"One hundred years of vampire cinema: opera capes and neck-nuzzling, glowing beauties and monster-kid wish-fulfilment. Gone! The whole lot swallowed up by this eerie bacchanal of sex and death."
That's Alec Worley on Substack, talking about Robert Eggers' 2024 remake of Nosferatu. Personally I found the movie disappointing after Eggers' previous work (especially The Lighthouse and The Northman) and would have spent my time better re-watching Werner Herzog's version or F W Murnau's 1922 original -- both so much eerier. (Spoiler-free review here if you're interested.)
My own preference is for the unglamorous and grave-cold variety of vampire, not the kind that snarls and growls and prowls like a big cat. It's a taste that may have been formed originally by Gerald W Page's short story "Thirst", which swept away my childhood notions of the vampire, acquired from reading Dracula when I was 10 years old*, and gave my teen self an unplugged, proto-punk take on the myth. Mr Page was kind enough to find the time to correspond with aspiring writers like me, so he may have discussed his reasons for wanting to break the mold. When I have time I shall go through his letters (which of course I have kept these fifty-three years) to see what he had to say about the story.
Later in my teens I was inspired by Gryphon's song "The Unquiet Grave" -- not specifically vampiric, admittedly, but chilling all the same with lines like this:
"My lips they are as cold as clay, my breath smells earthy strong, And if you kiss my cold grey lips, your days they won't be long."
Robert Dale, with his deep knowledge of British folklore, encouraged this predilection with his very chilling depiction of Pyron the reaper, a vampire in the Brymstone campaign. Oliver Johnson a few decades later gave us another feral vampire in his Lightbringers game. This is from the game write-up:
"A pitiful mewling cry came from a thorn thicket to the south of the clearing. It sounded like a small child in distress or perhaps a snared bird. A narrow crawl way snaked deep into the thorns towards the sound. Nafaj squirmed into the tunnel. The thorns snagged cruelly at his clothing and skin. When he was several yards into the thicket, he saw a boyish white face staring back at him down the darkened tunnel of thorns. Though he had steeled himself for such an encounter, his will deserted him as the creature started whispering its blandishments. To his horror he found himself crawling forward. Soon he was next to the vampire. All its limbs had been ripped off; it was but a torso and a head. The vampire drank Nafaj’s blood and instructed him to return later that night.
"Nafaj emerged from the thicket. The setting sun causing him discomfort, he had thrown the hood of his cloak over his head, but none of the others thought to question why this was. He was carrying a dead bird and explained the noise had been its dying song. The others were eager to be gone from the accursed place, but the marquis’ horse was suddenly lame and this caused a delay. Darkness fell, a temporary camp was made and watches held throughout the night."
The natural habitat of these revenants isn't a Victorian drawing room, nor even a Gothic castle. They are the dead who won't stay quiet, clawing their way up out of the dirt of the graveyard and crawling along ditches and over country lanes because enough of a spark of consciousness remains that they are jealous of the living and want to steal their warmth and lifeblood.
Such walking-corpse vampires can still have uncanny powers, like Gerwin in the Jewelspider scenario "Death Is Only The Beginning" who is able to hide himself from mortal sight after dark, though I prefer them to be nothing more than bloodless cadavers with a raging thirst, like the thing that visits you in your sleep in Workshop of the Gods:
‘Wake up!’
‘My friend... I dreamt a beautiful vampire was about to drink my blood.’
‘Beautiful?’ cries your companion in a voice thick with horror. ‘It is a monster. See!’
You look where he’s pointing and in a split-second you’re on your feet, heart pounding with adrenaline. Because only the vampire’s appearance was a dream. The rest is all too real. You see the vampire now as she really is – not a pale and beautiful woman, but a rotted corpse with maggots writhing in her pock-marked cheeks and lustreless eyes that leak brown slime. Clammy strips of dead flesh hang from her bones. The room is filled with the stench of decay.
She lurches forward, swollen grey fingers reaching for you, her lipless teeth clacking eagerly.
Sleep tight!
*To be fair to Mr Stoker, the Count is not intended to be a typical vampire. His wives and Lucy Westenra present as chillingly inhuman, nearly mindless vessels of simple appetite.
A lot of what goes under the banner of fantasy isn't really all that fantastical. Quaint half-timbered taverns filled with half-elf barmaids and dwarves with Scottish accents where you go to be given your latest quest. My own experience of these games is that the players tend to sit knitting or stroking the cat while saying things like, "My halfling thief asks the innkeeper if he's seen any strangers passing through." There will be a dark lord, and an item you must destroy to defeat them and fix everything. It's made up, but it's not exactly fantasy. Where's the wonder? Where's the weird?
Good fantasy isn't cosy. It isn't a safe space. It takes you somewhere new and unpredictable. In Wightchester you're sealed up in a walled city where the plague is turning people into undead. What are you going to do now? "My drow ranger-witch hides in the shadows and listens for rumours" isn't going to cut it. No theme-park retread of Tolkien's tropes, this, but a dark and exciting roleplaying setting that'll immerse you like quicksand.
The crowdfunding has just hours to go. If you're looking for real fantasy, drop the knitting and get over there now.
This short self-contained adventure could serve as a monster-of-the-week interlude if you need to insert a lull in a bigger campaign. The setting is rural Ellesland, part of the medieval world of Dragon Warriors and Jewelspider.
The restless dead
Two men, strangers to the district, recently died in the village of Drakelow. They were itinerant labourers who had hired on to help with the reaping, making their beds in an old cowshed across the fields. It appears they must have argued one evening and each stabbed the other in the heart.
The coroner, Sir Achard, duly arrived and assayed the scene. He confiscated the purses of the two dead men. Local enquiries revealed them to be Gerwin and Lampert. They had spent time on several local manors, usually getting driven on to their next location because of drunkenness or Gerwin’s tendency to flirt with milkmaids. The bodies were buried in a potter’s field attached to the churchyard.
To the annoyance of Sir Percy de Grainville, lord of Drakelow, the coroner levied a fine on him for taking on labourers of unknown provenance. He was even more annoyed a few days later when a farm worker returning from the fields with a cart full of wheat saw Gerwin and Lampert in the orchard. He ran off, abandoning the cart, and when a group of villagers returned to the spot they found the whole contents of the cart spoiled, the grain black and rancid as if it had been soaked in sewage water for weeks.
And so it begins
Now, at this point you may be asking how the player-characters come into this. They could be working in the fields themselves to earn a few coins (the pay is ninepence a week) but it’s likely your players don’t care to trudge around doing menial work. Higher status characters could be guests of Sir Percy, or perhaps they arrive in Sir Achard’s retinue. Another option: they’re sent by the bishop when the first hints of something diabolical start to get bruited about.
Or the player-characters could be wanderers themselves, just passing through, but with the locals already jittery that’s a dangerous position to be in.
Two days after the burial a little boy returns home without his sister, telling a story of how they met a man on the road sitting on a wooden box. He invited the little girl to lie in it, saying that it was a bed he’d been given by the charity of the villagers. ‘Then another man came and they put on the lid and carried her off.’
The sexton notices the soil in the potter’s field has been roughly churned up. ‘I patted those graves down myself.’ Digging at the spot, which is Gerwin’s grave, he finds the body of the missing girl. There is no sign of Gerwin’s corpse or his coffin.
Sir Percy decides there is no need to summon the coroner to investigate the death of a ten-year-old girl, even though the body has been drained of blood.
Further sightings ensue: two figures loping through the fields at sunset; a horrible clamouring and banging in the street at night; plague symbols daubed on the door of the mill house.
The facts in the case
Further investigation reveals some more facts, if the player-characters are interested. On the day Gerwin and Lampert died, they had taken part in a custom where the lord lets loose a sheep in a field and whoever catches it first gets to keep it. They won, but the sheep was not found with their bodies. ‘It must have got loose and wandered off,’ reckons the coroner if asked.
Their purses contained a total of twenty farthings, though they had earned at least two shillings each in the time they’d been working on the manor. ‘Spent the rest in the tavern,’ is the coroner’s opinion.
Apart from the fatal thrusts there were no other knife-wounds on the bodies, but some of the jurors (twelve locals summoned for the purpose) admit to seeing bruises on the arms and necks, as though the dead men had been restrained.
Gerwin had been seen hanging around Lucy, the 16-year-old daughter of Richard the miller. Some villagers think she was sweet on him, others that his attentions were unwelcome. A day or two before Gerwin’s death, he and Richard argued in the lane and each threatened the other. Richard has three strapping sons (Joseph, Barnaby and Abel) who all share their father’s fiery temper and most villagers wouldn’t care to get on the wrong side of the family.
Things get serious
Richard Miller comes down with a fever. He gets weaker and his son Joseph is sent to fetch a physician from the monastery. He takes some money to pay the monks but does not return that night. The next morning he’s found torn limb from limb. His purse is open on the ground beside the body but only some of the money has been taken – a little over two shillings, the sum the characters might expect Gerwin and Lampert to have saved if they make any effort to calculate it.
The coroner is no happier to be called back than Sir Percy is to see him, especially as the circumstances of Joseph Miller’s death don’t admit of any easy explanation.
‘Brigands, perhaps? They tortured him for his money, it seems.’
‘Why not just take it? The purse was in his belt.’
‘For sport, then. They must have tied him to horses. How else could he have been ripped apart like that?’
‘But there were no rope marks. Just hand prints on his limbs.’
‘Absurd. What hands could dismember a strong lad as though he were an over-roasted fowl?’
More calamities ensue. The geese are found with their necks wrung. Among the carcasses lies a severed finger, black and mould-spattered. ‘One of the birds must have bitten it off,’ says the sexton, picking up the finger. ‘I’ll bury it after I’ve got the rector to pour some holy water on it.’ But that night the sexton is taken ill.
Others get sick. The miller’s remaining sons are pursued on their way back from the pub and barely get home and bar the door before there is a terrible pounding and roaring outside which goes on all night. Next day they relate the tale: ‘On the roof it was, and we had to use all the firewood to stop it coming down the chimney. Suddenly the noise stopped, just as the cock crowed. Then at sunrise when we went to look in on Daisy – ’
‘Hush, you fool,’ says Barnaby, kicking his shin.
It soon seems clear that ‘Daisy’ is a sheep the Millers have been keeping tethered at the back of the mill. Nobody heard her bleating because of the sound of the river. The carcass been stripped to the bones.
‘Eaten raw,’ remarks the coroner. ‘Perhaps wolves..?’ But he sounds decidedly uncertain now.
Stake out
Lampert is easy to deal with. He can be dug up in broad daylight. The cloth around his face is soaked in blood and his flesh, though marked with pocks of decay, is ruddy and swollen. The rector sprinkles the body with holy water and directs the villagers to cut off the head and put it face down between the legs.
Gerwin’s grave is already known to be empty, so before he can be dealt with in the same way his new resting place must be found. As a red herring, he’s been seen lingering near Dipcap Wood, a copse on a rolling green hill half a mile from the village. The villagers occasionally gather fallen branches from the outskirts of the copse but never venture in because it is a place of ill repute. The characters could waste a day or two searching the copse for Gerwin’s grave site, which in fact is in the wheat fields much nearer to the village.
Gerwin is able to go about invisible after dark, so the characters need to track him. They can follow his path through the wheat field where he has trampled the stalks flat going to and fro from his new grave, or they must think of some other ploy.
But there is a risk if they leave it too long that Lucy Miller comes down with the sickness, and she is not expected to last the night, so perhaps they can’t afford to wait for the safety of daylight and must go to confront the vampire in darkness.
It’s a tough fight. Gerwin cannot be cut except by weapons that have been forged with magic or else blessed, so all other edged weapons do half damage against him. A mace will be useful only if it shatters a bone (signified by scoring at the upper range of damage), otherwise he shrugs it off.
Holy water? That’s useful only once the monster is down, to stop it rising again. There's no Hollywood acid-in-the-face effect here. Forget too the tigerish snarls and snapping of modern vampires faced with crosses. A holy character might succeed in driving Gerwin back to his grave, just as the sound of cockcrow does, but his departure will merely be accompanied a sough of wind and then he’s gone. If confronted at his graveside, he stands his ground and fights to the bitter end.
Gerwin’s own blows not only land with the force of stout cudgels, they inflict a stinging numbness so that the injured character is at a disadvantage to hit the following round. Meanwhile he is invisible, so characters who are fighting him must be guided by the movement of the wheat stalks, his heavy tread, and the stream of gibbering obscenities he’s uttering. That means a penalty to hit unless the character has a cantrip to see things masked by invisibility or is able to make a sorcery roll, in which case they will know to hold up a stone with a hole through it in order to see him.
Postscript
The idea of the scenario is to highlight the difference between vampires of the world of Legend (such as Robert Dale's memorably grisly Pyron, here) and the traditional Victorian drawing-room variety. Even the word vampire is used interchangeably with revenant, prodigy, fiend or draugur. If you were to use the term undead it’s unlikely most people in Ellesland would know what you meant, and folk theories abound: the corpse is reanimated by an evil spirit; the man didn’t die but became possessed; the individuals were always hellions yet dormant, needing only death to transform them pupa-like into the demonic thing they are now. Remember that the idea of the resurrection of the flesh is accepted as fact by most people – this is just a hellish parody, perpetrated by the Devil, of the Saviour’s return to life that all God-fearing folk hope to share on the Day of Judgement.
As a guideline, here’s William of Newburgh’s 12th century account of a creature modern readers might be tempted to call one of the undead:
‘A Christian burial, indeed, he received, though unworthy of it; but it did not much benefit him: for issuing, by the handiwork of Satan, from his grave at night time, and pursued by a pack of dogs with horrible barkings, he wandered through the courts and around the houses while all men made fast their doors, and did not dare to go abroad on any errand whatever from the beginning of the night until the sunrise, for fear of meeting and being beaten black and blue by this vagrant monster.
‘Hastening to the cemetery, they began to dig; and whilst they were thinking that they would have to dig to a greater depth, they suddenly, before much of the earth had been removed, laid bare the corpse, swollen to an enormous corpulence, with its countenance beyond measure turgid and suffused with blood; while the napkin in which it had been wrapped appeared nearly torn to pieces. The young men, however, spurred on by wrath, feared not, and inflicted a wound upon the senseless carcass, out of which incontinently flowed such a stream of blood, that it might have been taken for a leech filled with the blood of many persons. Then, dragging it beyond the village, they speedily constructed a funeral pile; and upon one of them saying that the pestilential body would not burn unless its heart were torn out, the other laid open its side by repeated blows of the blunted spade, and, thrusting in his hand, dragged out the accursed heart.’
A thought about how to handle that invisibility. Putting invisible creatures into fantasy games can feel a bit sci-fi, not to say tricksily green-screen, so how about suggesting to your players that there's something so horrific about the vampire that they just can't bring themselves to look straight at him. They know where he is, but their eyes just won't stay in that direction and their minds refuse to take it in. It's like somebody in a dream whom you're aware of but can't quite see. Don't use the i-word. Make it strange.
Oh, and who really killed Gerwin and Lampert? I don't really need to spell it out, do I?
Having dusted off the Questworld folders recently - and by the way I do mean folders and I do mean dust, these having languished in the attic for over thirty years - I thought I may as well take a look through and see what still catches my interest.
One of the things that baffled me and my co-writer, Oliver Johnson, was the degree to which Questworld retained Glorantha's bronze age technology, culture, races and even specific deities. After all, if you liked Glorantha then you'd play official RQ supplements, wouldn't you? I had nothing against Glorantha myself, but the setting wasn't what most appealed to me. What I liked about Runequest was the rules, which over the years I've used for games in ancient Sparta, Tekumel, Arthurian adventures, and my own campaign world of Medra.
Anyway, we set about tweaking Questworld to be as different from Glorantha as we could make it. We were lumbered with the Issaries River (though it did get renamed the Ophis a few years later, when we started repurposing the material for our creator-owned Invaders & Ancients project) but we insisted on including something more like traditional fantasy undead. Gloranthan mythology defined undead in terms of their inability to regenerate Power, so we invented a class of "living dead" as well. Vampires were already taken, so ours had to be "vampyrs". Oh well, we could always pass it off as a nod to Polidori.
VAMPYRS
ARMOUR: As worn
SPELLS: Any
SKILLS: A vampyr has plenty of time in which to develop its skills. Perception and Stealth are particularly favoured: assume an
average of 75%-80% for these.
A vampyr depends for its
existence on draining blood from the living. The symbolic nature of the act
provides potent magic; as the victim's life ebbs, the vampyr draws the vital
essence into itself. The blood must drain directly from the victim to the
vampyr. Blood stored in flasks would be useless, its magic destroyed.
If the vampyr goes without
blood its CON begins to decrease. This represents the sapping of the creature’s
energy. After seven full days without blood the vampyr loses 1 point of CON. Five
days later another CON point is lost, then further points at four day
intervals. For each CON point after the first, the vampyr also loses 1 point of
STR. Moreover, after the first couple of weeks without blood the vampyr begins
to show signs of ageing. When CON reaches 1 the vampyr's STR sinks to 3. It
remains in this state for one month, then becomes truly dead – though even then
the soul is not released unless the corpse's head is severed. The vampyr can stay
in its coffin in order to slow the rate of CON loss, as each night that it
rises is equivalent to two nights of remaining dormant.
The maximum amount of
blood that a vampyr can drain in a single night is one pint. Usually it
revisits a victim on successive nights, and the victim loses CON and STR as
shown on the Blood Loss Table. Each point of CON that the victim loses adds one
point to the vampyr's CON. When the vampyr’s CON reaches species maximum,
further points go towards healing any damage the vampyr has taken, at the rate
of each CON point lost to the victim giving the vampyr the equivalent of a healing 6 spell. This is the only way a
vampyr can heal itself.
Vampyrs are unaffected by
non-Runic weapons unless impaled by the weapon – and even then only half the
normal impalement damage is taken. Bladesharp
or other magic cast on a weapon will damage the vampyr, of course, as will
Runic metal weapons.
A vampyr does not collapse
when it has taken damage equal to its hit points - it must be hacked apart
until it cannot fight, and in this respect is treated as a zombie. If for any
reason the head of a fallen vampyr is not removed then the creature can be healed
(by a charmed servant, for instance)
by causing blood to gush from a living victim onto the vampyr's body.
Vampyrs have the power to charm. This requires the vampyr to talk
to the intended victim for at least thirty seconds, and they must be within ten
metres of one another. Charm cannot
be used while the vampyr and victim are in combat, it must be normal
conversation. A charmed victim allows
the vampyr to do whatever it chooses with him/her.
It is widely believed that
vampyrs can accomplish transformation into bat, wolf and mist form, but this is
not definitely known. A vampyr certainly cannot
make such a transformation in full view of its victims. When not observed, a
vampyr can find its way up vertical walls and through locked doors exactly as
though it does possess shapechanging abilities, but as it can never be seen to
do so the exact truth of the matter is irrelevant.
A vampyr can be destroyed
by driving a stake (in fact any sharp instrument) through its heart and then cutting
off its head. The stake interrupts the flow of magical energy that sustains the
vampyr, causing it to become in all respects like a normal corpse. If the stake
is later removed the vampyr comes back to "life", because the soul
has remained latent within the corpse. The action of severing the head frees
the soul to go to the spirit plane, irreversibly ending the vampyr's living
death.
Being caught in sunlight
immediately removes the vampyr's power to charm
and its invulnerability to bronze weapons. Also, the vampyr loses 2 points of
CON every round it remains in sunlight until CON reaches zero and it ceases to
function. Removing the head at this point will destroy the vampyr. If a vampyr
which is already dormant in its coffin is exposed to sunlight then it suffers
no CON loss but is held trapped, unable to rise, the until the sun sets.
Vampyrs cannot cross pure
running water except by bridge, boat, or on the back of someone else. Swamp and
marshland have no effect on them.
Vampyrs can be driven back
with the Life Rune. If someone tied to this Rune presents it strongly before
them, the vampyr is forced to retreat so as to keep at least four metres
between itself and the Rune. This only applies as long as the Life Rune cultist
concentrates fully on the power of the Rune. If backed into a corner so that it cannot circle
round the Life Rune, the vampyr will go berserk (as a fanaticism spell) and attempt to escape. The Death Rune has no
effect on vampyrs. Many of them worship it in some form, as a matter of fact.
Anyone who dies from a
vampyr's bite will become a vampyr or a demi-vampyr. A true vampyr is created when
the vampyr allows the victim to drink its own blood at the same moment that it
drains the victim's This costs the vampyr 1d4 points of characteristic POW
(regainable through POW increase rolls) and ensures that the victim will arise
three nights after his/her death as a new vampyr. The new vampyr loves its
creator and is therefore (usually) totally loyal. SIZ, INT and POW remain the
same as the vampyr previously possessed in life, DEX and CHA both increase by
1d6, CON increases to species maximum, and STR increases to 1½ times species
maximum.
If the vampyr does not
sacrifice POW its victim will arise as a mere demi-vampyr. Such a creature has
characteristics as follows:
So the demi-vampyr gets
the increased physical power of a normal vampyr, but its DEX and POW are
reduced and it is left with. animal-like intelligence. It drains blood just
like a vampyr, but cannot charm and
takes normal damage from bronze weapons, and so must resort to random attacks
and waylaying travellers on desolate country roads. Enough of its intellect
remains for it to utter phrases and pleas for help in order to lure victims,
but the demi-vampyr has no real understanding of anything it says. If meleed,
the demi-vampyr will battle ferociously (usually with its bare hands or a
simple club, and with a maximum fighting skill of DEXx5%) until it sees a
chance to escape. A demi-vampyr will obey simple instructions from the vampyr
that created it, but has no loyalty and will flee if endangered. Demi-vampyrs
have all the vulnerabilities of a true vampyr.
NIGHTSHADES
Nightshades are living
dead creatures that are sometimes encountered in woods. They are met only when
there is a fog, as they have the magical ability to create shadowy images from
fog. This ability is used to confuse and intimidate an enemy by making it seem
as though there are many more Nightshades lurking among the trees.
Nightshades are
translucent figures drifting forward through the mists. They often seem to be
screaming at their victims, but no sound can be heard. Nightshades are
protected at all times by a shimmer3 spell (not included in the Defence
above). Bronze weapons pass harmlessly through their insubstantial bodies.
Weapons of Runic metal, or
which are under the effect of a spell such as bladesharp, will affect a Nightshade, but only to the extent of
doing the basic weapon damage. For example: a fighter with a bronze greatsword
slices at a Nightshade. Seeing that he has done it no damage, the fighter now
applies a bladesharp 1 to his weapon.
This is enough to give the sword power to affect a Nightshade, and the
fighter's next strike does the weapon's normal damage (2d8 in this case), without
bonuses for the bladesharp spell or
the fighter's STR and SIZ.
When a Nightshade touches
its opponent there is a tremendous discharge of magical energy. The opponent
must match his SIZ+DEX vs twice the damage rolled for the creature's touch (see
Knockbacks, Runequest Appendix C). If
the touch did 14 points, for instance, and the opponent had SIZ+DEX equal to
24, this would give a 70% chance of a knockback.
If the body of someone
slain by a Nightshade is left in the woods where he died then he will become a
Nightshade himself once the body has rotted (in 3-18 months).
WIGHTS
*The
wight's touch is not a strike; it does no direct damage, but its effect reaches
through armour for a POW vs POW attack. If the wight wins, the character
suffers 1d3 damage (like a disruption
spell) in that body area and loses 1d4 points of STR. When the character's STR
reaches 0 he will fall to the ground paralyzed. Even before this, it is likely
that he will have become too weak to heft his weapon. Wights usually transform
their defeated victims into zombies, but if they are thwarted from doing so then
their victim's lost STR recovers at the rate of 1 point an hour.
ARMOUR: None usually; can wear any
SPELLS: Battle magic to INT limit; 1d12 points of Rune
magic
SKILLS: Detect Life 80%; Detect Magic 80% (as the spells,
but at no POW cost)
Wights are the spirits of
the priest-sorcerers of an ancient empire. They inhabit their original bodies
(transformed and sustained by their sorcery) and lurk in burial mounds. They
are sallowish and dessicated, and their sunken eyes gleam with a preternatural
light, but apart from this they look much like a normal man. Wights dress in
the rotting, dusty tabards of a bygone age and rarely trouble to wear armour
because they are unaffected by bronze weapons. A bronze weapon striking a wight
will, moreover, take 5d6 damage due to instantaneous corrosion.
Wights are capable of
various exotic Rune magics, including the ability to summon up dense, freezing
fog from the moors to lead travelers astray. Wights will travel abroad in such
fog, or at night, but abhor the direct light of the sun. Their Rune spells,
once used, recover at the rate of 1 point a day, at moonrise. Wights are living
dead (not undead) and therefore recover POW normally.
The wight picture at the top is by Ryan Barger and you can buy print copies of it here.
Leo just sent me the colourized images he's been doing for Megara Entertainment's limited hardcover edition of my second-ever gamebook The Temple of Flame, originally published in the mid-eighties. This picture of undead warriors caught my eye because I'd recently found the original art brief I sent to Leo. I was inspired by Steve Ditko's story "The Spirit of the Thing" in Creepy #9. He showed a corpse coming to life and wresting itself up out of the soil with galvanic convulsions of muscle you could almost feel.
Ditko is of course the master of portraying physicality in a picture - look at those extreme poses Spidey adopts as his momentum flings his limbs in all directions. The horrifying idea of those athletic, almost dance-like, cadaveric spasms stuck with me, so I sketched them for Leo and let him do his thing.
Megara's edition of the book will be shipping soon to the hundred or so Kickstarter backers, and of course the paperback is still available to everyone else.
Another curio from the writing of the book is this map of the catacombs within the pyramid. I remember being horrified when I playtested Oliver Johnson's Lord of Shadow Keep and discovered that he didn't bother with mapping - you might turn right and come into the same room reached by turning left. I think I actually sat down and rejigged the text so that it was consistent, although whether that mattered is another question. I assumed gamebook readers would make a map as they went along, just like a role-player would. What about you? Were you a map-maker or a barnstormer?
