An evening with the RPG Blokes

I had the opportunity recently to sit down for a natter with the RPG Blokes. Not in the same room, unfortunately, and the internet connection over Zoom gave us a hard time, but Mark and the guys cleaned up the audio to make a seamless confabulation (in the real sense, not the dopy AI developer jargon). Join us and listen in as we natter about Dragon Warriors, Jewelspider, and all things roleplaying.

And in the same week there's an interview with my Dragon Warriors and Golden Dragon co-creator Oliver Johnson. You can listen to that or read the transcript.

Going for gold

When Vulcanverse was first published, Emmanuel Quaireau said to me, "It's easy to see this is a work written with love." It's really nice when somebody notices that. Jamie and I put years of work into Vulcanverse, and gamebooks are not such a vibrant market that we can expect George R.R. Martin scale rewards, or even George Costanza rewards. When you're wrestling with plot twists and story logic and the flowchart looks like all those notebooks the guy has in Memento, you'd better really love what you're doing.

So I was grateful and flattered to see that in his roundup of the top narrative games of the year, Juan Pablo Fernández del Río awarded Vulcanverse the number one slot for the second year running. And that's especially gratifying when you see the stiff competition we were up against. I particularly like the look of Pentiment (a stylish-looking whodunit set in a 16th century monastery) and Chants of Sennaar (Piranesi meets the Biblical Tower of Babel, with elements that made me think of the legendary Chris Crawford's Legacy of Siboot). But they're all enticing and have been crafted with obvious love, which makes Vulcanverse's position at #1 all the more a thrill and a privilege.

Juan has written extensively on all forms of interactive narrative, so I'll just recommend his website Mundo Iludico -- which, thanks to the magic of AI translation (see Tower of Babel reference above), is a treasure trove now unlocked for us all -- and say that a great place to start is his essay on open worlds.

At least as good as Wicked

Looking for the ultimate fantasy rock opera? The wait is over. Blood Sword aficionado Philip Hill, working with Copilot and Suno, has created a musical version of the gamebook saga. Several versions, in fact. The one above is the hard rock opera, but if that's too heavy metal there's also the soft rock variant below. Or are Fairport Convention and Steeleye Span more your thing? Here's the English folk version.

Philip confessed that he made a mistake with the lyrics, having assumed the Blasting of Spyte took place a thousand years ago when in fact it was only two centuries. An easy mistake to make given that the events of The Walls of Spyte take place in 1000 AS, and in any case we can allow some poetic licence when the results are as awesome as this. Rock on.

Mythos without the þorn

Talking about H P Lovecraft last time reminded me of a pet gripe. I have quite a few of those, if we're being honest, but this one is about the proper way to pronounce Cthulhu. To begin with, here's HPL's take, as given to Duane Rimel in a letter dated 23 July 1934:

"The word is supposed to represent a fumbling human attempt to catch the phonetics of an absolutely non-human word. [...] The letters CTHULHU were merely what Prof. Angell hastily devised to represent (roughly and imperfectly, of course) the dream-name orally mouthed to him by the young artist Wilcox. The actual sound—as nearly as human organs could imitate it or human letters record it—may be taken as something like Khlul'-hloo, with the first syllable pronounced gutturally and very thickly. The u is about like that in full; and the first syllable is not unlike klul in sound, since the h represents the guttural thickness. The second syllable is not very well rendered—the l sound being unrepresented [in Angell's rendition of the word]. My rather careful devising of this name was a sort of protest against the silly and childish habit of most weird and science-fiction writers, of having utterly non-human entities use a nomenclature of thoroughly human character; as if alien-organed beings could possibly have languages based on human vocal organs. Actually, every name supposed to have been originated by non-humans should be painstakingly shaped in such a way as not to conform to the principles of human vocalism and language."

Clear? HPL gave a simpler account in a letter to Willis Conover dated 29 August 1936:

"Of course it is not a human name at all-having never been designed for enunciation by the vocal apparatus of Homo sapiens. The best approximation one can make is to grunt, bark, or cough the imperfectly-formed syllables Cluh-Luh with the tip of the tongue firmly affixed to the roof of the mouth. That is, if one is a human being. Directions for other entities are naturally different."

The confusion seems to have arisen because sloppy readers (and Wikipedia editors) have assumed Lovecraft was aiming for the suggestion of chthonian. Cthulhu is the very opposite of a chthonic entity, having come from the stars and been buried under the sea. If Lovecraft had meant the C to be pronounced as in the common but mistaken version "kuh-THUL-oo" he'd have written it Ch.

We can isolate the syllables as (Ct)(hul)(hu) rather than as the popular assumption of (C)(thul)(hu). It's more accurate to think of the sound that Prof Angell wrote as ct to be the consonant at the end of of a word like "act". Try isolating that, removing the a sound, and you have a sort of bitten-back consonant that could sound like a gulped k.

Now take the next element, rendered by Prof Angell as hul. With the gulped k followed by hul (vowel sound as in "full") and followed by hloo (mistakenly written by Angell as "hu") then we have something nearer to what Lovecraft imagined -- with the same proviso he applied, namely that our mouths and throats and the atmosphere we breathe are all wrong for making any such sound.

That said, Cthulhu cultists would have as much knowledge of the accurate pronunciation of their deity's name as any 1920s Christian or Muslim (etc) could have of the Big Bang. And Cthulhu probably knows and cares nothing for what its cultists think. So player-characters can pronounce it however they like, and argue it out with the big lug when it finally rises from the deep.

An ulcer on the big toe

‘People whose minds are—like [Arthur] Machen’s—steeped in the orthodox myths of religion, naturally find a poignant fascination in the conception of things which religion brands with outlawry and horror. Such people take the artificial and obsolete concept of “sin” seriously, and find it full of dark allurement. On the other hand, people like myself, with a realistic and scientific point of view, see no charm or mystery whatever in things banned by religious mythology. We recognise the primitiveness and meaninglessness of the religious attitude, and in consequence find no element of attractive defiance or significant escape in those things which happen to contravene it. The whole idea of “sin”, with its overtones of unholy fascination, is in 1932 simply a curiosity of intellectual history. The filth and perversion which to Machen’s obsoletely orthodox mind meant profound defiances of the universe’s foundations, mean to us only a rather prosaic and unfortunate species of organic maladjustment—no more frightful, and no more interesting, than a headache, a fit of colic, or an ulcer on the big toe. Now that the veil of mystery and the hokum of spiritual significance have been stripped away from such things, they are no longer adequate motivations for [fantasy or horror fiction]. We are obliged to hunt up other symbols of imaginative escape—hence the vogue of interplanetary, dimensional, and other themes whose element of remoteness and mystery has not yet been destroyed by advancing knowledge.’

We're almost a hundred years on from when H P Lovecraft wrote that and still plenty of humans imagine the universe being ruled over by a stern parent with a set of rules and punishments for naughty children to fret about -- and no two groups can quite agree on what the stern parent's rules are. It's pretty much the textbook study in how children grow up emotionally troubled. At this point I just hope we don't infect the AGIs of the future with our ape-brained notions.

HPL was a tireless champion for the sense of wonder. He was simply opposed to the category error that puts the numinous in the same box as objective reality. This is from the introductory paragraphs of  'Supernatural Horror in Literature':

'Relatively few are free enough from the spell of the daily routine to respond to rappings from outside, and tales of ordinary feelings and events, or of common sentimental distortions of such feelings and events, will always take first place in the taste of the majority; rightly, perhaps, since of course these ordinary matters make up the greater part of human experience. But the sensitive are always with us, and sometimes a curious streak of fancy invades an obscure corner of the very hardest head; so that no amount of rationalisation, reform, or Freudian analysis can quite annul the thrill of the chimney-corner whisper or the lonely wood. There is here involved a psychological pattern or tradition as real and as deeply grounded in mental experience as any other pattern or tradition of mankind; coeval with the religious feeling and closely related to many aspects of it.'

If that's the kind of fiction that sets up a stirring in your soul, you might like some of the offerings in Wrong magazine: stories that take the reader over the boundary into a place where everyday reality meets the inexplicable. Cue the music.

*  *  *

(While we're on the subject of Lovecraftian horrors -- if you missed the funding campaign on Gamefound for Whispers Beyond The Stars, there's now the opportunity to secure a copy with a late pledge. But don't dilly-dally. I can't guarantee there'll be a third chance.)

Caller Unknown

As well as co-creating Golden Dragon, Blood Sword and Dragon Warriors, Oliver Johnson has written a number of excellent fantasy novels. There's the Lightbringer trilogy and also a very fine opening volume in a new series, The Knight of the Fields. Unfortunately you'll look for that last one in vain. Publishers raved that it was the best fantasy they'd seen all year -- and then decided it was "too 1990s" (I wonder what they think A Game of Thrones is?) and wanted rewrites to give it a more conventionally heroic ending.

Fantasy publishers are idiots, but luckily Oliver has turned his talents to a field where the gatekeepers are more discerning: the conspiracy thriller. Caller Unknown, out next week, entangles its protagonist in a world of cults, terrorists and corrupt politics. Take a look at Michael Jecks' review in Shots magazine to see the kind of rave reception it's getting. If you enjoy the Winter Soldier/Three Days of the Condor kind of paranoia vibe delivered with the immediacy of a murky modern thriller, don't miss it.

The forms of things unknown

How come I'd never heard until now of Cardinal Cox? No, not the hottie from Friends -- Cardinal Cox is a poet who specializes in the eldritch, the macabre, and the wondrous, with poetry cycles devoted to the works of H.P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, and the like. He has been poet-in-residence at a Victorian cemetery, at a 15th century Gothic church, and at the Dracula Society.

I was introduced to his work by a friend who picked up some of his chapbooks at the World Fantasy Convention in Brighton recently and was kind enough to see that they would find a home with me. Look out for the Codex Nemedia, with poems about Conan, Bran Mak Morn, and Solomon Kane; and the Codex Yog-Sothoth, which includes lines that could have been penned for Queen Nyx in the Vulcanverse series:

"Whose body is the bend of stars

That bows across the night sky."

His poetry is accompanied by amusing and recondite notes to delight the hearts of every true SF/fantasy nerd. I particularly liked the reference to the Bramford apartment building and the translation of the Phaistos Disc. If the Cardinal doesn't run Call of Cthulhu games then he really ought to. One reviewer said of his work: "Earth is a part of the story but, as in much Lovecraftian literature, Earth and our species are by no means as important as we humans tend to think."

He has a collection called Grave Goods that is available on Amazon and is described thus:

"Yes, there are vampires. Plus ancient gods, Frankenstein's creation at the back of a drive-in, Dr Jekyll's sister's guest house, suburban devil worshippers, ship-wrecked sailors, alchemists, murderers, and an alien plant."