Martin McKenna

Martin McKenna has died at the age of 51, and it's a loss not only to his friends and colleagues but to everyone who appreciates the work of a master craftsman with a matchless imagination. There's too much to say here, just now when the shock is still raw, so I'll pass you over to my wife's newsletter in which she describes how we heard the sad news and an account by Martin himself from happier days.

Time for a new deal

Well, it's that election. The one that affects everybody in the world -- especially in the Western world. I'm not going to say anything about it because, after all, what's left to say? And in any case, like most of the people whose lives will be changed by the result, I don't get a vote. So I'll pass the mic to US citizen and onetime conservative H P Lovecraft, writing here to Catherine L Moore in 1936. It gives a hint of how HPL's experiences towards the end of his life changed his political views from the reactionary periwigged libertarianism usually associated with him. There's hope for us all, however deplorable.

The Mountains of Instead

The title of the post is a line from an Auden poem, "Autumn Song", which in one version concludes:

Clear, unscaleable, ahead
Rise the Mountains of Instead,
From whose cold cascading streams
None may drink except in dreams.

There's a different version of the last verse if you're interested. Every so often a poet just can't bring themselves to abandon a work -- think of FitzGerald's endless tinkering with the Rubaiyat. ("The Moving Finger writes..." And gets endlessly rewrit, eh, Eddie?)

It's not just poets. John Whitbourn asked me to put together a cover for his new book Altered Englands, a collection of short stories from his thirty-year career as one of Britain's foremost fantasy authors. Acutely conscious of the honour, I vacillated between half a dozen designs. I started with the painting above by Albert Gleizes, which I thought had a nicely skew-whiff cricketer vibe, but Gleizes isn't in public domain for another three years. Darn it.

So then I tried using this cakes-&-ale image by John Currie, but that was too much of "England" and not enough of the "Altered" and eventually it got rejected in favour of Eric Ravilious's take on the Long Man of Wilmington. Over the centuries the Long Man has altered quite a bit in appearance, and certainly nowadays he's no work of art (unlike the White Horse, say) but there are still some who believe the figure predates the early modern period. John tells me that one interpretation is that he's not holding a couple of staves but in fact standing guard in a doorway, a role I remembered from The Sandman #19 by (do I need to tell you?) Gaiman and Vess:

The door the Long Man is opening in this case is onto a varied selection of stories ranging from the darkly horrific to the purely marvellous and always with the author's startling imagination and sparkling humour inviting you into a state of total immersion.

Among the stories is the very last of the Binscombe Tales, never published before. Altered Englands is an eclectic, idiosyncratic and erudite mix, as you'd expect of the author, with subjects that range from Binscombe to Bratislava, from Allah to evolution, from Stalin to Sussex, and from castle lords to Charleston. And just when you think you have the measure of John Whitbourn's interests, he surprises you by throwing in a shaggy-dog yarn about none other than Jimi Hendrix. A bonus is that every story comes with the author's notes, which further reveal his lively imagination, wide reading and profound deliberation. Trump- and Brexit-supporting readers of this blog who complain about my occasional political posts might be pleased to discover that John holds diametrically opposite views on politics, ethics and even science/religion (I'm Starfleet officer, he's New York street cop) and only one of us has ever been photographed wearing black nail varnish and mascara*. 

Talking of Charleston, Jamie lives near Firle in Sussex and a few years ago we took a look around both Charleston itself and the nearby Monk's House in Rodmell, home of Leonard and Virginia Woolf. One of the paintings we came across there is this mysterious image, which the curator described to me as The Liverpool Ghost but which is actually A Man with His Horse, and a Boy. Why mysterious? Why "ghost"? Take a closer look. It obviously intrigued the Woolfs and it suggests for me an encounter between H P Lovecraft and the Bloomsbury Group. That particular story isn't in Altered Englands, but there is one featuring Lytton Strachey. Didn't I say eclectic?

Here are strange and elementally wondrous tales to "stain the wind with leaves", as another poet put it. With Halloween coming and the nights drawing in it's the perfect fireside read. If we could dig Auden up for a quote I have a feeling he'd shout: "Trolls run scolding!" Don't let 'em get there first.

Further reading and viewing:

Altered Englands

Carrington

The Letters of Lytton Strachey

Lytton Strachey by himself: A self-portrait

The Sandman 3: Dream Country

That's dark

Our group are trying Cthulhu Dark. It's a super-simple set of rules, which makes it ideal for playing online, and for the win we have Ralph Lovegrove as our guest referee. From the reviews, it looks like one of those games where you play in an author role rather than strictly in-character:

"If there’s anyone at the table who thinks that the story or mystery would be more interesting if you fail, they can step in, describe what would happen if you failed and roll a Failure die."

My knee-jerk to that kind of thing is to say, "I'll just roleplay going mad, thanks. I don't need insanity points and other players to write the arc for me."

But is that true? I have played in Cthulhu campaigns and I always take it that madness is inevitable -- though there are arguments against that view and in Lovecraft's fiction it's a characteristic of his chosen narrators that cosmic horror drives them mad; it may not be the inevitable reaction of any character to the same events.

Say it is inevitable, though. In GURPS I refuse to take mental disadvantages because they are so prescriptive, but to some extent playing insanity is going to yank you out of character anyway. As the insanity progresses, an ironic distance grows between player and character. You know that complete mental disintegration, suicide, whatever are inescapable. So you can't help thinking authorially -- "Is now the time for me to run gibbering?" "Do I leap off the building?" Unless you have the misfortune to be suicidal in real life, you can't wholly drive that from within. The character's end comes when you step aside and ordain it, more as an author than an actor.

Arguably the authorial approach is the only way to run an authentic Cthulhu game, if you take it as given that the characters are doomed to fail. Their madness can't just be a set of character quirks, like in GURPS. We're talking about the real horror of madness that leaves you absolutely helpless and bereft. And if we're simulating an HPL story there's never any real agency anyway. Against immemorially ancient and vast entities, indifferent to the "trouble of ants in the gleam of a million million of suns", there is nothing you can do to "win". It's only when you intervene an authorial view and recast reality in the shape of a story that you can perceive it as any kind of satisfying closure.

So, it's not how I normally like to roleplay. In fact I wouldn't even quite call it roleplaying. But it may well be the only fit for the subject matter. What I'm less convinced by is the designers' attempt to avoid what they see as the elitism inherent in Lovecraftian fiction, where an uneducated and either foreign or scarily feral mob revere the powerful other-worldly beings. Instead Cthulhu Dark makes the player-characters the oppressed (not that HPL's narrators are often very privileged) and substitutes as bad guys the most empowered people: the wealthy, bankers, politicians, socialites. I've used that as a bait-&-switch trope myself, but it just reinstates the Gothic tropes of degenerate, inbred aristocrats that Lovecraft was reacting against.

And to play a character from a genuinely deprived underclass, you again probably need to go with an authorial rather than an in-character approach. Do you know what it would be like to be brought up without any exposure to education? Like the very poorest people in mid-Victorian London, say? Prejudiced, illiterate, ignorant, made unhealthy and desperate by the most brutal existence. What you most definitely wouldn't be thinking is anything like, "I am of course a victim of the unbridled capitalism of my era and am unfairly kept down by the rich." Fact is, you'd be pretty much semi-feral. I could simulate it after reading Mayhew, but it would require a hell of a leap of imagination to get inside the character's head.

It should be an interesting experience. I'll report back -- if Azathoth doesn't devour my mind first.

First do no harm

A rare bit of housekeeping this time. Blogger, the platform I use for the FL blog, has recently changed its interface. How best to describe it... You know how if you buy a music gizmo for a baby it will have just a few big plastic buttons in primary colours so that the toddler can play do-re-mi? And then when he or she grows up, if the music bug has bitten then a synth and a mixing desk and all the proper kit can replace that? Well, Blogger used to be the grown-up mixing desk and now it's turned into the toddler's toy.

The idea, presumably, is to make it easier to post from a mobile device. You can snap that cat picture, add a quick note in textese, and you're done. But if you want a longer blog post, with formatted images and videos and so on -- sorry, you're bang out of luck. Google (they own Blogger) have decided to chase the mobile blog market and forget about the desktop dinosaurs like me.

Unfortunately in changing the interface they also broke it. The loss of features like being able to drill down into stats was presumably deliberate, but they've also made it almost impossible to place images where you want them to go. Yesterday I spent twenty minutes formatting a post, a task that used to take a minute or two with the old interface. Half the time you don't even know how to do what you want because some bright spark has decided to switch over to a purely icon-driven interface. You know, like Ikea.

I suspect all this is designed to make people give up on Blogger so that Google can drop it in a year's time without anyone kicking up a fuss. By the time it dies we'll all be glad to see it go.

But what does all this mean for the future of the FL blog? I am looking at migrating over to another platform like Wordpress. Alternatively, once I've got Jewelspider out into the world I could turn my Patreon page into the new home for FL. I'm afraid it would mean paying at least a dollar a month, but the occasional scenarios alone are worth that much, don't you think?

There'll be no immediate change, other than that I'll be checking on and replying to comments less frequently because it's so painful to have to cope with the new interface. And we have a whole stack of posts that I had the foresight to format before the old interface stopped working, so the blog will continue to look okay (if you call this okay) for months yet.

The other upside is that I've been thinking for a while now of doing some best-of books, taking the most popular posts and organizing them into topics - roleplaying, gamebooks, scenarios, and so on. Blogger buggering up its interface might be the spur I needed.

Dragons ahoy!

Here's a moment that every adventurer in the Fabled Lands has experienced: the confrontation with Vayss the Sea Dragon. (Yes, I know he's a sea dragon and he lives in a lake -- but I'm not going to argue with him.)

This gorgeous piece of artwork is by Renie Aganchyan, whose brother Bernar Aganchyan is the game's art director. That's one talented family!

It's just a taste of the goodies Prime Games have in store when their Fabled Lands CRPG erupts from the depths early next year. Players will be able to explore the lands of Sokara, Golnir, the Great Steppes and hopefully Uttaku too. And that's just for starters. Further releases will add other lands, and Jamie and I are looking at writing all-new books in the series if the CRPG kindles fresh interest. The year ahead could be a great time to explore uncharted waters.

Witch trees and wooden boys

I hope you've recovered from the recent Brymstone announcement, because here's more Dragon Warriors news. Not content with prepping the second issue of Casket of Fays, the good folks at Red Ruin Publishing have just released a couple of eerie adventure seeds by Nigel Ward: "A Real Live Boy" and "The Witch Oak". 

I can't say more about the adventures because one of our group has called dibs on running them, ideally on or around Halloween. But I can tell you that they're free (right here on DriveThruRPG) and look to be the perfect answer to my recent grumble about overlong roleplaying scenarios. Actually, "The Witch Oak" is a short story rather than an adventure, but our referee has embargoed it to raid for ideas, as I expect most will.

You might want to keep an eye on the Red Ruin page on DriveThruRPG, incidentally, as Casket of Fays #2 is due any day now. Also free and filled with encounters, adventures, items, spells and articles by the top creative talent working on DW today, it's better than the luxury suite at Gully's Inn -- and without the goblins waking you up at two in the morning, too.