Call of Cthulhu: The Cannibal Baby Factory

Advanced studies at the Miskatonic University…

This being a report on a Call of Cthulhu session I played in on 2nd March, in the style of the times.

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In the decade since our return from the war, Mr. Ambrose and I have had our difficulties, but life had settled into a pleasant flow here in New Orleans, until we were thrown into the strange affair of the cannibal baby factory, and our eyes began to open to the dark secrets lurking beneath the veneer of American life.

Our story began one lazy Sunday afternoon, as we sat on the balcony of the pleasant New Orleans home we had been sharing this past year. Bourbons and cigarillos in hand, we had just swung into reminiscence about the hard times that beset us after our return from the trenches – hard times that were a far cry from our recent good fortune. Just a year earlier I had finally been able to open my own medical practice just off of Canal Street, and though business was still slow, for the first time in years it appeared that I had a future. Of course matters were still more complex for Mr. Ambrose, who had shared my good fortune during the war and had witnessed the full horrors of trench warfare as a participant, rather than a sawbones, and who was having trouble settling into a steady civilian life even now. Nonetheless, things were looking up on that peaceful Sunday afternoon as we sat on our verandah, lazily discussing troubles that once held our lives in such a pinch, but now seemed just vaguely amusing from the perspective of a little distance, and a little whisky. Oh, to think now that we could have been so pained by the troubles of the mortal flesh – as if such concerns as addiction, poverty and strife could hold any real terror, when compared to what we were about to discover in our neighbour’s basement …

For it was at that moment, as we embarked upon our second glasses of bourbon, that our neighbour came home. Our neighbour Mr. Corbett – good, upstanding citizen, semi-retired from his shipping business, who still attended his warehouse three days a week, whiled away most middays at a well-respected gentleman’s club in the centre of town, and commuted regularly to New York – New York! – in pursuit of his extensive business interests. A man of such wealth and respectability that he owned his own Model T Ford, and a house across the way from our somewhat ramshackle bachelor’s pad, where he enjoyed extensive grounds and even a separate garage for his car.  There he was now, as the Bourbon warmed my palate, struggling up the pathway to his front door with two packages in his arms – one round like a bowling ball, the other roughly the length of a folded billiard cue, both wrapped in butcher’s paper. He seemed to struggle with them, and as he attempted to open his front door he dropped one on the porch. Then, the strangest thing: he looked all about him most furtively, as if caught in the act of smuggling something illegal through his own front door, snatched up the parcel as if it were contraband of some kind, and slipped inside his house most surrepititously.

Perhaps his act would have been dismissed as merely a whiskey-induced vision, and forgotten as a lazy Sunday afternoon’s fancy, were it not for the strange events that followed. When we were perhaps some distance into our third or fourth slugs of that fine Bourbon, lights came on in Mr. Corbett’s basement.  We would not even have noted this, but that the light we could see through his basement window grew brighter and brighter, till it was fit to dazzle us; and then, with a distinct popping sound as of electrical shorting, suddenly went dark. Upon first seeing that light, I had remarked to Mr. Ambrose that perhaps Mr. Corbett were in possession of a subterranean billiards room; however, that bright light spoke more of a workshop or laboratory.

This, too, would have passed unremarked, but for the later events of the evening. I had just laid myself down to sleep, having finished another chapter of Fishbein’s New Medical Follies (that pertaining to Eclecticism, I believe) when I was struck by the fancy that I could hear a low moaning, crying sound coming from across the road. I initially discounted it as some old tinnitus, but in truth that tinnitus was only ever psychosomatic and is long cured; and certainly though he bears many ills from the war, Mr. Ambrose has no hearing difficulties, and he had not only heard it but was up and about, trying to fathom it. I joined him and we returned to the verandah, there to listen more closely. It was a strange sound, in some regards like a baby’s crying, but in others like that of an animal or some swamp beast; a kind of gurgling, unpleasant choking sound, interspersed with sloppy gusts of breath and low wails. It was obviously muffled from within Mr. Corbett’s basement and insufficient to wake the neighbours, but it set me to shivering and nervousness such as I have not experienced for years, and perhaps Mr. Ambrose too. For it resembled a sound we had not heard in 10 years, and which the last time we heard it we discounted as merely the horrific vapours of wartime: sometimes, lying in the trenches at night after one of those reckless charges that left so many dead on the battlefield, after the last cries of the dying had subsided, we would hear that same sound, as of some wild beast that prowled the no-man’s land and perhaps feasted on the dead and dying. And once, approaching the bins behind the field hospital where we would dump amputated limbs, I also thought I caught such a sound, though I never found its source. Both Mr. Ambrose and myself dismissed those mysterious and ugly tones at the time as mere trench-madness; yet here it was, clearly emanating from our ageing neighbours basement.

We must, perforce, investigate. Dressing hastily, we marched across the road to Mr. Corbett’s front door. After a brief listen to confirm it was indeed his basement from which the wails and slurps arose, we knocked upon his door. After a considerable delay he answered, wearing that same furtive expression as crossed his face during the incident of the dropped package. I proceeded to make a noise complaint, and to ask him to still “whatever wild animal he was keeping in his basement.” He looked most alarmed at our having caught his game, and immediately tried to mollify us, also promising to still the beast at once. By now my curiosity was piqued, and placing a foot surreptitiously in the door to stop its closing, I offered to accompany him down to his beast, observing that he was old and perhaps not well, and might prefer to be accompanied by two men in the prime of life, lest there be some accident? He declined firmly, and begged of us to wait outside his door – all the while pushing the door against my foot as if to close me out, the scoundrel! I assured him we would wait, and that it were better he left the door open lest there be trouble. Being unable to close the door against me, he finally agreed, and off he went to still his beast. Listening at the door and window, we could faintly hear him talking to the mewling animal, saying to it “hush now!” and “be still, it’s okay!” and other phrases as if he were speaking to a baby, rather than a beast! Whatever he kept down there went silent, and he soon returned, looking even more furtive, and bid us please be gone. After we left him, assuring him we would assist him with his beast were he to need us, we heard the sound of several locks being turned in his front door. Why such security, in peaceful New Orleans?

The next morning we determined to break into his house and see what manner of beast he kept. We convinced ourselves that we did so only out of civic duty, but I think we both felt something was wrong, and needs must assure ourselves that some primeval fear waking in us were unjustified. Oh, had we only had the lack of imagination necessary to assure ourselves it were but a wild beast, and to return to our normal daily routine, we would never be troubled by those horrors such as subsequently have haunted us daily.

While I did my morning at the surgery Mr. Ambrose sought out and purchased the services of a Mr. Boleyn, a feckless and worthless man who spent some time in the trenches with us, and proved himself good for little but causing trouble. One line of trouble he was very good at was breaking into our Colonel’s whiskey safe, and it was the employ of these skills that we engaged for $15 and the promise of a bottle of good tequila. We met him on Mr. Corbett’s verandah at midday, and once he had us through that multi-locked door we bid him wait in the hallway, both to watch the door and to assist us were we to run into further barriers. We then proceeded into Mr. Corbett’s basement, me carrying that bottle of tequila as insurance against Mr. Boleyn’s services and Mr. Ambrose carrying his service revolver.

The basement was surprisingly spacious, consisting of a hallway with two doors on each side, all closed. We followed the traditional process for room clearing that we learnt in darker times, moving anti-clockwise down the hall, and so opened the first door on our right, entering the strangest room we have ever been in, and the first room to ever test our sanity. Before us lay an ordinary nursery, in which were a normal cupboard, a cot, a rocking horse, and over the cot a mobile of little winged angels. From within the cot came the sound of a baby sleeping gently, and the entire room was rich with the smell of formaldehyde. One door led out of the room, though we did not immediately notice it. We approached the cot to view Mr. Corbett’s basement-dwelling baby, thinking perhaps here was the source of last night’s sounds, and before we had time to prepare ourselves we found ourselves facing the most terrible of sights.

The cot did indeed hold a baby, but it was a monstrous construction, a baby with six arms, and all the parts of its body stitched together from what were obviously the discarded remains of other bodies. The arms were of mismatched sizes and colours, unmatched either with his legs; I say that it was a “he,” but that part most necessary to designate gender was not attached; and I swear his ears must have been procured from a girl, though I had no way to prove it. This monstrous frankenstein baby was also the source of that formaldehyde smell – for the body parts from which it had been made were obviously once pickled.

Both Mr. Ambrose and I would have loved to have dismissed this beast as some kind of grotesque doll, constructed for god knows what reason by Mr. Corbett. We knew he had lost his own son and wife, so perchance he was in the midst of some mad delirium, constructing a family life for himself out of the dregs of others; but at this point something so alarming, so horrific, happened that we would never again be able to look upon the macabre and seek easy or dismissive answers for it in the pscyhology of others. For as we stood looking into the cot, the dead eyes opened – and the baby started to scream. The eyes were the most chilling of all for me, because they had obviously been procured from different people. One was blue and slightly rheumy with early cataracts, as if snatched from a middle-aged diabetic; the other was, I am sure, taken from an Oriental of some kind, dark brown and almond shaped and much younger. As if the horror of this were not enough, though clearly the baby could see us and was responding to our presence, those eyes retained the glassy stare of the dead, a look we had both seen many times – but never thought to see mobile and directed at us!!!

We stepped back from the cot in disgust, and it was then that the baby sprang from the cot, hitting me in the face and proceeding to grab on to me with all six arms, bearing down on me with superhuman strength as it chewed at my face. The pain was abominable, as was the stench of mild rot and formaldehyde given off by this grotesque beast. I fear we both panicked, for I have a memory of punching myself in the face and screaming at Mr. Ambrose to get it off me! But after some moments we managed to drag it from my face, and Mr. Ambrose was able to place the upturned cot over it, then putting the rocking horse onto the cot to ensure its immobility. We then squatted before the cot and looked at this beastly thing, as it stuck its fat little mismatched arms through the bars of the cot and hissed and spat at us. We looked into its dead eyes for just a few more seconds before, turning my back on it, I said to my colleague, “Mr. Ambrose, if you please…?” Understanding my intent immediately, he shot that abomination in the head, right between the eyes, and it fell bloodlessly to the ground, dead at last. Shaking and disturbed, we retreated from that room and closed the door fast, leaning against the wall in horror and disbelief. What had we witnessed in there? How could such a golem be made real? Our world had begun to turn …

Our interest, though, had begun to rise. We must find what horrid scheme Mr. Corbett was engaged in, we must end it, and we must confront him and, if necessary, end him too. We would explore the rest of the basement.

The next room proved to be a kind of study. Its walls were lined with bookshelves, and there was a desk with a journal upon it, and next to it a strange, irredescent metal box. The box held a strange allure for me, and without much thought I put it in my jacket pocket. The journal I read, and it told us what we needed to know: Mr. Corbett was engaged in some strange ritual of reanimation, which he believed connected to some ancient Indian god called Ramasekval, and he was obtaining body parts from a deluded religious nutcase called Tomas Zewski, clearly some communist Jewish Pole, who worked at the local hospital. Mr. Corbett was plying Zewski with drugs, and in exchange convincing him that he served some dark lord, and that this lord’s purpose was served by cannibalizing bodies at the hospital for body parts to be sent to Corbett. Such a repulsive scheme as I had never heard of before! Though I spent two years sawing off legs and arms in the trenches of the bloodiest war the world has ever seen, believing myself to be as close to hell as it is possible for living men to go, I now realize that I had only just begun to splash in the shallows of human depravity – and that beyond what I already knew and believed so foul, was an ocean of depravity so deep no one could ever know what horrors lay at its depths. I fear now I am beginning to see just how dark and evil a man’s soul can be, and it unnerves me.

The next room in the basement was confusingly normal: a laundry, full of drying baby clothes. We investigated, but found nothing of interest. At the far end of this room was a door, which we passed through into a machine room, stacked full of parts that had been stripped from various machines. In the corner was a massive generator, and many cans of petrol, that must clearly be used to power whatever light we had seen the night before. We left this room and returned to the hallway. There was one final room off the hallway that we had not looked into, and this we now entered, to find a small space cramped and full of jars and bottles. Many were empty, but some contained pickled body parts – heads, arms, legs. There was a strange picture on the wall at the end of the room, somewhat akin to Michelangelo’s man, but in an Indian style with many more arms and legs. We came close to this picture to investigate it, but it had a strange, unnatural aura that caused it to seem larger, as if it filled the room; strange sounds assailed our ears, and it were as if the painting had been painted on a canvas that was more complex and mathematical than real; only some part of it, wrongly folded, protruded into our own time and space, and looking upon it gave us a twisted and sick hint at those other places where its full form was stretched out. These bizarre contortions of reality sickened and terrified us, and for some minutes I passed out. I must confess that I soiled myself in my terror, and Mr. Ambrose had to drag me, twitching and frothing, from the room. When I came to he was cleaning me up in the laundry room. He had taken off my soiled jacket and trousers, and bid me wear replacements from amongst the stacked laundry of the room. I did, and did not notice at the time that in taking off my jacket he had also stolen from me that lustrous silver box.

So, we had found all but the room in which Mr. Corbett made his baby, and we knew this must be in the room beyond the macabre nursery we had first entered. We needed to return to it, but before we did, I had an idea. I poured the tequila away, and returning to the machine room filled it with petrol. I then stuffed it with a rag from the laundry, also well-soaked in petrol, and thus made a makeshift firebomb. Now we were ready for trouble. We passed back through the nursery, trying not to look at that horrid infant, and through the other door in that room. This took us, we were not surprised to find, into a dissection room filled with the equipment required to build a horrific golem of flesh. We searched it thoroughly but found nothing more to enlighten us. We did, however, find a trapdoor leading deeper into the basement, and were just beginning to look down into it, contemplating further exploration, when behind us we heard the sound of pattering feet, a grinding sound, and a crash. Dashing back into the nursery, we saw the cot had been overturned and the baby’s body was missing! It had somehow survived Mr. Ambrose’s perfect shot, and was now out somewhere in the basement.

We passed carefully out of the nursery and into the hallway, and yet still we could hear the sound of that baby’s feet, pattering around in the basement. Fearing it behind us, and wanting to calm our nerves, we ducked back into the room full of pickled body parts and slammed the door shut. I stood near the door, and Mr. Ambrose returned to look at the picture. As he did so, he suddenly disappeared! One moment he was there, and then he was gone! I was left alone in the room, with nothing but that maddening patter of baby feet, and the body parts. Somewhere behind me, an empty jar fell off of a shelf and smashed. I confess I panicked: I lit my petrol bomb, through it amongst the jars, and ran for the door. The bomb exploded, and up went the formaldehyde, creating in moments a conflagration I was sure would take that damned baby, and I dashed out of the room. Moments later though, leaning in the hallway, I heard Mr. Ambrose crying for help from inside! He had somehow reappeared in that inferno! I thew open the door, dragged him out, and slammed it shut again, then dragged him to the laundry to tend his wounds. He was badly burnt, though not in a life threatening way.

We now, however, had no time. The basement was beginning to burn, and upstairs we heard Mr. Corbett returning. We dashed up the stairs to find him standing ready to confront us, and outside a crowd gathering as the fire began to consume the house. Having no time to spare, I punched Mr. Corbett in the face, and bid Mr. Ambrose drag him outside. I dashed upstairs to his room, grabbed the only useful thing I could find – a pile of letters on his desk – and dashed out after Mr. Ambrose. Putting the doubts of the gathered crowd to rest with my doctor’s manner, we dragged Mr. Corbett’s limp body to my house to “tend” to him.

Once the crowd and the police were gone, and Mr. Corbett’s once-proud home nothing but smouldering ruin, we woke him and began to demand answers. He denied any knowledge of the doings in the basement, and professed to a singular terror at what we told him. We believed him innocent of the charges laid, though we could not think how such could be, and decided instead to investigate Mr. Zewski. It came as no surprise to me than elderly, respectable gentleman would not be the one most to blame for such evil deeds, when a Polish communist were also in the frame. It was time to visit with him, and to have words.

What horrors do they seek beneath these peaceful avenues?

Our pursuit of Mr. Zewski came to nothing. He tried to escape us in a car, and we were forced to commandeer an ambulance, eventually driving him off the road and nearly killing him. Under duress he revealed himself to be exactly the dupe Mr. Corbett’s journal described him as; less a communist mastermind and more a foolish drug addict who believed himself a satanist, though he was a member of no covern. I patched him up as best I could and we drove him back to the hospital in the same ambulance. At the hospital I procured a few harmless injectable placebos such as we occasionally use on the worst of psychosomatics, and we returned to our house. I was now convinced that Mr. Corbett knew more than he was admitting to, and enacted a fiendish plan to get the truth. I injected him with one placebo and told him that it was a poison, and the only antidote was in my possession. Showing him another vial of a harmless placebo, I placed a bell in his bound hand, and told him he had three hours to tell us everything. Before we had even left the room, he was ringing that bell madly, desperate to tell us all. Yet still, when we interrogated him, he denied all knowledge of the doings in his basement. Exasperated, we left him to his imagined death, and decided there was only one thing left to do: before the police dug deep and discovered the body parts from the ruins of his house, we needed to enter that trapdoor.

We wasted no time, and kitting ourselves up with shotgun, pistol, rope and flashlight, we returned to Mr. Corbett’s ruined house. We re-entered the basement and, after digging away ash and rubble, opened the trapdoor. I went first while Mr. Ambrose covered me, and then he followed. We found ourselves in a narrow tunnel, that curved away and out of sight. Most perplexed, we followed it for some minutes. It descended a little and straightened, and we followed it for a few more minutes before encountering the most perplexing and disturbing of sights. Ahead of us the tunnel ended in a blank wall. In front of the wall were some dozens of the same homunculi we had seen in Mr. Corbett’s house, all constructed from discarded body parts, all of different sizes, though all vaguely human. They were digging frantically at the tunnel end, extending it through the earth, and as they dug they hurled the soil behind him. There, blocking a part of the tunnel, was a terrible ugly slug-like thing, larger than a man, that oozed along behind the monsters, eating the soil they threw away with a horrid slurping sound.

The creatures had not seen us, so busy were they at their digging, and we were in no way well-enough armed to best them. We were also deeply, profoundly disturbed by what we saw. We backed slowly away and then fled in terror back down the tunnel, reemerging in the basement as fast as we could. We slammed that trapdoor shut and ran back up into the light, shaking in terror. What were we to do?

Mr. Ambrose became then the most practical of men. He directed me to find a map and a hose. While I did so, he turned on the engine of Mr. Corbett’s car. The hose we snaked from the car’s exhaust pipe down to the trapdoor, where we fed it into that tunnel. We then sealed the trapdoor and returned to the surface to consult the map. Our guess was that those horrid cannibal babies were digging straight towards the centre of town, to an old statue that stood there. Perhaps there was something buried beneath that statue, something they sought, that we could dig up first?

So I must end this diary entry, for we rest now before approaching the resolution of these mysteries. Why did Mr. Ambrose disappear before that warped and mysterious picture, and what was its purpose? Was his strange disappearance linked to the lustrous silver box? How can Mr. Corbett not know what goes on beneath his own feet? And why does his legion of homunculi dig towards that statue? By what fiendish power does he animate those corpses? What secrets have we uncovered in New Orleans? I fear we are on the cusp of a great and terrible discovery, and that our lives will never be the same again …

 

Adventures in Japanese House-Moving

Where’s my Chai Latte!!!?

Today was moving day – up at 6am, finish packing, removalists come at 8am, cross the suburb of Kichijoji to our new river-side apartment in nearby Mure, then back to the house to clean, deliver a present to our previous landlord and done and dusted by midday. That was the plan. Things went a little wrong, though, from about 9:30, and didn’t quite right themselves until our previous landlord drove us to our new house at 2pm. Our previous landlord is a sweet 70 year old ojiisan (Grandpa) who kicked us out because his 40 year old house is crumbling down around us. To make up for kicking us out he gave us his fridge, washing machine, bedding, microwave oven, television and rice cooker. He also offered to look after our rubbish (a perennial and serious problem when moving house in Japan). In exchange we gave him a packet of tim-tams, so all is even.

In the course of moving to Mure (which, incidentally, is an archaic word for “hill”) I had the opportunity to see various examples of classic Japanese work ethic, proved that incompetence is a universal property of real estate agents not confined only to westerners, learnt the Japanese word for “nictitating membrane” (shunmaku, 瞬膜, if you’re interested), witnessed my cat get acupuncture therapy, probably experienced the curse of a suicidal alcoholic dead author, and learnt some interesting things about property ownership in Japan. Naturally, I want to share.

So, in order of appearance, here is the tale of my day.

The super-efficient removalists

The removalists started work at 8:15. There were two of them. Their task was to move about 15 boxes, 20 bags, two desks, one large cupboard, two chests of drawers, two computers, one printer, one fridge, one washing machine and sundry accumulated crap from the two floors of our house, along a narrow path and into their waiting truck. Nobody told them beforehand, but in order to get to the washing machine they had to move 20 boxes from the shed into the house (we helped with this). Oh, and they had three “hanger boxes” for our clothes, that we filled while they worked, and they then carried out. They were done by 9am, even though every time they came into the house they had to take their shoes off. They also wrapped all the furniture before they moved it, and moved everything carefully, and even managed to reseal some boxes they weren’t satisfied with.

The smaller guy couldn’t have weighed more than 60 kg, he was tiny, but he could lift the washing machine by himself. He could also carry a chest of drawers down a very narrow and windy flight of stairs. This man was so small that he wore his packing tape as a bracelet (it fitted on his wrist and came off easily). He wrapped my printer in a blanket in about 3 seconds flat, and not only did he tape it up but he put an X-mark of tape on it to indicate it was fragile. He and his mate actually ran up and down our stairs, and moved through the house at a kind of shuffling semi-run – all while carefully avoiding touching the walls or risking damaging anything. They wrapped the fridge in these kind of padded socks that stop it from damaging or being damaged by door frames, and to get these socks on was a kind of 3 second effort: one of them says “se-no!” and then they flip the whole thing over the top of the fridge like they’re putting on some kind of enormous head band. Pat Cash would be proud, if his head were the size of a fridge. These are men with a rare and refined ability to size up the dimensions and weight of an object, and be done with it in 1 second flat. And they were going to be working at this pace at houses around Tokyo until 7pm.

(If you’re moving in Tokyo, try フクフク引っ越しセンター、27000 yen for all that done professionally in 1 hour! But Japanese only, I think).

So all of this done by 9am. We were thinking that the whole day would be over by 10. Sadly, removalists’ efficiency is easily done by the universal incompetence of real estate agents …

The wrong keys, in the rain

We reached the house at 9:15, only to discover that the keys the real estate agent gave me the day before wouldn’t open the door. Luckily I had kept the real estate’s number in my bag, so I called them … they open at 10am. The removalists told me that they could wait until 10am … and then the rain started. It’s the fag end of the rainy season here so it was pretty desultory, but it wasn’t looking promising. I assumed that the removalists had another job to get to, and come 10am were going to start dumping my shit on the road. Actually I discovered later, they could wait until 10am before they started charging me a waiting fee (which was very nice of them!) But I didn’t know this, and I had visions of my stuff sitting on the mud next to my doorway, getting rained on, while I waited for the real estate agent to turn up.

Fortunately, Japanese businesses have staff in them before their appointed opening time and they answered the phone at 9:30. Our estate agent couldn’t get in touch with the landlord, however, and couldn’t understand how our key couldn’t work. It somehow took him 30 minutes to reach our house (a 20 minute walk from his office!) only to discover that the key didn’t work. Well, shock! The removalists had tried it and they couldn’t get it working – what chance did he have? As I was talking to him the electricity guy turned up to check our electricity, and I had this vision of all the utility company reps standing in a queue in the rain while the removalists dumped my shit on the pavement and I remonstrated with the real estate. No doubt, if these removalists needed to bail to their next appointment they’d have my stuff out of their truck in five minutes flat.

As an aside, when I signed the contract the real estate initially presented me with the contract for a different apartment in the same block, and a few hard words from his boss were required to get him to reprint the contract to my satisfaction. My suspicion was he’d done the same with the keys, but they didn’t work on the other empty apartment, so his mistake was way more random than that. Random incompetence is so much more frustrating than focused stupidity, don’t you think?

As another aside, when the real estate agent gave me the key the day before, he pointed out to me that it had no room number on it, but said “you can see it has the word WEST written on it, which means it’s the right one” (my apartment is on the west side of the building). Hmmm… famous last words.

So I was starting to yell at the real estate, the electricity guy was looking on in fear, the removalists were laughing, the Delightful Miss E was explaining things to the electricity guy, the rain was falling … then the removalists revealed that they wait for $35 per 30 minutes, and everything smoothed out. The real estate offered to pay while we waited for the locksmith, and then we all just waited. Fortunately he contacted the landlord (who lives nearby) just a few minutes later, and scored a key. Win!

I’m still pretty pissed off with him though. This was Sunday, so his shop was open, but if I had been moving on a Wednesday his shop would have been closed, I wouldn’t have been able to contact him, I wouldn’t have been able to get into my house, and would have had to send the removalists away (or pay them to wait a day!) So, note to self: never move on the  day that the real estate is shut. Also, maybe punching your real estate’s lights out when you meet him, just to remind him of his place in the universe, is a good idea. Just in case. Anyway, this proves that real estate agents are incompetent, without fail, the world over – I had expected better in Japan, where being thorough about details like “is this the right key?” is standard in most workplaces, but the real estate business must have not read that memo. Wankers!

The Dazai curse

So I also discovered from my landlord that my house is situated right next to the bridge where the famous Japanese author Osamu Dazai killed himself with his lover Tomie Yamazaki. He seems like a pretty dissolute and useless kind of chap – maybe his ghost is stalking the area, making real estate agents incompetent and disconnecting landlord’s phones? Actually, I think he did himself in a little further south of my house, towards Shimorenjo. Looking at the canal now, even my cat couldn’t drown in it, but apparently back in the day it was much more ferocious. Anyway, I guess if this house turns out to be cursed, it’s the fault of Japan’s version of Lord Byron. I’ll have a thing or two to say if I meet that ghost!

Cat Acupuncture

In amongst all this, it had become apparent that our cat Arashi chan was somehow sick: his nictitating membrane was showing, which is definitely not normal, and by Saturday night his eyes were half-covered. I did a brief web search and discovered it’s probably just stress, but I didn’t know a vet near my house (of course there are three, I now know) so we decided that it would be a good idea to take him to the vet we know, near our old house. So after successfully not gutting our real estate agent and feasting on his liver in the street in front of our new house, challenging though it was to show such restraint, we decided that it might be best if we went back to the old house (where, fortunately, he was still safely ensconced) and took him to his regular vet. So off to the vet, where the nurse on reception remembered Arashi chan’s name as soon as we walked in even though we hadn’t seen them since last September. He’s a lady’s man, our Arashi chan.

By now it was midday, and it took an hour to get Arashi chan into the vet after the queue of rabbits and extremely small dogs. Terazono veterinary surgery is a beacon for rabbit owners and – obviously this is pure conjecture – I suspect a lot of them are lesbians. I think there’s a secret rabbit-owning lesbian underclass (cabal?) in Tokyo, and they live in or near Kichijoji. Maybe they’re in league with Totoro, who is a damn sight shiftier than the movies give him credit for, in my opinion.

My suspicions about this vet were confirmed when, having told me that Arashi chan was suffering from stress, he offered to administer a soothing session of acupuncture! Cat acupuncture! The great thing about conducting these kinds of negotiations in Japanese is that I don’t understand half of it, and my natural response is to trust my interlocutor and say “yes” while I catch up with what’s going on. So by the time the needle was in Arashi chan’s shoulder blades I was just catching up with the details. OH! Acupuncture! Like Black Adder in the German prison – “ooohhh! It’s a scythe!” He also got a needle in his inside thigh, just near his bum. It did seem to calm him down, and he certainly didn’t notice it. How strange! The vet told me that that cat acupuncturists are very rare, though he has heard it’s all the rage with horses in Australia[1], which had me imagining rapiers, or a vet turning up to the farm with a nail gun “for therapeutic use only.” How do you administer acupuncture to something as large and as thoroughly, irreconcilably evil as a horse? It’s like massaging a satanic whale.

So, Arashi chan calmed down (apparently – it’s hard to tell with an animal that spends 23 hours a day sleeping and one hour a day being profoundly stupid), and after a brief clean of our old house we went to hand in the keys to our previous landlord. After delivering the tim-tams, though, we discovered that all the taxis in Kichijoji were full or booked or dead, and we couldn’t get a taxi.

It’s as if just for this one day of the year, the 1st July 2012, Tokyo had decided to do a bad service exchange agreement with Sydney. No taxis? That never happens! Bad real estate agents? Sydney! Note to self: don’t move house on a day when the entire city of Tokyo has decided to do an exchange of bad vibes with Sydney.

So, our landlord offered to drive us to the new house, and during the drive we found out why he was unconcerned that we only did a perfunctory clean of his granny flat … and strange indeed it is …

Buying a house on someone else’s land

Our landlord is moving in August. Apparently his son is rich, and has bought the whole family a nice place in nearby Mitakadai[2]. I asked “what will you do with the old house?” His reply: “knock it down.” (actually, he said “destroy it,” but whatever). After establishing that knocking the house down will cost him money, I naturally asked, “will you just sell the land?” and he replied “oh no, we don’t own the land!”

WTF? You bought a house on land you don’t own? In Tokyo? Isn’t that a little risky? Is that even possible in Australia[3]?

Apparently it’s not risky, because they’ve lived there for years and it was their decision to quit, not the owner’s. They’ve been asking him to sell the land for years but he keeps saying no. Why, they don’t know – he lives in Shikoku, and doesn’t care one whit about Tokyo. But he won’t sell so they finally gave up and decided to move. I guess that this means their house is really just a very elaborate version of a mobile home, that you buy and stick on someone else’s land and then move away with, only in this instance “move away” means “take off and nuke the entire site from orbit.” Maybe this is why a retired typesetter can afford a massive two-storey home with Granny flat in one of Tokyo’s most sought-after locations – because he only bought the house, and is renting the land at some dodgy dirt-cheap pre-bubble rate.

Is that even possible in Australia? And would you do it?

I wonder if a lot of the houses I see going for sale cheap in Kichijoji are operating like this – you’re actually buying a home that, if you can’t sell it on when you try to move, you have to destroy. That is so radically different from western concepts of property ownership. And probably something to look out for if you’re planning on buying a house here…

So that was my day. My feet hurt, my cat is composed entirely of nervous energy and nictitating membranes, my real estate couldn’t organize a root in a brothel, and my house may be cursed by the ghost of a dissolute alcoholic cheating bully who wrote overwrought prose about self-destructive idiots, a kind of wartime-era Sid Vicious of letters. Have I made the right decision moving to Mure? Perhaps I should have bought a house on someone else’s land in Chiba? Ah, the complexities of finding a home in Japan …

—

fn1: I guess these vets don’t call themselves “the horse poker” for obvious reasons.

fn2: Mitaka means “three hawks.” My house is also in Mitaka and, rather shockingly, around the corner from my house is a “hawk cafe” where you can have coffee in a building that contains owls and hawks. You can get your photo taken with them. Today I discovered that birds can consciously control their nictitating membranes. That’s right, that blink they do is them sneering at you.

fn3: Well obviously, everyone’s doing it, in essence, since no one ever bought the country from its original inhabitants, but I think property law somehow managed to … cough … find a way to overlook that.

 

Campaign Setting: Shadowrun in a Time of Default

Shadowrun is suited to campaign settings rife with economic corruption, the desperate and abandoned poor, powerful corporations who control the social fabric, shady underworld groups and street gangs in conflict. Sounds rather like a vision of Greece after the default, if you were to chuck in a bit of magic. So let’s do that! And what better way to do it than through a resurgent Greek mythical pantheon. And, for that matter, if Greece’s default were to drag Europe down, we would also see Italy and Ireland fall into chaos – and what do they have in common but a history rich in pantheism and magic? How would we construct such a near-future shadowrun campaign?

In comments to my previous post, Paul tried to describe a worst case scenario for Greek default:

Greece comes up to a pay day for the public sector and has no money to pay in. They issue IOUs. The public service goes in strike shutting down hospitals. A run on the banks begins and everyone withdraws their money in Euro. The banks collapse. No medicine is being imported into the country or moved to hospitals. Petrol imports stop and the prices go through the roof, preventing the transport of food and other critical supplies. The entire economy locks up because no one can get to work. Farms lie fallow or with harvests rotting in them because farmers can’t use their equipment. Food and potentially power/water shortages start to hit major cities leading to rioting. The police haven’t been paid or fed so they join in. The damage to property and life is massive. Refugees head to neighbouring countries. Eventually international aid arrives, food and petrol shipments unlock the ability to provide basic necessities of life but medical support remains at the level provided via international aid (i.e. broken bones are treated, people with cancer aren’t going to get drugs worth more than tens of dollars – which I believe is most of them). Restarting the economy from this situation is chaos, it’s basically shut down and had spiralling cascades of defaults.

Now let’s suppose that Greece has a pantheon of sleeping gods, but they were roused by some mischievous figure in one of the resistance movements (New Dawn sound like contenders, but anyone will do). They see a country in chaos and desperate for a guiding hand, so they start letting their magic seep out again. How could they have been roused, and what would the implications be for Greece and Europe? I have a few ideas …

Witch Hunter Rebekka

In this version of the campaign, the PCs are members of a top-secret Greek government organization that was tasked with keeping supernatural threats under control, like the organization from Witch Hunter Robin or Double Cross 3. Unfortunately, their organization was abolished as part of the austerity package insisted on by the European Central Bank, and they suddenly find themselves unemployed in a world where the supernatural is suddenly given a free hand. Perhaps they embark on a solo quest to find out what’s really happening, or maybe they set themselves up in some seedy downtown office and start selling their services to corporations and gangsters who have discovered that the dark side is coming for them. And during this maybe they notice a pattern. Perhaps there are other, similar organizations throughout Europe, and as Europe unravels in the wake of Greece’s chaos those organizations too get shut down or worse.

An orthodox priest, a banker and a schoolgirl walk into the Parthenon …

Perhaps the secret organizations working to protect Europe are not government run, but maintained instead by the churches. In Greece this means the Greek Orthodox church… so what do they do if they are approached by a banker, who does a sideline in hacking, who has discovered evidence that something behind the trouble was planned – that much of Europe’s chaos was actually schemed up by some sinister cabal that saw a chance to create chaos in Italy, Greece and Ireland at the same time. The mechanism is economic collapse, but the goal is to revive old, dark gods – the pagan gods of Ireland and the Southern Mediterranean that the more modern churches drove out. So who do they turn to? A motley group of PCs who have special powers and a can-do attitude, perhaps drawn from the many warring street clans and gangs that have sprung up in the chaos of the default and the political struggles that followed.

A conspiracy of bankers

Of course! What else? We all know that the major banks are servants of satan – let’s make it official! Perhaps the whole economic collapse was engineered to create the kind of chaos necessary to create space for new gods, to generate new, radical and subvertible political movements, and to force the collapse of the secret bulwarks that the Europeans have established against the dark powers that used to rule Europe. Perhaps European history is a long story of dark powers manipulating politics, and the modern European Union was a post-war project to try and drive them out of society and politics. It was working fine – until someone had the silly idea of setting up a common currency. Then the dark powers saw that they could use mundane, financial means to tear the entire European project down, along with all its political and cultural movements against the kind of chaos on which the dark powers depend for their success.

This whole conspiracy would take place in the halls of power, in the boardrooms of banks and sinister organizations, would be traced through emails and secret meetings and currency transfers through shady swiss bank accounts. It’s the perfect conspiracy for a couple of street hackers to slowly track down and unravel in the course of their dubious work – running in the shadows of the corporations, they find a deeper, darker conspiracy at play than mere political corruption … and all of it focused on unleashing old powers long forced down by the church, the enlightenment and the scientific revolution. We all know that our enlightened, materialistic world view depends on the special social order made possible by wealth and the absence of war and political conflict. What better way to unravel it than to engineer economic chaos, poverty and political disruption in the heartland of the old gods – Greece!

A New Dawn for the Gods

Another possible campaign would involve not a conspiracy of bankers, but a conspiracy of radicals. In this campaign, political movements proliferate after the default. Some of them are very violent and become popular very quickly, and as Greece slides into poverty and political paralysis the conflict between these street gangs explodes. Many are also connected to criminal groups and also to ethnic groups – Macedonians and Albanians, Turks and African migrants, for example. Many of them are easily infiltrated by people with authoritarian tendencies, and one of them – probably New Dawn, but others could be imagined – is soon overtaken by a man with special powers, a descendant of one of the Greek gods whose powers have revealed themselves during the chaos. He begins to impel his movement towards the revitalization of the gods, and as other gangs see it they also begin looking for new powers to fight with – perhaps they begin to research alchemy, or bring their ancient gods from across the sea. The PCs, investigating minor crimes as adventurers in the post-default chaos, suddenly begin to discover hints that people are dragging up bigger powers than they have ever seen before, and realize that the street-fighting and political conflict is taking on a religious flavour – with the gods returning to the world as the fervour increases. The fevered political environment of a country in chaos and conflict is a perfect place for new powers to emerge, or old powers to revitalize themselves.

Exploring the Genesis

Shadowrun is set after the cataclysmic events that changed the world. Those events are history, and their effects taken for granted in the Shadowrun setting. But I’m fascinated by how they could have come about, and what the world would have been like when magic was being unleashed. Perhaps an imagined economic and social cataclysm in Europe is a good way to construct those events, and gives us a chance to run an adventure right at the time of the genesis of the world Shadowrun takes for granted. I’ve always imagined that such a catastrophe would not necessarily be a physical one, but some kind of cultural and social upheaval that made gaps through which magic and gods could flow. Catastrophic economic problems and social conflict in Europe offer just such a setting. From something completely mundane like a run on some banks, to dragons ruling the sky … could you run a campaign all the way from beginning to end, and create the world of Shadowrun from whole cloth?

 

 

World Review: Carcosa

Hideous dark secrets await...

I received the pdf version of James Raggi’s re-release of Geoffrey McKinney’s infamous Carcosa “supplement V” two days ago, and have been reading it voraciously since. I haven’t received the physical version yet, so can’t comment on that, but my main interest was the content so I’d like to give a review of it here. It’s my first reading of Carcosa – I missed the original version and the controversy surrounding it – so I’m going to review it as if nobody knew what it was. I have wanted this product since I read the controversy, since much of the material contained within it is relevant to my own campaign ideas, which can involve a certain amount of ritual sacrifice and happen in worlds with an underlying morality that I think has similarities to that of the “lawful” or “neutral” residents of Carcosa – that of sometimes making very unpleasant bargains with evil powers in order to further a greater good.

Background

Carcosa is a science-fantasy/swords and sorcery setting, a planet far from earth in which the ancient gods of the cthulhu mythos slumber (and sometimes wake), and humans live in small and scattered settlements, terrified of the evil powers that dominate the world. The appendix to this edition describes the state of Men[sic] nicely thus:

Man has not populated the world of Carcosa with the monsters of his imagination. Instead, the monsters of Carcosa infect the nightmares of man. Nor has man imagined mythological spirits and projected them upon his surroundings, later refining his mythologies with philosophy and theology. The world of Carcosa is fraught with the like of the Old Ones and their spawn, the legacy of the extinct Snake Men, and Sorcery.

Humans were created by the Snake Men and placed on Carcosa as slaves and chattel to be used in vile sorcerous rituals by which the extinct Snake Men summoned, controlled or banished the Old Ones and their related entities. The Snake Men are long gone, but their legacy remains in the world that is presented to us: Spawn of Shub-Niggurath, the Old Ones, strange mutations and sorcerous effects, and lesser and greater Old Ones who are either imprisoned within our outside the planet, or roaming the planet itself looking for prey. The planet also hosts some Space Aliens, whose artifacts and high-tech items adventurers may be able to find and use.

In this world there is no magic, though there are some psionics. The only magic available to humans is that of sorcery, which enables one to summon, bind, imprison or banish evil entities. However, aside from banishment these sorcerous invocations depend upon rituals which invariably involve the degradation, torture and murder of humans. The 13 races of humans come in distinct colours, and these colours are coded to different rituals; in order to gain power over the elder gods one must find a suitable number of the correct humans of the right colour, age and sex, and then do what is necessary to raise the entity, in a ritual whose contents are themselves difficult to learn, and require precise ingredients collected from rare locations across Carcosa. Being a sorcerer is neither easy nor sensible. Being a sorcerer’s chattel is far, far worse.

So, the world of Carcosa is a brutal and nasty place, where humans were invented to be used, and continue to use each other in the manner that their extinct progenitors planned for them. It is a world where moral decisions are made in a very, very different framework to that of many other fantasy worlds; but it is my contention (and I’ll outline this below) that the moral framework for decisions in Carcosa is simply reflective of a different period in our own history, and the decision to play in Carcosa will simply represent a preference for playing in a different historical milieu to the one we’re all used to. No big deal, really, right?

The Rules

Carcosa is presented as a supplement to Original D&D (OD&D), so it doesn’t present a system per se. Rather, it contains a new character class, the Sorcerer, and some kooky ideas for dice rolling and determining hit dice that I’m not sure I’ll comment on until I’ve played with them. It also presents a wide range of new technological items (of the Space Aliens), new monsters (connected to the Old Ones) and a set of rituals for the Sorcerer. The book also makes clear that on Carcosa there are no PC classes except the Fighter and the Sorcerer (and the Specialist, if you want). There is no magic but sorcery, and no clerical magic of any kind. If you want magic on Carcosa, you have one choice: summon an entity of purest evil, and bend it to your will.

The Sorcerer character seems little different to the Fighter, though I don’t have any OD&D rulebooks so can’t tell the details. Perhaps its XP progression is slower and its saves slightly better, but otherwise it seems broadly similar. In my opinion (and I think Grognardia agreed with me on this) this is a big weakness. The sorcerer is basically a slightly inferior fighter who gains levels more slowly, and can only differentiate him or herself from the Fighter through the long and arduous task of learning a ritual and then binding an entity to his or her will. At this point the sorcerer becomes almost invincible, or dead. I think it might be better if the Sorcerer started off with some differentiating power, such as e.g. a single banishment ritual, or psionic powers. The way the rules are structured, they open the very real possibility that you could start play as a sorcerer with no special abilities or powers of any sort, while your fellow player started off as a fighter with psionics! If, on the other hand, Sorcerers gained psionics from the start and advanced in them slowly, they might be more … enticing. The possibility that one day you can summon Cthulhu and maybe, if you’re lucky, he won’t eat you but will serve you for 72 hours, is not a great lure for the average player. Especially if summoning Cthulhu means you have to rape a couple of children and murder them in a pool of acid.

Also, learning rituals appears to be very difficult, so it’s possible you could play a sorcerer for a lot of levels and never get to use any special powers. So, I can’t see the point of distinguishing the sorcerer from the Fighter.

The Rituals

In truth, the rituals are one of the main reasons I got this book. There are six types of ritual, and only one of them can be conducted without doing something nasty.

• Banish: these drive a specific entity away, for varying times, and are usually quick and easy to perform
• Invoke: these put the sorcerer in contact with some horrific extra-dimensional being that will answer questions that the sorcerer puts to it
• Bind: these grant complete control over the subject entity for a given period of time. At the end of this time, it’s wise to have your banish ritual ready
• Imprison: these trap an entity in some extra-dimensional or subterranean prison, possibly forever, and are the surest way to ensure that it doesn’t come back without the intervention of another sorcerer. All imprisonment rituals seem to involve human sacrifice.
• Conjure: these summon an entity, either from wherever it is now or from its prison. They don’t guarantee control over the conjured entity, however, so it’s a good idea to bind it first
• Torment: these cause a chosen entity to suffer horribly, reducing its hit dice and/or forcing it to obey the sorcerer and/or answer questions

So, it’s possible to see that there are ways in which these rituals, even though they involve human sacrifice, can be for the good of all. In fact, one can imagine a “lawful” sorcerer traveling the earth, forcing every sorcerer he finds to teach him their rituals, then killing them and imprisoning any deities they had the power to conjure. This would involve a lot of pain and slaughter but at the end of such a successful campaign the world would be free of deities and no one but the PC would be able to conjure them again. Is this worth a bit of child murder? Don’t answer me unless you live on Carcosa.

The rituals themselves are very nicely written, in a portentous style that is very evocative of the Cthulhu ethos, and involves a lot of words like “blasphemous,” “ineffable” and “canticle.” The descriptions have an underlying sense of horror, but are themselves clinically written and detailed, capturing both the mechanical elements of the ritual, its arcane meaning and its horrific consequences in just one or two concise paragraphs. They’re also key to establishing the philosophical and theological background of the world of Carcosa, and in my opinion one can’t really properly describe the world without reference to these rituals. Once one has read this tome of rituals, the descriptions of the communities of the world – tiny enclaves of humans, largely the same colour, suspicious of outsiders and often treacherous and warlike – make a great deal of sense. It also sets the tone for a world steeped in horror.

My main criticism of the rituals would be that it’s not clear how they mesh together – does one bind a creature before or after conjuring it? Why would one torment an entity, and what are the key differences between banishment and imprisonment? Ideally, I would have liked a couple of examples of rituals in use: perhaps a description of a sorcerer’s attempts to conjure a particular entity – how he found the ritual, the order in which he enacts them, and the benefits. For a GM’s section this would be particularly useful, since it would enable a GM to work out how to mesh the quest for and consequences of a ritual into adventure planning. Without this we have to work out the details ourselves, which is fine, but I paid 35 euros for this book so I could read the ideas of the person who wrote it, so I’d have liked a few examples or ideas to support the use of rituals in the game. Also, I would like to know more about what one gains from summoning the entities. The entities all have their stat blocks given, but they are largely for combat, and this means that really the sorcerer seems to be just taking a great deal of risks to invoke a great big weapon. It would be nice if conjuring a given beast gave the sorcerer some benefits (like a kind of familiar), so that even without going into combat the sorcerer got some non-Fighter-oriented benefits. Otherwise, why not just go to hex XXXX and grab the Space Alien Tank there – a much safer way to do 4 dice of damage than summoning It of the Fallen Pylons, which, incidentally, requires casting eight Red Men through an extra-dimensional vault into outer space, and making a save vs. Magic at -4 to avoid joining them yourself.

Despite these limitations, the rituals lend the world of Carcosa a particular feeling of grim horror and foreboding that is both very Cthulhu-esque, and very atmospheric even if, like me, you haven’t read much Lovecraft.

Entities, Monsters and Maps

I really like the entities and monsters presented in Carcosa. The entities have evocative, sinister names and are very, very nasty, and the main monsters arise in almost infinite variety through the random generation tables. Robots and cyborgs follow a similar range and would make both interesting allies and formidable adversaries. The book comes with a hex map of a section of Carcosa with two possible encounters for every hex described. Some of these hexes offer opportunities for further adventuring in dungeons or castles or forests, and give simple adventure hooks; others present towns to explore and conquer, or simply monsters or the opportunity to learn rituals, find ancient technology, or uncover strange objects. It’s a really weird and compelling map that sets out a world completely different to the average D&D setting. This world is definitely not to everyone’s tastes – brilliant Yellow-colored men carrying laser pistols and riding mutant dinosaurs to war against Cthulhoid entities is maybe not everyone’s cup of tea – but if you like science fantasy then it has a lot of material to explore.

Presentation

I can’t comment on the physical book, since I haven’t received it, but I certainly can commend the presentation of the pdf format. I’ve been reading it on my iPad, and it’s a joy to use. The pdf is extensively hyperlinked, so if you’re reading a ritual and want to know what the creature it summons is, you can jump to the creature; then you can use the list of rituals related to that entity to jump to a different ritual, or to go back to where you were. Ingredients that can be found in certain hexes include a link to those hexes; if a particular hex in the map is related to other hexes, those hexes are listed next to the text, so you can jump to them. The hex map itself is hyperlinked, so you can click to the description of any hex – sadly, on my iPad the bit of the map I tap doesn’t work, and I get directed instead to the column left of where I wanted to tap, but this is not an insurmountable problem (I just tap slightly more to the right) and I don’t know if it’s a problem in the original text or in its translation to my iPad. It would be nice if the hex descriptions included a link back to the map (perhaps in their name?) so that one could explore the map more rapidly, but this too is not an insurmountable problem. The linking is an excellent idea and really makes the pdf useful.

Other elements of the presentation also really appeal to me. I like the font and the style on the edges of the pages – perhaps the patterns at the top of the page are a little overdone, but they suit the theme. I like the layout of things like rituals and monster descriptions, with the text next to the title and then all the hyperlinks below the title, next to the text; and the artwork suits the world very well. Unlike usual OSR artwork, it’s actually good, and the sketch-like style gives a sense of hurriedly glimpsing horrors, like seeing a massacre through grainy camera footage rather than being a direct eyewitness. This suits the content – especially the rituals and monsters – very well. It’s a very well-presented and laid out text.

The content is also very well written and maintains its Cthulhoid theme pretty much seamlessly across the whole book. This is a fine achievement and really makes the book stand out as a work of fiction as well as a gaming supplement. It’s rare I think to find a world setting that maintains a coherent theme across world content, presentation and writing style, and through the combination of the three builds up a distinct atmosphere. This book does that, in spades, and in that sense I think it’s a masterful work.

I do have some complaints about the content, though. In addition to wanting more detail on the mechanics of rituals, I would have liked more context to the world as a whole. After just a page or two of introduction the book jumps straight into the rules, and further exposition of the background to the world only comes in an appendix, which is very short. Even though the rationale for this – not wanting to bias the Referee, so that they can be free to interpret Carcosa as they like – is perfectly understandable, I’m not into it. I want Geoffrey McKinney’s bias in my interpretation of his world, and I’m adult enough to get rid of what I don’t like. I would like his bias at the beginning, because as it is I have waded through the whole book before I discover why certain rituals use certain colors of human, etc. This problem is even more pronounced in the sample adventure, Fungoid Gardens of the Bone Sorcerer, which is not really an adventure at all but a more detailed exposition of a single hex in the map. Some context to this adventure, perhaps background details to the tensions and regions of the hex map, how PCs might be drawn into differing factions or adventures, and what the political circumstances in the region are, might help. The motivations and perspectives of the various denizens of the map are not clear, and the reasons for selecting it as an adventure are just not there. It’s usable, but it doesn’t add anything to the main hex map except more detail. I would say this is a general structural problem in the text: it isn’t set out in the flow of Introduction/Body/Conclusion, but just as a random scattering of information with a rough flow. Even the appendix setting out the basic circumstances of humans on Carcosa is missing a conclusion: it just ends with a description of the uses of Space Alien technology. Repeatedly missing this structure means that the work is sometimes contextless, which is a shame given the depth of its actual content.

The layout, though generally excellent, suffers some minor flaws and I think James Raggi may have been guilty of over-egging how much he has added to the original. The editing is sometimes a bit weak, with obvious errors in presentation (such as italicizing a book title, then putting other book titles inconsistently in quotes, in the same paragraph of the introduction). Indeed, there is even an error in the preview – e.g. page 129, Hex 0502, has inconsistent pronoun usage (it and he to describe the Mummy). Also I think the linking is incomplete – sometimes a description will say “cf. [ritual name]” where it would have been much better for it to have the link to [ritual name]. Of course I’m happy to forgive tiny errors, because overall the layout is excellent and the writing very concise and clear.

The Controversy

This review isn’t meant to be about the controversy, but I guess I should cover it. Two (?) of the rituals involve the rape and murder of children, and most of them involve the torture and murder of humans. This has led some to say that Carcosa goes too far, that it brings disrepute onto the gaming world, and that it is itself a morally repugnant work. Well, it’s certainly morally repugnant, but much of what happens in role-playing is morally repugnant. In standard D&D most adventuring parties happily torture and murder captured enemies, and exterminate without mercy those who are racially different to themselves, on the very dubious moral assumption that our enemies have no humanity of any kind. D&D explicitly states that elves have no soul. This is a moral framework that is taken pretty much straight from the playbook of 19th and early 20th century western Imperialism[1], and although we are supposed to believe that our D&D worlds make these ideals objectively true, rather than subjectively true, I don’t think this really exonerates the worldview contained therein.

So the world of D&D as most of us are used to playing it is pretty morally repugnant as well, and it explicitly allows for or describes the use of human and non-human lives as tools for the benefit of the PCs. What else is necromancy but the most horrific misuse of humans? What about the Imprisonment spell, or Dominate Monster? Sure, the Player’s Handbook doesn’t say “You can use this spell to rape anyone you want,” but it’s pretty obvious that this is what evil people will do. And most PC groups at some point have used enslaved/captured/charmed/dominated NPCs as meat in the grinder – for trap finding, for attracting the monster’s first, worst attack, etc. I think the old school blogosphere makes quite a point of doing this with henchmen and hirelings.

So what is the difference with Carcosa? It makes the moral framework of D&D explicit, and I think this offends a lot of people who would otherwise have enacted many of the components of the rituals in their ordinary play. But in presenting this moral framework explicitly, is Carcosa asking us to play in a world that is any different from 15th century Europe, which is the moral exemplar for much of our gaming worlds? What distinguishes a sorcerer in Carcosa from the leaders of the USSR in Afghanistan, any of the players of the Great Game, or the British in India? D&D’s implicit morality is, largely, that of 19th century colonial Europe; Carcosa’s implicit morality is that of crusader Europe or the vikings. If we can accept one, and play it at its most invidious, then we can surely play in the other without compromising ourselves overmuch.

Furthermore, I don’t think these rituals need necessarily be construed as irredeemably evil. In Hex 2013 of the Carcosa map is a village of 497 Jale Men ruled by “She of the Lake.” She is slowly building up an empire and “her hunger for slaves and captives to fuel her sorceries is bottomless.” So if my PC summons the Lurker Amidst the Obsidian Ruins through the murder of four Black Males, and binds it to me using the horrific Primal Formula of the Dweller (which requires my PC to kill 101 Dolm Children with an axe), then sends the Lurker to kill She of the Lake and her main minions, have I not done the world a great service? And what harm have I done to the world if instead of killing the two Yellow Men bandits who survived a bandit attack on my party, I inflict them with a fatal disease and sacrifice them in the ritual called The Encrusted Glyphs of the Deep, which imprisons the Leprous Dweller Below in a primordial city in the Radioactive Desert?

Carcosa presents us with a morally repugnant setting, but as mature adults we can negotiate it in a more sophisticated way than merely averting our eyes and declaring it wrong.

Conclusion

If you like your worlds to be dark, cruel, primitive and full of evil and hard choices, then Carcosa is for you. If you want to play in a Science/Fantasy Swords and Sorcery setting with or without bizarre and evil sorcerous rituals, this book is a great starting point and will give you endless hours of crazed sandbox adventuring. It’s a very nicely laid out, excellently written and well-crafted addition to the gaming world, and I think James Raggi should be encouraged in his efforts. He brings a huge amount of energy and creativity to the OSR, and should be justifiably proud of his achievement in presenting this setting in this format. But of course the ultimate credit should go to Geoffrey McKinney, who has crafted a genuinely disturbing, morally dubious, occasionally repugnant, but very well-written and ingenious world setting that, while not to everyone’s tastes and a little more controversial thank I think is warranted, is definitely a brilliant and amazingly creative work. I hope that he and Raggi will work together again in the future to produce more material of the same high quality and style, and I would definitely like to see more material for the Carcosa setting – whether or not I ever get a chance to play it.

—

fn1: please do not take this to mean that I think only Imperialists believed these things; this is the particular historical framework that western Europeans draw upon when they make these moral statements.

 

Current Reading: The New Death and Others

I read this in response to a request from its author, James Hutchings. The book is self-published, I think, and can be obtained through Amazon or from James’s blog, Teleli, where the second post down explains the giveaway. I’m a nice chap, so I bought it at Amazon.

The New Death and Others is a collection of short stories, many of which are set in the city of Telleli or perhaps in its associated world. The world of Telleli is a slightly bizarre or carnivalesque version of a swords and sorcery setting, like a kind of irreverent Lankhmar, and the gods feature prominently in Telleli life. Many of the short stories in this book feature those gods, or humans or other beings of Telleli attempting to communicate with or challenge those gods. The gods are clearly capricious and not entirely intelligent, and not particularly interested in the affairs of humans – they seem to be caught up often in their own silly little dramas, and the consequences of these dramas for humans do not really get much consideration. There are also a few stories in other fantasy or near-fantasy settings, and at times the stories cross from fantasy into a vaguely fantasy-realism kind of setting. The stories are often irreverent about both the fantasy genre and the gods they describe, and a few of them are straight-out comedy, with humorous footnotes and a punchline. Examples of the kinds of stories in the book are:

• How the Isle of Cats Got Its Name: A story about a sorceress in the town of Telelee who has learnt all the magic known to humans, and begins to seek out the secret knowledge of the gods. This puts her into a collision course with the cats of Telelee, and the results are unexpected for both sorceress and reader alike. This is a well-constructed short story, combining two stories (the sorceress and the cats) in a very concise and tightly-worked structure. Weaving the plot and characters from two separate storylines into a single arc, with a twist, in the space of a couple of pages is no mean feat; making the story work and evoking a sense of the town that the tale is set in, the mythology of its world, and the particular character of both the cats and the sorceress deserves, in my opinion, a fair bit of respect. This is a nicely done story
• The Face in the Hill: This is an extremely short story about a politician seeking answers to a significant quandary his society is facing, and manages to fit a neat moral message into a very small space, delivering a powerful ending and a nice description of the key conflicts facing the society in question all within the context of the politician’s journey to consult a particular oracle. In this same five pages we also find out the ultimate results of his decision. It’s a well-balanced and entertaining tale, though perhaps a little heavy-handed.
• Everlasting Fire: one of the directly comedic stories, this story tells the tale of a demon named Lily, working in hell, and her tragic love affair with one of her underlings. It includes several bad puns, footnotes that add to the self-referential humour, and a lot of cute jokes about hell. It’s also stuffed full of management speech and bullshit bingo, so successfully conjures the image of hell as just another workplace. The ending of the love affair is a little bit 1984, and the asides describing hell are just exactly what it would be like in a really cheap christian morality play (the sort that we all poke fun at, but that has never really been written). This kind of humour isn’t to everyone’s tastes, but it’s well done and funny.

A lot of the short stories in this collection are good examples of the craft of short story writing: pithy, quick to establish characterization and setting without falling back on cheap stereotypes, and often delivering an unexpected ending that keeps you guessing and engaged right through the book. If I have any complaint about them, it’s a complaint common to Australian art: the continuous irreverence and refusal to take the work seriously can, in my opinion, undermine fantasy and sci-fi settings, and I wish Australians would do it less. It’s like Australians are scared to just sit down and write a serious genre novel, or create a serious genre film; this is why Buffy or Star Wars would never be made in Australia.  But on the flipside, this kind of irreverence is refreshing if you don’t read too much of it, and I don’t, so I can’t complain specifically about this book. It’s a general gripe about the production of culture in Australia. My main gripe about this book is that it contained quite a bit of poetry and most of it I didn’t like (If My Life Was Filmed and untitled I really liked). I skipped most of the other poems after a couple of verses. But I don’t know if that’s a commentary on the quality of the poetry or on me – I’m pretty tough on poetry generally, and even tougher on theatre (which is, in general, shit).

One other minor complaint I had about this book is that in many of the stories I got the sense that the author was constructing a certain atmosphere and level of irreverence, but sometimes let down the story by overdoing the irreverence or overdoing the setting. This is a hard line to tread in writing semi-humourous or irreverent genre stuff: you need to be sure that your jokes don’t cross a certain poorly defined line, and you also need to make sure that your setting has the right level of seriousness and authenticity to match the tone of the tale. I found that occasionally Hutchings would fall afoul of these traps, and a joke would be out of place or the setting would suddenly become too heavy. I guess that this is a common problem for a new writer, and given the difficulty of maintaining tone and style in an endeavour like this I can’t really fault him.

Overall, I think this work is an excellent first book, a fine contribution to a small field of irreverent-but-serious genre writing, and a collection of tightly-constructed and entertaining short stories. For $0.99 it’s a bargain! In fact, my main question is how work like this can be not picked up by a serious publisher, while the book I read afterwards (review to come) was. But there’s no point in dwelling on injustices: buy the book and give James Hutchings less than his just reward for the work.

 

Svalbard in 1635 Infernal Europe

No Place for the Warm-hearted

This is the plan for a campaign setting in one of the earlier eras of my Compromise and Conceit campaign setting, to be run in English using Warhammer Fantasy Role-play 3. This campaign will be set in Svalbard in summer 1635, early in the period of time in which Europe began to rediscover magic, through infernalism. I discussed some reasons for the Svalbard setting some time ago, and I’ve recently done a little research that suggests setting it in the 17th century gives me an opportunity to combine political intrigue, pirates and polar exploration. It also gives a chance to test a campaign setting where the environment is itself an adversary for the PCs, and to explore some more of the political and infernal concepts of the Compromise and Conceit setting. The last adventure enabled my players to explore the complex and violent politics of the French and Indian war, and ultimately to change the course of American history. Maybe this time we can explore the possibilities inherent in Scandinavia.

Svalbard in 1635: Political Context

This era is the beginning of a long period of infernal exploration, and the near end of the Age of Discovery, which was still playing out in Northern Europe and the Arctic. Svalbard had only been discovered 40 years previously, and was not yet controlled by any single power. Instead, companies from different nations – primarily England, Denmark, France and Holland – would come to Svalbard in the summer for whaling and seal hunting, establishing camp in bases along primarily national lines and hunting furiously during the limited months of sunlight. The nation states that backed these companies had limited authority out in the wilderness of Svalbard, and the whaling companies would come into often violent conflict with each other – even with companies from the same nation. These whaling companies were essentially freebooters, pirates with a semi-official backing from their home nation, and they would use quite vicious methods to ensure access to the lucrative whaling zones of what was then known as Spitsbergen. Political and mercantile tensions from Europe would be played out in these freezing waters.

The main nation with a solid, long-term interest, however, was Denmark: at this time Denmark, Norway and Sweden had united under the Kalmar Union and had also absorbed Iceland, which had accepted Lutheranism 80 years earlier after the beheading of its last Catholic Priest. By adding Spitsbergen to its crown Denmark would control all the islands of the Arctic, and access to the fabled Northwest Passage. It would also be able to exert control over lucrative whaling regions, and all the fisheries and any natural resources of those islands. During the middle part of the 17th century the Danish crown turned its attention on consolidating complete power over the union of Scandinavian nations, and although unable to back its claims of sovereignty over Svalbard with military force, was undoubtedly up to mischief on the island. With the rediscovery of magic in Europe, the Lutheran church also found itself facing a resurgence of interest in Odinism and paganism, and so the church as well needed to extend its powers across the distant archipelago.

Svalbard itself is a harsh environment for piracy or adventure, and in fact until 1634 no one had ever wintered on the Island. The Little Ice Age was well underway, and this meant sea ice in the Northern and Eastern edge of Svalbard for 9-10 months of the year, and freezing temperatures all year round. The North Eastern side of the archipelago was yet unexplored, and even traversing the main Island (Spitsbergen) was a formidable challenge for 17th century explorers. Against this political and environmental backdrop the Danish were attempting to establish a permanent presence on the Island sufficient to guarantee a long-term hold over the arctic, and its lucrative whale oil trade. At this time the full promise of Infernalism and the materials and technologies it would make available to Europe had not yet been revealed, and resources like whale oil were of great importance.

Svalbard in 1635: Infernal Context

With Shakespeare only recently dead and Marlowe long in his grave, the groundwork had been laid for the expansion of infernalism across Europe. Marlowe’s objections to the use of Demonology to bolster the power of King and God had been washed away in blood under suspicious circumstances 40 years earlier, giving Shakespeare 20 years to preach the gospel of Infernalism. His lessons had taken hold but the full benefits – magical and technological – that would flow from Infernalism, as well as its future challenges, were not yet known, and a diverse array of magical schools and colleges flourished throughout Europe. Their understanding of magic was fragmented and their power limited, Descartes had not yet written his Meditations or Principles, and the systematization of magic – as well as its restriction to a handful of schools – was not to come until the end of the century, under Newton, Liebnitz and the years after the Glorious Revolution in England. For the period from Shakespeare’s death until the English civil war magic remained a kind of cottage industry, and its practitioners a diverse and unruly bunch.

Settlements on Svalbard

There are five main locations on Svalbard, numbered in the map above:

1. Smeerenburg (“Blubber Town”): The Dutch settle at Smeerenburg in the summer, and hunt whales from here. Their activity was so frenzied and the sights the settlement offered so disgusting that the town was given the name “blubber-town” by those who work there. The Danes were driven out of Smeerenburg a few years earlier, and now only a few Danish traders visit during the period of activity.
2. Danskoya (Ny-Alesund): The combined settlement of Danish and Dutch whalers forms the de facto political base for these two nations, as well as a resupply base for Smeerenburg, which is further north, and the official point of communication with the English and French whalers to the South. This town is equally frenzied in its pursuit of whale meat, but also contains some non-whaling related commercial activities, primarily hunting and trapping. It is also the first area of Svalbard to be turned into a permanent settlement. Just South of Danskoya is a small French settlement, called Refuge Francaise, and largely dependent upon Danskoya for protection and resupply.
3. The Silent Tower: A group of Norwegian monks have set up a small monastery here, in the ruins of an ancient stone tower that no one seems able to account for. The tower provides excellent protection from the elements and seems to have a permanent supply of fresh water, and the monks are able to winter in the tower. They have been doing so for at least the last 10 years, and no one really knows anything about them: they have taken a vow of silence, and most people assume that they see the long months of winter darkness as an opportunity for contemplation undistracted from the concerns of the mortal world.
4. Ice Fjord: This is the main base of the London Whaling Company, and also the unofficial English government outpost, the Ice Fjord base has the best weather conditions in summer and is also blessed with the permanent monastery on its Northern side. The London company wrested this base by force from the Danes a few years earlier, and although Danish boats may now dock here and some traders come and go, there is a tacit agreement that they will engage in no whaling South of Prins Karls Forland, giving the British free reign of the whole South western half of Spitsbergen. This doesn’t mean they don’t come into conflict, of course.
5. Bell Sound: The base of the English Muscovy company, famous for having opened up trade with the Russians a few years earlier, but also for having lost a major sea battle with the London company a few years ago and having been driven into Bell Sound, a much less profitable whaling location than Ice Fjord. The two companies regularly come into conflict. There are rumours that the Muscovy company has begun to focus on overland exploration, and may also be prospecting inland of its camp, but of course no one knows anything about the commercial activities of this company

Aside from a few small survival huts set up in between the main outposts, these are the only established settlements on the island. Until 1635 the island was completely silent and dark in winter, save for the Silent Tower; it becomes a hive of frenzied activity in summer, focused on the mass slaughter of the whales that throng to the island. Against this backdrop various tales of murder, piracy, industrial espionage, sabotage and theft will be played out every summer. Anyone who survives the summer will leave the island rich with whale oil, but the death rate, like the stakes, is high.

The First Adventure

In 1634 the Danish wintered for the first time in their temporary settlement at Danskoya. The first winter squad consisted of only seven men, well supplied and dug into a deep and well-built shack. When the first Danish explorers arrived in spring 1635 the hut was empty, the men all gone, and some signs of a struggle could be seen. The Danish are concerned that one of the other companies on the island also over-wintered there, and launched a daring mid-winter raid to kill the Danish crew. If so, this has alarming implications both for what the other companies are willing to do and for their winter-survival technology. The Danish whaling company needs to send a squad of adventurers to Spitsbergen to investigate who did it and how. Once they know this they are to kill the people responsible. They will travel there under the guise of guards for a Danish royal expedition, which aims to draw maps of the whole archipelago over the next few summers. This expedition will spend the first summer traveling up the west coast conducting initial soundings and exploration, and so the PCs will be able to visit every settlement over the course of a few weeks, giving them a good sense of who is where and what they are doing. With the cartographer as cover, they can then visit any settlement they need to for further investigations.

Simple, surely?

 

The Piss-christ in Context

Discussion of whether Jesus was a Vampire has taken an inevitable turn towards discussion of the Big J’s phylactery, the piss-christ. Now, I’m not a big fan of the piss-christ, I haven’t seen it in person but it doesn’t seem like good art and it doesn’t seem like a good contribution to the debate about christianity. I’m also sympathetic to the view put in comments that modern christianity has been defanged, and it’s no longer particularly brave or radical to take the piss out of it (haha). What I’m not so sympathetic to is the view that the modern art scene has an unacceptable anti-christian bias, or that the current crop of artists should be focussing on a wider debate about all the different religions. This is because:

• The main thrust of modern conservative debate about identity in the English-speaking world claims that we are a “christian” society with a “judaeo-christian” heritage. See, e.g. this repulsive tweet – by a christian – on Anzac Day. You can’t claim that we’re a christian society and then complain that people who want to criticize their own society’s morals and social structures lay into christianity.
• Most of the modern crop of artists didn’t come of age in the post-9/11 world, and the context they grew up in was a vigorous and sometimes violent fight against a christian movement not yet in full retreat. In the era they grew up in, Islam and Hinduism were non-events, non-issues, they probably neither learnt about nor knew about them. It’s rich to expect them to change their angst in late adulthood because a few western leaders decided to start a war with a previously largely irrelevant religion

I’m not going to talk about the first problem (reaction against claims of judaeo-christianity) here, but I do want to talk about the context of the artists’ upbringing, because a) it relates to role-playing and b) Paul in comments has suggested that the reaction to the Satanic Verses is indicative that actually Islam was a big issue in the 80s (the fatwah against Rushdie occurred in 1989). I don’t think this is true – I remember when the fatwah was issued, and it came as a complete shock to Westerners – and I want to do a quick scout through the main pop cultural movements I’m familiar with from the 70s and 80s, to give a highly biassed account of how completely irrelevant Islam was in the development of the sensitivities of the current crop of “elder” artists.

And Serrano is an elder. The piss-christ was made in 1987, suggesting that he “matured” (in physical years, if not in artistic merit or sense) before 1987. In fact he’s in his 60s now. So is it reasonable to suppose that he should give a drop of piss about Islam or Hinduism? He was raised in New York by a strict catholic family, so it seems like popular culture in the 70s and 80s is more relevant to his development and his perspective on art than, say, Osama bin Laden.

New York, Islam and the Debates of the 80s.

So what was going on in New York in the 70s and 80s? I don’t think we can say that Islam was a big issue in the melting pot of 70s and 80s America; this site suggests that today in NY there are 160,000 arab Americans, who came in two waves, the first of which was in 1925 and was largely Christian. This is not exactly a big population for New York, and a lot of them aren’t even Muslim (and probably the descendants of the 1920s migrants don’t even think of themselves as Arab-Americans, after 3 generations). The second wave of migrants in the 1960s may have raised some issues about settlement, integration etc. but this needs to be seen in context – 1 million Vietnamese moved to the USA in a few years after 1975, and Chinese migration was an ongoing process in the US. The debates in the western world about migration in the 1970s and 1980s focussed on Asians, not Muslims, and really the issue of “Islamification” only came up in the 1990s, after the collapse of Israel’s war in Lebanon and the camp David peace accords, the second intifada, etc. – i.e. in response to the growing presence of Islam in western news reports, and corresponding waves of refugees fleeing those countries.

If you look at some of the pop cultural stuff specific to New York or the Eastern seaboard from the 70s and 80s – things like the work of Brett Easton Ellis, movies like Heathers and the other teen-movie stuff of the time, Wall Street etc, they’re much more concerned with debates about in- and out-groups in New York, as reflected in class and some regional or christian-specific categories (like WASPs vs. nerds, or simliar) than they are about Islam. I remember watching 21 Jump Street and Cagney And Lacey, and episodes about migrants and discrimination were rare, and primarily focussed on Asians. 21 Jump Street had a few episodes about e.g. abortion, HIV/AIDS, etc. but the background of political trouble to these was always christian. As an outsider looking at NY, I don’t see much evidence that Serrano would have been growing up in an environment where other religions were much of a significant factor.

The key issue in the west in the 70s and 80s was the uneasy relationship between christianity and civil society as envisaged in a modern liberal democratic state. There was a low-key conflict going on between popular culture and christian sensibility, that occasionally exploded in controversy, and this conflict provided fertile soil for the imagination of budding artists. I don’t know much about art, but there were some pop-cultural movements at that time that I understood, so let’s look at them.

Thrash Metal and the Christian Revival

The shock-troops in this conflict with christianity in the 70s and 80s were undoubtedly heavy metal, who took up where punk’s guerilla warriors left off at the end of the 70s, and mobilized an army of disaffected young men against the religious imagery of the time. This wasn’t equivocal, either – heavy metal hated christianity and christianity hated metal. Islam and Hinduism didn’t figure in this, and in fact it took the generals in this movement – Metallica – 10 years to finally write a song about a religion other than Christianity. When they did, it was a hate-filled screed about alternative religions, telling the very personal story of James Hetfield’s own family life. No interest in the large international religions at all. But before then, Metallica wrote songs like Leper Messiah and Creeping Death that were highly critical of christianity; Slayer were using and abusing christian imagery as much as they could, Testament wrote whole albums about the hypocrisy of christianity (albums like The New Order) and the more skatey/speedy metal bands like Suicidal Tendencies were laying in with criticisms of religion as a prop or crutch, and direct criticism of the new wave of televangelists (with songs like Send Me Your Money). Tellingly, the christian response at the time wasn’t to accuse them of bias and Islam-loving. No one demanded that Metallica write Leper Prophet, or that Slayer’s Expendable Youth be rewritten to include lines about muslim martyrdom. No, instead, they accused these bands of being satanists and wanting children to go to hell. Other religions didn’t enter into this debate at all, and in fact to the best of my knowledge the only song written in that time about islamic countries was Iron Maiden’s Powerslave – which was about the Pharaohs.

The christian response to this was organized and serious. They first tried for censorship, introducing the PMRC (a censorship committee beautifully attacked by Megadeth’s Hook In Mouth), they invented the concept of back-masking and made videos about how AC/DC were satanists who believed they were channelling their dead singer through their new singer; they did speaking tours and later Tipper Gore introduced those abominable censorship stickers called “Tipper Stickers.” At no point did the issue of bias come into it, because religious groups in America in the 70s and 80s hadn’t registered Islam, it was irrelevant. They directly accused their enemies of attacking christianity within a christian framework, i.e. of being satanists. The relative sophistication of the “why don’t you criticize Hindus too” victimization complex is very new.

So, Serrano grew up in an environment where all of the extant good music (i.e. heavy metal) was at war with christianity, and neither side was talking about other religions at all. This isn’t reflected in just the good music either…

Pop Music, Blasphemy and Smut

Madonna exploded onto the pop scene in the early 80s with a huge sexual energy and a lot of catholic angst, and was immediately targeted by religious campaigners. She wasn’t targeted by Muslims or Hindus, but by Christians – and they fed off each other for years. This came to a head with the highly emotionally charged Like A Prayer, where she has sex with a child Jesus[1], but she had already managed to offend with Papa Don’t Preach and, well, pretty much everything else she ever did. Compare the lyrics and imagery of songs like hers with those of Lady Gaga, and you can see that it’s a lot harder to offend anyone now than it was in the early 80s. Madonna used blatant christian imagery in her work, and got a lot of flak for it; but christian imagery wasn’t just used negatively in the 80s  – it was heavily present in the work of bands like U2, Terence Trent d’Arby, the New Romantic movement, The Cure, etc. Through the entire opus of New Romantic work (and there is a lot!) you’ll be hard pressed to find any reference to any religion except Christianity and maybe a touch of Buddhism. Sure, the Cure sing about killing an Arab, but they’re quoting Camus; the Bangles Walk Like an Egyptian but they don’t talk like one, and again when speaking of a North African country they explicitly skip the 800 years or so of Islamic history and go straight to the Pharoahs. Nik Kershaw mentions “a lone man of Aaron” in The Riddle, but that’s pretty much the only reference to Judaism in 10 long years of make-up, military jackets and spikey hair. Meanwhile the christian imagery comes thick and fast, and again much of it positive as well as negative. Particularly Gospel Singers, crosses, kneeling in prayer, churches as symbols of mystery, decay or (generalized) faith. You won’t find a mosque or a Hindu temple as an image of any of these things, though they may be visible in the odd place here and there as a homage to exoticism or the Orient.

So where do we think we can find the most obvious evidence of “alternative” religions being presented? Perhaps in a musical movement symbolized by the Ankh, a distinctly non-christian symbol…?

Goth, Punk and the Wyccan Impulse

Goth music draws heavily on the twin themes of religion and death, and was at its peak during the mid-80s under the guiding influence of bands like Sisters of Mercy, Christian Death[2], Bauhaus and the like. Christian Death spent most of their lives ranting against christianity exclusively, in strong and uncompromising terms; but the other bands in this genre were much more eclectic in their tastes. The Sisters of Mercy are a good example, using a lot of christian imagery but also drawing on the magical (in songs like Floodland) and expropriating middle eastern musical forms, particularly that amazing wailing woman in Temple of Love. But when they took this music, they took it in purely aesthetic terms – the political and religious context was stripped out. It’s as if the cultural background was irrelevant to the Western world, so strange and mysterious that it could not influence thinking beyond the aesthetic. And indeed, when we see groups like Inkubus Sukkubus or Garden of Delight searching for mystical inspiration, do we see them drawing on the extant religions of their day, which they could easily turn to for inspiration were those religions omnipresent in their cultural life? No, Inkubus Sukkubus turn to Wycca and varied notions of pre-Christian witchcraft; Garden of Delight construct a strange personal religion based on the ancient Sumerian angels and Cthulhu. Sure, Garden of Delight have a song called Sharia but the lyrics are completely unrelated to Islam. They have a lot more songs about fallen Sumerian angels than they do about any extant religion.

The efforts of Goths and punks to revitalize Witchcraft, Paganism and Wycca are particularly illustrative in this light. In the late 80s and early 90s there was an interesting blend of hardcore punk that attempted to sing about paganism, and which drew on pagan ideals and mythology; at this same time witchcraft and paganism were beginning to be accepted as a religious theme or ideal for people seeking a new type of religious outlet, and I think even were accepted as one of the religions the US Army allows one to worship (by the end of the 90s). However, in reconstructing these religions the people involved were heavily influenced by a christian context, and thought only of investigating the paganism destroyed by christianity. Had they known anything more about the wider religious setting of the modern era, they could have taken a quick trip to Japan and explored a currently existing pagan religion practiced by 120 million people. They didn’t though, because the context for religious thought in the West is so heavily dominated by christianity that the concept of an animist religion that never came into conflict with christianity doesn’t exist to most of us; the idea of animism living in harmony with modern society is anathema to our concept of religious progress because we see religious progress through the prism of christian conquest. Where non-christian religions entered the popular mind in the 80s they did so only in as much as they were perceived to have a relationship to christianity, or stripped of all context down ot the purely aesthetic.

Context-free Islam in Cinema

Islam was barely relevant in cinema in the 70s and 80s, but where it was shown in movies it tended to be presented as the backdrop for western stories, its own history and culture irrelevant. So we see at the beginning of The Exorcist that the original source of the demon is dug up in Iraq, but the demon itself is christian and Iraq is just an empty backdrop, a series of bazaars and the call to prayer as culture-free exoticism to define the origin of the demon as the middle east; islam is here only as historical fact. In the first Indiana Jones the Holy Land serves only as the colonial setting for the conflict of western powers – neither Judaism nor Islam have anything to say about the expropriation of an object that is sacred to both of them, and all the non-white characters are incidental (or mercenaries to be shot). It’s the same old adventure in a different setting. In A Passage to India we have a love story in a colonial setting, but that’s all it is; even the Zulu movies give barely a moment’s time to elucidating the religious and cultural details of the enemy, which is jsut a black African mass. It’s as if there is not even an awareness of the possibility of other religions, or they’re discounted immediately as irrelevant to the Western story.

And this is the key here – irrelevance. It’s not that people wish to deny the existence of other religions in the world, they just don’t figure into the Western cultural context. Religious representation in the West in the 70s and 80s occurred entirely within the Christian framework.

Role-playing and Christian Censorship

This is also clear in the christian response to fantasy RPGs, which was to accuse them of satanism or idolatry, and to campaign for censoring them. This campaign had partial successes, resulting in schools banning gaming clubs and even a 60 minutes “documentary” on how dangerous these games are. But again, the christian response to these games was not in terms of the risk of allowing other religions into schools, or of the game being disrespectful to religions generally – the only concern was about christianity and satanism. And the games themselves were largely bereft of non-christian religious influences when they started – the Cleric character’s spells are clearly inspired by images of the Priests and holy men of the western religious canon, and about the only non-western monsters are the Rakshasa and the Djinn. Even the conception of Hell is heavily inspired by Milton, Dante etc., rather than drawing on those of other religions (such as the Bhagavad Gita). Campaigns set in middle eastern or Asian settings came much later as “alternative worlds,” and the two key settings right up until 3rd edition were Greyhawk and Forgotten Realms – pantheistic but clearly European and feudal. Warhammer was explicitly christian-themed. The main departure of role-playing from the common themes of religious context we see in other cultural works of this time is its adoption of pantheism. But this pantheism doesn’t change the backdrop from its European feudal setting, and it only provides colour to a character class obviously based around western, christian notions of what a cleric can do. And you won’t find many islamic or hindu objections to RPGs in the western world – when a generation of young nerds grew up in the 80s, they knew that they only had one religious enemy, and it was christianity.

The Politics of the 70s and 80s

Anyone who was growing up or a young adult in the 70s and 80s will remember that the social politics was enormously conservative and heavily influenced by christian ideals; much of the pop cultural struggle in the 80s was to push christianity out of our private lives. In the 70s and 80s christian minsters and evangelists preached their bigotry loud and clear, and attempted to enforce it in ordinary life as much as they could. Homosexuality was still illegal in some places, and violence against gays was both accepted and normal (I even had a GM in the early 90s tell me casually about his younger days “poofter-bashing” on Oxford Street). HIV/AIDS was just entering consciousness and widely decried as a gay disease; discrimination against gays in employment and housing was both legal and common, and attempts to end this discrimination met organized and vociferous resistance from the church. Depending on where you were domestic violence and/or rape in marriage were considered acceptable, and it was generally not considered possible to rape a prostitute – this was theft, not rape. Censorship – in the sense of book burning – was advocated by all major christian groups, and attempts to decriminalize prostitution or drug use were met with extremely vocal christian objections. The police were free to beat, rape and torture members of the underclass, and in the 70s in Australia, the US and the UK political activists were still murdered by their opponents, or the police. In America Irish catholics were raising funds for Irish catholic terrorism in the UK, and christian extremist survivalist groups were establishing arms caches in advance of the coming race war. The doctrine of “blood in the face” and white supremacism were intimately connected with religion in a way that they aren’t now – it was inconceivable that a member of the far right could be openly gay in 70s and 80s Europe, but now their leaders are, and even atheism and vegetarianism are tolerated amongst their ranks – this was impossible in the 80s because fascists were universally christian. The catholic church openly supported, or later tacitly condoned, fascism, torture and mass murder in latin America and the Phillipines. Abortion was still illegal and extremely hard to get in many countries – in Ireland even into the mid 90s children who had been raped were prevented from leaving the country to get abortions by mobs of christians. Even women’s shelters and domestic violence programs were opposed by christians on christian grounds. The numerous victims of child abuse in the church were still either too scared to come forward, or their cases were failing, or their lives were destroyed when they did; and the catholic church was still openly involved in destroying evidence, hiding crimes and moving accused priests to other states and countries.

This was all unique to christianity in the west, though no doubt in Hindu countries there were hindu scandals, and in muslim countries muslim scandals (e.g. Anwar Ibrahim in Malaysia). But the central angst of the western world and of artists, musicians and large slabs of what was to become “Generation X,” the central threat to the freer, more open way of life we could see coming was the christian right. Islam wasn’t complaining about Roe vs. Wade; Hindus weren’t objecting to Slayer; Buddhists weren’t trying to ban AD&D or stop the sale of morning after pills to raped teenagers. You didn’t see Shintoists protesting in front of abortion clinics or African animists rampaging through Soho smashing gay bars. They may have been doing that in Egypt, India and Japan; but we didn’t even know what was going on there, or even really care much what religions were practiced where, because we were told every day in no uncertain terms that we lived in the christian west, and that game we liked was an offence to christian values; those people coming here from Africa would dilute christian English blood; those women gyrating on the stage were offending christian values of chastity and modesty.

Conclusion (at last)

By the time the Satanic Verses came out and Islamic engagement with western art exploded centre stage, Serrano was 39 years old and had been making art for 6 years. He was raised a catholic in New York during a period of history when non-christian religions were not a big part of either our cultural sensitivities or our cultural fears – and particularly when Islam and Hinduism were simply considered to be colourful parts of the backdrop of our colonial history. At the time he was creating his work there was an intense cultural conflict playing out, especially in America, between christianity and secular culture, and this conflict probably played a defining role in the development of the artistic sensibilities of Serrano and his peers. It’s highly unlikely that he would have even thought about Islam in his attempts to explore “the relationship between beautiful imagery and vulgar materials.” Somewhat perversely for the christian advocates of the “Judaeo-christian society” they claim is the status quo for the English-speaking west, until they allow other religions to share an equal part of that status quo, both in practice and in rhetoric, it’s unlikely that artists like Serrano will ever spare much thought to making art that criticizes those other religions. This isn’t a sign of the shallow obssession of people like Serrano with attacking a weakened and fading christianity – it is, instead, a sign of the way christians have been able to reserve a special place for their own religion in the ostensibly secular west, whose cultural underpinnings they jealously claim as their own. Until they give up the one, they can’t expect to see much of a reduction in the frequency or intensity of the other – which, on a charitable reading of its value as art, might explain why the piss christ remains a popular artwork 20 years after its creation.

—

fn1: Thus ticking all the boxes!

fn2: Need I say more?

 

Cthulhu in the Eye of the Storm

Young, but ferocious in his hatred of the Squid Gods

Even his tongue is a lethal weapon in the war against Infinite Evil

 

Old Campaigns: The Apocalypse Campaign

The campaign I lovingly refer to as The Apocalypse Campaign was a campaign I ran in the early 2000s in Sydney, Australia with a combined group of inexperienced friends and experienced players. It started off, I recall, using a tarot-card based system whose name I forget and which was, unsurprisingly, terrible. I then moved rapidly to a non-tarot system of my own devising that was intended to be very simple and was, correspondingly, probably quite useless. This system was characterized by now character classes and skill-based magic (i.e. no spells – players just say what they want to do and I set a difficulty).

I think of this campaign as a kind of story seed with sandbox, in that I placed a few key story elements in the first adventure with no clear plan as to how they would unfold, an initial plan for one or two unrelated adventures, and a plan to build a strong story based on whatever happened next. The story seeds were quite powerful and gave me a backdrop within which I could easily control the PCs actions whenever I felt the campaign needed a kick, but the setting was quite powerful and the PCs good at exploring and controlling it themselves.

The Setting: Post-apocalyptic fantastic Europe

The setting was Europe after some kind of combined arcane cataclysm and apocalypse, in which the seas had risen (possibly due to global warming, though it wasn’t clear), advanced civilisations had collapsed and magic and monsters had entered the world. The cause of the collapse was unknown, with all knowledge of that time mysteriously lost, and the events were generally blamed on “science” so the world had retreated into a kind of neo-luddite mediaeval system, ruled by feudal kings under the wise guidance of the Catholic Church. This is the campaign for which I carefully constructed maps of a flooded Europe using just paint and a photocopier. I don’t think I have those maps anymore but the rich detail they provided was very useful for keeping my players engaged in what turned out to be a complex and interesting post-apocalyptic scenario.

In fact, the true history of the apocalypse was that the Catholic church, seeing their grip on the world slipping away with the increasing influx of technology and scientific knowledge, unleashed the catastrophe of the apocalypse deliberately into the world, breaking barriers between the material plane and some other planes to allow demons, monsters and magic in. The ritual they invoked led to the destruction of the modern order but preserved their own temporal power, enabling them to assert themselves in the aftermath as both the ruling powers and the first custodians of magic. In the new era, they hunted down those who were not officially licensed to use magic, destroyed heretics, and carefully shepherded all knowledge of “before” to hide their complicity in the world’s downfall. They held all of Europe in subjection under an undying pope, whose soul was reincarnated in a new boy child every 90 or so years. They also sought out and destroyed pre-collapse technology, and controlled a pan-European army of religious inquisitors (the Falcons) whose job was making sure everything went smoothly. All more advanced magical items that would replace the role of technology in the new era were also controlled by the church or its secular representatives. The model society was similar to that in the flooded post-apocalyptic Europe of the White Bird of Kinship novels, with demons.

The Plot Hooks

The basic plot hook for the adventure was simple: the characters were in a pub waiting for a ship from a fragment of England to Brittany, when Falcon soldiers descended on the pub and attempted to destroy it and abduct a child. The PCs rescue the child and the old man protecting it, and flee, but are chased and in a brief battle kill the soldiers but lose the old man. His last dying words are a request for them to save the child, which they agree to do, and they begin hiking overland to a different port to take ship to Brittany. The child, of course, is the next pope, and their act of charity has put them in direct conflict with the church. They then go to Brittany, meeting a Hungarian Fire Lancer along the way (and stealing his gene-coded fire lance), then in flight from the Church they travel to somewhere in Germany. On the way they are stranded on a haunted Ocean Thermal Energy Collection platform, where the haunting ghost shies away from them in terror at the mere sight of their baby. Much of the rest of the adventure involved them slowly discovering that yes, the child harboured an intensely evil being and yes, the being was the next Pope. From there they began to discover details of the history of the collapse, the Church’s power and how evil the Church really was.

Settings and Adventures

I managed to put some pretty memorable settings and scenarios into this campaign, some of them based on rediscovered tech and some of them based on the new magical world and its links to hell. Some examples:

• The Ocean Thermal Energy Collector, which the characters wash up onto during a storm. While seeking shelter they stumble on the undead guards of its last occupants, killing them, but they are unable to defeat the chief ghost in the OTEC tower; however, they are able to steal his treasure because he shies away in terror from the infinite evil of the baby they are looking after. This gave them the first hint that they needed to investigate the baby magically for clues as to why the church was chasing it
• Hungarian Fire Lancers, which I made up on the spot but proved very useful. A Hungarian fire lance is a pre-collapse plasma cannon of awesome power, gene-coded to a particular family so essentially an heir loom. The lance’s owners are allowed to keep these artifacts in exchange for service to the church, and they are legendarily powerful. The PCs, meeting a lancer early on in the campaign, were way too crafty for me, and turned an NPC meeting I had intended as a bit of flavour into a chance to empower themselves mightily. One of the PCs was a technomage, and the PCs thought that he might be able to hack a genecode. So while the fire lancer was distracted during a battle with some pirates, this PC slipped down below and recoded the fire lance to his/her own DNA. The fire lancer died when he next touch his own lance, and the PCs stole it.
• The Time Bomb: Passing through an area of Southern Germany in their skyship, the PCs stumbled on a region deep in the mountains where birds hung in the air, slowly collecting moss; and on the ground below were the scenes of a battle between tanks and soldiers, all frozen in the midst of their actions. So dirt was frozen in the middle of an explosion, soldiers caught in mid-air halfway through a leap, a tank in the middle of being destroyed. The PCs investigated and found they couldn’t move anything or interfere with anything except a single bomb. The technomage disarmed this bomb, and suddenly all the previously-frozen soldiers and animals collapsed, dead, to the ground; the tank completed exploding and the dirt flew to its natural trajectory. The PCs had discovered a bomb that freezes time in a small area, causing all living things in the area to die instantly, and freezing everything in the state it was in when set off. Very useful for, say, killing a very powerful pope… but with only one use. They took it, and a grav tank.
• Conversations with Orc Lords: The PCs did a bit of trading and passenger-carrying with their skyship, and in one memorable journey carried an Orc lord who turned out to be a very civilized and sophisticated chap, with a taste in fine wines and art. He hailed from a kingdom in Southern France that was entirely Orcish, and described their society of ritual duels, slave-owning, and continual internecine conflict. I re-envisaged Orcs as sophisticated, intelligent and yet still brutal and cruel, denied access to any form of trade with their neighbours and so only able to obtain magic items and technology by conquest. The PCs, of course, formed an alliance and immediately traded tech with this chap, and the Orcs – in all their brutality and sophistication – became a prominent feature of this campaign.
• The Dragon Battle: I do dragon battles very rarely in my campaigns, preferring to keep dragons for near the end, when things are really out of control, and usually making them so awesome and inspiring that they only ever need be met once. So once the PCs had set up a kingdom for themselves in the pyrenees, discovered the truth about the Catholic church and were starting to coordinate resistance to and war against the pope, the pope sent a dragon to destroy them. This dragon, longer than London bridge and louder than a steam train, descended on their tower in a storm of its own making and killed one of the PCs instantly in a surprise attack. It then set about destroying their skyship, wasting their castle and slaughtering their followers in quick order, and they had to use all their wits to defeat it. It was only finally defeated by the technomage, who very quick-wittedly grabbed a grav bike and flew to a neighbouring cliff face, from where he took sniper shots at the dragon using the Hungarian fire lance, while the dragon tore the top off of their skyship, trying to kill their fighter. They lost two of their party to the dragon, half of their followers, one of their grav bikes, the skyship and a chunk of their tower, and even when it was dead and had fallen to its doom in a valley it was still dangerous – two PCs went to look at the corpse and with its dying gaze it mesmerized one, trying to get him to attack the other one. This dragon was a really stunning and powerful encounter for everyone involved, and really impressed on me the joys of high-level adventuring (which I do rarely).
• The Shrike Tree: The PCs discovered that the Pope and the church had taken control of the earth and controlled access to a lot of magical power, as well as holding open the gates between the planes, through a deal with hell. Particularly, an innocent figure was being eternally crucified in hell, and while this figure was there there was no way of stopping the pope from reincarnating. So the PCs entered hell and found the figure, which I think was Judas (my memory doesn’t serve me well now). Judas was pinned to a tree of thorns that grew in the centre of hell. The rest of the tree was covered in thorns too, and on every one a fairy was impaled (or some other good creature). In order to stop the reincarnation, the PCs had to kill Judas and then impale their own baby on the Shrike Tree. I got this idea from Dan Simmons’ Hyperion, which I’d been reading at the time. The PCs’ journey through hell to here, and the subsequent mercy-killing of Judas and infanticide, were the first time I had ever set an adventure in another plane.
• The River Styx and the Starbound Sea: After killing Judas, the entirety of hell turned on the PCs and they fled. They crossed the river styx and reached the gates of hell as they were closing, but a final, huge monster (the gatekeeper) attacked them and they had to flee, back into hell. Finally they somehow all got hurled into the river styx, where they were washed away downstream, until they all woke up, without their memories, on a beach of dark sand under a perfectly black sky. The beach was being gently lapped by waves from a sea that seemed to be teeming with stars. They knew nothing, but walking along the beach towards them was a character from a distant monastery – a monastery on another plane that the characters had previously visited to get information about the Shrike Tree. And it was here that the campaign ended, with the PCs having been successful, and lost everything.

Conclusion: Story-seeded sandboxes are fun

These settings were a lot of fun to think up and throw at the PCs, and really none of them (except the OTEC) were planned before the adventure started. We explored post-apocalyptic Europe together, and I made it up as I went. The only story goal I had when the campaign started was that the PCs would uncover the truth about the apocalypse, and maybe kill the pope. In the end they did much more than that, destroying the power of the church and establishing their own kingdom in the temporal world (which they then lost). But the details of all of that kind of drew together as we went, with me crafting the next stages of the plot from what the PCs had already done and found. It was a roller-coaster of a ride in a really dense, richly detailed science-fantasy world. If you have a strong setting, a vision of a final goal, interested players with interesting PCs, and a story seed that is both mysterious and compelling (and offers a lot of plot-intervention moments) you can create a truly exciting, long-lived and powerful campaign that is both sandbox and story. Well worth the effort!

 

Some D&D-style Actions for Compromise and Conceit

Here are a couple of examples of “actions” based on the skill-based d20 system I developed a while ago, combined with the Actions framework discussed yesterday. One is a spell, one a “supernatural ability” and one a “mundane” (and hideous) special ability. The Cost line in each description gives the attribute against which damage is done if the action fails. The cost is always 1 wound. In my conception of magic, arcane magic incurs a physical cost (it is exhausting) while divine magic incurs a mental cost (it drives you a little bit.. irrational and loopy). So failed arcane spells incur a wound against strength, while failed divine spells incur a wound against intelligence. In this system, a critical is achieved by a roll of a 20, at which point 2d10 are re-rolled and added to the previous roll to get a new total. On rolling a critical, all maximum effects (damage, rounds of duration of effect, etc.) are increased by some amount.

Grendel’s Demise

Type: Spell

Level: 7

Cost: Strength

Conditions: Must have one hand free and be unencumbered, not wearing metal armour. Target must be within sight, and have at least one arm or other limb.

Skill check: Intelligence (Offense) vs. Target Strength (Defense)

Critical: Yes (Double)

Effect: This spell attempts to tear off the target’s arm. It does maximum damage 7, and the target is stunned for one round plus one round per point of success (maximum 7, double on a critical). The target is also bleeding (1 wound/rd) until healing is administered. The target loses all use of one arm, either temporarily (due to massive injury) or permanently (due to amputation) at the GM’s discretion.

Hideous death

Type: attack, reaction

Level: 1

Cost: Charisma

Conditions: Attacker must be visible to the targets of the action, who must be allies of the target. Target must have been reduced to 0 hps in this round, by the PC or one of his/her allies.

Skill check: Charisma (Offense) vs. Charisma (Defense)

Effect: The character turns an opponent’s death into a lurid display of horror and gore. Any ally of the dying enemy who witnesses his/her/its death is shaken for 1 rd plus 1 rd/point of success. The target experiences a -2 penalty on all actions and will attempt to avoid combat with the character if possible. If the target is already shaken due to witnessing a hideous death in this engagement by this character, they move from shaken to terrified, and will immediately attempt to flee the battle.

If this action is being used on an enemy the character did not kill, apply a -2 penalty to the skill check.

The GM may choose to allow the player to describe the type of hideous death for an attempt at a bonus on the skill check. This is strongly advised! Note that failure to successfully terrify the target merely makes the PC look like a bloodthirsty maniac (charisma damage).

Infernal Essence

Type: Ability

Level: 1

Cost: None

Skill check: Wisdom (Use) vs. DC 20

Effect: The PC conjures an infernal essence to enhance their weapon or armour, giving a +1 to maximum damage or damage reduction for 1 min + 1 min/pt of success (maximum=character level). This is an infernal effect, so can be dispelled by demon-binding or abjuration effects, but not by magic-dispelling effects. It is usually visible as a faint glow and/or feeling of discomfort or unpleasantness surrounding the PC.

Higher-level versions of this effect are possible, and give an effect equal to the level of the action.