've become enamored of finding and exploring these works. Since my German and Latin are sub-par, and since there are so many languages I don't have time to learn, I really appreciate what Wakefield (and others) has done here. They've presented an excellent primer for works of "The Weird".

Marcel Beaulu's The Impersonal Adventure continues this trend. The title, as one might guess, is tongue-in-cheek, with several meanings, at least a couple of them laced with irony. The situations that the main character, Fidibus, finds himself in speak to the crumbling of individualism, the loss of "me" in what I will call crowded situations. Simultaneously, Fidibus discovers that his singular importance has been hidden even from himself by the overwhelming tyranny of the majority in which he finds himself. And what if the majority imposing such tyrrany is altogether mad? What if it is so mad that you are unsure of your own sanity? And when one comes to their senses, what happens when the fact that everything making sense doesn't make sense anymore? There's a powerful sense of surreality throughout, which the appended analysis of the novella interprets in Freudian terms (while disavowing a proprietary interpretation - it is pointed out that this is only one way in which the text may be interpreted and acknowledges that this is probably the wrong way to approach the book anyway). Even this last essay at the end of the book adds a further element of ambiguity.

What is not ambiguous about the work is the sheer atmosphere presented here. In my notes, I characterized it as Alfred Hitchcock meets David Lynch, and as I continued reading the book, this feeling never diminished. I felt as if I was immersed in a world created by these two, but in an admittedly anachronistic sense. If you're a fan of Vertigo and Twin Peaks, for example, I think you'll like this book!

This novel becomes more and more claustrophobic, in a social sense, as it goes along. Questions of personal identity vis-à-vis other's expectations and the expectations of society at large are at the forefront. In sum, this might be the greatest gaslighting story ever told, but its surreal tone and bizarre conclusion make it much more than that.

View all my reviews

_____________________

If you like my writing and want to help out, ko-fi me at https://ko-fi.com/forrestaguirre. Every little bit is seen and appreciated! Thank you!