OK, that could make for a scary adventure, albeit with a strain of body horror perhaps a bit too reminiscent of "The Shadow Over Innsmouth". There's only one problem with it. By setting the story in the 1920s, the whole idea becomes -- well, kind of quaint, right? It loses the immediacy that could make it genuinely unsettling.
Now suppose we set it instead in the present day. The same therapy is being promoted by a Goop-like company in 2025. (For the avoidance of doubt, I do not mean to imply that Goop actually uses alien glands in their products.) Now it’s much scarier. We live at a time when the US administration has been telling citizens that the best counter to a measles epidemic is not the measles vaccine but large doses of vitamin A, and medical researchers have been told to avoid mentioning mRNA in their grant applications if they want federal funding. So gland transplant nuttiness is not only more uncompromisingly horrific in a modern context, it’s also starkly credible.
This is why Paweł Dziemski and I chose not to set our upcoming Cthulhu gamebook in the traditional Depression-era milieu but instead in a near future in which history has taken some very dark turns. We don't want readers to have the get-out clause of imagining it all in a hokey playacting past. This is horror you're going to have to face without a comfort blanket. More on that project to come, so stay tuned.
Wightchester is a low-fantasy horror campaign that sounds perfect for gamers who play to discover the story. As the Indiegogo description explains, this is "a setting where blades and gunpowder are more important than magic, and where the magic that does exist demands a price. Not a hex crawl, or a conventional adventure, but a free-roaming setting where you can decide what you want to do.
Do you want to try and escape?
Do you want to create a fortified place to live within the prison?
Do you want to clear the entire city of the undead and earn your release?
Good luck with any of those."
You've got till the end of September to back it. And after the last eighteen months of real life, what could be more cathartic?
The conceit is that we're listening to a real-life mystery podcast presented by Matthew Heawood (Barnaby Kay) and Kennedy Fisher (Jana Carpenter). These are well executed dramas, with good scripts (bar the occasional exposition-dump episode) and top-notch acting. They even got the superb Nicola Walker on board. How on earth does she have any spare time? I suspect her husband, who plays Heawood, might have twisted her arm.
If I have any quibble (and of course I do) it's that the flavour of scariness is more Delta Green than authentic Lovecraft. And, yes, I know they're not trying to do authentic Lovecraft, but it's a big step down from cosmic horror to cults-&-conspiracies. Secret organizations saving the world from scheming bogeymen? Not again, thanks. Really, what we have here is The Derlethian Investigations, whereas Lovecraft's conception of horror was genuinely innovative and I'd love to see somebody turn his ideas into a modern horror movie, TV show or podcast. That sheer bleak dread was what I was aiming for with the scenario "The End of the Line" but even there the tension can only build for so long before it all breaks up into running and screaming. Maybe that's a problem with all drama: the takeoff is always more atmospheric and interesting than the landing. That could explain Lovecraft's own aversion to plot. Thrillers are just fairground rides, whereas what was at stake in his stories was something much more personal and disquieting.
But anything that retained the existentialist nightmarishness of unadulterated HPL would likely not be that popular. Audiences want the Doctor Who style of panto horror -- the same thinking that inflicted a queen on the Borg, so that they could get actors in to chew the scenery. After a century of tying plucky reporters to chairs and planning rituals that will summon the apocalypse, it's futile to hope that drama is going to change now. But The Lovecraftian Investigations is a great deal better written than Doctor Who is these days, so putting my purist nitpicking aside I'll happily recommend it as a gripping and genuinely creepy modern classic. I've been listening to it while strolling the sunlit woodland of Surrey and it has transported me to shabby London car parks, rain-swept patches of Orford Ness, posh Pall Mall clubs, and spooky old cottages at night. It's true what they say. On radio, the pictures are better.
Coming up tomorrow: what happens when your roleplaying adventure hinges on a key character -- and the player can't make it that week?
British literary critics of the 19th century had the notion of the "Young Lady Standard", which was a kind of family-friendly U-rating for novels that would not offend the sensibilities of a Victorian girl. Because of this, British literature often shied away from the sort of forthright depiction of life you find in French or Russian novels of the time. There was a feeling on the Continent that literature was an art form and had a right, indeed a responsibility, to mirror life warts and all. In Britain literature was the forerunner of early-evening television.
Even so, authors like Jane Austen were not the twee and cosy yarn-spinners that many suppose. Lady Susan Vernon is an amoral, manipulative adventuress who deserves a place in the ranks of dark antiheroes alongside Vic Mackey and Walter White; Catherine Morland runs afoul of predatory sexual vindictiveness; Lizzie Bennet takes on a real-life dragon for very high stakes; Becky Sharp is willing to betray even those who love her just to squirrel away some cash. Nonetheless, though depths of human depravity are certainly there to be inferred in 19th century British literature, those are all pre-watershed conflicts. None of them is described with the uncompromising raw honesty and occasional breathtaking brutality of authors like Balzac or Chekhov.
Dickens wrote stories to stir your emotions, but he and his readers knew they were parlour entertainment, to be read by the whole family -- a "safe space" in entertainment. A Victorian paterfamilias who opened a novel to be confronted with the likes of Madame Bovary might well have stormed back to the bookshop and thrown it through the window.
I think something similar is behind the uproar we sometimes see nowadays over "unsuitable" content in roleplaying games. There are some people who play games the way those Victorian families read novels; there are others who expect games with no holds barred. This has led to the concept of the "x-card" -- sadly nothing to do with homo superior, but a mechanism to interrupt games whose scenes or subject matter a player is unhappy with. To quote from the blog I linked to there:
"The x-card is used to signal that a boundary has been crossed or that a player is not OK with the content. The game stops immediately, and discussion shifts to the reason why the card was used."
For me that's as absurd as calling a halt to a disturbing play or movie. If you don't like what you're seeing, don't tell me about it; there's the exit. But there's a category disconnect here. I regard roleplaying games as art, no different from literature, theatre, cinema, poetry, and painting. The people who advocate x-cards want their games to be morally uplifting and to avoid upsetting anybody, just like those family novels for the Victorian fireside. We have different expectations.
I have a player who doesn't like horror scenarios. If we're going to be playing a horror campaign, that's OK; she sits it out. Sometimes there's a grey area. A scenario may not be overtly intended as horror, in the sense of belonging to the horror genre, but horrific things happen. There have been a few times when my players have shocked me to the core with some of the things they're willing to do. And that's fine. It's why I play, in fact, to see those things that emerge unexpectedly from characterization -- sometimes beautiful, sometimes very nasty. It's the same when writing characters. You ask yourself how far they will go, what lines won't they cross, and the answer is often revelatory.
What do you do if you come up with something you know will be shocking, whether as a player or a referee? If I thought my players couldn't handle it then I'd keep it to use in a story, perhaps. But really, if my players were like that then we'd soon part company. They and I know we're not setting any limits.
Taking the blog post I cited again, one of that player's boundaries is "I don't want any romance involving my character." But it's really hard to plan that kind of thing in advance, especially in the improv style of play that gives the best games. When refereeing, I wouldn't have an NPC profess love for a PC if I didn't think the player was capable of running with it. (I'm talking about their acting ability and imagination, of course.) What if one player-character falls in love with another? I'd much rather they both played it. Unrequited love is one option there, and it could develop in interesting directions as we know from countless TV shows and novels. It would be pretty disappointing if a player just said, "I don't want to roleplay that." In that case play your blocking. Reject them, spurn their advances in-character. Don't tell everyone about it.
But what about games in a public forum? Twenty years ago I went along to a convention to sign Fabled Lands books but soon got roped into a series of fascinating mini-RPG scenarios run by the guys behind West Point Extra Planetary Academy. Each game had a different setting and was built as a moral quandary to be played out in twenty minutes. They could hardly have started by saying, "This scenario deals with issues X, Y and Z." It's the trigger warning problem. If you're trying to capture a genuine sense of surprise in the game, you can't give too much away upfront. (Not to mention that the evidence indicates that trigger warnings are of no use in any case to the genuinely traumatized.)
Why have these debates crept into games of late? I think partly because roleplaying is becoming -- well, not mass market entertainment, not by any stretch, but certainly it has opened up beyond the hardcore gaming demographic of the early days. Aficionados take a sophisticated approach to their hobby. The casual fan tends to have a less mature outlook.
Also, American culture has always had a much more censorious streak than European. The idea of shutting down a discussion because it offends somebody's moral code is perhaps natural if your country was founded by Puritans. And because of social media, the Overton window has shifted away from liberalism towards moralism. Hence gripes like this, that maybe do make sense over in the US (American friends, feel free to chip in) but strike most Europeans as potty.
And because most roleplaying derives from genre fiction, and genre sensibilities tend to be a little less grown-up than proper literature, there's a tendency to expect roleplaying games to stick to the soft-soap forms of conflict you get in traditional SF and fantasy. Witness the outcries over Game of Thrones when the writers stepped outside genre norms -- even though that was pretty much the entire thesis of the show from day one.
Anyway, enough theorizing. What do we do about it? Well, surely few gamers want to sit around listening while one player explains their reasons for halting the game. The next stop on that line is struggle sessions, which nobody will enjoy. But those people's sense of offence seems genuinely to overwhelm them, and there's no point in subjecting anybody to an experience they disapprove of. So we're going to need better ways to signal which kind of roleplayer you are. High literary with anything goes, or pulp with puritan boundaries? As long as everyone around the table knows what they're letting themselves in for, I'm sure we can all keep on gaming without needing to call the thought police.
A little late for Halloween, here's a short adventure seed for a Victorian horror campaign, possibly but not necessarily something likeTremulus, Call of Cthulhu or The Yellow King. This adventure assumes some background:
The player-characters were previously involved, months or even years before the events of this scenario, in an adventure such as “The Night of the Jackals” in Cthulhu by Gaslight (see video playthrough below), or any scenario which ends with a mansion being gutted by fire.
The villain of "The Night of the Jackals" adventure is now in a mental asylum in Hampstead.
It’s not necessary for you to have run that specific adventure, just as long as there has been some earlier scenario that ended with a house fire. That ought to be easy enough to engineer in a Victorian horror/investigative campaign!
An invitation to the theatre
It is Tuesday, 4 August 1891. Bram Stoker (44 years old) sends a message asking the characters to come to the Lyceum Theatre at lunchtime to talk about some eerie experiences. It is feasible that at least one of the characters has met Bram Stoker before (at a dinner party, perhaps, or at their club) but that’s not essential for the scenario, as long as he could know them by repute.
The Lyceum is in Wellington Street, off the Strand, with the Wellington pub on the corner. As the characters arrive, Henry Irving (53 years old) is rehearsing a scene in a play Stoker has written. Stoker is business manager of the Lyceum but is not yet established as a novelist, though he recently had some lukewarm reviews for The Snake's Pass.
Irving is not impressed, disparaging Stoker in front of Annie Oakley (31) and her husband Frank E Butler (44) who are both crack shots with a .22 rifle and are on a break from Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show, which is currently touring Europe.
Irving finishes the scene, one where he comes up behind the actor playing Jonathan Harcourt (sic) who cuts himself while shaving. In character as the Count, Irving reaches for the blood on Harcourt’s cheek but recoils from a crucifix around his neck.
‘Take care,’ says Irving, putting little feeling into his delivery of the lines. ‘Take care how you cut yourself. It is more dangerous than you think in this country. And this is the wretched thing that has done the mischief. It is a foul bauble of man’s vanity. Away with it!’
Stoker, watching from the stalls, jumps up brandishing a copy of the script. ‘Then you break the shaving-glass, Henry.’
‘Oh? Why don’t I do this while I’m at it?’ And Irving slowly tears up the script. ‘Absolute twaddle, Bram. “The children of the night, what music they make.” Pah.’
‘Well, maybe if you said it with an accent…’
‘I know how to read a damned line. And as for “Count Wampeer – ’
‘Vampire, please.’
‘It’s been done to death in the penny dreadfuls, old chum. Warney the Wampeer. Forget it. I might as well stick a stake through my career and bury it as play this old hokum. Just stick to managing the accounts, will you? I say this as a friend – you have no more talent as a playwright than McGonagall has a poet.’
Stoker’s story
With Irving’s criticism stinging his ears, a flushed Stoker takes the player characters to his office. There, if distracted from his public embarrassment, he explains why he asked them to come and see him.
In 1885 (on October 24th to be exact) Stoker went to look at the wreck of a Russian ship called the Dmitry, which had been washed ashore at Whitby. There was a coffin broken open on the sand and he remembers the crest: a crude copper symbol, a rozeta solara with a serpent or dragon curled over it.
Stoker goes on: ‘A large black dog raced across the sand and started barking at me. I conceived the notion that it was warning me off the casket. Probably it was nothing of the kind. Perhaps the beast was merely made nervous by the smell of death. But it gave me an idea for a play I may one day write.’
That was six years ago, and Stoker had almost forgotten it until an incident near Hampstead Heath a couple of weeks ago:
‘It was evening. I’d emerged from the Heath after a long walk and was looking around for a pub. I was wandering deep in thought, so I don’t know the road I was on. A carriage pulled up and a man and woman got out. The woman was beautiful but very pale, and stared ahead of her as though in a dream. She wore a cloak, under which her dress was white. The man, whose face I scarcely noticed though I recall he was tall and gaunt, led her into the driveway of a large house. I had the impression the house was unoccupied, though I couldn’t see it for the high hedge that surrounded the property. As I crossed the road, I happened to glance at the open carriage and saw that it bore the same symbol inside the door that I saw on the coffin at Whitby: a serpent on a rozeta solara. At first it didn’t register, and I had gone a few yards before I realized where I’d seen it before – or thought I had, for I had barely glanced into the carriage. I hesitated, and had a mind to go back for another look. Then the man came back out of the drive.
‘It was like looking at a moving image in a zoopraxiscope. He was at the hedge bordering the property, or so I thought, but as I turned my head he was already passing me. And as I then looked back it was as though another blink had occurred, and he was already climbing back into the coach. It rolled off and was swallowed in darkness. It was most odd. It seemed to me as though he had either moved at unnerving speed, though he seemed merely to be walking at a normal pace, or else I experienced a series of momentary blackouts. For a moment I thought of looking in the driveway of the house to see what had become of the woman, but my nerve failed me. At any rate, I abandoned all thought of a pint and went straight home. Then yesterday he saw this piece in the paper.’
He hands them yesterday’s Westminster Gazette:
A
HAMPSTEAD MYSTERY
The neighbourhood of
Hampstead is just at present exercised with a series of events which seem to
run on lines parallel to those of what was known to the writers of headlines as
“The Kensington Horror,” or “The Stabbing Woman,” or “The Woman in Black.”
During the past two or three days several cases have occurred of young children
straying from home or neglecting to return from their playing on the Heath. In
all these cases the children were too young to give any properly intelligible
account of themselves, but the consensus of their excuses is that they had been
with a “bloofer lady.” It has always been late in the evening when they have
been missed, and on two occasions the children have not been found until early
in the following morning. It is generally supposed in the neighbourhood that,
as the first child missed gave as his reason for being away that a “bloofer
lady” had asked him to come for a walk, the others had picked up the phrase and
used it as occasion served. This is the more natural as the favourite game of
the little ones at present is luring each other away by wiles. A correspondent
writes us that to see some of the tiny tots pretending to be the “bloofer lady”
is supremely funny. Some of our caricaturists might, he says, take a lesson in
the irony of grotesque by comparing the reality and the picture. It is only in
accordance with general principles of human nature that the “bloofer lady”
should be the popular rôle at these al fresco performances. Our
correspondent naïvely says that even Ellen Terry could not be so winningly
attractive as some of these grubby-faced little children pretend—and even
imagine themselves—to be.
There is, however,
possibly a serious side to the question, for some of the children, indeed all
who have been missed at night, have been slightly torn or wounded in the
throat. The wounds seem such as might be made by a rat or a small dog, and
although of not much importance individually, would tend to show that whatever
animal inflicts them has a system or method of its own. The police of the
division have been instructed to keep a sharp look-out for straying children,
especially when very young, in and around Hampstead Heath, and for any stray
dog which may be about.
“The
Westminster Gazette,” 3rd August. Extra
Special.
THE HAMPSTEAD HORROR. ANOTHER CHILD
INJURED. The “Bloofer Lady.”
We have just received
intelligence that another child, missed last night, was only discovered late in
the morning under a furze bush at the Shooter’s Hill side of Hampstead Heath,
which is, perhaps, less frequented than the other parts. It has the same tiny
wound in the throat as has been noticed in other cases. It was terribly weak,
and looked quite emaciated. It too, when partially restored, had the common
story to tell of being lured away by the “bloofer lady.”
Stoker himself cannot remember other details, such as where the house was, but hypnosis or even just careful questioning would help. For example, he was on the north side of the heath and he said the carriage was soon lost in the darkness, meaning the house must have been quite near to where the electric street-lights run out.
Investigation
Things the characters can find out:
The house turns out to be the burnt-out ruin of Kandahar House, which in this scenario is located on the Bishops Avenue in Hampstead, east of which the newly installed electric street-lighting peters out.
The names of the two abducted children were Sally Vane and Jimmy Murdin. (Whether they can be rescued or are already dead depends on the bleakness of tone you're striving for.)
The symbol Stoker saw (he sketches it) is Romanian and is the ancestral crest of the Counts Vârcolac, a noble house now thought extinct.
At the ruined house
The players have been here before, and will remember the house when a family was living here (Colonel Hollingsworth’s, in the original scenario), so there is something melancholy in seeing the sooty brickwork, charred timbers, blistered paintwork and weeds growing through the weather-ravaged ruin. The smell is of dank ashes, brick dust and decaying wood.
The stairs are unsafe but can be used with caution to reach the upper stories. The characters find evidence that somebody has been searching the house: fallen rafters that have clearly been recently moved, cupboards that largely escaped the fire but that show signs of having been broken into, and so on.
The “Bloofer Ladies” will be encountered up in the vast cavernous space of the attic. They are to all intents and purposes vampires, though in our campaign that’s a science fictional effect (engineered retrovirus) rather than a mark of the undead.
Count Vârcolac is long gone. The characters may encounter him eventually, but not in this scenario. He left his “brides” here to search for an item in Col Hollingsworth’s collection of ancient artifacts. It doesn’t much matter what that item is; it can be a MacGuffin for a future adventure.
The Butterworth Hospital
A private mental asylum in Hampstead run by Dr Algernon Mahler. Other useful NPCs are a burly male warder, Stackpoole, and a nervous young psychiatrist, Dr Hiram Carver.
Mounir Faez from the published “Night of the Jackals” adventure is a patient here. Faez is unable to take control of complex minds, but is slowly building a “hive mind” of insects he has captured. That’s just a seed you can build on or ignore as you see fit; it’s not an essential element of the scenario, though it could of course inspire Stoker (if the characters give him a full account later) to create the character of Renfield.
Notes
There are no real twists here. The characters go looking for vampires in Hampstead and they find them. OK then. In my campaign the surprise factor was that they didn't expect vampires (it's not a fantasy game, as I mentioned) and the fun was to be had in meeting Stoker & company and experiencing the retooled elements of Dracula. I tend to use my notes as a springboard for improvisation, and so rarely bother to pre-plan twists as I expect to use the "plot" as a McGuffin while the characters' actions and interplay create the story. If you're going to run the adventure, it will work best as the teaser episode of a longer search for Count Vârcolac, something like this.
With Halloween coming up, maybe you’re looking for some pleasurable chills. Maybe a few shudders. Even an outright shriek or two? If so, here are a few suggestions to get a little cold grue into your life.
John Whitbourn's creepy short story "Waiting For A Bus" has been collected in various anthologies including The Year's Best Fantasy, has picked up a slew of awards, and even been dramatized on the radio. I was fortunate enough to hear it from the author's lips one dark autumn evening in the late 1980s, and I can still feel the finger of ice that ran down my spine as he read the fateful words --
Ah, but no spoilers. Read it for yourself right now here. And if your hair hasn’t gone stark white after that, you can delve into the other Binscombe Tales here.
If gamebooks are your poison, you can climb inside the skin of the Frankenstein story with my interactive version of the classic drama of hubris, dark secrets, murder, and toxic love-hate. Among other things you get to be the voice of Victor's conscience - although, like Tony Stark, he doesn't always listen.
You also get to see through the eyes of the monster. And if you’re thinking that doesn’t sound too scary – well, you’re probably thinking of the movies, all of which are jolly romps compared to the flesh-crawling horror of the genuine Frankenstein article.
Steve Ditko, probably the greatest artist in the history of comics, produced some of his best work (so far) for Warren's horror mags, Creepy and Eerie, in partnership with Archie Goodwin. Now Dark Horse have collected those masterpieces of the macabre into one beautiful hardcover book. It's right here if you think your nerves can take the strain.
A rising star in the firmament of fantastic fiction is Jason Arnopp, whose novel The Last Days of Jack Sparkshas justly earned him comparison with the greats of the horror genre. It's a brilliant Bloody Mary of a story mixing black comedy, postmodern zing, eye-popping terror, poignant notes of regret, all told at a pace that won't let you put the book down.
I'd say Jack Sparks was the best modern horror story out there but - sorry, Jason, that accolade must go to... oh, none other than Jason Arnopp, for A Sincere Warning About The Entity In Your Home. This personalized yarn is so effectively scary that it's probably not safe to read it when you're alone in the house. You can also send it to a friend and enjoy the twitchy, haunted look they'll carry around with them for the next few months.
Lastly, if you just want something sinister to watch, try the classic TV movie Schalcken the Painter, based on a J S Le Fanu story. That'll send you off to bed with an eye on the shadows.
Come back on Friday when we'll put the spooks aside and have a kick-ass roleplaying adventure involving supervillains: "The Enemy Of My Enemy".
My first ever gamebook was Crypt of the Vampire, illustrated by Leo Hartas, and recently Leo was asked to do five new illustrations for a special colour edition of the book published by Megara Entertainment. It's not just window dressing. Megara also commissioned Way of the Tiger scribe David Walters to write a bunch of new sections for the book, expanding the adventure by about 30%.
David has done a fang-tastic job of matching the style and mood of the original book, while also making it more cohesive by building up the sense of the vampire as a threat throughout. So it's no longer just a dungeon bash. Now it really feels like you might find Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing around the next corner. (Possibly with Jack MacGowran and Alfie Bass not all that far away.)
You can get the new edition exclusively from Megara, while the original version is available from Fabled Lands Publishing on Amazon. Take your pick.
I sometimes think the imagination is a big old cooking pot that carries the tang of every ingredient that’s ever been put in it. A frinstance: long ago at primary school I came across a storybook with big, blocky, semi-abstract illustrations. You know the sort of book, covered in plastic that made a creaky, crinkling sound as you opened the spine. One of the stories was about a cursed ship. It had people’s hands being cut off, is about all I can remember. Now, I was a kid who relished a good fright. I read Dracula at a tender age and started writing my own sequel to it before I was ten. But that story about the ship scared the bejasus out of me. I shoved it back into the book cupboard, did a good job of forgetting it, and then spent years trying to remember exactly what it was that I’d found so terrifying.
If you’re a writer, that’s where the cooking pot comes in. Because I was striving to recapture that special frisson in the haunted ship sequence in Blood Sword 5: Doomwalk.
Black clouds clot along the horizon. Only minutes ago the sky was as blue as a sapphire, now the furled sails mutter fretfully in the easterly gusts. You shiver and follow the mate below. The entire ship’s company is crowded into the forecastle, and oil lamps are lit and the hatches are battened down against the coming storm.
I won’t give away what happens next in the book, but that’s where it was dredged up from – getting spooked out by a story in childhood. And that’s appropriate for this book because, as much as it’s a descent into the lands of the dead, it’s also a journey into dream. This is not the afterlife of fiery torments that Dante described, but a chilly protean clime where you might trip over ghosts creeping about looking for bowls of blood to lap up, or bump into a half-cadaverous goddess in the myths. I mean mists.
The first part of Doomwalk involves finding a way to reach the afterlife so you can go and retrieve the Sword of Life stolen by your enemy, Icon, at the moment you killed him. If you first put in some library time like a good Scooby, here’s how a dusty book you find describes the land of the dead:
Your search through Emeritus’ books drags on into the evening, when the muezzins’ call and the sound of church bells mingle in the dusk outside. A servant comes into the library to light the lamps. You are on the verge of giving up when you find some more references to Sheol. Theodoric of Osterlin Abbey writes that Sheol is a dream landscape comprising fragments of various mythologies. He confirms the claim that you found earlier that mortals can reach Sheol – but adds that the longer one spends there, the more difficult it is to return.
I thought, as was editing this book, ‘Dream landscape? I must have been ripping off Gaiman.’ But in fact I completed the manuscript for Doomwalk a full year before Sandman #1 went on sale. I expect we both had in our blood the same cocktail of Ron Embleton’s Wrath of the Godsand the cosmically bleak stories of the BBC’s Out of the Unknown, we both devoured Norse myths and the gloriously far-out fantasy strips in Valiant, were both reared through adolescence on the same heady stew of Moorcock, Dunsany, Lovecraft, Calvino and others. Or, I dunno, maybe it was just that kickin’ early-80s Afghan Black.
More about the influences on Doomwalk next week, but drop back Friday for another announcement.
It's almost Halloween, and if you're stoking up the fire (or even just upping the brightness on your PC's fireplace screensaver) you may be casting around for delicious fictive chills to run a teasing finger of fright along your spine.
Fans of John Whitbourn's classic Binscombe Tales stories will know that few experiences can be quite so disturbing and at the same time strangely comforting as dropping in at the Duke of Argyll in the company of Mr Oakley, our hapless narrator, and the mysterious Mr Disvan. It's what autumn, imagination, log fires and real ale were created for.
The Binscombe Tales are hard to describe. Possessed of great human warmth and yet often coldly heartless. Sometimes scary but just as often more in the way of startling and thought-provoking. Science fictional except where they're fabulous, fantastic, whimsical, spooky or simply bizarre. Thrilling yet often delightfully leisurely. Terrifying or mind-bending - but always funny with it.
In short, they're the very best of English weird fiction, and if you haven't encountered them yet then you're missing a treat. Fortunately, Jamie and I think ahead so that stuff like the equinox, tax demands and the release of Witcher sequels don't take us by surprise, and this year we had the foresight to prepare an omnibus paperback edition of the complete Binscombe Tales from our Spark Furnace imprint.
Herein you will learn about: the man who spent a lifetime waiting for a bus; the suburban kitchen cupboard that is a gateway to another world; the whispering voices that force a nightclub owner to keep the music turned up loud; the incredible reminiscences of an antique writing desk; and all about the mythic threat lurking under Binscombe's electricity substation. I have previously blogged about the first of those stories, which gave me an authentic shudder as John read it out at a ghost story evening chez Morris, and if you want to try "Waiting for a Bus" then it's available as a free PDF - but only until Halloween.
As well as all twenty-six tales, many of which have garnered awards such as the Year's Best Fantasy, Binscombe Tales: The Complete Series includes a long essay by John Whitbourn in which he reveals that oft-asked authorial secret - to wit, where he gets his ideas from. The whole book is 660 pages so there's no danger of running out of gruesome entertainment before the days start getting longer. I'm going to go out on a limb and say it's the perfect present for those long dark evenings ahead.
Reality is breaking apart. Fracture lines exist in the
fabric of reality and are spreading. People can be sucked out of the universe.
Their lives are just erased as if they had never existed. From the darkness
beyond the fault lines, other things from a time that never happened are
waiting to break through into our world.
The players are cabals of wizards who operate secretly in
the modern, urban environment. They alone can maintain and repair the cracks in
reality. However, the various cabals are at loggerheads because the cabal that
mends the final fracture will remake the world on their terms.
Any use of everyday magic widens the cracks, making damage
to the local environment and the incursion of nightmare creatures more likely.
Some districts of the city appear whole and normal. Other neighborhoods, where
the cabals are weak, are magical Chernobyls where no one can walk in safety.
Hence cabals have to organize and self-police to limit such damage. They also
have to band together to compete with other cabals on a citywide scale.
* * *
Every so often you come up with a piece of an idea. You wait
around for something else to join it to, and if you’re lucky that grows into a
novel or a game design. Other times, those fragments just sit around as
orphans.
Fractures is one of those.
Jamie and I would love to work it up into something. It’s
got a modern Lovecraftian urban thing going on, and as a big fan of B.P.R.D. I
find that has a strong appeal. Not that it’d look anything like B.P.R.D. when
it grew up. I think of it as more Tarot teams up with Doc Strange to
investigate The Killing.
We even tinkered with a script, whether for a game cutscene
or a comic book we couldn’t say. But still the concept stubbornly refused to
come out of its chrysalis. And there it remains, perhaps forever – or,
alternatively, sudden inspiration next week might kindle a spark of existence
for it. These things are rarely in the authors’ hands.
INT. HYLEM BUILDING –
DAY
The doors open and Grace gets out. She’s in a long anonymous
hall which, in contrast to the lower floors, is still decorated in a sober
‘forties style.
She makes her way along the hall. The doors are dark wood
with heavy round handles and frosted glass panels. Set under the glass pane on
each door is a copper nameplate. They’re all blank.
Grace looks back along the hall. The elevator doors close.
She tries one of the doors. It swings open.
INT. OFFICE IN HYLEM
BUILDING – DAY (CONTINUOUS)
Grace steps into the office. It’s uncarpeted and bare except
for a single desk with an old-style dial telephone.
The telephone is off the cradle. It’s emitting soft buzzing
sounds that seem like speech, but distorted so as to be sibilant and hard to
make out.
She approaches the phone and picks it up. For just an
instant that we catch a voice talking quietly, half hidden by the heavy clunk
as she picks the receiver off the desk.
Grace listens to silence on the other end of the line,
punctuated by just a few random clicks.
GRACE
Hello?
She jabs at the cradle contacts.
GRACE
Who’s there? Hello. Hello.
Suddenly she hears a soft exhalation of breath on the other
end of the line. Grace stiffens.
