Dark with something more than night

American GIs returning home from the war found their society had changed in disturbing ways. The homecoming boys found women's new confidence and independence both alluring and threatening. At the same time the soldiers had to adjust from being brave heroes to nine-to-fivers -- if they could find work at all. And they brought back their own demons, the aftereffects of having faced death and being expected to kill. The tough masculinity that was so prized in wartime was out of place and brittle in peacetime America. And over all of that hung the shadows of the atom bomb and the almost unimaginable monstrosity of the Holocaust.

No wonder it was the heyday of noir.

Noir and hardboiled fiction are adjacent and often people get them mixed up. Author Megan Abbott explains the difference:

"The common argument is that hardboiled novels are an extension of the wild west and pioneer narratives of the 19th century. The wilderness becomes the city, and the hero is usually a somewhat fallen character, a detective or a cop. At the end, everything is a mess, people have died, but the hero has done the right thing or close to it, and order has, to a certain extent, been restored. [...] In noir, everyone is fallen, and right and wrong are not clearly defined and maybe not even attainable. In that sense, noir speaks to us powerfully right now, when certain structures of authority don’t make sense any longer, and we wonder: Why should we abide by them?"

The best noir game I can think of is the original Max Payne, which is a long way from the hardboiled 1930s background that is the default setting for Cthulhu roleplaying. Paweł Dziemski and I have drawn on noirish elements for our upcoming Cthulhu 2050 gamebook, locating them a century on from classic noir's origins. There are some RPGs like Gumshoe that lend themselves to the hardboiled milieu, but up till now there haven't been many specifically for noir in a mid-20th century setting. Which is why Alexander and Mina Stojanovic's Infinite Night looks so interesting.

Here the world is definitely a morally murky one. To paraphrase the rulebook, the game takes place in a Los Angeles that reeks of desperation, betrayals, and deals gone wrong. Infinite Night has an elegant dice pool system based on three stats: Brutality, Cunning, and Seduction. Rolls are quick and simple, modified where appropriate by Reputation (War Hero, Driver, Night Owl, etc). Instead of tracking hit points, injury and emotional trauma impose conditions that reduce some rolls. Personal contacts provide a roster of supporting characters to ease PCs into adventures. I like it because it's a system that is there when you need it but that doesn't get in the way of the story.

Currently it's only available as an ebook -- Kindle link here; Apple version here. I don't know whether there'll be a print edition, but Future Pixels who publish it have an Infinite Night MMO in the works. Noir gaming has a bright future ahead.

And... while we're talking about ebooks, this is a good time to mention that The Houses of the Dead and The Hammer of the Sun, the first two books in the Vulcanverse open-world gamebook series, are now out on Kindle and on DriveThruRPG at a special low introductory price. If you've been thinking of giving the Vulcanverse a try, now is the perfect time.

A feeling of overwhelming awe

One of my favourite places in the mid-1960s was the London Planetarium in Baker Street. In fact that’s not strictly accurate. My favourite place was, as always, the inside of my own head. The Planetarium was just a good way to get there.

The auditorium was nearly twenty metres across and in the centre was the giant ant-like shape of a Zeiss Mark IV projector. As the lights dimmed, the cosmos was thrown against the dome and on wings of the imagination you could soar among the stars.

It never failed to cause a tingling at the back of my neck. "Do they chill the room when the show starts?" I asked my father. They didn’t have to. The sensation of cold I felt was awe at the immensity of space, a delicious sensation on the cusp between excitement, curiosity, and fear.

H.P. Lovecraft must have felt those same emotions. He talked about that “mixed wonder and oppression which the sensitive imagination experiences upon scaling itself and its restrictions against the vast and provocative abyss of the unknown.” I wouldn’t call it oppression myself. Even to say fear isn’t right. I was eager to launch myself into that abyss; I loved the daunting face of the unknown, the mind-staggering distances between stars and galaxies. I didn’t then and don’t now subscribe to any religious views – they would only have diminished and cheapened the experience. The uncaring blankness of the universe was exactly what attracted me and instilled that awe.

Lovecraft called it the chief emotion in his psychology, and in that respect we’re kindred spirits. So it’s surprising that, until now, only one of my books could really be said to be Lovecraftian, and that's Heart of Ice.

I’ve run Lovecraftian roleplaying games, though never really a devotee of Call of Cthulhu. Investigation is only the most superficial element of HPL’s tales, and there is always the risk with any investigative scenario that it will fall into the old-fashioned whodunit pattern in which some enormity disrupts the status quo, the investigator solves it, and normal order is restored.

That’s not intrinsic to CoC, but it’s a template that players may expect. A better form of mystery that offers scant comfort is noir. There the transgression is revealed in greater and greater depth as the layers are peeled back. The investigator is unable to stop, like unwrapping the bandages over a suppurating wound, and there is no denouement in which order can ever be restored and people made safe because the safeness was an illusion to begin with. The world is not set right, the problem is not really fixed, but the investigator is fundamentally changed by his or her experiences, and it is that journey to face up to a reality that gives no consolation that makes for a kind of bleak heroism, just as Lovecraft’s cosmic fiction should.

“In general, we should forget all about the popular hack conventions of cheap writing and try to make our story a perfect slice of actual life except where the one chosen marvel is concerned. We should work as if we were staging a hoax and trying to get our extravagant lie accepted as literal truth.”
– H.P. Lovecraft, Some Notes on Interplanetary Fiction

So when Paweł Dziemski, the creator of Storm Weavers, proposed that he and I should collaborate on a Lovecraftian horror gamebook and app, my only thought was why had I left it so long? I’ll have more to reveal about our project in the weeks ahead, but for now I’ll just leave you with the title: Whispers Beyond The Stars. We’ve aimed to make it a truly cosmic horror adventure, and we hope that HPL would approve.

Deadman Diaries

I'm a big fan of film noir. An ordinary Joe in a fix that tips him over the edge of the safe little bubble we normally live in and into a crazy whirlpool of existential nightmare: from Sunset Boulevard to Max Payne, all it takes is the slick of rain, ominous bars of shadow, a heavy-lidded femme fatale and a patina of luminous monochrome, and I'm hooked.

So it's a particular delight to discover the latest gamebook adventure from Cubus Games (developers of The Frankenstein Wars and Necklace of Skulls) is a noir thriller called Deadman Diaries. It takes the form of a diary written by a guy who's deep in gambling debts and now needs to do whatever he has to, legal or otherwise, to stay alive. So you can help him find a way to pay off the mob, or you can lead him further astray with a view to getting him killed in a variety of different ways.

The text is by Ricard Fuster and the artwork is by Gerard Freixes. As it says in the logline, life's a bitch and then you die. Grab your ticket to the long goodbye for iOS here and for Android here.