At the Mutants of Madness

 I make no apologies for my love of post-apocalyptic roleplaying games. My first steady-playing of an RPG was not D&D, it was Gamma World. Yes, I played D&D first, but I played Gamma World (and Traveller, for that matter) much more often. I hosted the Glowburn podcast what seems like eons ago, and have written a few things for the Umerica setting for DCCRPG. 

So when Mutant Crawl Classics was released, of course I fell in love. I wrote up a couple of Patron descriptions when I finally gathered up the time to do so: The Mold Mother and Supreme Brainskull Commander (truth be told, I ran several adventures for my then-home group with Supreme Brainskull Commander minions as the baddies. I need to put that one on paper some day). But that wasn't enough.

So I wrote and playtested the heck out of an adventure that tries to answer the question: In the MCC Aerth setting, what lies beyond "The Great Radiation Barrier". And what exactly did that thing do, anyway?

I pictured the barrier as an aurora-like emanation that shimmered from the ground up into the upper atmosphere. One essentially has to go through to find out what's on the other side. Most sane people would not bother breaking through to see what's on the other side, but most adventurers are not sane people. Besides there was incentive: an ancient artifact of great significance, something that would go a long way to establishing some semblance of security and protection for those who possess it. 

Now, as you can probably guess by the title, I am fond of cosmic horror, particularly in roleplaying-games. I'm a Call of Cthulhu junkie, to be perfectly honest, and every convention I attend, I try to get in at least one game of CoC. But I didn't want to pastiche a Call of Cthulhu scenario for Mutant Crawl Classics, I wanted something that embraced both the post-apocalyptic setting and at least the trappings of the Cthulhu Mythos. So I wrote At the Mutants of Madness.

AtMoM is a very high-level MCC adventure. I tried playtesting at 5th level, and it was just plain too deadly. So I experimented with my playtesters and after populating a cemetary full of graves, I settled on 7th level as the recommended level. Now, I would encourage you to flout that recommendation, especially if you want to ensure that there is a TPK. You could even run it as a 0-level funnel, but it's not going to last very long. Ideally, the adventure would cap off a campaign or make for a series of high-level one-shots. There's no way to run the whole thing in one sitting, being a sprawling point-crawl with several encounters and a random encounter chart that I am quite proud of (because of its lethality). 

So if you have a hankering to know what lies beyond the great radiation barrier and love to die at the hands of terrors from beyond the stars, this is for you!

Just for giggles, here is one of the many really, really bad "maps" I drew while writing this thing up. The maps in the module are MUCH better!!!

I have to say here, too, that working with Space Penguin Ink to have this published was an absolute pleasure and, for me, at least, an awesome experience. Space Penguin Ink has an eclectic and excellent mix of RPGs, supplements, and soon, boardgames. It's a class operation, and you should be giving them your money. The rewards will be well worth it, trust me! Oh, and I have another thing on the docket with Space Penguin Ink that I can't wait to unleash on humanity!

You can buy AtMoM at Space Penguin Ink, or you can buy it at Goodman Games. Enjoy your radiation-saturated doom!

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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 Explosion of a Chandelier

 

The Explosion of a Chandelier by Damian Murphy
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Like any good sleight-of-hand, even the publisher name, "Occult Books," is a deception, at least in the popular conception of what "Occult" means. Here, I think it's wise to refer to the original meaning of the word: hidden from view. You won't find wild sabbats, goat sacrifice (virgin or otherwise), or sulfur and brimstone here. No, this occultation of of a more refined sort. Something far more interesting (and sinister in the trickiest of ways).

What we have here is an exploration of the imagination and the manifestation of the imagination into the "real" world. This world is filled with subterfuge and the already-mentioned slight-of-hand. It is labyrinth whose walls shift. A game where the rules change in unexpected, winsome ways. But it's a make-believe which breaches the wall to that-which-is-hidden. These games and labyrinths create thin cracks in the zones that contain realities.

You'll recall this from your childhood, the imaginative playfulness and discovery of places undiscovered by most of society, the unveiling of the "truth" behind individual identities, the understanding of the true mechanism of seemingly ordinary objects that are much more than they seem on the surface.

Some of us are lucky enough to have survived into adulthood with those same revelatory faculties intact. But we have to work at it. It's a gift, to be sure, but a gift that has to be wrested, nay, stolen from the universe.

The Explosion of a Chandelier is a carefully-encrypted guidebook on how one might access such gifts, if one is bold enough to sieze them! But, like Damian's other works of a similar ilk (The Exalted and the Abased, The Academy Outside of Ingolstadt, and Abyssinia all jump to mind), those who are not accustomed to seeking for hidden things, who have forgotten the very real power of imagination, or who lack the courage to sieze the scepter that cracks the barriers between realities . . . well, they simply do not, cannot, and will not Know. On the surface, they will read a story about young men living in Spain during the age of anarchic revolution, a story about hotels and keys and bombs and chandeliers.

But, trust me, there's much more in there, SO much more! Hidden between the words, behind the pages, and most importantly, inside. Look inside! Don't let your reading eyes deceive you. Or, actually, please do!

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On Poetic Imagination and Reverie

 

On Poetic Imagination and Reverie by Gaston Bachelard
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

How does such a slight book pack in so much insight? I think there's a corrollary here between On Poetic Imagination and Reverie and the works it uses for it's examples. Bachelard is careful and particular about using such examples, but is able to expand the readers understanding and appreciation with only a scant selection of representative samples. This fact mirrors his insight into the works themselves, works that don't speak to the reader, but speak with the reader, works that invite the reader between the letters and words immerse the reader in a hidden world that breathes behind the page.

For example, Bachelard cites Poe's "A Descent into the Maelstrom":

On a theme as slight as falling, Edgar Allan Poe succeeds in providing, by means of a few objective images, enough substance forthe fundamental dream to make the fall last. To understand Poe's imagination, it is necessary to live this assimilation of external images by the movement of inner falling, and to remember that this fall is already akin to fainting, akin to death. The reader can then feel such empathy that upon closing the book he still keeps the impression of not having come back up.

Conversely, he states:

The picturesque disperses the force of dreams. To be effective, a phantom should not have bright colors. A phantom lovingly described ceases to act as a phantom.

Which reflects one of the most common charges levelled against Lovecraft,/a>. With his overly-long descriptive passages, Lovecraft holds his terrors too dear, robbing them of both their cosmic aspect and their aspect of horror. This is why I find Aickman's horror so much superior. It is not what is said or how it is said, it is what is unsaid, but apparent to the reader who is paying close enough attention, that generates the real horror. It is the implication, the throbbing background "sound," rather than the brazen crash of trumpets that draws the reader in to be embraced by dread.

And this applies to other human emotions, joy, loss, love. It is more lasting to use an image to imply the unsaid, to, rather than impress the reader with words, to invite the reader through unspoken cues to become embraced by the implications that only images can foster. As the old Deep Purple song says "it's not the kill, it's the thrill of the chase".

The ideal image must seduce us through all our senses and draw us beyond the sense that is most clearly committed.

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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!