About a month ago, I saw a Note on Substack by asking for volunteers to participate in a massive film review project centered on adaptations of Jane Austen’s novels. Since I consider Jane Austen to be one of the greatest authors in the English language (she, Dashiell Hammett, Mark Twain, and Tolkien have special places in my heart), I asked if I could be a participant and was welcomed into the fold and became a full-fledged member of The Jane Austen Screen Adaptations Club.

When it came to adaptations, I had my heart set on one of two adaptations. I either wanted to write about my favorite adaptation (Persuasion) or about one that my beloved friend Shawna Benson worked on (The Lizzie Bennet Diaries). Someone had already taken the Diaries, and so I was left with a beloved filmic companion. As always, something I am sure annoyed , it took me longer to write than I’d hoped, but that’s because I wanted to have something novel to say. I’m very proud of my contribution and was happy to see an edited version of it included in today’s entry over at .

SCREEN SOMM

The Jane Austen Screen Adaptations Club

Hi friends…

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4 days ago · 5 likes · Kristen SaBerre

Kristen, the editor, did a good job cutting my longish piece down to a similar size to the other reviews and recommended that I publish my full review here. I appreciate that she is letting me do this (as a participant in her project I would not have done so without her permission) because while I believe her edits retained much of the main thrust of my review, it lacks the meandering and intellectual sidetracks I am prone to and I want to share those with you.

Before I do though, I’d like to take another moment to thank Kristen for putting this project together. This is the kind of project we need more of in the world, displays of the things we love and why we love them. I don’t agree with some of the reviewers regarding their assessment of some adaptations, but I do appreciate their enthusiasm and sincere joy.

Persuasion (1995) — The Full Review

Persuasion is Jane Austen’s last complete novel. It was published posthumously in a set that included Northanger Abbey. These two novels represent Austen at the height of her powers as an author and observer of human behavior. It is fitting that these novels were published together because even though they have very different narratives, they both give audiences a glimpse into Austen’s thoughts about the literature of her time. Northanger Abbey directs its gaze at the Gothic tales of authors like Ann Radcliffe and argues for the importance of such narratives, even as it critiques them. Persuasion, too, includes commentary on Gothic themes and adds analysis of Byronic ones as well, but Austen directs her critical eye at a new target. With Persuasion, Austen aims her analysis at her own earlier works, and in particular at Emma.

In the earlier novel, we are presented with the irresistible character of Emma. She is as charming and delightful as she is naïve and meddlesome. For all her faults, we fall in love with her as deeply as Mr. Knightley even as she gives Miss Smith dreadful advice regarding Robert Martin. We come to understand, through Mr. Knightley, that Robert Martin represents a new and emerging world where merit triumphs over paper titles and that his love for Miss Smith is a privilege and not something to be shunned. Knightley teaches Emma about virtue, and Robert Martin demonstrates the constancy one expects of a worthy partner. As with all Austen novels, we are privy to the thoughts of the characters, but most of what we learn is in brilliant conversations. It’s an easy story to adapt because feelings are expressed, rather than suggested.

Like Emma, Persuasion has at its core bad advice transmitted from a respected mentor to a young woman in love. Unlike Emma, Lady Russell is not naïve or meddlesome. Instead, she is overprotective as she fails to recognize the potential inherent in the object of young Anne Elliot’s affections. As Emma did with Miss Smith, Lady Russell advises Anne Elliot that her suitor is beneath her station and that she deserves someone more fitting to her virtues. As with Emma, Lady Russell is wrong because she doesn’t recognize fully the superiority of individual virtue over the false pretenses provided by virtue of birth. Given that Sir Walter provides such a glorious example of the failures of paper virtue, it pains us that she held onto her older notions. We, like Anne, forgive her because we know her love of Anne was sincere and her motivations pure. We know that Captain Wentworth will forgive her too. In sharp contrast to the narrative of Emma, though, we learn much of what we know about the characters in Persuasion through their thoughts and actions and not their statements. It is fitting that Captain Wentworth’s ship was called the Laconia, for the characters are often silent about their real feelings in public. This presents a particular challenge to those adapting the tale to film. How does one show the inner longing and love of Anne Elliot and Captain Wentworth without relying on a ham-fisted technique like voiceover?

This is the obstacle director Roger Michell and screenwriter Nick Dear deftly overcome in the 1995 production of Persuasion, and in overcoming this challenge they create one of the best adaptations of a Jane Austen tale ever put to film. In some ways, we shouldn’t be surprised that an Austen adaptation released in the mid-1990s is compelling and shows great fidelity to the source material. This was the era of Emma, Sense and Sensibility, and Pride and Prejudice, all of which were beautiful and showed great deference to the source material. Even Clueless, which brought Emma into what was then modern-day Beverly Hills, retained so much of the heart of Austen that it has become a beloved classic in its own right. What makes Persuasion shine above these films, in many ways, is that it is deeply moving even though so much of the action is internal to the characters.

To have audiences feel the full force of the internal longing of Captain Wentworth and Anne Elliot requires both great directing and great acting, and Amanda Root (Anne Elliot) and Ciarán Hinds (Captain Wentworth) provide a masterclass in subtlety. When Captain Wentworth is writing his letter, we can see his longing, and the tension builds as we hope he can finish the letter in time to get it to Anne. The scene pulls my romantic heartstrings every time. Those not familiar with the tale beforehand get to see the well-paced revelation of Wentworth’s love for Anne and feel the full impact of many subtle movements and actions earlier in the film come to fruition. Those of us who have read the book, or are rewatching the film for the tenth time (for it deserves at least that many viewings), see each glimpse from Anne or gesture from Wentworth for what it is, a sincere and powerful, yet quiet and small, expression of a deep love that has endured years of separation. There are small areas where the film fails to capture the novel. For example, Elizabeth’s and Sir Walter’s villainy and fate are not explored in the film as much as they are in the book. Additionally, the exploration of the reasons for and fallout of Lady Russell’s advice is done more cursorily in the film than in the book. We don’t see as clearly how the novel returns to some of the themes of Emma. Such is the challenge of adaptations, though. One must choose what to include and what to leave out, and Nick Dear and Roger Michell focus, rightly, on the most important relationship. We spend our time with Anne and thus are able to feel the full force of longing when she is in the presence of Captain Wentworth.

Do yourself a favor and watch this wonderful production and follow it up by reading one of the great novelists in the English language. Jane Austen is a treasure, and this film does justice to her legacy.

My mom died twenty-eight years ago today and I am once again reminded that I have lived more of my life without my mom than I had years with her. My mom died during my junior year of college, but it is rare a day goes by that I don’t think about her for one reason or another. She is forever a part of me in my memories and in my self-deprecating sense of humor.

To be clear, I am not an orphan, I still have a dad and chat with him and share pictures. One of my favorite things in life is when my dad sends me a picture of him and my twin daughters from one of his visits. These moments bring me joy, but a part of me is still very much missing, a large part.

October 7th, 1998.

10…7…98 those numbers loom large and ominous in my heart, and it is only recently that I am no longer completely overwhelmed by them. I still think about my mom daily and I still feel sad around this time of year, it is no longer a date that I need to take off from work because of overwhelming sadness. The sorrow of the loss still surrounds me like a fog every year. Each year the fog is a little less dense, but it is always there and brings a sorrowful chill to my productivity and mood.

My wife and I have intimate conversations often, it is one of the joys of marriage, and during one of these conversations a few years ago she and I discussed the death of her grandmother. My wife explained her feelings this way, “When someone dies, the world feels a little less complete. Bird songs aren’t as joyful, and sunrises are slightly less beautiful.” Displaying, as she often does, her magnificent talent for unedited, awkward, and spontaneous verbal poetry. She was also correct.

She recently shared similar sentiments when we were talking about her dad this weekend. He died in 2020 and though he did not die of Covid-19, my wife was unable to see him due to lockdowns and the difficulty of getting time to drive to the Bay Area for what would be a very brief visit. She had already stopped by once during lockdowns and the process of doing it made it very emotional. She wondered then, and still wonders, how we could have done more to make him feel less alone in his final months. Our response to that situation was to try to make the world feel a little more complete and to add more love to our lives.

This meant that in July of 2020 my wife turned to me one day and said, “Christian, would it be okay if we went out and got a dog?”

I responded with a quick, “Sure. That sound’s like a good idea.”

“Great!” She said. “I found one. Let’s drive to San Diego to get her.”

We did and Snowball has been a wonderful addition to our family.

Then at the beginning of November of 2020, my wife asked me another question.

“Honey, do you think we could move to Idaho to be close to my mom?”

My response was, once again, “Sure. That sounds like a good idea. Judi and Bud don’t have any other family in the area and I am working remotely.”

“Great!” She said. “I found a place and we can move in two weeks from now!”

We did and I have fallen in love with Idaho, but Idaho reminds me a lot of Reno which is where I grew up and where my mom died.

C.S. Lewis opens his book A Grief Observed with the following observation about death:

I still feel this way. Not everyday, but on random days and certainly yesterday and today. Historically there had been two things that were remarkably difficult for me to do even years after my mom died.

The first was that I sometimes had a hard time remembering truly happy moments with her...on command. Happy moments enter my consciousness at random moments and seldom on the anniversary of her death. Glimpses of her nymph-like smile...brief auditory illusions of her laughter enter my mind. But the majority of my memories are neither happy nor sad, they are the memories of everyday activities, evening dinners and the question which ever looms over the head of a teenager, “Have you finished your homework?”

Now, when I think of my mom the moments that most come to mind revolve around her sense of humor. For example, though I watched many movies with my mom, none as awkward as the time we watched The Hunger. I think it was a Friday night, around this time of year, but I could be adding to the memory. I do remember that it was just the two of us and an erotic vampire film. I remember feeling both uncomfortable being aroused by the film, in my mom’s presence, while at the same time finding the situation hilarious. I mean, what mom picks a highly erotic vampire film to watch with their kid?

Okay, she probably picked it because it has David Bowie in it and he was one of my favorite musicians (those of us with January 8th birthdays have to stick together). Still, it was odd to be sitting there watching it with her and comedic troll that she was, she waited until a very specific moment in the film to ask me from where she was sitting on the other side of the room, “You like that?” Not in a judgmental way, rather in a “Ha! I caught my fairly straight edge son in an awkward moment” way. Makes me laugh every time and it makes watching The Hunger an ever awkward experience because even though she’s dead, she’s always watching it with me.

Speaking of her being a troll, there is one moment that really stands out for me. It comes to mind all the time and it is from when I was very young, maybe 6th grade or middle school. I came home to see my mom eating some scooped white substance from a bowl. I asked her what she was eating and she said, “A new vanilla ice cream…want to try it?” Naturally, I did. She told me to close my eyes and open my mouth and then she gave me a bite. It was cottage cheese and it was a horrible shock when I was expecting vanilla ice cream.

These memories just come to mind when I think of her. I used to not be able to remember them on demand, but more and more I can remember these and other moments. I do wish I could remember more of them though. In all honesty, I remember my mom as a happy person, a person who added joy to the world. Every time I watch a romantic comedy starring Meg Ryan, the character Meg portrays typically echoes how I remember my mom. This is especially true of Sleepless in Seattle. My memories of my mom as a generally happy person are why I experience significant cognitive dissonance when I think about her death.

I can’t understand my mom’s addiction, and eventual death due to how it ravaged her body, to heroin. I try, by reading/watching/listening to and about other addicts. I know the narrative of my mom’s addictive cycle, I can see each step of her hopeless journey. That’s not what I can’t understand. I know the things that led to her addiction. I watched them happen step by step and the progress is as logical as it is common among addicts. What I can’t understand is the overwhelming power of her addiction and how that addiction stole my mom from me...day by day.

Oddly, some really shallow things help. They are a poor substitute for true knowledge, and seem trite when I think hard on them, but they help. These things include the music of the Velvet Underground (in particular, you guessed it, Heroin) and Iggy Pop, the films Permanent Midnight (which I saw just after her death) and Trainspotting, television shows like Breaking Bad, the book and film versions of Razor’s Edge, and the writings of C.S. Lewis among other things.

I am the only member of my immediate family I know of who attends church regularly. I was raised secularly. Strange as it sounds my mom found comfort in, though she was baffled by, my faith. She once asked if I believed, expecting me (the first college student in my family) to laugh at the absurdity of the question. I told her I did and her response lingers with me to this day, “Really?” Her eyes looked at me...proud, confused, unbelieving, yet hopeful. I never was able to tell her that hope was what faith was all about (”Faith is the realization of what is hoped for and evidence of things not seen” Hebrews 11:1). It isn’t about “knowledge,” little of life is about actual knowledge. This is why Socrates asked us to know ourselves. That is a difficult enough task. Let alone the ability to acquire actual knowledge of something else.

I was notified of my mom’s death by answering machine. I was in classes and at work all day and even though it was the late 90s I didn’t have a cell phone. A series of messages of an ever-worsening condition. My father and sister were trying desperately to contact me so I could be there, but without a cell phone it was impossible. The calls were informative and dire. Seizures... followed by emergency medical action.

My wife and I later read the medical records to piece together a timeline, to see if there was an heroic effort to save my mom. There was. It is not the best way to be notified of death, answering machine, I think it is the worst. I can only imagine how hard it was for those trying to contact me. Until I received the messages, I was living a normal day while they were experiencing desperation and sorrow.

In retrospect I wish that my mom had been buried not cremated. I would have liked to have had the chance to speak, to say my own words. At the time, I hadn’t been to many funerals, but I have been to more than I’d like since that time. Now that I’ve attended funerals of friends taken too soon or who killed themselves, I have found that there is comfort and closure in them. There is also the knowledge that you can go to a quiet place to reflect and honor the memory of your loved one at another time. For example, when I used to drive by Mount Sinai Memorial Park across the freeway from Disney Studios, I was able remember my friend Cathy and shout “Twins Cathy!” It was something I said almost every time I drove by the site. When I drove to class at Cal Poly Pomona for my MBA, I knew my great uncle was buried at the Covina Hills cemetery near the exit and I’d think about him and our family visits to his home…visits that always included a trip to Disneyland.

It is different when you have a portion of someone’s ashes. It’s not bad, but it’s different. One of the interesting, and neat things about it, is that I am constantly looking for ways to honor her. One of the ways I do this is by leaving ashes at random places I visit so that my mom is also visiting them. Any time I am going somewhere my mom didn’t have the chance to visit, I think about leaving a little bit of her there to share a new memory. The total amount of ashes is limited though, so there is also the desire to keep some to keep the memories close.

This blog post is my annual eulogy, but I never feel that my own words are quite capable of fully capturing my grief so I also like to share the two poems I think best capture the way I feel. I first encountered one in a movie and the other, I read in an English literature class focusing on Romantic Literature. Both moved me deeply for their understanding of sorrow. Later, when I was reading a science fiction novel a friend recommended to me, I was deeply moved by some comments made in Philip K. Dick’s author’s note from A Scanner Darkly. I am going to quote these works below because fiction and poetry can play a vital healing role because they let us know that we are not alone in our grief. Grief is timeless.

The first poem is by W.H. Auden. Like many, I first heard the poem when I watched Four Weddings and a Funeral. It’s a lovely movie, and that is in large part due to the power of this particular scene.

The poem, which is available in its entirety at the Poetry Foundation, begins as follows:

                                    Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone, 
                                    Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone, 
                                    Silence the pianos and with muffled drum 
                                    Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

The second poem is one of my favorite poems. It resonated with me before I had learned of loss. I read it in a class I took on the Romantics as an undergraduate, a year before my mom died. It’s by my favorite Romantic poet, William Wordsworth. There is something in his sentimental writings that connect with me more than the work of any other Romantic poet. While Coleridge and Blake capture my imagination, Wordsworth captures my heart. When I was an angst-ridden teen Shelley’s Ozymandias was my anthem, but from the first time I read Surprised by Joy I finally knew how powerful the medium of poetry could really be.

                                   SURPRISED by joy--impatient as the Wind
                                   I turned to share the transport--Oh! with whom
                                   But Thee, deep buried in the silent tomb,
                                   That spot which no vicissitude can find?
                                   Love, faithful love, recalled thee to my mind--
                                   But how could I forget thee? Through what power,
                                   Even for the least division of an hour,
                                   Have I been so beguiled as to be blind
                                   To my most grievous loss?--That thought’s return
                                   Was the worst pang that sorrow ever bore,
                                   Save one, one only, when I stood forlorn,
                                   Knowing my heart’s best treasure was no more;
                                   That neither present time, nor years unborn
                                   Could to my sight that heavenly face restore.

Wordsworth wrote Surprised by Joy (C.S. Lewis titled one of his autobiographies after this poem), for his daughter Catherine who died at the age of four. This poem masterfully captures the grief I feel over the loss of my mom. I am “Surprised by Joy” often and every time I have wonderful event in my life, I want to call her and share the news. That can never happen and it brings the event of her death immediately to mind and my sorrow and feeling of loss are renewed. Every time...without fail. My mom missed my graduation, my wife’s master’s, my acceptance to graduate school, my wife completing her MFA in film at USC. She was not there to see her twin grandchildren born, and she did not experience any of the joy that the twins bring into the world.

The twins are a blessing in so many ways, but there is one particular way that amazes me. I get to see my mom in them every day. They are the Joy in my own personal Surprised by Joy. One of them will often do something that reminds me of my mom and I’ll want to share it with her, but have to settle for reminiscence.

As I stated before, I have continually looked to fiction and biographical narrative to understand my mom’s addiction and that is why I am including the following quote from Philip K. Dick. I think it captures a lot of how I feel about my mom’s addiction. Unlike Dick, I do think addiction is a disease, but like him I think it is a decision too.

When my mom first told me of her addiction to heroin, she expected me to be angry. A lot of my family was, I think the thought of my mother using heroin was too alien to my grandparents for them to even imagine it as a possibility. I think they viewed her use as somehow a failure on their part. I didn’t, I only wanted to know if she was okay. By which I meant was she okay at the time she told me. My mom thought that heroin could make life more bearable, for her it wasn’t a selfish desire to have fun, because she felt empty and sad on a regular basis. Heroin made her feel distant from the world and that distance let her forget her sadness for a moment. It made her feel like she could endure life by giving her moments of “nothing.” From the reading of the medical records, in her final moments of life heroin gave her nothing but fear and pain. She used heroin to endure life, but heroin took life from her.

I don’t “forgive” my mom for dying, I have never thought there was anything to forgive. I miss my mom and wish she were here. I love her and knowing that makes the missing part not so bad, because (as C.S. Lewis stated long before WandaVision) “The pain I feel now is the happiness I had before. That’s the deal.”

Sometimes I imagine that we do get to pick our families before we are born. In this fantasy, I get to see the deal that I signed up for when I chose Eugenie Lela Ilsa Johnson as my mom. I see all the pain and sorrow, but then I see her smile and I know the joy is more than worth the sorrow.

I’d take that deal every time. I love you mom, and I miss you.

The Preface: Where I Share Stuff from Other Substackers

It’s the spooky season and that means it’s time for every geek to share fitting movie, fiction, and gaming recommendations. I’ve already provided two lists of film recommendations for the season, one based on Witches and one based on Ambrose Bierce’s “The Damned Thing” and H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Colour Out of Space.” Both of those stories share certain stylistic and thematic elements, and both have influenced a lot of later stories. Speaking of which, I’m particularly interested in hearing what movies you think are a part of the legacy of Bierce’s storytelling.

We see a lot of conversations about Lovecraft, but far fewer about Bierce. mentioned how much she liked “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” and that immediately got me thinking about films that follow a similar structure. As much as I like Bierce’s tale, I find many of the stories in the “Occurrence” genre to be a bit disappointing because the twist can feel cheap and lazy if it isn’t earned by the way the narrative plays with perceptions of time and place. Here are a couple of films I think fall in the “Occurrence” genre, and I’ll let you decide whether they work or not for you:

1 - Buried (2010)

2 - 47 Meters Down (2017)

3 - Fall (2022)

4 - Carnival of Souls (1962)

I’m not alone in providing movie lists and several excellent lists have appeared in my email inbox lately. In fact, there seems to be an uptick of new Substack authors recently too and these lists come from two of these “newer” Substackers. The first is ’s 31 Days of Horror list. It’s a nicely balanced list that could serve as the basis for excellent conversation.

Your Professor of Fear Substack

31 Days of Horror: A Horror Movie for Every Night of October

There is something about October that makes horror movies feel necessary…

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23 days ago · 50 likes · 27 comments · Your Professor of Fear

I’m including two lists by because she included an interesting list of 31 different films as well as a list of 5 films for those who want to watch Halloween appropriate films, but aren’t fans of the horror genre.

Cool Girls Cry at Movies

Halloween Movie Month 2026: The official watch list!

Halloween Movie Month starts tomorrow, October 1st. What happens when you spend about two hours every night watching a spooky, scary movie for 31 days in a row? You’re about to find out! (But it will most certainly include nightmares before the month is up. I know from experience…

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24 days ago · 4 likes · 1 comment · Trisha Bartle

Cool Girls Cry at Movies

5 spooky-adjacent movies to watch with your favorite horror-hater

I know there’s a veritable slew of horror fans lurking in my subs and, as lovers of the genre, you all no doubt know how sad it can be if you wind up partnered with someone who can’t handle anything scary. No matter what you say or do, they’d rather claw their own eyes out than witness Chucky with a knife or the surreptitious ghosts standing quietly in …

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22 days ago · 7 likes · Trisha Bartle

Sadly, neither the professor nor Trisha recommended one of my favorite Halloween themed films, so I’ll drop that film here before getting into my first gaming recommendation. It’s the 2005 children’s film Spookley the Square Pumpkin. Given how crude the digital animation is and how simple the plot is, I don’t know why I love it so much. Love it though, I do. Spookley is just too cute.

Now on to the Spooky gaming recommendation, Deadlands (Savage Worlds version) and my Madelyn Kidd microsetting. Yes, Madelyn Kidd is a pun, a pun I expect you to get by the end of the essay.

Why I Decided to Write a Comic Book Weird West Microsetting

I’ve been a fan of the Deadlands role playing game since it was first published by Pinnacle Entertainment Group in the 1990s. The way it combined Greg Gorden’s innovative step-die mechanics, Shane Hensley’s love of the Old West and Civil War history, with a strong dose of the artist Brom’s horror aesthetic appealed to me greatly. The game is a master class in meta-narrative design and marks the high point in the meta-narrative genre of roleplaying games that was so popular in the 1990s.

Pinnacle and Shane are still hard at work supporting the Deadlands setting, but the rules of the game have shifted over to the much more streamlined mechanics of their Savage Worlds role playing game. Deadlands was published during an era when highly complex rules were the trend, rather than the exception. While Deadlands rules are more streamlined than games like GURPS, it still contains a number of interesting subsystems. These include the incorporation of elements like Hindrances (similar to Champions’ Disadvantages) and Edges (similar to Champions’ Perks/Powers depending on the Edge) and a magic system where players try to put together the best poker hand possible in order to defeat the chaotic forces that provide magical power.

For example, if you wanted to cast a spell that allowed you to step into one shadow and step out from another you would need a pair of Jacks or Better to move a distance of 2 yards or a Full House to teleport 100 yards. It was a thematically inspired system, and fit in with the play style of the times. The trend eventually shifted away from complex systems and you saw games like Feng Shui signal a trend to games that played faster while still facilitating narrative playstyles. The trend away from complexity accelerated with the Story Game movement of the early 2000s, even as mainstream mechanics minded gaming hit its peak with Dungeons & Dragons 3rd Edition and the d20 Boom. Pinnacle Entertainment released a d20 version of Deadlands which did fairly well for the company, but also rubbed some fans the wrong way. The collapse of the d20 boom led my local game store owner to believe that Pinnacle Entertainment had gone out of business since they had participated in that boom. They hadn’t, but that’s a very complex story for another time.

While Pinnacle was smart enough to participate in the d20 Boom, they had enough foresight to lay the groundwork for the future even as they took advantage of a brief trend. They designed their Savage Worlds game system from 2001 to 2002 and playtested the game at the final Milwaukee Gen Con in 2002 before releasing the first edition of the game in 2003. I’ll be doing a post discussing the evolution of their free introductory rules sets (aka Test Drives) for the Savage Worlds game soon, but what’s important here is that the game demonstrated Shane’s savvy understanding of the market. Not only was he taking advantage of short-term available revenue, but he was also building the foundation for future revenue by cultivating a solid fanbase.

Savage Worlds is a quick to play and easy to learn game that advertises itself as Fast! Furious! Fun! because of the ease of play and how it makes the job of the game master easy through a variety of tools. Those tools, random charts and adventure paths etc., will be discussed on their own in the future, but the fact that Savage Worlds approaches the ease of play problem from both the player and game master sides makes it a special game.

One of the things that I find interesting is that the mechanics of Savage Worlds are an adaptation of Deadlands Great Rail Wars, which was the tactical miniatures game Pinnacle Entertainment developed as a kind of Warhammer alternative in the mid to late 90s. Shane is an avid miniatures gamer, so it was natural that he’d want to make a miniatures game based on an intellectual property he cared about. Miniature wargames need more streamlined rules though and that’s what Shane and his team designed with Deadlands Great Rail Wars.

The more the staff at Pinnacle Entertainment, and their fans, played the system, the more they understood that they had not only a great skirmish miniature wargame, they had a great foundation for a role playing game and so Savage Worlds was born. All that remained was to eventually bring Deadlands under the Savage Worlds umbrella, which they eventually did and to glorious effect. I’ve been dying to play the game again for some time, but I need the right hook to get my daughters and their friends interested.

Then I remembered that the CW did a fantastic Scooby-Doo/Supernatural Crossover in Season 13 called Scoobynatural. In that episode, Sam, Dean, and Castiel find themselves transported into the animated world of Scooby-Doo where they applied their skills to aid the Scooby gang. Between that and Shaggy’s Showdown, I’ve got everything I need to create a campaign idea that will appeal to History, Mystery, and their friends.

So join me as I introduce you to...

Madelyn Kidd’s Academy for Inquisitive Children

On the final day of Gettysburg (July 3rd) 1863 the United States and the world experienced “The Reckoning.” The border between Earth and the Happy Hunting Grounds was sundered, if only for a moment, and all kinds of terrors leaked into our world. On that day, the field of Gettysburg was littered with corpses...and some of those corpses rose from the grave to spread horror. In the years that followed, the sinister Reckoners selected four champions who would transform the world into a literal Hell on Earth.

All of this is well documented in the Deadlands Role Playing Game. What is less well known is that on that day, the forces of Good selected some champions of their own. Four children born on the day of The Reckoning might just have a chance at stopping the world’s transformation, but only if they could meet up and gain sufficient knowledge and power to thwart the Servitors who served the Reckoners.

These young children would never have met if it hadn’t been for Madelyn Kidd. A simple schoolteacher from Serendipity, Pennsylvania, Madelyn had been on a picnic with her beau Aleister McKenzie overlooking the Battle of Gettysburg when the events of the Reckoning took place. Her beau was struck by a stray bullet and as Madelyn reached over to comfort her dying lover, she experienced a vision of a terrible future. She saw the world as it would be if the Reckoners had their way. She also saw a vision of hope where she was the founder of a new kind of school, a school dedicated to teaching children the skills necessary to fight back evil and to bring joy to lands that are dominated by fear.

While her vision was grand, the results so far have been very meager. Madelyn Kidd’s Academy for Inquisitive Children was successfully established in 1865 in the town of Serendipity, Pennsylvania. The first graduating class of two students graduated in 1869 and both of these students have gone on to jobs with the Union Government. Since that time, Madelyn has trained a number of gifted young students and currently has 45 students enrolled in her school. For all that training, not one of her students has gone on to achieve any great success against the evils the world is facing. All of her students are struggling against the darkness, but no great hero has emerged. Madelyn is on the verge of giving up hope because her four oldest currently enrolled students seem more concerned with solving local mysteries than they are with confronting greater threats.

Madelyn had high hopes for these four students. All four were born on the same day, July 3rd, 1863, and all four exhibited high levels of potential. They were quick learners, too, but they lack focus. They constantly take day trips in their Stagecoach, which they have named the Ratiocination Roller, to neighboring cities to unravel mysteries that the locals think are supernatural. Initially, Madelyn encouraged the behavior because she knew how important it was to fight real supernatural dangers, but as it became clear that every “supernatural” foe the students fought was revealed to be a fraud she began to lose hope. How would these students fare against the real horrors of the Weird West, let alone the Servitors, if they never had to face down supernatural horrors? It’s a worry that has begun to affect her sleep. She recently sent them on a trip to disputed territory to do a field study of flora and fauna in the hopes that the students would begin their training in earnest. Time is so short and 17 year old kids have to grow up quickly in the Weird West.

What Madelyn doesn’t know is that her students really are fighting supernatural foes, they only make it appear that the creatures they defeat are humans in disguise or swamp gas. This is because Eliza “Em” Vilnius noticed that when she made towns think that the evil that haunted them was a mere trick being performed by greedy individuals, those towns became happier and more successful places. It didn’t take “Em” long to catch on to the fact that the best way to undermine the Reckoners was to take away the power that fueled them...fear. The kids, who call themselves Ratiocination Incorporated, are looking forward to their trip into the Weird West with the knowledge that if they get into too much trouble, they might be able to call on Madelyn Kidd and her other students to help them fight the good fight.

Whatever the case, Madelyn hopes to create a world where “the Reckoners might have succeeded if not for those Madelyn kids.”

Madelyn Kidd (Huckster)

Attributes: Agility d6, Smarts d10, Spirit d6, Strength d4, Vigor d6
Skills: Fighting d6, Gambling d6, Guts d6, Intimidation d6, Investigation d8, Persuasion d6, Riding d6, Spellcasting d10, Stealth d4, Streetwise d8
Charisma: 2; Pace: 6; Parry: 5; Toughness: 5; Grit: 3
Hindrances: Enemy (Major), Heavy Sleeper, Loyal
Edges: Arcane Background (Magic), Attractive, Brave, Connections, Investigator, Linguist, New Power, Power Points
Powers: Armor, bolt (burning cards), hunch, mind rider; Power Points: 15
Gear: Hatchet, Knife (Str+d4) x3, Playing cards x8, Shirt/blouse, dress, Spectacles, $247

Jedediah Heiter (Mad Scientist)

Attributes: Agility d6, Smarts d8, Spirit d6, Strength d4, Vigor d6
Skills: Fighting d4, Guts d6, Investigation d6, Notice d4, Persuasion d4, Repair d8, Shooting d6, Weird Science d8
Charisma: 0; Pace: 6; Parry: 4; Toughness: 5; Grit: 1
Hindrances: Big Mouth, Doubting Thomas, Overconfident
Edges: Arcane Background (Weird Science), Knack (Bastard), New Power
Powers: Deflection (Jedediah’s Ocular Disruptor), stun (Jedediah’s Auditory Imbalancer); Power Points: 20
Gear: Backpack, Bed roll, Boots, Canteen, Derby, Drill, Duster, File, Gun belt, Hammer, Lantern, Lantern oil (per gallon) x2, Lockpicks, Mule, Rifle (.38-.52) x5, Shirt/blouse, work, Trousers/skirt, Watch, gold, Winchester ‘76 (.45) (Range 24/48/96, 2d8, Shots 15, AP 2), $62.65

Petra Quartz (Gunslinger)

Attributes: Agility d8, Smarts d4, Spirit d6, Strength d6, Vigor d6
Skills: Fighting d6, Guts d6, Intimidation d6, Notice d4, Riding d6, Shooting d8, Streetwise d4, Throwing d6
Charisma: 0; Pace: 6; Parry: 5; Toughness: 5; Grit: 1
Hindrances: Arrogant, Stubborn, Vengeful (Minor)
Edges: Quick Draw, Two-Fisted
Gear: Backpack, Bed roll, Boots, Chaps, Colt Peacemaker (.45, Double-Action) (Range 12/24/48, 2d6+1, Shots 6, AP 1) x2, Duster, Gun belt, Knife (Str+d4), Pistol (.40-.50) x10, Quick-draw holster, Rifle (.38-.52) x5, Shirt/blouse, work, Trousers/skirt, Winchester ‘76 (.45) (Range 24/48/96, 2d8, Shots 15, AP 2), $133

Eliza “Em” Vilnius (Hellstromme?)

Attributes: Agility d6, Smarts d6, Spirit d8, Strength d4, Vigor d6
Skills: Faith d8, Fighting d6, Guts d6, Investigation d4, Persuasion d8, Riding d6, Shooting d6
Charisma: 2; Pace: 6; Parry: 5; Toughness: 5; Grit: 1
Hindrances: Bad Dreams, Heavy Sleeper, Loyal
Edges: Arcane Background (Miracles), Brave, Charismatic
Powers: Detect/Conceal Arcana, Relief, Smite; Power Points: 10
Gear: Boots, Horse, Knife, Bowie (Str+d4+1, AP 1), Saddle, Saddlebags, Shirt/blouse, dress, Shoes, Shotgun shells x2, Suit/fancy dress, Trousers/skirt, Winchester Lever Action (Range 12/24/48, 1–3d6, Shots 4, +2 Shooting rolls), 80¢

Mockingjay (Shaman)

Attributes: Agility d6, Smarts d4, Spirit d8, Strength d6, Vigor d6
Skills: Fighting d8, Guts d6, Intimidation d6, Riding d6, Throwing d6, Tracking d4, Tribal Medicine d6
Charisma: 0; Pace: 6; Parry: 7; Toughness: 6; Grit: 1
Hindrances: All Thumbs, Curious, Loyal
Edges: Arcane Background (Shaman), Beast Master, Brawny
Powers: Beast Friend, healing; Power Points: 10
Gear: Arrow x5, Bolas (Range 4/8/16, Str+1, Shots 1, see notes), Boots, Bow (Range 12/24/48, 2d6, Shots 1), Horse, Knife, Bowie (Str+d4+1, AP 1) x2, Shirt/blouse, work, Spear (Str+d6, Parry +1; Reach 1; requires 2 hands), Tomahawk (Str+d6), Trousers/skirt, $68.50

Editor’s Note — Spoilers abound in this discussion, but they come after the link to the file containing the Bierce story. Give it a read and then continue on if you haven’t read it before.

Editor’s Note #2 — Some of this has been published by me before, but I am adding movie recommendations related to Bierce’s and Lovecraft’s tales at the end of the article.

I’ve been trying to catch up on the reading and researching I need to do for a series of reviews from the golden age of Sword & Sorcery, and adjacent, pulp fiction. In gamer terms, it’s an Appendix N adjacent series of reviews, but not a formal Appendix N series because I want to be able to wander down paths as the whim takes me. I’ve started the series a couple of times, but dissertation (now finished) and work often get in the way.

During this recent return I was re-reading the notes for the article I wrote in 2024 discussing the collaboration between C L Moore and Forrest Ackerman on her story “Nymph of Darkness.” I was particularly taken with Moore’s reference to Ambrose Bierce’s “The Damned Thing” as an inspiration for the way Nyusa’s invisibility worked in that story. I have been known from time to time to make a connection between Lovecraft’s “The Colour Out of Space”, which also featured a creature made of a color no one had ever seen before, and the creature in Bierce’s story. The creatures are different, but there are a number of similarities in the tale that stick out.

The Damned Thing Bierce

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I first read “The Damned Thing” a few years ago and I still find it to be an enjoyable short tale that leaves you thinking about the underlying horror for much longer than it takes to read the story. It also wasn’t at all what I expected it to be based on my earlier assumptions. Having read Moore’s correspondence with Ackerman, and the description in my copy of Lovecraft’s Supernatural Horror in Literature, I expected something Gothic and atmospheric. I expected a tale filled with madness and despair. The description of “The Damned Thing” in Supernatural Horror in Literature points to it as an exception in Bierce’s narrative style, a style which the book describes as “a jaunty and commonplacedly artificial style derived from journalistic models.” Gothic and atmospheric are not words that I would use to describe “The Damned Thing.” It certainly has its disturbing elements, and it is a wonderful commentary on willful disbelief, but it is a shockingly straight-forward tale. In fact, I might describe it as commonplacedly derived from journalistic models.

“The Damned Thing” is a perfect example of the modern procedural tale. The story opens with men, Mountain Men to be specific, gathered around a table upon which lies the body of Hugh Morgan. The use of Mountain Men is likely very intentional with regard to what Bierce is aiming at with the story. Frederick Jackson Turner’s presentation on “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” had been made earlier in the year that “The Damned Thing” was published, and the stages of Turner’s hypothesis are witnessed in the tale.

First, we have the Mountain Men those rugged adventurers who explore the vast unknown wilderness. Then we have the “coroner,” a figure who is one of the Mountain Men in dress and composure, but who has a job associated with greater civilization. In fact, the reason the men are gathered around the table is to perform a kind of coroner’s inquest and decide upon the cause of Hugh Morgan’s death. Finally, we have William Harker, the young journalist and fiction writer who had come to the Frontier to write a story about Hugh Morgan because he believed Morgan’s isolated life was worth sharing with his civilized readership. William completely represents the final stage of development in Jackson’s work. We have explorer’s, law bringers, and the civilized, and they are all gathered around a table to guide us through the narrative.

The narrative is broken into four clear acts that are given chapter markers.

There is the establishing act where we find out that the men have gathered as a jury and that William Harker will testify regarding how Hugh Morgan died. We also learn that there is an additional piece of evidence, a book, that will play a role in the story even after it fails to play a role in the jury.

The next act consists of Harker’s testimony about his hunting trip with Morgan and the beast that they encountered, a beast responsible for Hugh’s death. A couple of things stand out here. We are finally given hints as to the location of the story. Bierce consistently uses the term chaparral when describing the environment, a flora commonly associated with the West. The use of chaparral lends further evidence to the Turner-esque nature of the story. When the beast is introduced, it is described as “the wind” moving vegetation. It is only after Morgan shoots at the beast, and it charges Morgan, that Harker realizes that they have encountered some creature...an invisible creature. The description of the invisibility is intriguing and somewhat puzzling.

We know from Harker’s description that the creature is invisible, and transparent. We can see through it as it moves through the bushes in the earlier description. We also learn that things within its grasp are similarly obscured from our vision in the places where the creature holds its victim. There is obviously some cause, other than mere transparency, for the beast’s invisibility. The image that keeps coming to my mind is the representation of the predator in John McTiernan’s Predator (1987).

In the third act, the Jury deliberates and determines that the death was caused by a mountain lion. The coroner assures the jurors that there is no other evidence available to help them in their determination of cause of death. The jury rejects a purely supernatural cause for the death, but acknowledges that Harker bears no fault. We also learn that the coroner was lying when he said that there was no other useful evidence. The book the coroner had been reading at the beginning of the tale happens to be Hugh Morgan’s diary.

The final act is where all is made clear, in non-supernatural terms. Morgan’s diary reveals to the audience that Morgan had indeed been encountering an invisible creature for some time, but Morgan had a scientific explanation. This was no mythic beast, rather the creature only reflects light that the human eye cannot see. Somehow light bends around the creature. This is where the description of the invisibility of the creature is at its strongest and weakest. The reason for the invisibility is ingenious, the execution is lacking. Bierce refers to Morgan noticing the creature because its form blocked his ability to see a couple of stars, yet he can “see through” the creature to the world behind it. In essence, the creature may not actually be invisible in the sense we tend to think of invisibility. Rather we may just be unable to see the thing, no black absence of light and no true transparency. A little awkward, but still cool.

What is even more interesting is what Bierce is doing here. One can readily understand why authors might write tales about the inability of those who follow a material metaphysic to acknowledge or engage with the supernatural. The Exorcist is a wonderful horror tale of this sort. The science being applied to the victim of possession is as horrifying as, if not more than, the effects of the actual possession. What happens in Bierce’s tale is a material metaphysician, or rational realist if you will, in the form of the coroner unable to cope with a plausible scientific description of an unimaginable thing. Some scientists might want to explore the chaparral to find the beast, but the coroner essentially asserts that it is “better not to know.” One wonders if Bierce was critiquing particular rigid dogmatists in the scientific community with this tale.

One can see why Lovecraft and Moore were inspired by the piece. Lovecraft liberally borrows names from “The Damned Thing” in his story “The Colour Out of Space.” The only person who will share the tale of the invisible beast stalking the lands around Arkham is named Ammi Pierce -- clearly Ambrose Bierce -- and the name Nahum Gardner is close enough to Hugh Morgan for government work. The reluctance of the townsfolk to talk with our narrator in “Colour” fits with the jury’s reluctance to deal with the unknown.

Simple tales like “The Damned Thing” and “The Colour Out of Space,” are often the targets of criticism by iconoclasts who seek to establish newer voices in a genre. One such case was an older article on the Tor website Which brings me to Seamus Cooper’s 2009 article in the Tor 12 Days of Lovecraft series. Tor is a major publisher of science fiction and fantasy, arguably THE major publisher especially if you judge major by my personal buying habits. They are also a publisher that alternates between phases of mythical canonization and iconoclasm.

In the article Cooper asserts that “The Colour Out of Space” is quite bad. A strong opinion regarding a story that Lovecraft thought his best, and about a tale that is largely praised among Lovecraft fandom. Cooper believes that “Colour” is “ill-conceived and poorly executed.” This belief seems to largely stem from the fact that Cooper believes that the stakes of the tale have already taken place and that there is nothing left to chill the spines of the reader. This kind of analysis reminds me of when I saw The Blair Witch Project in the theater. After months of watching the marketing materials, I left the theater disillusioned and I asked my friend J, “is that it?” He nodded and we both agreed it wasn’t scary at all. Then, about five hours later, when I was going to sleep, it hit me. I was genuinely scared of the shadows in the corner of my room. I felt the dread. I’m not even superstitious, but I was in that moment. I thought there was no fear there, and there wasn’t at the moment, but there was later when I was alone in the dark. It changed my views about the film entirely. My friend J had similar thoughts.

Cooper is wrong on both counts. Kenneth Hite discusses some of the merits of the tale in his Tour de Lovecraft, so I won’t repeat them here. Instead, I’ll make a couple of my own observations.

With regard to the tale being poorly executed, one finds this a particularly baffling claim. The story begins with what may be the best written first sentence and introductory paragraphs in all of Lovecraftian fiction:

The words are poetry without purple prose. Lovecraft sets the tone of the wild and unexplored marvelously, and he sets the tone for the foulness of the place itself in exquisite fashion. This story is rife with beautifully constructed wordsmithing, something I wouldn’t often credit Lovecraft’s fiction.

It would be fair to say that Lovecraft was inspired by Washington Irving’s classic The Legend of Sleepy Hollow which opens as follows:

That might suggest that Lovecraft’s introduction wasn’t original, but it argues against it being poorly executed. I think Lovecraft’s prose is tighter and achieves the same effect with fewer words.

It is also remarkable how Lovecraft has transformed a hunting encounter with an unknown beast into a horrifying encounter with an alien presence. An encounter, I might add, that extends the interaction between the alien and the scientific beyond the mere coroner. In the end the beast does vanish, leaving a small piece behind trapped in a well, putting a seeming end to the stakes. But given the fact that there is soon to be a reservoir on top of the location of the small (trapped) piece, and the nature altering and mind altering affect this piece has on the land and the people surrounding it, one wonders what will happen when the reservoir comes and possibly frees the beast.

The end of this tale is as creepy as the end of the first Friday the 13th, when we discover that it might be possible for Jason to rise from the bottom of the lake, or John Carpenter’s The Thing. The creature is destroyed at the end of Carpenter’s movie...or is it? The same is true here. Just how has the beast altered those around it? What effect will it have?

The stakes are subtle, rather than grotesque. They are social, rather than personal. But the stakes are horrifying none the less.

This beast represents something more than a colorless thing. Bierce’s tale inspired “Who Goes There?,” the source story for The Thing, but as well as influenced the narrative of The Blob. To give just a glimpse of how “The Damned Thing” influenced “Who Goes There?” check out the “coroner’s inquest” image from the original Campbell tale in the August 1938 issue of Astounding Science Fiction, as well as a brief excerpt name dropping the older tale.

Damned Thing and Colour Out of Space Movie Recommendations

The Thing (1982)

In many ways, John W. Campbell’s tale “Who Goes There?” is an updated version of Bierce’s classic horror tale. It changes key things, like having the action take place narratively rather than through testimony, but the essence remains the same. There is a creature that exists that is difficult to detect and it’s coming for you and sowing distrust. The Thing is John Carpenter’s classic adaptation of Campbell’s story, and it remains one of the best horror films, and one of the best “containment” science fiction films ever made.

Predator (1987)

Bierce’s tale features “Mountain Men” who are attacked by an invisible creature that is hunting them as much as they are hunting it. I don’t know if the screenwriters, or John McTiernan, had Bierce in mind when they penned the tale of an invisible alien stalking soldiers in the jungle depths, but it’s very much a parallel story. Like Campbell’s tale, this is one that happens narratively rather than in retrospect. I’m sure you’ve seen it before, but watch it after reading Bierce.

The Blob (1958)

While H.P. Lovecraft’s tale was about an intangible creature that emerged from a meteor and emitted a light (or radiation) that warped the perceptions, minds, and reality of those affected by it, The Blob is about a slimy creature that emerges from a meteor and consumes everything it comes into contact with. It absorbs the body and essence of the things it consumes but doesn’t absorb their personality or ability to adopt their appearance like The Thing. Instead, it consumes everything. It makes those it destroys a part of a “Species Being.” There’s been a lot of writing about how films like Invasion of the Body Snatchers embodied Cold War fears, but The Blob is as much an anti-communist film as the rest of them. It just happens to have been released in the aftermath of the McCarthy era, so it highlights how the paranoia and blame of the “young” is misguided. The threat of the loss of individuality to a “foreign” threat is still there, but paranoia about your neighbors is removed. The threat is obvious and it’s growing. I don’t even think it’s an accident that “cold” kills the beast.

Annihilation (2018)

While Jeff VanderMeer has denied that “The Colour Out of Space” has any influence on Annihilation and his Southern Reach saga, I think he is protesting far too much. That doesn’t mean I think he based Annihilation on the Lovecraft tale, only that it was one of the stories that provided that materials that allowed him to tell his story. Vandermeer, along with his wife Ann, is one of the great editors in the history of Science Fiction and Fantasy fiction. Unlike many of the other great editors (I’m looking at, and loving you, Lin Carter…Thongor’s a favorite, but it is far from literature even as what you championed was), VanderMeer is a talented and inspired writer. He also edited an anthology called The Weird that is excellent, but sadly includes neither of these tales. He incorporated the materials more organically and created something new, but it’s still a tale of cosmic horror that echoes the themes and storyline of “The Colour Out of Space.” It’s also damned good.

Over the years, I’ve purchased and run a lot of roleplaying games, but I have a particular affection for superhero roleplaying games. As readers of my past two articles know, my superhero roleplaying game collection ranges from Superhero 2044 to games currently being play tested. I once had a desire to eventually own every superhero roleplaying game ever published, but I’ve abandoned that quest due to the outpouring of games that digital publishing enabled. That doesn’t mean I’m not still on the lookout for new and interesting games in the genre. I very much am, but between itch.io, DriveThruRPG, Lulu, Substack, and random websites with links to cool stuff it can be hard to even find the games that are very much worth my time. What I mean by this, is that there are a ton of games worth experiencing, but that finding them can be a challenge because of how fractured the market has become.

A perfect example of how difficult this can be is Plaid Rabbit’s Modern Knights superhero roleplaying game, which has wandered in and out of publication on that site and isn’t even published by Plaid Rabbit anymore. Wait? You are saying that you’ve never heard of Plaid Rabbit or Modern Knights? They were a part of the growing digital publishing industry in the late 90s and early 00s. Like today, there was a ton of interesting digital content being published and like today a lot of it was quickly forgotten.

Much like Steve Jackson Games’ digital Pyramid, there was a time when finding copies of Plaid Rabbit games was nigh impossible, especially if you are like me and seek to only acquire your games through legal means. A person doesn’t acquire a DriveThruRPG library of 9,380 copies unless that person prefers avoiding digital piracy.

Digital is great, but when material disappears it really disappears and can be impossible to find by any traditional means. Sometimes the only reason older games exist is because of piracy. It really is unforgivable, in my opinion, for digital games to disappear because it’s a format that should allow for truly deep catalog retention due to ease of “shelf space” etc. Publishers have little commercial excuse to pull stuff from the shelves. Certainly, they can pull stuff if they don’t want to offer it anymore because they are embarrassed by it or have come to hate it (like Vincent Baker with Dogs in the Vineyard), but it makes little financial sense to have a past product completely unavailable.

Thankfully both the Steve Jackson Games Pyramid Archive (at Warehouse 23) and Plaid Rabbit’s Modern Knights (via Electric Mulch on DriveThruRPG) have resurfaced in the digital marketplace. There are still other games completely lost to the ether.

As a collector, it’s one thing to worry about digital games that become vaporware. It’s quite another thing to lament over the game that was advertised but never saw the light of day. These are the games that really frustrate me. That’s because these were games that were far enough along in the development cycle that the publishers spend advertising dollars to promote them, or at minimum to offer them for solicitation, and yet no publicly available version exists. Like the second and third boxed sets to Pacesetter’s excellent Sandman roleplaying game, these games are either completely lost or exist as a digital file or random pile of papers in their creators’ homes. If this post on Facebook is correct, those of us who have been wondering who the Sandman is in that wonderfully bizarre game finally have our answer.

Over the years I’ve begun creating a list of these unpublished games, a list of games I’d love to see released digitally or print on demand. Games that are lost to time but need not be.

Today’s post is about three superhero roleplaying games and a “mech” game that I would have loved to see in print. I also hope that the publishers, one that is still in business and two that alternate between existing and not, see fit to at minimum offer these games digitally and regardless of where they are in development. These are games that I don’t need to be released in playable form, but they are games I’d at minimum like to explore for their ideas.

d20 Modern Spectaculars

Yes, you read the title of the first game correctly. Wizards of the Coast at one time planned to publish a superhero roleplaying game for there d20 Modern rules set. Wizards had already released a number of high quality products in the line and has made them available online for legacy play. The quality of these games was high enough that any skepticism I might have regarding the ability of the d20 System to smoothly handle super heroic action were dismissed by my enthusiasm. Here’s the advertising blurb for d20 Modern Spectaculars:

Let me repeat those designer names again. Mike Mearls (who’s work on D&D was excellent), Bill Slavicsek (Paranoia, Star Wars, D&D, Pokemon Jr.), and Owen K.C. Stephens (a designer who can make the d20/3.x/Pathfinder systems do essentially anything) were the designers on the project. Stephens has been as open as an NDA allows on the subject, but he has made it clear that the designers were paid and treated well even though this product was cancelled. I desperately wish that Hasbro would devote like 60 hours of development to finish the manuscript and put it up on their d20 Modern page. That’s all I ask...that or a super-secret copy of the unpublished manuscript which I will put into a steel vault and never mention to anyone.

If not Hasbro, then maybe Evil Genius will release an Everyday Heroes version of the game. Then again, their focus on licensed games seems to have had the effect that always has on smaller publishers.

Supra-Sentinels

On the opposite end of the “graphic design” and “modern mechanics” spectrum is Judges Guild’s never released Supra-Sentinels roleplaying game. The game would have likely been published in 1983 if Judges Guild hadn’t gone out of business. Based on the publisher, the art, and the advertisements, this game would have been an interesting glimpse into what a late stage old school superhero roleplaying game would have looked like mechanically.

There was some talk by the designers of the game back in 2014 on rpg collector message boards that there was some interest in seeing this game published. Given Judges Guild’s stuttering rebirth in the early 00s, followed by their recent Kickstarter and cooperation with Goodman Games, followed by their later decline it seems like any possibility of it seeing the light of day is gone. Given that Goodman Games had publishing old Judges Guild Journals and modules hardback format without “updating,” I would have loved to see them give Supra-Sentinels a similar treatment. Sadly, Goodman Games and Judge’s Guild have parted company acrimoniously so that looks unlikely.

Proton Fire

Another game lost to collectors was 1985’s “most exciting roleplaying game that never came to be,” TSR’s Proton Fire. The game was far enough in development in order to be solicited to retailers and advertised in TSR’s annual catalog, but it never got published. Like d20 Spectaculars it is one of those games that may have been pretty far down the development pipeline and a skeleton of the game might exist in a box somewhere.

Though the game was never released, it was playtested and heavily promoted. In issue 99 of Dragon Magazine, the Ares section of the magazine included a feature article by Michael Breault discussing the background of the game on pages 76 and 78. You can find copies of those pages around the internet, and they don’t include any mechanics, so I won’t include them here. I will say though that if TSR had managed to release this game, they would have provided some pretty serious competition for FASA’s Battledroids (now Battletech) game.

Battledroids came out in 1984 and was still gaining a fan base. Looking at the proposed materials for Proton Fire, it looks like it would have been more of an RPG than early Battletech and that would have made for an interesting market dynamic. Which would perform better, a tactical miniatures game or a roleplaying game? We’ll never know, but I would love to see the Proton Fire rules if they ever surface.

Superhero 2044 (Second Edition)

In August of 2017, Mark Christopher Thompson launched an initial Kickstarter that was supposed to fund a “Third Edition” of Superhero 2044 and a corresponding line of miniature figures. The pedant in me can’t stop thinking that it’s a Third Edition of Superhero ‘44 and only the Second Edition of Superhero 2044, but pedants will be pedants. Thompson owned the Checker Book Publishing who had published several volumes of the early Flash Gordon comic strips in hardback omnibus editions. While some have critiqued the quality of those books, I really liked the format and still read my copies from time to time. While the initial goal of $100,000 seemed simultaneously overly ambitious and insufficient to meet the intended goals of the project, I backed the project immediately. It failed spectacularly and was cancelled with only 50 backers. That cancellation was in large part due to the overambitious nature of the project. Good minis require a good distribution partner and Thompson was dreaming bigger than his logistics.

He quickly rebounded and offered a product within his capabilities and strengths. This time he was merely asking backers to support the creation of the game, a game written by Steve Perrin no less. The goal was set at $100 (he already had all the art he wanted to use because a lot of it featured Public Domain Superheroes a subject very dear to the author of the ) and just needed money to pay Steve and the printer. Thompson promised to publish the book at a loss. Steve Perrin worked hard on the game, and I have three different playtest drafts that I cannot discuss in detail because I signed an NDA on one draft and want to be respectful on the other drafts. I will say that it is very much a Steve Perrin design and it moves away mechanically from the original game.

I would desperately like to see this game in print. It is so close to being publishable. In fact, I think it is publishable with some layout changes and copyediting. Sadly, Thompson is caught in the cycle that so many people who miss deadlines find themselves falling into. He wants the game to be perfect, when all we want now is for the game to exist. It’s worthy of existence. It deserves to be played. It’s Steve Perrin’s last game, so I’d go with one of the 2017 rules sets and not the 2022 one, and I’d love to see the master designer’s final game see the light of day. It’s not perfect, and fandom would be mean, but I would be overjoyed.

Conclusion

I honestly don’t know what the market outside of “me” looks like for these products or games like them, but I would purchase them in a heartbeat. I’d even try to get my players to play them for a spell and would pay another $50 for the Superhero 2044 edition.

While Thompson likely owns the rights to publish Superhero 2044 in perpetuity now (Donald Saxman’s Estate could override that, but Saxman is dead), so I don’t think anyone will be designing a Third Edition to follow Thompson’s Second but I’d love to see that happen. I’m still interested in doing a retroclone of the original Superhero 2044 (called something else naturally). Rules aren’t copyrightable, though the particular expression is, and mine would include the rules additions by Wayne Shaw who has given me permission to use them. Even though Thompson hasn’t delivered the Second Edition, I’m pretty forgiving because I have seen the work done on the project and it was done in good faith. Given that Gareth Skarka’s Far West was finally released (another long delayed Kickstarter I backed), I have hopes that the 2nd Edition of Superhero 2044 will eventually see the light of day. I

The edition I’d like to produce would include excerpts from the interview I did with Wayne Shaw and discuss the influence that Superhero 2044 had on the superhero game genre. It would include notes on how the combat system influenced future games and would be as much an academic cultural artifact as a game. Speaking of which, here’s the initial draft (unfinished) of the combat tutorial I put together for Superhero 2044 back when tigers used to smoke. I think it could serve as a good foundation for the retroclone.

Superhero 2044 Combat Tutorial

1.01MB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

What do you think? Should I give the retroclone a go? Does anyone want to join me on that endeavor?

Because Superhero 2044 is a very old and rather obscure game, this article will begin with a very long preface. It’s an important game, but not very well known and even less often discussed.

As you might notice, right under this preface, I am posting a YouTube video version of this review. I’m including both versions here because I want to share this information in as many places as possible.

I have two reasons for my particular enthusiasm. First, I am a HUGE fan of superhero roleplaying games in general. At one time, I could honestly say I owned them all. Given the explosion of the pdf market and indie games in general, this is no longer the case but I still own a ton of superhero games. Second, as you will read in the discussion below, I was pleasantly surprised by Superhero 2044. People have often described the game as “unplayable”,” but that’s not quite true. Superhero 2044 is a clear demonstration of the wild creativity of the early RPG community (a wild creativity that still exists in various corners of the hobby). More than that, it is also an example of how hard it is to create games in a chaotic environment.

Starting with this article, I will be writing a series of articles that will attempt to review and discuss most of the major superhero roleplaying games, and a couple of key supplements, that have been published over the years. I’ll alternate new and old a bit, because I want to finish my Marvel review sooner rather than later. Given that I own a large library - though sadly not all - of the superhero games that have been published to date, this should be a fun exercise. Some games that you’ll be reading about soon are Villains and Vigilantes (1st Edition) and Supergame.

Background

According to Heroic Worlds by Lawrence Schick on Grognardia and Steve Perrin in Different Worlds #23, Superhero 2044 by Donald Saxman is the first commercially available superhero themed roleplaying game. Saxman’s game was initially published in 1977 under the name Superhero ‘44 (when I post the YouTube video I’ll share my copy). The game wasn’t entitled Superhero 2044 until the game was published in a second edition by Lou Zocchi’s Gamescience Inc. later the same year.

While I am a huge fan of superhero roleplaying games, and a student of the history of rpgs, this game sat on my bookshelf for years without a complete reading. Its lack of a list of itemized superpowers, or even mechanics of how superpowers work, was one of the key reasons that the game languished for so long on my shelf without a thorough examination. Apparently, Donald Saxman intentionally left a formal list of superpowers out of the book in order to respect the copyrights of various comic book publishers -- though that didn’t stop artist Mike Cagle from providing a cover illustration filled with characters who bear an uncanny similarity to many popular comic book characters (see above).

Donald Saxman was inspired to create Superhero 2044 when he was a player in a D&D campaign run by science fiction and fantasy author John M. Ford. Ford’s game featured an adventure in which, “the party of magicians and swordsmen met Batman and Doc Savage and ultimately fought Doctor Doom and Darkseid with the help of Luke Cage and the Phantom Stranger.” From that short bit of description of Ford’s campaign from the Superhero 2044 rulebook, one can see how this kind of high concept mashup could inspire players to design all kinds of things. After two years of design and playtesting, and a lot of help from his friends, Donald Saxman created the Superhero 2044 roleplaying game. While Lawrence Schick and others have stated that the game was influenced by D&D in Different Worlds, a close reading of the game shows that few if any of those influences were mechanical. Saxman writes that one of his chief influences was GDW’s early roleplaying game En Garde and that he made a conscious effort to avoid being influenced by D&D. I own En Garde as well and I’m not quite certain how that game influenced Superhero 2044 either, except maybe by pointing towards a more theatre of the mind experience than early D&D (remember this is pre-AD&D) suggested.

Overview of the Game

Superhero 2044 begins with a description of the game universe. The majority of game play will take place on the island of Inguria, a city that is kind of a cross between Macross City and the future cities of the Legion of Superheroes. There are a number of creative influences on exhibition here and the combination results in one of the game’s biggest assets, a rich world in which to play. It’s quite remarkable how much world design Saxman managed to fit into so few pages. Yes, there are a lot of granular details for GMs to fill in, but the big picture is presented in a manner that many modern games would do well to emulate.

Like many games being released around the same time Metagaming’s Melee was published the same year, Superhero 2044 features a point based character build system. In this case, players have 140 points to spend on a number of character attributes (Vigor, Stamina, Endurance, Mentality, Charisma, Ego, and Dexterity). While some of these attributes share similar names, they do have different functions and one- Stamina - would have benefited from a different name as it represents hand-to-hand fighting ability and overall physical capability. It would have been much better for Stamina to be called “Fighting” or “Melee” instead of Stamina. You’ll also note that there is no “Strength” statistic in the game. It’s interesting to note that while some modern gamers are critical of the new Marvel game because it lacks a Strength stat, the same was true of the very first superhero roleplaying game. It’s true of others as well, I’m looking at you Tiny Supers you amazingly simple and fun game. It should also be noted that players pick one of three superhero archetypes (Übermensch, Toolmaster, and Unique) and that each of these modifies starting attributes accordingly.

While there are no “strict” minimum values to the stats, or even stated average values for the stats, there are effective minimums if you want to avoid penalties. For example, if you want your character to start without any limitations or penalties, the game requires a character have a minimum of 20 Endurance, 11 Vigor, and 6 Dexterity. If any of these statistics are lower than these values, then the character suffers from some sort of penalty. Given that the Toolmaster starts with -10 points to the starting value of Endurance, a player would have to spend 30 of their starting points on Endurance to avoid any penalty. It might have been better to have the statistics start at base values and allow players to buy them down if they want to represent some disadvantage in a manner similar to what Champions adopts later.

One could, for example, have started characters with the minimum statistics I listed above as “average” and given out 103 statistic points instead of the 140 default in the rule book. Saxman might also have considered using more uniform base values for the statistics. In Champions an “average” person has a 10 in every stat, in Marvel FASERIP they have a 6 value, but in Superhero 2044 the average value is different for every statistic. All three of these critiques are issues that are quickly addressed by other superhero rpg designs, for point based systems anyway. Given that Wayne Shaw’s house rules for Superhero 2044 were one of the inspirations for Champions, one can hypothesize that the design choices of that game were a direct result of similar thoughts by Shaw.

Once these initial points are spent, the players are allowed 50 bonus points to add to one of these in special circumstances in order to emulate some power. The example given is 50 extra Endurance vs. Bullets and some recommendations are made to base superpowers on weapons and gadgets contained in the game.

Though there is a point-based system for the purchase of attributes, there is no such system for superpowers. Donald Saxman had intended to write three books for the Superhero 2044 system in which one of the later books would provide such a system, but those books were never published. This doesn’t mean that no power design rules were ever published. Wayne Shaw - who I interviewed on the Geekerati podcast (above) - wrote an extensive super power design rules set in issue 8 of Niall Shapero’s excellent The Lords of Chaos fanzine. Shaw also offers some ideas in the insert to the 2010 reprint of Superhero 2044 mentioned earlier.

Importance to the Genre

As I mentioned before, the lack of a super power design system meant that this the game sat on my shelf for some time. When I finally too the time to read the book, I found it to be much better than I expected. While I would argue that without Wayne Shaw’s additions in The Lords of Chaos issue 8 the game would be challenging to run, if Superhero 2044 had never been published the modern super hero roleplaying would not be what it is today. The game has had wide reaching on the super hero games that came after it. If not for Superhero 2044, there would be no Champions, Supergame, Golden Heroes, or even (I’d argue) the new Marvel Multiverse Roleplaying Game. Each of those super hero games lifts a concept out of Superhero 2044 and incorporates it into design.

While it wasn’t the absolute first point based game, it was the first superhero game to include point based character construction. Though the point expenditure was limited to the building of a character’s “attributes” and were not a part of “power design,” this was still a major shift in game design. This innovation in particular is one of the major design starting points for a number of super hero roleplaying games -- not the least of which is the Champions game.

Earlier I mentioned that the Champions roleplaying game was an off-shoot of Wayne Shaw’s house rules for Superhero 2044 and you may be wondering, “just where is Christian getting this information? Sounds made up to me.” Well, the first edition Champions rule book specifically mentions the influence that Wayne Shaw’s character creation rules had on the game’s early design, but the influence Superhero 2044 had on Champions reached beyond having a point based character design system. It also influenced the combat system.

Influence on Champions’ Combat System

In addition to being inspired by the point-based character design of Superhero 2044 it is evident that Champions melee combat system was influenced by Donald Saxman’s game as well.

In Champions combat is resolved by taking a character’s “Offensive Combat Value” and subtracting an opponent’s “Defensive Combat Value.” The result of that subtraction is then added to 11 to find the number required to hit an opponent on a roll of 3 six-sided dice. Champions combat system is one of the best on the market and the fact that it uses a comparison of combatant’s effectiveness, and a bell curve resolution system, are among its chief strengths. As you will see in a future review, the new Marvel Multiverse Role Playing Game does something similar, though it streamlines the process.

In Superhero 2044, you take a character’s “Stamina” and subtract his opponents “Stamina.” The difference between these two numbers is compared to the Universal Combat Matrix which gives you a number between 3 and 18 that the character must roll on 3 six-sided dice to determine if the character hit his opponent. It should be noted that this combat system is only used for “melee” combat in Superhero 2044, where it forms the foundation of Champions combat.

The Champions version is more elegant, as the result of the initial comparison is the modifier to the 3d6 roll, but it is the same system. It is as if the designers of Champions play tested and refined the Superhero 2044 melee combat system. Champions combat has some significant differences overall to Superhero 2044, but one can see that one echoes the other.

Influence on Supergame

Like Champions, Supergame was influenced by Superhero 2044‘s point based character generation system. Given its own 1980 design date, and the fact that it was a part of “California Gaming Culture,” might hint that Supergame itself also influenced Champions. One sees the underpinnings of Superhero 2044 is in the purchase of a character’s starting attributes.

Both Superhero 2044 and Supergame feature something that many modern gamers might consider odd. All of a character’s attributes start at zero and can be increased -- this itself isn’t odd to the modern gamer. What is odd is that both games have attribute levels where the character is suffering from a disability. In Superhero 2044, if a character has an Endurance of less than 20 that character is “fatigued” or worse. In Supergame, a character with an “Agony Score” of less than 15 “may either move or attack, but only one per turn.” There are similar penalties for “Vigor” in Superhero 2044 and “Physical Score” in Supergame. The names of the attributes and the level of effect are different, but one can see the similarities. Most modern systems would start a character with a base number of points sufficient to not be fatigued or incapacitated, but both Superhero 2044 and Supergame allow for the possibility.

But it isn’t the point based character design where Supergame bears the most similarity to its predecessor. Supergame includes rules for building specific powers -- though not as robust the later published Champions -- that are themselves an innovation over the state of gaming at that time and a step beyond what were offered in Superhero 2044.

The area where Supergame most reflects Superhero 2044 is in its ranged combat system. In Superhero 2044, ranged combat is decided by rolling a six sided die and adding/subtracting to the die total applicable modifiers. This sets the target number that must be rolled, or higher, on a second roll of a six sided die. For example a character with a 20 Dexterity (-1) shooting an opponent at point blank range (-3) with a shoulder weapon (-1) rolls a 6 on a six sided die. This gives a modified result of 1 (6-1-3-1=1) and means that the character hits if the player rolls a 1 or better on the second roll. This system, with some differences in modifier values, is the system used in Supergame.

I swear that this system (roll to get target number, then roll with modifier to see if you hit) seems really familiar to me. I’m sure I’ve encountered it elsewhere, likely in wargaming circles, but I cannot for the life of me remember or find it anywhere else.

Influence on Golden Heroes

While I was intrigued by the way that Superhero 2044 influenced the design of American super hero roleplaying games, I was amazed at how it had influenced a British one. In White Dwarf magazine issue 9, game designer Eamon Bloomfield reviewed Superhero 44 -- Superhero 2044‘s first edition -- and wrote the following:

The weekly planning sheet is one of the most intriguing aspects of the Superhero 2044 game and the most playable aspect “out of the box.” The game includes weekly planning sheets that provide a number of “activity blocks” to which players assign particular tasks, like fighting crime or resting. Golden Heroes, Games Workshop’s super hero roleplaying game, featured a campaign system that bears no small similarities to that of Superhero 2044. Games Workshop was, and still is, the publisher of White Dwarf magazine and so it is easy to believe that this game review sparked some discussion of “planning sheet” style campaign play.

Golden Heroes by Simon Burley features a campaign system that heavily relies on something very similar to Superhero 2044‘s weekly planning sheet. They have a system that uses something called a “Daily Utility Phase” or DUPs. The game describes them as follows:

The player’s allocation of DUPs is compared to various campaign ratings, something vary similar to what Superhero 2044 calls “handicaps,” in order to determine what events happen to the character and how much the character is able to improve over time. Both systems are dynamic and change as characters interact with the game world. The Golden Heroes system is more developed and is a part of a more complete system of mechanics, but it is unarguably a descendant of the Superhero 2044 system.

Closing Remarks

I wish I had read Superhero 2044 much sooner than I did. It is a definite diamond in the rough. While it would be difficult to play RAW, it has a large number of innovative mechanics and ideas. Even more surprisingly, the game is actually playable. The underlying game mechanics are solid. It’s the character creation bit that needs a lot of work. Regardless, the fact that it contains enough ideas to influence no fewer than THREE super hero roleplaying games in their design is a significant achievement in and of itself. One cannot truly understand the development of the hobby without reading this game.

I think I will try to play the game itself soon, though I don’t know if I will try to design a comprehensive powers system or use an existing one to supplement the game, as the campaign play system still stands out as something that has some depth and would be useful in a number of games. Given the abstract nature of the campaign planning system, one could easily adapt it to another game for use.

The game also features a detailed setting for super hero play. The setting lacks the microscopic detail of modern settings, but for the time the game was written it is quite intricate. Like the game itself, its setting is one that inspires addition and extension rather than provides a complete painting.

Donald Saxman created something pretty special and I’d love to see someone take this system and make a modern edition out of it. It would take some work, but it would be worth it.

There is currently an updated version of Superhero 2044 being slowly but surely designed as I write this. It was launched as a Kickstarter, but the death of the hired designer (Steve Perrin) and other potholes have long delayed the project. Many think the game will never see the light of day, but I disagree. I think the new edition will eventually be completed, but I have no idea when. I backed that Kickstarter and have the playtest rules, so I know it can be finished. It just has to make it over the final finish line.

That said, I wish I had personally asked Donald Saxman while he was alive if he would have agreed to work with me to run a Kickstarter of Superhero 2044 Second Edition that incorporates some of Shaw’s changes while keeping the basic system as is. Such an endeavor would have been a truly OSR adventure and one that I think would have been worth exploring. I would have asked some of my experienced designer friends if they wanted to jump on board as well.

What would a more developed version of the original game look like? I hope we get to find out some day.

For more information about the early days of superhero roleplaying games, the Age of Ravens blog has written a series on the History of Superhero RPGs that gives brief synopses of these games through the ages and James Maliszewski has published an essay by Superhero 2044 creator Donald Saxman. The Saxman essay, along with an old post I wrote on Cinerati in 2010, were included as additional materials in a 2010 reprint edition of Superhero 2044 issued by Gamescience.

As you might have guessed by the title above, all of this week’s film recommendations feature witches in one form or another. While my earlier “Geekshelf” article covering great horror films of the 60s and 70s included a couple of foundational witch themed films that everyone should watch, it was far from a complete list (even for the era). The list included one of my absolute favorite “witch films,” Burn, Witch, Burn which was based on Fritz Leiber’s novel Conjure Wife. I think one of my favorite parts of the film is that even as witchcraft is at the center of every plot element, the real horror is competition for tenure track positions at a university and the lengths people will go to acquire that prestigious and low paying position.

Witches have long been a part of societies darkest fears. The concept exists in almost every human society and the societal fears they embody can vary wildly and include things like fear of aging (particularly of women) in a phenomenon Rebekah King called Hagsploitation. There’s more to it than just aging, but the ways that aging alters the body can be quite frightening to the young and to those about to begin aging in earnest. Witches can also represent society’s struggles with sexual liberation, with women’s empowerment as they gain more formal political authority, and grapple with our concepts of femininity and care taking. Think for a minute how many witch tales involve people going for some kind of medical aid, only to find that the Hag of the Woods has cursed us instead. Then there are the tales of witches and missing children. From Baba Yaga’s chicken footed hut that wanders from place to place enabling her to steal children to the witches of Roald Dahl’s tale (not to mention Jack and Jill) witches stealing and eating children is a common trope that combines many of the fears above.

One of my favorite fantasy novels, The Scar by Marina and Sergey Dyachenko, does a nice job of inverting the hagsploitation trope. The novel is rooted in Russian folklore, so it should be no surprise that the protagonist encounters a witch in the woods. He meets her when he is at his absolute lowest state and his encounter with her is when he begins to become a virtuous person, in large part due to her moral guidance. In this novel, like in the movie Centurion starring Michael Fassbender, the witch (Imogen Poots) is a protective and healing figure. That’s not the case in a lot of films appropriate for Halloween viewing, though it is for at least of the films.

As we enter the Spooky Season, I will try to do a weekly list of seasonal films that I think you will enjoy watching. Some of them are classics that have received high praise, but at least one is a personal choice where I think I might just be the only fan the film has. Not all of the films will be scary, but they will all fit the theme.

1. The Witch

Sometimes a film manages to perfectly capture the classic tropes of a horror mythology while updating it in a way that makes it salient for new audiences. Robert Eggers’ The Witch is one of those films. In The Witch, Eggers doesn’t try to update or shift the mythology of witches and witchcraft but instead goes straight to the historical sources and pulls no stops in pushing them to their natural conclusion. From the inclusion of the material components necessary to craft a witch’s flying ointment, to the focus on faith and isolation and how doubt and separation from the community can empower evil. It’s a complex movie that touches on so many more themes, that draws deeply from the lore of witchcraft, and it may well be the best witch related horror film ever made. I cannot wait to see what Eggers does with the Werewolf tale later this year.

2. Warlock

Prior to seeing Robert Egger’s film, my personal favorite witch related film was Steve Miner’s Warlock. The film explores the simple “what if” question of what would happen if a witch traveled through time from 1691 to modern day Boston. A similar time travel conceit was used in I Married a Witch, but that tale was played for humorous effect. Miner’s film, with a screenplay by David Twohy (Waterworld, Pitch Black), has humorous moments, but it takes its subject matter very seriously. Julian Sands is charming and disturbing as the eponymous warlock who has made a pact with the Devil in pursuit of power and the destruction of the Earth.

The witch (warlock) in this film is entirely nihilistic and seeks to unmake creation in the ultimate act of evil. Like Eggers’ film, the movie draws heavily on real lore, right down to the flying ointment’s necessary ingredients, and uses the folklore beautifully. Richard E. Grant is perfect as the witch hunter in the film. He has been in many comedies and could have played his role up for camp, but he plays the role straight and it elevates the film.

People often criticize characters in horror films because they behave in ways the viewer finds ridiculous. I don’t tend to agree with that critique. True, the behaviors are ridiculous for characters “in a horror film,” but they are perfectly normal behaviors that you and I do every day…even when we might be in danger. In many horror films, even a mundane action like opening door when the doorbell rings (as the pirates do in the remake of The Fog) could lead to your death. What separates the victims from the best “Final Girls” (like Sharni Vinson’s Erin in You’re Next, who is my favorite Final Girl) is that the survivor at some point realizes they are in a horror film and reacts accordingly. Erin reacted immediately, and the Winchester brothers of Supernatural fame know it from the first episode. That’s their superpower, early on at least.

The citizens of the late 20th century are not prepared for Julian Sands’ morally depraved Warlock, but the man hunting him across time knows he’s in a horror film and that is why I love this film so much.

3. The Blair Witch Project

The Blair Witch Project was released my Junior year of college and I remember all of the promotional materials that aired in anticipation of the film. Of particular note were the promos produced by the SciFi (now SyFy) Channel that transformed the “found footage” aspect of the film from mere conceit to completely plausible. They produced shows like “Curse of the Blair Witch” which aired in July off 1999 during the build up to the wide release of the film. These all gave the film a verisimilitude it would have otherwise lacked.

The most interesting aspects of The Blair Witch Project are that we never actually see the witch in the movie itself and how the film didn’t initially frighten me at all. I left the theater where my friend John Ford and I watched it in preparation of writing a review for the Sparks Tribune. Neither of us was moved by the film on first viewing, but our review wasn’t due for another day so we agreed to mull over the movie before meeting for our regular “dialog” themed review the next day. That night, when I went to bed and turned out the lights, was when the movie caught up with me. I was staring at the ceiling, genuinely scared. It made me reassess the film as one that give delayed fear, rather than immediate cathartic fear.

4. Seventh Son

And here is where I deviate from “expected” recommendations and into the realm of “this is my list and I’m going to share my artistic AND guilty pleasures” mode. If Robert Eggers’ The Witch is the perfect example of what happens when a director stays true to the source material, then Sergei Bodrov’s adaptation of Joseph Delaney’s The Spook’s Apprentice (aka The Last Apprentice: Revenge of the Witch in the US) is the perfect example of what happens when a film gets Hollywoodized. In Delaney’s original young adult series, Thomas Ward is an apprentice witch hunter (called a Spook in the books) who doesn’t know whether to trust Old Gregory and his tales of girls with pointy shoes and his naivete might well free Mother Malkin, a witch of the classic variety.

The screenplay by Charles Leavitt and Steven Knight pretty much tosses aside everything that made the book engaging, and Delaney’s book is a very entertaining example of classic witch lore. Yet there is something about this film that brings me back to enjoyable viewing after enjoyable viewing. The film, which was a financial failure that only earned $114 million on a $95 million budget, is more a Dungeons & Dragons movie than a traditional witch tale. I think the film would have been a financial success had they stuck to the original story (and it would have been a much better film deserving of that success), but Alicia Vikander and Ben Barnes have genuine chemistry in the film and Jeff Bridges is appropriately curmudgeonly so I find the film to be a fun time. Julianne Moore is very good as Mother Malkin, though with much more sex appeal than the character in the book.

I’m pretty sure I’m the film’s only fan, but fan I am and I watch it every year, even if only to see Kit Harrington as the Penultimate Apprentice that requires the recruiting of the final one.

5. Solomon Kane

Where Seventh Son abandons the source material in both plot and tone, M.J. Bassett’s Solomon Kane diverges quite a distance from the source material while still perfectly capturing Robert E. Howard’s Puritan Hero. This is in large part due to James Purefoy’s performance as Solomon Kane and the fact that Robert E. Howard’s characters have been the victims of so much pastiche fiction that getting the character right, rather than any plot elements, becomes the most important feature of any adaptation.

When people complain about L. Sprague deCamp’s Conan stories, it isn’t the plots themselves that are usually the source of ire. Instead, it’s a complete misunderstanding of Conan the character as an intelligent character who is as crafty mentally as he is skilled physically. Howard’s Conan isn’t Thrud and Blunder, he’s a character capable of appreciating the arts even as he knows that the artists themselves despise him as a barbarian. Similarly, Solomon Kane is a man of rigid virtue and Purefoy’s performance shines through in what is a relatively weak screenplay that didn’t trust the source material. I imagine this is in part due to the fact that some of it would be very out of touch with modern sensibilities. There is an entire Kane arc that was inspired by H. Rider Haggard that many would view as problematic and shifting away from that was likely an influence on the decision to write an alternate villain and conflict. Weaknesses in the screenplay aside, which I think I am actually overstating because it isn’t a bad screenplay, this is a film where the performances elevate the movie into something well worth watching.

6. Bell, Book, and Candle

I’m going to take a moment to shift away from the grim and dark and turn toward the witty and romantic. As might be surmised from my earlier mention of I Married a Witch, I am a sucker for the romantic witch story and the pinnacle of the witch romance is Richard Quine’s (It Happened to Jane, The Notorious Landlady) 1958 adaptation of the play Bell, Book, and Candle by John Van Druten. The story is a simple one. A young witch named Gillian (Kim Novak) is bored with her life and ends up having a series of screwball romantic comedy adventures with her upstairs neighbor Shep (James Stewart).

The film is a delightful high concept mashup of the traditional screwball comedy with witchcraft lore that is made all the more charming because of a wonderful cast. Elsa Lancaster (the Bride in James Whale’s Bride of Frankenstein) plays Gillian’s Aunt Queenie and appropriately alternates between angry and charming. Jack Lemmon is very funny as Gillian’s brother Nicky, but the real show stealer is Gillian’s Siamese cat and familiar Pyewacket. This film, along with I Married a Witch, was one of the major inspirations behind the television show Bewitched, but it has a charm all its own.

7. Weapons

Okay, I almost didn’t include this film because including it in a list of witch films is almost a spoiler, but witches and disappearing children go hand in hand in folklore and Weapons is a very strong entry in the creepy as heck witch film genre. Additionally, it’s been out long enough and there’s been enough discourse that I think people know this is a witch movie. Many of the same things that made Robert Eggers’ The Witch such a strong film are what make Zach Cregger’s Weapons so effective. It’s a movie that uses the traditional witch tale to touch on a host of modern anxieties that range from the very common fear of parents that their children will be abducted to mass shootings and pandemic fears.

A Final Request

I’m looking for someone who is willing to stop by the “Geekside Chats” on a fairly regular basis to talk about a wide variety of pop culture. Ideally, you’d be willing to talk about movies, books, and role playing games. I’m willing to do a rotation for each of those if that fits best, but I’d like to do it fairly regularly. If you are up for it, let me know in the comments and we can try to schedule

While I know that the science fiction author John M Ford (who wrote the excellent The Dragon Waiting) ran the game that became Superhero ‘44 (and eventually Superhero 2044), I don’t know of many people other than Wayne Shaw and I who have actually played Superhero ‘44 and I think this has resulted in a dearth of knowledge about how influential this game really was. I’ll be posting a video review of the game shortly, but this interview contains a ton of vital historical information straight from the source.

The early days of Superhero themed role playing games are a case study in innovation and collaborative design. A couple of years ago on Geekerati Media I demonstrated some of the influence that Superhero 2044 influenced the Champions roleplaying game’s combat system, but the Superhero 2044 rule book wasn’t the only thing to influence the Champions system.

A key influence was Wayne Shaw’s point build system. The first clue as to Wayne’s influence on Champions is in the first edition of the game. Toward the end of the rulebook there is a brief discussion of how the game came to be designed. The basic story is that George MacDonald “had some good ideas for combat and characteristics, but the problem of assigning powers was a difficult one. George met Wayne Shaw at a convention, and saw his point system for distributing superpowers. The current system looks almost nothing like Wayne’s original work, but owes much in spirit to Wayne and his group’s pioneering work”

Those rules were published in issue 8 of the Southern California based fanzine Lords of Chaos, and we were lucky enough to talk with Wayne about how those rules were designed and get a glimpse into pre-internet era collaboration and innovation that was fostered by a vibrant APA community.

While there were already some point build role playing game systems, The Fantasy Trip and Superhero 2044 itself, they weren’t as complex as the system that Wayne designed. Additionally, Wayne added a concept that would shape many games published in the future…the disadvantage.

Pre-Review Ramblings

I’ve long been a fan of D&D media tie-in fiction and a part of me is sad that there is so little new fiction being written for the line. I reviewed Ravenloft: Heir of Strahd earlier this year and I thought that Delilah S. Dawson put forth a good faith effort to produce an entertaining story. She tried to balance body horror, Gothic horror, traditional fantasy, and the modern Critical Role D&D party. Overall, the experience was enjoyable, but it’s certainly not the book for everyone.

I am currently reading the first two volumes in The Fallbacks series, which leans pretty heavily in the Critical Role direction. That tone isn’t for everyone and that’s what prompted me to pick up the keyboard and write this piece. That Wizards of the Coast is publishing a couple of series that appeal to only a segment of their fanbase wouldn’t be a big deal if they were producing books like they used to. When you are only publishing a handful of books a year, hitting only one segment of your fanbase isn’t the best planning. Last year saw the publication of Ravenloft: Heir of Strahd, The Fallbacks: Dealing with Dragons, and Drizzt: The Finest Edge of Twilight. This year we’ve seen the publication of a new Dragonlance novel called War Wizard and a romantasy called The Feywild Job.

I’m not throwing any shade at the fact that Wizards is publishing the Critical Role-esque and romantasy books. Those have an audience and that audience wants books, so a publisher should publish them. What I am throwing shade at is the dearth of books being published by Wizards of the Coast. There was a time when TSR published over 240 D&D-related novels. Sure, TSR went bankrupt, but as James Lowder (who was one of the key editors during the golden years of D&D media tie-in fiction) told Ben Riggs for his book Slaying the Dragon, the fiction was a money maker. It was Dragon Dice and Dragon*Strike (as much as I love both) that helped seal TSR’s fate. They overprinted Dragon Dice on the second printing and Dragon*Strike was expensive to produce and did not sell well. In fact, many of the boxed sets TSR was selling back in the day cost more to make than they were selling for.

The explosion of books resumed when Wizards of the Coast released 3rd edition and continued all through 4th edition. I was easily reading two D&D books a month for a couple of decades and so many of them were excellent. There are some fantastic Eberron, Forgotten Realms, Dark Sun, and Greyhawk novels out there. Sure, not every novel is a banger, and not every novel is for me, but there were so many that there was always something I wanted to read. There was something for everyone and I wish they’d go back to that model. Yes, publish the books you are currently publishing, but publish MOAR!

Which brings me to why I am sharing a retro-review. Back at the transition from 3rd edition to 4th edition D&D, there were a number of fun books that were published and many of those got overlooked. Heck, maybe their lower sales (and I don’t know that their sales were low) are why we have fewer and more targeted books today. One of the books I very much enjoyed from that era was Downshadow, a tale that is essentially D&D Paladin Batman, and here’s my retro-review of the book.

The Retro-Review

The Forgotten Realms, where Erik Scott de Bie’s 2009 novel Downshadow takes place, began as the brainchild of game designer and author Ed Greenwood long before there was a game called Dungeons & Dragons. The Forgotten Realms was Ed Greenwood’s fantasy world, a world he wrote stories for and for which he eventually wrote several articles in Dragon magazine. By the late 1980s, the Forgotten Realms became one of the major core settings for D&D and there have been tens of thousands of pages devoted to its characters, its unique rules, its mythology, and its history. One can easily get lost perusing the Forgotten Realms wiki.

Downshadow takes place in one of the major cities of the Forgotten Realms world, a city called Waterdeep. Since the God of Murder and Strife (Cyric) killed the Goddess of Magic (Mystra) nearly a century ago, the Realms have been a place of chaos and despair. With Mystra’s death, the Weave of Magic that surrounded the world shattered and much of it fell to earth (Toril), infecting the world and its residents like a disease in an event called the Spellplague. This event, and others, changed the world forever. Many of the great heroes who once protected average citizens have died or been driven mad in the ensuing years. Waterdeep, a once great and wondrous city, was badly affected by the Spellplague, both in terms of physical destruction and in becoming a refuge for those who were cursed by the Spellplague. These cursed individuals now live in a part of the city called Downshadow, a city that lives under the city of Waterdeep. Strange and dangerous things lie all around Downshadow in the form of monsters and traps of ancient magic, but strange and dangerous things live in Downshadow as well. Where there is civilization, there is crime, and where the shadows are deep, the criminal element is even more powerful.

The city watch of Waterdeep has formed a special Guard unit that is given the duty of protecting the citizens of Waterdeep from the dangers of Downshadow and of protecting the citizens of Downshadow, but even they cannot do enough. Aiding the brave members of the watch is a troubled vigilante named Shadowbane — the main character of Downshadow. Shadowbane was once a beggar, thief, and murderer who had been both blessed and cursed by the Spellplague. He heals faster than most people and has near superheroic strength, agility, and stamina. He used these abilities for evil purposes in the city of Luskan until he met a Paladin who gave him faith in a higher purpose and who provided the young man with a legacy. Shadowbane went from a dark stalker on the edge of society to a shadowy vigilante who used his knowledge of how the criminal elements operate to combat them where they hide.

As one can imagine from the description above, Downshadow is a combination fantasy and superhero adventure tale that owes a good deal to many prior stories. Reading the novel one can see the influence of Zorro, the Scarlet Pimpernel, and Batman. Like the tales of these heroes, Shadowbane hides his real identity from many of those he loves and strives to balance his bloodthirsty nature against his need to provide justice for and not vengeance to those he hunts. The Spellplague has given him power, but it is also slowly killing him and removing his ability to feel physical sensations. This phenomenon is symbolic of his own growing emotional distance from those around him. If he wants to atone, Shadowbane must learn to love and protect others and not just hide in shadows and avenge past slights. And it is in the narrative of Downshadow that Shadowbane must make this choice.

The story of Downshadow is fairly simple. There is a criminal mastermind in town who wishes to stir up chaos in the aristocracy of Waterdeep and expand his influence. To do this he uses his provocateur protégé Fayne to create scandalous situations and reveal the secrets of those who wish their secrets kept. He also hires an assassin named Rath to eliminate those he cannot ruin. He seeks to ruin the High Priestess of Sune and to destroy Shadowbane, whose vigilantism interferes too much with his machinations. Shadowbane must do his utmost to oppose the plans of the mastermind while discovering who he really is and what his true purpose will be. Into this struggle enters a mysterious young woman named Myrin. Myrin appears out of nowhere and has no memory of her own past, but it seems that she too has been touched by the Spellplague (or has she?) and given abilities she cannot truly control.

Can Shadowbane stop the plans of the mysterious mastermind? Can he protect those he loves? Can he keep his secret hidden? Can he meet his destiny?

These are the questions that work themselves out in the novel, and the answer to the above questions isn’t always yes.

Erik Scott de Bie meets the challenge of writing a compelling story while working within the constraints of a media tie-in novel. Though the tale is based on a D&D world, one rarely sees game mechanics leak into the storytelling. A major challenge a writer in a D&D novel faces is making the magic and action feel like the D&D setting without making it seem too much like a reader is reading mechanics out of a user’s manual like the Player’s Handbook. De Bie demonstrates a deep knowledge of the Forgotten Realms setting and infuses the narrative with bits of history and mythology where necessary. Reading Downshadow, I very much felt that the story was taking place in a larger world that had a rich history. De Bie was able to convey information about Shadowbane’s heretical Paladin order and the origins of the Spellplague without the information seeming overly expository. The exposition is presented narratively and only when necessary. The story is compelling and the outcome open enough to leave a reader wanting more. Shadowbane himself is a bit of a cipher, but his character does grow as the story progresses. He starts as a generic superhero, but by the end of the book readers are beginning to see the personality behind the mask. I am eager to cover how the character further develops as I reread Shadowbane and Shadowbane: Eye of Justice in the coming months. Many likable characters die in the story and there is a cameo or two from other Forgotten Realms tales that provide nice Easter eggs.

The only flaw with the novel is that the narrative sometimes jumps from one scene to another in a mildly awkward way that caused me to double back and reread past passages to make sure I didn’t miss any information. Given the breakneck pace of the book, this slight speed bump interrupted the flow of the story.

De Bie got his break in 2005 with Ghostwalker because Wizards needed books to publish in their massive pipeline. I’m glad I read Downshadow and I wish Wizards would go back to publishing a couple of books a month instead of a couple of books a year.

Post-Review: Let Me Tell You About My Character

The Shadowbane character is based on either the Shadowbane Inquisitor or Shadowbane Stalker prestige class from the Complete Adventurer book for the 3.5 edition of Dungeons & Dragons, though there are some significant differences. One of those differences is that Shadowbane’s sect is heretical. It believes that the essences of two dead gods are still active in the world, rather than the accepted belief that a single god now has control of the “portfolios” of the dead gods. Gods dying and being replaced has been a part of the Forgotten Realms, for good or ill, since the transition from 1st to 2nd edition when some of the world’s gods were killed to explain why Assassin was no longer an official class in the game (among other things).

I think one of the things I liked about Shadowbane was that he reminded me of a fusion of the only two characters I have ever played in Forgotten Realms campaigns. The first was a 2nd edition AD&D Paladin of Tyr who had the Swashbuckler kit from The Complete Fighter’s Handbook. How could one not want to be able to specialize in four (FOUR!!!) weapons?! Not only was this possible for a Swashbuckler, but it was also required. Awesome. I have always been a fan of Zorro, the Scarlet Pimpernel, and the Three Musketeers, so I really wanted to play a happy-go-lucky swashbuckling Paladin. Since Paladins had been typically portrayed as humorless, this was fun.

The other character was a Fighter/Mage/Thief I played in a Forgotten Realms-based RPGA Living City campaign, also under 2nd edition AD&D. The character had a “secret identity” as a fop who investigated troubles with his brave companions, only to flee suddenly when the going got tough and let his “bodyguard” take care of all the meaningless little things like combat. The bodyguard was always mysteriously lurking in the shadows, waiting for the moment to trade places with his employer. This character required buy-in from my group, who had to separate character knowledge from player knowledge. Some tried to “cheat” to discover my secret or demonstrate that they “knew” my secret, but most of them discovered it made for better roleplaying moments, humorous and dramatic, to play along. Thus, some of those who once “knew” my secret eventually “forgot” as well when they discovered how much fun ignorance could be.

That’s right, I committed the most heinous of gamer sins and “told you about my character.” If you don’t mind, I’d like you to tell me about one of yours.

When I first started the Geekerati Media Newsletter, it was my intention to write two to three articles a week. The central article was going to be a weekly rundown of curated content that I had recently encountered and found interesting. I wanted to do a modern version of the magazines like Dragon and White Dwarf (before they became “house magazines”), Wizard, Different Worlds, Twilight Zone, and Space Gamer. All of these magazines contained a ton of geek content from a wide array of product categories, and my pop culture brain didn’t want to focus just on games or comics or fiction or film. I wanted to talk about them all and a weekly newsletter seemed the best way to anchor this desire.

If someone subscribed to the newsletter for film reviews, they’d at least get one film recommendation a week even as in-depth reviews and lists might be rarer. The same would be true of the other categories as well. Even better, the newsletter would provide me with an opportunity to build a positive community. Too much of modern “fan new” is rooted in ragebaiting to drive the clicks and too little is aimed at educating, informing, and recommending excellent content. It’s one thing to provide fair criticism, but it’s another to constantly offer knee-jerk negativism (that often ends up being ahistorical) just to generate revenue on the Tube of You or Twitter/X. Informed critiques can make later products better, but anger for anger’s sake is another thing and it’s something I wanted to combat. To this end, the Weekly Geekly would share other articles from Substack that were promoting awesome things, often things created and sold by those Substackers.

I’m typically very proud of the average Weekly Geekly entry, with one exception. I have not been able to produce them on a weekly basis, and I think this has contributed to a bit of back and forth on subscription growth. People come to the site after someone recommends an article and then the next few emails they get from me have nothing to do with their interests and so they unsubscribe. Don’t get me wrong, the site has a great free subscriber base, but I see people come and go more than I’d like. I want to build conversation, so each unsubscribe leaves a small hole in the overall conversation.

The past week has had so much great content that I was compelled to restart the Weekly Geekly. Without further ado, we’ll start with the Weekly Oddity.

Turns Out Everyone Loves Spiders…Well, Some Spiders Anyway

My wife and I recently watched a video on the Tube of You by that blew our minds. For most of my life, spiders have really freaked me out and when I say spiders I mean ALL spiders. That all changed last year when I looked at the wall, behind my double-monitor set up, at work one day and saw a very little spider watching me. I didn’t know what kind of spider it was at the time, but it moved differently than any other spider I’d seen and it seemed friendly. I know, I know. That’s some major anthropomorphizing, but I swear that the little fellow was actually interested in what I was doing and it came back day after day.

I eventually learned that it was a jumping spider and that I wasn’t alone in thinking that they were friendly. That’s where Stephanie’s video comes in. The video doesn’t argue that jumping spiders are the cutest and friendliest spiders, but it does demonstrate that these tiny arachnids are far more intelligent than I ever imagined and with that intelligence comes the possibility that they might just be friendly.

I Can’t Believe I Streamed

Last week, I asked if any of my Substack friends would be willing to watch if I did a live stream of me playing the original Pool of Radiance computer roleplaying game if I included some of them as the characters. The post got a lot of positive response and so, I ventured into the Streets of Phlan for the first time in decades directing my friends , , , , , and on our first adventure. The initial stream was about 30 minutes long and James Spahn dropped by to add some advice in the chat. I’ve included a clip of the content below, but if you want, I can post a write up of the full 30 minutes in another post. Regardless of the answer to that poll, I won’t be doing posts for every time I stream though I do plan to stream and if you want to be invited as a guest to chat and add your voice to the gameplay let me know. I’ll be happy to have you.

The Lamentations of Luke Y. Thompson

is one of the biggest He-Man and the Masters of the Universe fans I know. He has great enthusiasm for the franchise and when most recent film was released earlier this year, he did yeoman’s work trying to get people to watch it. Sadly, like the more recent Dungeons & Dragons movie, which I’ve seen about ten times now, it received a lot of pre-negativity that affected the early box-office. It looks like both films garnered enough streaming fandom that sequels are not out of the question, though whether they are likely is another question. Luke’s review of the new Masters of the Universe film is a good one, though when he talks about the computer-generated He-Man that was released on Netflix and why it failed, I am compelled to give a little pushback.

I don’t think it was just canonical deviations that resulted in low ratings for the computer-generated He-Man, I think marketing had a lot to do with it too. There was no real effort to differentiate it from other shows in the market that were out there at exactly the same time. It’s partially a case of “cannibalizing” a brand. I believe that the computer-generated He-Man and the Masters of the Universe was unpopular less because of its own deviations from canon, but because people thought it was the Kevin Smith series. They were both released at the same time, with different intended audiences, but most people I talk to don’t even know the computer-generated He-Man series exists. It’s too bad too, because it is significantly better than Kevin Smith’s version. I’m not just saying that because my friends Shawna and Julie Benson worked on the show. I’m saying it because it captured the wonder of the original in a new way. The changes to Cringer were really cool and having Yuri Lowenthal as Adam was fantastic.

It reminded me of the young reader novels that Games Workshop release for their Warhammer games. They didn’t do particularly well financially, but and the other writers did a bang-up job on presenting the Warhammer Universe for a future generation. Cavan’s description of the Ultramarines arriving to fight Necrons, and thus saving the lives of our young adventurers, he described it as if the Emperor’s Angels were falling from the sky. It perfectly captured the propaganda of the setting. It lacked the irony of the games, but those are filled with Horus’ anti-imperial propaganda.

Enough of my own nostalgic wanderings. I’m here to promote Luke’s review of Masters of the Universe. The movie was a fun ride and Luke does a good job selling it.

Mortal Cinema

Masters of the Universe 2026 Review: The Toys Are Us, Kid

If you want to see a bunch of late middle-aged men shed a tear over a guy in a loincloth, take them to Masters of the Universe. If you are one of said guys, prepare to be overwhelmed in all the feels by your childhood remade right. The power is back, and Masters of the Universe has gotten the epic movie it deserves, nearly forty years after Dolph Lundgr…

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5 months ago · 7 likes · 3 comments · Luke Y. Thompson

I’ve long been a fan of the 1632 (aka Ring of Fire) series of books by Eric Flint. In these books, the fictional town of Grantville, West Virginia (circa 2000) is shifted in time and space so that it is now located in the Thuringian Forest of 1631. As the townsfolk soon learn, they have been transported into the middle of the 30-Years War, and they use all of their wit and skills to survive and change the course of history. The books in the 1632 series are part of a long tradition of “fish out of water” tales that include some of my favorite stories ranging from Edgar Rice Burroughs’ A Princess of Mars and David Drake’s Redliners to Jerry Pournelle’s Janissaries series and Harry Turtledove’s The Misplaced Legion. All of these stories take people from one time and place and transport them into another to see how they would react and it is always interesting to see how and whether the people survive.

The End of Oak Street is more along the lines of the 1632 series than some of the other entries, in that it transports regular people from suburban tranquility into the violence of the Jurassic Era…before they’ve even had the chance to watch Jurassic Park. As Luke describes it in his review:

As you can see, he’s given the film a positive review and I am eager to see it as a part of my Scary Movie Marathon this October. I normally have a two-month horror marathon, but my wife reminded me that our busy summer meant that we missed out on Christmas in July and if we only share one month of heartwarming syrupy sweet romance, we only get one month of frights. It was a fair trade this year. Our daughters started college this fall and we crammed in a lot of staycation goodness this year. I do have to say that I hope that the title isn’t too much of a double entendre. I would like the families, or at least most of them, to endure and adapt. I just rewatched Centurion and have experienced enough hopelessness and despair for the year.

Mortal Cinema

The End of Oak Street Review: The Dinosaurs Fuck

The End of Oak Street, for no particular reason, is set in 1982, but doesn’t tell you that upfront – only when high-school senior Audrey (My Old Ass’ Maisy Stella) says she wants to go to Cornell because Carl Sagan teaches there does the period nature become clear. (Will the teens this movie presumably targets know who Sagan is, and that he’s dead? Mayb…

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2 months ago · 6 likes · 4 comments · Luke Y. Thompson

I don’t mean to give Luke’s review of the most recent Resident Evil too much of a TL;DR summary, but his main argument is “If you tell the story from the video game, they will come.” It’s a tried and true formula that Hollywood seems to keep forgetting. Heck, even the first to profit from doing it forgot the lesson. When I first saw Paul W.S. Anderson’s (the initials are needed because of all the Paul Anderson’s making films) Mortal Kombat film, I was impressed. It wasn’t the best martial arts film I’d ever seen (at the time that was probably Drunken Master 2), but it was solid, fun, and followed the video game. That’s all I wanted and that’s what I got. In a world of Super Mario Bros. movies, it was Citizen Kane. Over time, Hollywood has made a lot more movies that were as loyal to the source material as Super Mario Bros. and far too few that were as close as Mortal Kombat.

It’s almost always a bad choice to re-imagine the source material. It’s true when adapting literature and it’s true of adapting video games. The core must be true to the source. Clueless adapts Emma, but the core is true and only the era has changed. Autumn de Wilde directed a visually stunning and era appropriate Emma in 2020 but gave us nose bleeds and introversion that pulled me out of the film. Great cast, visually beautiful, and a better adaptation of Amelie than Emma. The first two partially explain why it gets as much love as it does (it’s also well-acted and directed aside from the self-insert moments), but I think most of the praise is due to the fact that the late 2010s were a wasteland when it comes to good romances. So much for a brief intro to Luke’s review. Read it and enjoy.

Mortal Cinema

Resident Evil 2026 Review: Deliver Us an Evil

I refuse to do what too many other reviewers are doing in regards to Resident Evil 2026, by throwing every previous movie attempt under the bus. Paul W.S. Anderson’s original, with its Marilyn Manson score (he was cool then), mise-en-scene similar to the game, a narrative that involves the protagnoist recovering memories and figuring out where she is in…

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a month ago · 1 like · Luke Y. Thompson

has renamed her Substack to the more professional since I first read her piece on Partisanship and Ideology. It used to be called Herding Cats and Polls, and I prefer that, but I understand the name change. The article (8 months old now) does a good job of presenting a phenomenon that political scientists have understood for some time now. People who we classify as “leaners” are far more partisan than those we classify as “moderate” voters. Normally on a left to right partisan distribution, you’ll see something like the following:

Strong Dem - Weak Dem - Lean Dem - Moderate - Lean Rep - Weak Rep - Strong Rep

The implication of such visualizations is that “Leaners” are more centrist than “Weak” partisans and that couldn’t be further from the truth. In a classic article from 1986, Keith, Magleby, Nelson, Orr, Westlye, and Wolfinger argued that leaners vote more like outright partisans. In case you are wondering, and I know you are, Raymond E. Wolfinger is the political scientist who coined the phrase “The Plural of Anecdote IS data.” That’s right, data IS the plural of anecdote and all the internet scientists who argue that it isn’t show a fundamental misunderstanding of data and the philosophy of science. Never mind that every experiment is an anecdote (in that it is a single example) and that meta-studies take these anecdotes and test to see if the anecdote is generalizable, Ericcson and Simon (1980) have a good rundown of how verbal reports are used as data. It’s a good thing that the plural of anecdote is data, otherwise all of public opinion research is Quatsch and Unsinn. Now, it is fine and true to argue that inducting from a single occurrence is bad causal inference. A single case proves nothing. That’s what the “Well Ackshually” Scientists mean, but that’s not what they are saying and what they are saying is wrong.

Anyway, ’s excellent article is now hidden behind a paywall, and I weep for not sharing it sooner. She has some more recent articles about the current election and I recommend looking at how a pollster looks at elections. It’s a bit different from your typical pundit.

Stuck in the Middle

Our understanding of partisanship and ideology is outdated

Hello …

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9 months ago · 4 likes · 2 comments · Natalie Jackson

While he might disagree, I think that is one of the most important figures in the history of comic books. He is a seemingly endless font of ideas who created many of today’s most popular characters, but more importantly his participation as a founder in Image comics changed comics forever. Sure, there had been great indie titles before Image, but they were often resume builders before artists and writers made it to “the show” and worked for DC and Marvel. Image was an independent publisher that was launched by some of the biggest artists of the day and made independent publishing “the show.” He has never stopped advocating for creator rights and in a recent Robservations, he discussed the lawsuit Marvel brought against Jack “The King” Kirby. Rob is an artist who knows the business, not just the history and lore of the industry, but the ins and outs of the financials.

Rob Liefeld

Jack Kirby Vs. Marvel!

NEW Robservations! Jack Kirby Vs. Marvel! Rob recounts the long and bitter lawsuit that Marvel brought against Jack “The King” Kirby as his estate sought to receive the compensation, respect and ackn…

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2 months ago · 10 likes · 1 comment · Rob Liefeld

wrote a wonderful horror short story a couple of weeks ago. By horror story, I mean he wrote an essay reminding us that tempus fugit and we don’t actually have time in our lives to read as many books as we might desire. Given that I subscribe to the Eco-ian/ist philosophy of having a personal library, I refuse to call it an “anti-library” when it is in fact a library, I’m not particularly panicked by the thought. It has, however, made me evaluate how I want to balance my actual reading time. This prompted me to buy a copy of Moby Dick (to actually read) and think about starting a parallel Substack where I discuss central works in political philosophy and political science. Too much of the “political” discourse in the modern era is wrapped up in what Daniel Boorstin called Pseudo-Events or without acknowledging what Walter Lippmann called our Pseudo-Environments and I think a discussion of the genuine classics of political philosophy and political science (with an Americanist focus) would be of some value.

I will be starting up the Substack soon, it will be called Politics: The Master Science, and I’ll be starting with a bit of Plato. I’ll post a link to the Substack in a future post, and all the articles will begin as Substack Live chats where you are invited to join in and contribute. Before we chat about the Plato though, make sure you check out these paragraphs from Plutarch’s Life of Alcibiades.

In my first, pre-chat, video I’ll give a poll asking what Plato we should start with, but we’ll definitely do The Republic, The Laws, and The Symposium as well as a couple of shorter works.

MILLER’S BOOK REVIEW 📚

How Long Till Death Revokes Your Library Card?

“So many books, so little time,” Frank Zappa supposedly said. You can take it as longing or lament or both. Of the countless millions of books in circulation you’ll only read a fraction…

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a month ago · 70 likes · 94 comments · Joel J Miller

Boy oh boy is producing a lot of very cool stuff right now. He’s got a Necromancy sourcebook out for Shadowdark, just in time for Halloween and he’s publishing some really nice printings of his White Box books. If you are looking to play some great “Folk D&D,” James’ books are the place to be.

There has been a great deal of talk over the years of what exactly the “OSR” movement in role playing games is and what OSR games are. James gives a very good rundown here in his . He discusses the difference between early OSR, which printed reference documents meant to substitute for/replace the old Basic/Expert, AD&D, and BECMI rulebooks. The books were out of print and Wizards of the Coast had removed many of them from digital reprinting, but the OGL (Open Game License) allowed people to reprint “just the rules” under legal protections that were clearer than the vague “rules cannot be copywritten” mantra. The mantra is true, as far as it goes, but specific expressions of rules can be copywritten and the OGL expanded what could be done. Since the old rule books were often expensive, OSRIC and other resources were a godsend for gamers who wanted to play older style games. It didn’t take long though, for these games to incorporate “Heartbreaker” changes making them their own games.

Speaking of OSR, has a discussion of his experiences running OSR games now that he’s playing 4e 2.0 (aka Draw Steel) with his group. Draw Steel is a fun game and is one of a number of games that were influenced by D&D 4e that I really enjoy. The others are 13th Age and Shadow of the Demon Lord. It’s a different play experience than the OSR experience, but they are compatible in play groups which is one of the reasons I keep playing around with my Heroes of Karameikos idea.

Writings

Reflections: OSR

Now that my Arden Vul game is finished, we’re playing a Draw Steel game in its native setting, starting with the Delian Tomb. I expect this will run for a year, during which I won’t be running OSR modules. I’m taking that opportunity to reflect on the last 3 years of playing/running/analyzing OSR…

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2 months ago · 45 likes · 54 comments · Beau Rancourt

It’s Solo September and there is no better place to go for a look at solo and cooperative games than . It’s one of my favorite Substacks and I recommend checking out the games on offer.

The Soloist - an indie RPG newsletter

🎲 Solo September

Welcome to The Soloist, a newsletter for players, creators, and curious explorers of solo and cooperative tabletop RPGs and other games…

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2 months ago · 54 likes

Speaking of solo RPGs, I love reading a good rundown of a gaming experience and has a write up of her experience with the Pocket Fantasy RPG. It’s a nice read and I recommend following her Substack if you’ve got the time.

Okay, I am recommending a ton of stuff here, but I had to add from the Substack. He and his co-author have been writing a number of articles on Gen X geek culture and last month Tom discussed the Dying Earth genre of fiction and SF fiction where Fantasy and Science Fiction are blended together. The genre is as old as Frankenstein, but hit its pinnacle with either Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Martian Tales or Jack Vance, depending on your preferences. Ancient Geeks is a definite must follow and I really have to try and schedule a chat with them at some point.

Ancient Geeks

When science and fantasy are indistinguishable

One of the most enduring sub-genres of science fiction and fantasy blends both. These stories depict a distant future in which science and magic have become indistinguishable, or they co-exist. Let’s call this motif far future science fantasy (FFSF). While there’s plenty of far future science fiction, which goes back as least as far as Olaf Stapledon’s…

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2 months ago · 39 likes · 6 comments · Tom Grant

Donald Featherstone is one of the most important personalities in the history of gaming…period. He influenced roleplaying games and he is a cornerstone figure in miniature wargaming. over at has a nice rundown of Featherstone’s rules for the American War of Independence. Featherstone published a ton of rules in his lifetime and I still remember the first time I opened a copy of his book War Games and saw the words “Saving Throw” and realized that D&D really was a descendant of wargaming.

Splendor of Fire

Donald Featherstone's Wargamer's Handbook of the American War of Independence

One of the joys of having adult children with jobs, is getting them to buy you more things you don’t need, but absolutely want. I got this book back for Father’s day (along with a couple of other thi…

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2 months ago · 11 likes · Thomas

When she’s not adapting Shakespearian plays so that they can be performed on replicas of Sir Francis Drake’s famous ship, is writing libretti for Operas about fencing. When she’s not doing that, she’s writing one of the most engaging Substack newsletters on the platform . While she has some more recent posts, including one about her fall reading list, I found her recent article about the Game of Thrones play to be very engaging. I have a love/hate relationship with George R.R. Martin’s unfinished series. I started it when I was obsessed with edgy and dark fantasy and held the opinion that morally gray fiction was superior to morally forthright fiction…because…reasons. I have since grown out of my edgelord phase and have read more of the fiction and history he used as a foundation for his series and he pales in comparison. I’d rather read of the Winter King than about how Winter is Coming, in part because one actually happened and the other likely never will.

All that aside, the play sounds like fun and I enjoyed reading about how various technical aspects of production were handled. There really is a difference when you read a review written by someone who has actually made things, versus when they have only experienced them. You get “eine Gesamtkunstkritik,” rather than lazy plot rehashes. Dr. King’s review is definitely Gesamtkunstkritik.

Dr King's Curiosities

Is the Game of Thrones play any good?

If you’re new to Curiosities, welcome! I’m Rebekah King, I have a PhD in English from Cambridge exploring magic on the early modern stage and I’m currently turning my thesis into a book for Bloomsbury Arden. I’m also an award-winning playwright and librettist…

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a month ago · 10 likes · 4 comments · Rebekah King

Queen of the Demonweb pits is a great example of how older D&D modules handled sequential adventures, campaign threats as characters gained levels, adventure themes, and what alignment really means in AD&D. It also includes both fantasy and science fictional elements, it’s a true depiction of Appendix N style storytelling.

The adventure marks the culmination of a conflict that started with giants attacking the lands of men, only for the heroes to discover they were doing so because they were being pushed out of their lands by Drow, and eventually battling those Drow and discovering a dimensional portal to the Demonweb Pits where their Goddess Lolth lives. According to Shannon Appelcline, Gary Gygax had initially intended the Drow to be worshipers of the Elder Elemental God, but by the time Dave Sutherland took over writing duties the Spider Queen had become the new big bad. The map of the Demonweb Pits, and the Goddess herself, are truly iconic and I highly recommend running this adventure at some point.

The Paradox has a new video where they perform their latest single, “That’s Not Fair.” Where most of their music has evoked the pop-punk sounds of bands like Bowling for Soup, this one has a dash of Black Flag and the hardcore seen. It still has pop-punk vibes in the chorus, but the rest of the song is pure Los Angeles 1979 and the band is waiting for their bassist to finish her final exam so they can go on tour.

When I wrote that The Paradox was channeling a bit of Black Flag, you were probably picturing something angry and filled with hatred of society and “The Man.” That’s not what I meant. I meant songs like TV Party, a song with so many pop culture references from the 70s Gen Z will need Claude to keep up.

Wagon Wheel is a song based on an unfinished song Bob Dylan wrote while composing songs for Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. Ketch Secor of Old Crow Medicine Show added additional lyrics to the song 25 years later and the result is a fantastic song. For my money though, Darius Rucker of Hootie and the Blowfish does the best version of the song. It’s catchy and full of heart.

When my wife was in film school, one of her classmates made a short film inspired by T.S. Eliot’s poem The Hollow Men. The film was well shot and had a lot of interesting visual ideas and was clearly influenced by the films of David Lynch. To this day, my wife and I find ourselves quoting the young girl her classmate had read the poem because of how she pronounced the lines of the poem. Instead of a clearly articulated, “There are no eyes here” we heard a mournful “There are no Ys here.” Not “whys,” but “Ys.” We have come to think of the voiceover as a kind of haunting Lynchian Sesame Street episode. None of this is intentional, nor was it really there when we watched the film later. But when we were sitting in the editing bay, having not slept for 24 hours, listening to the voice over, that’s what we heard and imagined. As I wrote, the film was well shot and edited, but I prefer our imagined version better.

I only write all of that because I recently watched the Barnaby Clay directed Yeah, Yeah, Yeahs concert video Hidden in Pieces on Criterion Channel. I had to look twice to see if Jody’s classmate had directed the film. The style was spot on. Alas and alack, it was another person. All of which made me want to recommend a song by the band for this entry. I often find myself listening to Maps, but today it’s all about Zero.

I’ll leave of with a “how the hell did that happen” inspired video. The other day, I was playing a mix of YouTube music videos on our television and Duncan Sheik’s Barely Breathing came on. My wife and I, who are new empty nesters, found ourselves singing the song to each other and remembering our dating days. It was a wonderful moment of loving nostalgia. Duncan Sheik died the very next day. I know that these things are unrelated, but there have been so many deaths this year of people far too young. Sheik went on to write for Broadway, but his first hit is a banger and it’s mournful enough that it makes a good tribute.

This is a very long Rundown, so I’ll keep this short. I love “Spider” movies. Ever since I first saw Kingdom of the Spiders with William Shatner as a kid, I’ve been kind of obsessed with them and have watched everything from Tarantula to Eight Legged Freaks. All of them pale in comparison to Frank Marshall’s Arachnophobia. If you wonder what film both Madame Web and Morbius (it’s Morbin’ Time!) were ripping off with their jungle scenes, this is it.

It’s International Talk Like a Pirate Day and once again, I am issuing my reminder to celebrate “Play Like a Pirate Day” rather than participate in “Talk Like a Pirate Day.” Since 2008, I’ve been regularly posting recommendations of things to do other than half-heartedly making piratical references that might annoy your coworkers. The posts all contain similar information, but each year I update it with some minor differences to make sure that the links stay up to date and that it provides at least one new way to play.

My contention was that one of the most irritating things you can hear your co-workers say is, “Aaaargh, Avast, Ye Mateys” a couple times an hour in some half-hearted participation in a day of international live action roleplaying. Even worse are the inconsistent uses of “Yar!”

What makes it most irritating is the fact that these small offerings of participation are lackadaisical at best. It isn’t talking like a pirate that’s annoying, it’s the ironic detachment or lack of commitment that’s annoying.

I would rather my co-worker show up dressed in full “Age of Sail” apparel, blunderbuss and cutlass in hand, and charge into the office while staying in character as much as is possible for the day. A wholehearted celebration of Talk Like a Pirate Day, I can get behind. It would be fun, in the “employees showing up to work in costumes on Halloween” kind of way. You know... like when a person comes to work in their full blown Optimus Prime costume -- one where they can actually “transform” from robot to big rig. Things like that create moments where you are truly impressed with your co-workers’ commitment. On the other hand, when your other co-worker shows up with only a pair of “cat ears” on and a mild scowl on their face, it’s annoying.

Most participation in International Talk Like a Pirate Day is of the cat ear type, and not the Optimus Prime type. That’s why I still believe that it is time for the phenomenon to die. That doesn’t mean that we should no longer have a day “celebrating” piracy and the outlaw attitude, or as Mark Summers, the co-founder of Talk Like a Pirate Day, called it “Pirattitude.” Pirates are still awesome (though not as awesome as Transforming Psionic Robot Pirate Ninja Dinosaur Mutant Demon Hunting Vampires), it’s just that inserting random “arrrrs” like a pirate is lame. I think gamers, and geeks of all kinds, should lay claim to the holiday and re-cast it as “International Play Like a Pirate Day.” That way the costume role players can cosplay pirate and other people can play pirate themed games, read pirate themed novels, or watch pirate themed films.

As I wrote a couple of years ago, “from now on September 19th will be a day when families and friends get together and enjoy some form of Piratical Recreation. Such recreation can include celebrating by talking like pirates, certainly role play (in the traditional sense) is play. Our celebration is inclusive, not exclusive. But families and friends will no longer be limited to listening to the ‘yars’ and ‘aaarghs’ of everyone around them. Some might choose more formal ludographic participation -- that’s game play.”

Here is a list of recommended activities for this year’s festivities:

Play a Pirate Themed Roleplaying Game

Play a pirate themed roleplaying game. In the past, DriveThruRPG would have a sale to coincide with Talk Like a Pirate Day, and I’d comment on the great bargains you can get on some of the games, but it looks like there is no such sale in 2026.

I highly recommend Pinnacle Entertainment Group’s excellent PIRATES OF THE SPANISH MAIN. It’s a fast, furious, and fun system that perfectly captures the feel of the pirate films of yore.

Playing a pirate themed roleplaying game is great for those who want to talk like a pirate. It encourages engaging in Piratical behavior in an appropriate venue. Besides, by roleplaying (in the game sense) participants can act far more Piratical than is allowed under modern mores and laws. Your coworkers might object to you stealing their stuff and flying off to Tortuga to sell it in exchange for Rum!

If you want a more heroic bent with some really interesting mystical aspects, you can always play Pinnacle’s 50 Fathoms instead. If you aren’t a fan of the Savage Worlds system, but still want to play an excellent pirate and swashbuckling roleplaying game you should check out 7th Sea!

If “Neo-Old School” is your bag, why don’t you check out Pirate Borg? It’s a recent pirate adaptation of the doom art-punk RPG Mörk Borg. The mechanics are easy to learn and the combination of piracy and supernatural horror is a match made in…well Disneyland rides.

If you are looking for an easy to learn and quick to play pirate themed game, you can’t do better than the Tiny d6 game Tiny Pirates. Like all of the games Alan Bahr works on, this is a true labor of love and the game is easy to play and can be run with almost no prep.

Since September is Solo RPG Month (aka Solo September), I thought I’d highlight Sundered Isles from Tomkin Press (2024). Sundered Isles is Shawn Tomkin’s seafaring expansion for the excellent Ironsworn: Starforged roleplaying game. With Ironsworn and its sequels Tomkin continues pushing the edge of what I considered to be the limits of solo roleplaying. Sundered Isles is a wonderfully rich expansion to Starforged and it is a compelling solo pirate game.

In Sundered Isles, Tomkin has shifted players away from the Traveller-esque spacefaring frontier and into a world of wind and tide and of science and magic. It combines fantasy and science fiction, allowing you to create adventures as rich as, if not richer than, those I experienced playing Sid Meier’s Pirates! (the greatest video game of all time). I’ve already spent some time marauding the seas and expanding my armada of great ships and loyal crews.

In a recent post discussing how important the solo Fighting Fantasy Gamebooks were to me as a roleplayer, I mentioned that Tomkin’s design made it so that “You, and the dice, are the Dungeon Master and not an unseen author.” You can see how Tomkin describes the process in his Starforged rulebook. The mechanics interact with what you envision (hope) the narrative to be and resolve it into a real outcome that feeds into a new narrative situation.

This is a deep game, but it is an expansion so it does require the Starforged rules and printing everything out (or buying the hard copies) can get a bit pricey. Personally, I think taking the time to print out your own personal spiral bound copies is worth it. Just make sure you are printing out files you purchased. It may be fun to play a pirate, but Tomkin can’t keep making as many great games if too many of us are real pirates. There’s no finer way to spend Talk Like a Pirate Day than charting a defiant course across a haunted sea. It’s how I’ll be spending mine.

Play a Pirate Themed Board Game

There are a number of excellent Pirate themed board games, but my own tastes tend a little towards the older games. If you own a copy, and not many do, play an exciting session of the classic Broadsides and Boarding Parties. I remember when my friend Sean and I stopped using the official rules for combat and exchanged the Basic D&D rules for them. It wasn’t long before his copy of Broadsides and Boarding Parties became the prop for a pirate themed D&D campaign that I still think of as our Dungeons & Boarding Parties campaign. The game started as an inexpensive paper chit and map wargame from The Citadel, but the Milton Bradley version (both by Larry Harris of Axis and Allies fame) is a wonder to behold. Track one down. You won’t regret it.

If you don’t own a copy of Broadsides, try one of these two excellent pirate games from GMT Games. Blackbeard: The Golden Age of Piracy. The game is a redesign of Avalon Hill’s classic game of the same name. The new version is suitable for 1 to 5 players and has less “down time” for players who aren’t in their current turn.

Winds of Plunder is a quick and fun game that is more in the style of the “Eurogame” than Blackbeard or Broadsides.

Watch a Pirate Themed Movie

Lastly, I recommend watching one of your favorite pirate films. I am a fan of a number of the recent Pirate television series, but you can only watch so much in a single day and a movie fits nicely in that time frame. Some classics in the genre include Captain Blood and The Sea Hawk with Errol Flynn, The Pirates of Penzance for those of a musical bent, and the more recent Pirates of the Caribbean films. There is a long list of wonderful films filled with pirattitude, give one of them a play today.

Or if You Are Hell Bent on Irking Your Co-Workers…

You can lean into the ridiculous and belt out your best version of the greatest Pirate Song Ever Written “For I am a Pirate King!“

What better time to reminisce about an ancient Star Trek game, than on the 60th anniversary of the airing of the first episode?

I’ve worked a lot of interesting jobs in my life ranging from a 21/Craps dealer to a construction supply delivery driver, from movie theater Assistant Manager to Non-Profit Program Director. One of my favorite memories comes from when I was working as an undergraduate in the university’s IT department. I wasn’t studying computer science. I was a Political Science and English dual major. That didn’t stop me from applying for a job in the IT department. As is true of a lot of people my age, I grew up programming in BASIC and eventually C++. It’s a background that made the transition to doing data analysis in R pretty smooth and that has inspired me to build a SmartyKit with my daughters this upcoming winter break. We will be building it and it will be glorious.

I will also probably try to add memory to the basic system and upload BASIC so we can do a bit of BASIC programming for fun as well. After all, what better way to spend Christmas break of your Freshman year of college than building an outmoded 8-bit computer with your dad?

When I worked in the IT department, I became friends with a couple of the admins and I remember chatting about Asimov’s Foundation books, Iain Banks’ Culture series, Tolkien, D&D, and more with them. It was almost enough to get me to change my major and had things gone a little differently in those early undergraduate days I might have. That I am currently employed as a data analyst and research analyst doing statistical analysis in the R programming language is a sign that I was on that path anyway.

In one of these conversations, I talked about how much I absolutely loved Interplay’s Star Trek 25th Anniversary game. I first played the game on the copy of Interplay’s 10th Anniversary Collection I owned. I bought it for Bard’s Tale and kept playing it for Star Trek 25th Anniversary because it was such a great adventure game that captured the best of the adventure game genre with the feel of Original Series Star Trek.

During that conversation, one of the staff said, “You know, we have an ancient Star Trek game on the server. You’ve likely never played it before.” I was intrigued, so I asked how to access it and loaded it up to play. It was a completely text-based game. Not text-based in the sense that it was a narrative game, rather in that ASCII characters represented graphics like they do in early NetHack/Hack and Rogue games.

While the interface was primitive, it was also functional and fun. It created a kind of “theatre of the mind” presentation of the Star Trek universe and I was an instant addict. I played the game during almost every moment of downtime I had. I also probably played it when I should have been doing other things, like actual work in the office.

Super Star Trek, or as I knew it at the time Star Trek, was based on a 1971 game by high school student Mike Mayfield. Mayfield’s original code is believed lost, but you can access code Mayfield wrote in 1972. Bob Leedom expanded the game, and gave it the name Super Star Trek, in 1974. The game was once again updated in 1978 by David H. Ahl and Mary Cole. This “final” version was published by Ahl and Cole in the book BASIC Computer Games.

It’s amazing that Ahl and Cole were able to publish a version that thousands of people could hand type into their personal computers only seven years after Mike Mayfield was coding it on the SDS Sigma 7 mainframe computer using paper tape. Does anyone know what paper tape is anymore? Ahl and Cole’s initial updating of Mayfield’s and Leedom’s games is very similar to the originals, but they did add a significant change in the 1978 version by finally secured the rights to use the Star Trek brand name.

You can find a text copy of the game in David H. Ahl’s 1978 book BASIC Computer Games and you can find the original BASIC code here. If you have an emulator, you can copy and paste it. Personally, I plan on manually programming this, or at least manually copying it onto our “The C64,” in the coming weeks using the code in Ahl’s book. If you don’t want to spend all that time typing into an emulator or onto a retromachine you can play a Commodore 64 version of the game right now on Internet Archive. The old game is tons of fun, but it recently got an update.

Emanuele Bolognesi, an amateur game designer and programmer from Florence, Italy, programmed an updated version of Super Star Trek a couple of years ago. He then further refined the game by merging the classic BASIC game with the Interplay adventure game’s aesthetics. He calls his second game Super Star Trek meets 25th Anniversary. It’s free to play and absolutely fantastic. The image below was taken from his Super Star Trek and you can see how faithfully he merged the two games using the 25th Anniversary edition’s view screen as the playing area.

I’ve already spent more than a few hours playing this excellent adaptation of Super Star Trek and it’s a great demonstration of how Old School Gaming/Retrogaming is active, and creating great content, in the video game community as well as in the tabletop roleplaying game community.

The Background

In 1977, Steve Jackson revolutionized the gaming industry when he published his classic wargame OGRE through Metagaming Concepts. What made OGRE revolutionary wasn’t that it was a balanced science fiction roleplaying game that built upon the premises in the Bolo and Hammers Slammers books. Instead, it was the bang for the buck. Wargames, even chit and map wargames, have always been a bit pricey and OGRE was cheap and it created a MicroGame revolution. That revolution included games like Melee and Wizard (The Fantasy Trip) and eventually created the foundation for Steve Jackson Games when he left Metagaming.

While we think of Steve Jackson games as the company that Munchkin built, this isn’t the case at all. Yes, they are as big as they are today due to Munchkin, but before they were the company that Munchkin built, they were the company that GURPS built. Before that, they were the company that Car Wars built. In reality, they are the company that OGRE and The Space Gamer built. When Steve Jackson left Metagaming, he wasn’t able to take The Fantasy Trip with him, but he was able to take OGRE, GEV, and The Space Gamer and those formed a solid basis for a company that exploded in popularity with Car Wars.

OGRE has a simple premise. At some point in a post-apocalyptic future an artificially intelligent tank battles human forces on a blasted and irradiated battlefield. One player takes the role of the unstoppable and heartless killing machine and the other takes the role of the relatively helpless human opposition who try desperately to stop the OGRE from destroying their Command Center. It’s a castle defense game with asymmetrical forces and it is brilliant. The game is currently on its 6th edition, which is a lot prettier than the original version, but the tense gameplay remains the same. It is a must own game for even the casual wargamer. While the 6th edition is a bit pricey at $49.95, it is worth it because the game is extremely replayable and has tremendous tactical depth. If you want to get the game cheaper, you can always search the internet for used copies and older editions. I’m a particular fan of the OGRE/GEV set that was packaged in a VCR box.

The Lost Opportunity

While the game is currently available from Steve Jackson Games, in part because it looks like their 80/20 Munchkin to everything else ratio is sliding into 70/30 territory requiring them to have strong titles in the 30 percent of non-Munchkin sales, there was a time when OGRE was completely out of print and that’s when a neophyte game illustrator named Kwanchai Moriya decided to make a print and play version of the game reskinned to a Science Fictional World War II with Giant Robots. Kwanchai is a big name in board game illustration today, but that wasn’t the case back in 2009 when he produced his amateur print and play edition and released it on Board Game Geek.

His amateur version quickly went viral due to its unique look and theme. That theme included a cover inspired by Avalon Hill’s classic Cross of Iron expansion for Squad Leader. That Cross of Iron cover is one of the best examples of the excellent work that Rodger B. MacGowan produced in the wargaming hobby. Rodger was a frequent illustrator for Avalon Hill and eventually became Art Director for GMT Games LLC and was the Founder and Art Director for C3i Magazine, which contained support materials for many GMT games and frequently included full games in the issues with high end components. MacGowan was inducted into the Adventure Gaming Hall of Fame in 2006 and passed away tragically due to pneumonia in February of 2025, an event that hit the fan community hard because his home and studio (where much of his work was stored) were burned down in the Palisades fire in January of that year. While many of the originals were lost, GMT published a hardcover collection of his art just as these tragic events unfurled.

Kwanchai’s work was years before MacGowan’s death, but it paid homage to one of the great illustrators of the hobby. The game itself was a great tribute to one of the classic games of the hobby, but it also had one major problem. He did more than create new counters and a new map, he reprinted the entire rulebook and did several other things that violated copyright and trademarks owned by Steve Jackson Games. As Kwanchai himself describes it:

He hadn’t licensed the homebrew and went far beyond what is standard practice for fan versions under fair use and Steve Jackson Games brought the hammer down. When they did it wasn’t in a mean or insincere way. Sure, they used the full legal authority they had, but they (as we would soon find out) were about to release a new and even more beautiful Designer’s Edition of OGRE. They had every right to come down on Kwanchai and remove the files from Board Game Geek. They weren’t acting in bad faith, and I am a very strong advocate of intellectual property, so I agree with what they did morally.

But, and it’s a BIG BUT (sorry, not sorry), I don’t think they should have merely required BGG and Kwanchai to remove the files from the internet. I think that stopping there was a bad business decision. Unlike Wizards of the Coast’s OGL fiasco, Steve Jackson Games didn’t get a lot of hate from fans for their action because they were within their rights. They got some from the copyleft to be sure, but most people understood. What Steve Jackson Games did wrong was in failing to BUY the files from Kwanchai and enter into a contract with him to publish them. There was clear demand for this product, and they could have offered it as a pdf stretch goal for their Kickstarter. They never did and that was a HUGE missed opportunity. Had they done so, even the critics on the copyleft would have had little to complain about.

The story isn’t an unhappy one for Kwanchai, but it was a slightly unhappy one for fans. Kwanchai went on to become a highly desired artist in the board game industry. We fans got the beautiful 6th edition of OGRE, but imagine if Steve Jackson Games had worked with Kwanchai to design an alternative edition of OGRE (both physical and pdf). Just imagine what a fully refined version of the game, with feedback from Andrew Hackard and Steve Jackson…and maybe Rodger MacGowan, could have been. It’s a real missed opportunity and I wish fans had been able to see that game.

It’s early September and that means that the Scary Season has begun for those who celebrate the prolonged season. These are the Halloweeners who celebrate the true spirit of the season, like the good old youth of yore. This is when kids really knew how to celebrate the season by breaking into people’s houses to steal furniture for the bonfire in the town square. Damn those late 19th and early 20th century kids knew how to celebrate. We really have lost a bit thanks to the TikTok era. Sure, we have moderately vandalous challenges, but these kids were committed.

I’m not quite in that camp, but I do like to begin watching horror movies starting on September 1st. My wife has informed me that this year, I will have to wait for the more traditional October 1st because I failed to properly celebrate Christmas in July. She is correct. I only watched a couple of Christmas themed films, and I think only one (gasp!) Hallmark movie, this July because I was watching every American Revolution movie and/or series I could get my hands on. It did mean that I got to watch the magnificent musical 1776 again, as well as The Scarlet Coat which is one of my favorite films.

Just because I cannot watch the movies at home though, doesn’t mean that I cannot begin sharing recommendations for other people to watch during the Scary Season. Those who have been readers for a long enough time know that I am always resistant to do “Top 10 Lists” (though I enjoyed ’s recent RomCom list and will have a reply post of my own soon), and I’m even more opposed to the “List of Films You are Supposed to Like.” This is that, largely, unwritten list that almost singlehandedly explains the gap between critics and audiences.

That doesn’t mean that there aren’t movies I don’t think you should have seen in order to get an overview of a genre. I do. I just understand that such lists are subject to revision and should avoid being elitist whenever possible. Those caveats aside, I have decided the time is ripe for a Five-Foot Geekshelf of Horror Films from the 1960s and 1970s.

What is the Five-Foot Geekshelf?

Welcome to the sixth entry in my Five-Foot Geekshelf series where I create lists of 13 entries highlighting what I think are things that every geek should own or experience. These lists aren’t meant to be a comprehensive or “best of” lists, rather they are meant to be starting points. They are meant to include frames of reference that we can use to discuss the category the list represents.

I was inspired to do these lists when I was reading through some old genre magazines last year. I came across a short two article series that ran in the May/June and July/August issues of Twilight Zone Magazine in 1983 entitled The Fantasy Five-Foot Shelf that had some very interesting recommendations and recommenders and I thought it might be fun to attempt a series of lists for all the various parts of pop and geek culture that I love.

The authors of the Twilight Zone magazine articles were themselves inspired by the famous nickname for the Harvard Classics series created by Charles William Eliot when he retired as President of Harvard University. Eliot’s collection of 50 books, which took up approximately Five Feet of shelf space, contained everything that Eliot believed was necessary for a person to read in order to have a “liberal arts” education. Given that one of Eliot’s main efforts as Harvard President was to minimize the status of liberal arts and transform the university experience from a liberal education to a practical scientific research education, you can imagine that Dr. Eliot had some significant holes in the series.

It must be acknowledged that any list, no matter how long, will always have holes within it that anyone with a level of familiarity will notice with minimal effort. Because of this, I am willing to forgive Dr. Eliot for leaving out The Republic of Plato, even if his leaving it out meant that Karl Popper’s analysis became the common opinion of the dialogue for generations. Anyone who has actually read The Republic begins to doubt that Dr. Popper read more than a couple of undergrad papers on the book. I have a great deal of respect for Popper analysis in the Philosophy of Science, but his interpretation of The Republic leaves a lot to be desired.

That’s just my fancy way of saying that my lists, including this one, will have holes in it and that’s where you the discussant come in.

The first few entries in the series included a discussion of 13 Martial Arts films that belong in everyone’s video/movie library and a list of 13 roleplaying games from the 1970s I think you should own. Today’s list will focus on horror movies from the 1960s and 1970s. I could have started with the Universal era, but there is something very interesting about this particular period in time. It was a time where audiences pushed back against the Gothic horror of the early 20th century (to their detriment), while also pushing the boundaries of horror in ways that paralleled the New Hollywood films of the era with their raw grit and sepia tones.

While I don’t consider myself an expert on horror films, my friends J and know a lot more than I do; I really love horror films as a genre. Horror films capture our anxieties in ways few other genres can, and they provide us with a sense of cathartic release. If you were to ask me how much I love horror films on a 1 to Rebekah King, I’d be somewhere about the John Landis level, with my true love being the Amicus and Hammer films produced from the 1950s to the 1980s (with a new blessed resurgence). There will be some “obvious” films missing from the list like Rosemary’s Baby (1968), and Halloween (1978). Of course I think you should watch these, but I also assume you probably already have. With those caveats in mind, here’s my list of 13 Horror Films from the 1960s and 1970s I think every geek should watch. Later in the month, I’ll be doing a follow up to this article where I provide game stats for a number of the films in a variety of roleplaying game systems.

Geekshelf Time!

1) Nothing But the Night (1973)

Christopher Lee has starred in at least three iconic roles across many generations. For the Baby Boomers, he will always be known as Dracula, but he was also Saruman and Count Dooku. If you read up on his life, he’s definitely in the running for the most interesting man in the world during his lifetime. While he did a lot of work with Hammer Studios, he and fellow Hammer alum Anthony Nelson Keys teamed up to create Charlemagne Films where they produced one and only one film Nothing but the Night.

Watch Nothing but the Night on Amazon

Nothing but the Night is an interesting horror film that touches on the fear of death that we all have and combines it with a bit of intergenerational hatred. Where Children of the Corn and The Children contained explicit “the kids are dangerous” messages, Nothing but the Night turns that on its head a bit. Given that there is a mystery at the core of the story, I will offer only one spoiler. The film was partially an inspiration for Get Out. The terror is different here, but…

2) The Asphyx (1973)

The Asphyx, ah, The Asphyx. I have such fond memories of this film. When I was a child I used to spend the night at my Oma and Opa’s house every other weekend. My Opa was a HUGE fan of genre fiction of all kinds and he introduced me to Flash Gordon, Buck Rogers, and The Asphyx.

Watch The Asphyx on Amazon Prime

Like Nothing but the Night, this film has as its central theme the battle against mortality, but in this case asks the question “what if we could kill (or at least capture) death and thus live forever?” What are the costs of such a life and is it worth living? The movie is wonderfully weird and while it was made in the 1970s, it perfectly captures the Victorian tone in both imagery and narrative. If you’re running a Victorian, or even modern, horror roleplaying game session for Halloween, this film is rich with ideas to inspire you.

3) The Beast Must Die (1974)

What do you get when you combine The Most Dangerous Game, The Wolfman, and the classic Cozy Mansion Mystery? The Beast Must Die is what you get. Amicus Productions, a competitor of Hammer Studios, produced this one and it is a tone of fun.

Millionaire Tom Newcliffe is a monster hunter who has invited a group of people to his home in order to reveal that one of them is a werewolf who must be killed. The mystery portion of the film is directed in much the same manner as a typical Agatha Christie tale and includes a famous “Werewolf Break” where the film is paused so that viewers can make their final guess regarding which guest bears the curse of lycanthropy. It’s a ton of fun and you can see echoes of its influence in films like Ready or Not and Werewolf by Night as well as other mansion murder mayhem films. Calvin Lockhart is wonderful as Tom Newcliffe and is my personal mental model for Blade the Vampire Hunter. He’s cool, calm, collected, and on the prowl to kill a werewolf.

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4) Day of the Triffids (1963)

John Wyndham’s 1951 novel Day of the Triffids is a classic science fiction tale that has vast influence in both the science fiction and horror genre. Like many horrific science fiction stories, this film catalogs how the world shifts after an apocalyptic event and the decline of civilization is as much the story as the actual monsters. People are, as they say, the real monsters. You can see echoes of Day of the Triffids in 28 Days Later, It Comes at Night, The Walking Dead, Bird Box, and The Quiet Place. If the apocalyptic story is more about how society changes than it is about jump scares, it’s been inspired by Wyndham’s tale. In the cases of 28 Days Later, Bird Box, and The Quiet Place the connection is pretty explicit.

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5) Burn, Witch, Burn (1963)

I’m a huge fan of Fritz Leiber. After my introduction to fantasy fiction via Michael Moorcock, Leiber was my transition from deconstructive Sword & Sorcery into Sword & Sorcery proper. His Fafhrd and Gray Mouser stories are among my favorite tales, but Leiber’s writing extended beyond the narrow confines of Sword & Sorcery and into literary horror. His novel, Conjure Wife, is among my favorite modern urban fantasy tales. It tells the story of a University Professor and his wife, a story that pre-sages David Mamet’s play Oleanna with regards to campus politics and the lives of professors and which pre-sages Bewitched with the use of a supernatural wife. Like Bell, Book, and Candle this is a tale of a witch in love, but unlike that light hearted story this is one with dark undertones.

The film stars Peter Wyngarde as Norman Taylor, the naive university professor who is about to have his entire world disrupted. You may remember Peter Wyngarde as the actor who played sexy spy Jason King of Department S in two ITV series or as Klytus in Flash Gordon. He’s magnificent here. He manages to be sexy and charming while also seeming distant and academic. Janet Blair plays his wife, who begins innocent and complies with his requests, but in the end shows a ruthlessness in defending her family that hints at Leiber’s (and the film maker’s) critique of early 1960s patriarchy. It’s a fun film and a very different from the other tales that inspired Bewitched. As much as I like I Married a Witch (which is good enough to have a Criterion edition) and Bell, Book, and Candle it’s Burn, Witch, Burn that I make sure to watch every year.

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6) Captain Kronos Vampire Hunter (1974)

As I mentioned above, I’m a big fan of the British horror movies of the 1950s through 1970s. I cut my teeth on films like the Quatermass Xperiment and the Cushing and Lee revitalizations of Universal’s Classic Monsters. The saturated colors, sensuality, and passion on display in these films made horror feel as vibrant as the Greek and Norse Mythology I was reading at the time. There was depth of world building and more importantly, though I didn’t notice it at the time, engagement with the underlying fears experienced by society at large.

Captain Kronos was directed by Brian Clemens and was released in 1974. Clemens has written a couple of films I greatly enjoy (The Golden Voyage of Sinbad and The Watcher in the Woods) and is credited with the story on one film that doesn’t exist (Highlander II: The Quickening) and with Captain Kronos he shows that when he’s in control of story and direction, the results are extremely entertaining.

Horst Janson stars as the eponymous Kronos who is summoned by his former brother-in-arms Dr. Marcus to investigate a series of deaths involving young women who have died of rapid aging. Kronos determines that these deaths are the work of a vampire, but not the blood drinking vampire we are used to seeing in films. This vampire feeds on youth directly.

While the film was not well received critically, and it was one of Hammer’s last films before its revival, the film is rich with inventive vampire lore and has a compelling story. Hammer films at the time were venturing from the sexy and serious into the sexy and camp with films like Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde (1971) and Dracula A.D. 1972, so the more sincere, but still sexy as it starred Caroline Munro as the romantic foil, Captain Kronos was a bit discordant with the productions at the time. I like the camp era of Hammer, but it was definitely an era when Hammer was following rather than setting trends. Classic Gothic horror was, for a time, on the way out of the zeitgeist and tended to be relegated to camp. It’s a cycle that happened before. After all, Frankenstein met Abbott and Costello as Universal’s horror dominance waned. For all that it came out at the wrong time, Captain Kronos is an entertaining and engaging vampire film that deserved as many sequels as there are kinds of vampire.

7) The Devils (1971)

When I was a kid, I loved watching the various film adaptations of The Three Musketeers. In my mind the G.O.A.T. is the Richard Lester version starring Oliver Reed, Michael York, Richard Chamberlain, and Frank Finlay as the Musketeers and Charlton Heston as Cardinal Richelieu. At the time I had no idea how horrifyingly brutal the Thirty Years War was or even an inkling of the terrible events of St. Bartholomew’s Day in the century prior. All I knew was that there was swashing of buckles going on and that was enough for me as a kid.

When I got older, I came to appreciate the events that surrounded the film and it added greater context to the political tensions underpinning all the adaptations I’d seen. I still have a soft spot for the Gene Kelly version, with Vincent Price as the Cardinal, but now I see where it fails on numerous levels to show with any veracity the sinister political machinations of His Excellency. Vincent Price is perfect casting for the role, but the film is far too bright in tone and technicolor to capture the cruelty of the period.

I also didn’t know how ironic it was for Richard Lester to cast Charlton Heston as the Cardinal in a version starring Oliver Reed. You see, when Oliver Reed was interviewed about the controversies surrounding the excesses of the Ken Russell film The Devils, he responded, “We never set out to make a pretty Christian film. Charlton Heston made enough of those.” As with the Three Musketeers stories, one of the chief antagonists of The Devils is Cardinal Richelieu, and though this Richelieu remains primarily in the background he is crueler and more ambitious than most interpretations of the character.

Ken Russell’s film The Devils is a dramatized account of the accusation, trial, and execution of Father Urbain Grandier for the crime of witchcraft. This particular account is based on Aldous Huxley’s non-fiction work The Devils of Loudun. Historically Urbain Grandier (Oliver Reed) is accused of witchcraft and sexual depravity by Sister Jeanne des Anges (Vanessa Redgrave). This accusation spreads and transforms into a mass hysteria in the convent. Events unfold and there is a trial after which Grandier is executed. The inciting incident that leads Sister Jeanne to accuse Grandier of wrongdoing is when he secretly marries Madeleine (Gemma Jones), a woman he falls in love with after giving her mother the last rites. Jeanne had been fantasizing about him and this triggers her envy, envy that gets used by those who want to destroy Grandier. With the exception of the secret marriage, these are all documented historical events and thus are not spoilers.

The Devils is an interesting, important, and disturbing film. It is disturbing on two levels. The first is in the way it depicts acts of sexual and violent depravity in the film. Even though the film as it exists in modern edits isn’t tremendously graphic, these moments can be very difficult to watch. Russell understands that believing is seeing and there are moments when you can imagine exactly what is happening as your mind fills in the gruesome gaps. When you read about the actual events surrounding the Grandier trial, and the 30 Years War in general, you realize that Russell is not trying to be exploitative in a Grand Guignol fashion. Instead, he is trying to get you to see how horrifying a totalitarian state can be.

Because the state in this case is the Kingdom of France during a period when the government and the local Catholic Church were heavily intertwined and dominated by Cardinal Richelieu’s influence, many might think that this is an anti-religious or anti-Catholic film. While Russell has said that The Devils was the “last nail in the coffin of [his] Catholic faith,” his treatment of Grandier as the film progresses is more a critique of French Political Catholicism as political institution than religion itself. Grandier’s faith and piety grow as the film progresses. When it comes to the 30 Years War, one must keep in mind that France was fighting not only Huguenot, but Spanish Catholics as well. The English would soon be fighting their Civil War, where Puritans would fight against a Protestant (though Catholic sympathizing) king. When I teach about the Colonial Period of America in my introductory classes, I remind my students of what was happening in Europe to explain how unique our vision of religious liberty was at the time.

Russell has stated that this film is about state power and the main argument of the film is that tyranny could happen under any regime and that it is even worse when the tyranny is supported by institutions who should resist them. Grandier’s opening speech is about how religious toleration and his priestly guidance has saved the city from the ravages of war. This point is made even more explicit in Grandier’s final moments at the stake and in the last shot of the film where the Grandier’s wife Madeleine leaves the now destroyed town of Loudun. In some ways the film is a more brutal and sexual version of The Crucible because it seeks to convey a similar message about the state, power, and manipulation.

The second way it is disturbing is in the odd visual and audio contradictions within the film that destabilize the viewer and push them out of their comfort zone. In this case, I don’t mean the late-Sixties/early-Seventies exploitation material. I mean the way that Ken Russell is simultaneously pushing brutality and camp in a discordant mix that makes the unseen brutality all the more horrific. In this manner Ken Russell’s direction is an intersection of three filmic movements. With The Devils, he combines the sexploitation camp of films like Hammer’s Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde, and a host of other late-Sixties and early-Seventies films capitalizing on the sexual revolution for film revenue, with the rawness of a Sam Peckinpah film, and a focus on using score and sound to manipulate the audience similar to Hitchcock in Psycho.

A key example of Russell’s use of sound is in an early scene featuring Grandier. He has previously praised his town for resisting the secular conflict that has ravaged most of Europe and in this moment he is leading a funeral procession for plague victims. During the procession a version of the Dies Irae plays, the same one that is echoed in Camille Saint-Saëns Danse Macabre. Both songs feature a musical interval called the “tritone”,” which is a dissonant and disturbing musical tone often called the Devil’s Interval. Russell, whose films include The Music Lovers, Mahler, and Lisztomania knew his music and he uses it here to make you feel uncomfortable. You don’t see much violence, but your eardrums feel it.

It is a film that pushed boundaries in a variety of ways and as a result received an X rating and was banned in some countries. For a long time it was difficult to find a copy to watch. Though controversial and difficult to find, it has been a very influential film. As I watched the movie, I was reminded of scenes from later films. I cannot imagine that the director of the Timothy Hutton film Taps, wasn’t thinking of the scene, in the trailer below, where Grandier’s crossbowmen confront some of the Cardinal’s guard.

It’s interesting to me that Russell’s “depravity camp” seems to be a part of an honored tradition among English directors when depicting the crimes of France, regardless of whether it is Richelieu’s Catholic or Napoleon’s Imperial France. Where Russell’s film opens with a scene where the King of France enacts the Birth of Venus with himself as Venus in what is essentially a burlesque, Ridley Scott’s film Napoleon focuses more on Napoleon’s sexual relations with Josephine while ignoring any political savvy the real Napoleon had. Similarly, Almost all of Russell’s villains have external physical, or behavioral, manifestations of their evil. Richelieu is wheeled around and Vanessa Redgrave’s Jeanne has a hunched back. Meanwhile, Oliver Reed is a charismatic sexual dynamo who may be morally gray in breaking rules on chastity, but is morally forthright when it comes to valuing peace. When one compares this imagery with that of the French film La Reine Margot, which covers the horrific St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, it’s easy to see the contrast. Neither flinches away from the horrors of the day, but only Russell’s engages in depravity camp.

I don’t often issue caveats when recommending films, but I cannot recommend Ken Russell’s The Devils to everyone. It is a film that will offend many people. Not everyone will agree with me that the film isn’t as heretical as critics of an earlier era found it to be. For me it’s a film that begins as exploitative camp, but when it hits Grandier’s trial and Oliver Reed takes over the film it transforms into something powerful and horrifying. The Criterion Channel is currently showing the unrated version that Shudder has shown in the past as a part of their Nunsploitation collection. If you are up for it, it’s a disturbing way to spend a day. All the more disturbing because as camp and over the top as this film is at times, it is nowhere near as brutal as the reality.

8) Night of the Living Dead (1968)

I don’t think any discussion of horror films can be complete without George Romero’s classic horror film Night of the Living Dead. Not only did the movie change the zombie genre film forever, it showed how a director on a shoestring budget could return to older film techniques (including filming in Black and White) to create a real sense of dread. Romero uses the film to comment not only on the fear of conformity that was prominent in the horror films of the 1950s and 1960s, but to expand the commentary to questions of familial fidelity versus communal responsibility and race relations. The film ends with a gut punch, that is all the more powerful for how casually the event is treated in the film. One part of what makes it work is the powerful message about race, but the other reason it works is the casual nihilism it expresses. That nihilism elevates the film and takes the horror from gore and tension into the realm of cosmic horror where we wonder what the point of anything really is.

The film was shot outside of Pittsburgh, and like films in the late 1970s and early 1980s that took advantage of New York’s urban decay, the architecture alone speaks of a breakdown of the social order. The film has also been deeply influential in the comic book and gaming industries with titles like Marvel Zombies and games like All Flesh Must Be Eaten building on the mythos that Romero transformed.

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9) The Devil’s Rain (1975)

You ever wonder where the William Shatner mask they used in Halloween came from? It was manufactured from a life cast of Shatner taken for The Devil's Rain and used to very good effect. The Devil’s Rain was directed by Robert Fuest, who provides the bridge across the Atlantic with this film. Fuest had worked on the Dr. Phibes films, as well as an adaptation of Michael Moorcock’s Jerry Cornelius novel The Final Programme. While British horror can have a downbeat ending from time to time, it is rare that they are able to capture the hopelessness of the Satanic Cult films US production companies were churning out in the 1970s. If you were a character in one of these films, things were not going to end well for you. There were no Final Girls in the vast majority of these films, just the bleak disappointment that you would be killed last. The depressing endings of the New Hollywood films, as well as the New Hollywood Satanic Cult Horror films, were so predictable that I’ve come to call any downbeat ending a 70s ending. The Devil’s Rain has a self-sacrificial ending that hits a bit differently than most of the genre.

The Devil’s Rain is a very 1970s film. I chose it as to represent the Satanic wave because it’s a bit off the beaten path. Most people might have recommended Race with the Devil, which is essentially Steven Spielberg’s Duel but with a Satanic Cult instead of a pissed off trucker. The Devil’s Rain is more Lovecraftian with Ernest Borgnine starring as the priest of a Satanic Cult who transforms into a goat headed demon, William Shatner plays the devout Christian Mark who attempts to defeat the Satanic Cult, and there are appearances by Tom Skerritt, John Travolta, and Anton LaVey. That last one giving the film a touch of “authenticity.”

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10) Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974)

When I was a kid, Texas Chain Saw Massacre was the film that everyone bragged about being brave enough to watch. It held an almost mythical status as the most frightening and gory film ever made and that status prevented me from watching Tobe Hooper’s original film until I was well into my 30s. When I did watch the film, I still found it scary, but I also found it to be an interesting film that may have taken some inspiration from the story of Ed Gein’s life but took that into entirely new directions. Thematically it shares an element with Nothing but the Night. Both films are about some social group seeking to extend itself and traditions through the destruction of the young. The cultures being preserved are very different, but neither deserves to be maintained.

When I was younger, I followed the common trend of asserting that Tobe Hooper didn’t direct Poltergeist because of the vast differences in style between that film and Chain Saw. I still think it’s impossible to argue that Spielberg had no influence on Hooper’s direction, but over time I’ve come to see Poltergeist as Hooper’s film. Repeated viewings of Hooper’s film Lifeforce have beaten all resistance out of me. Did Hooper learn from Spielberg? Absolutely, but he applied those same lessons to Lifeforce and they retain a similar Hooper-ness.

11) Suspiria (1977)

For years I heard about the brilliance of Dario Argento’s 1977 horror classic Suspiria and I avoided watching it because the people who recommended it tended to be the kinds of people who dismiss mainstream films and enjoy sitting through repeated viewings of Ulysses Gaze. Who am I kidding? No one wants to live through that. That’s real horror. See, I can be mean every now and then.

When I finally watched the film a decade ago, I was extremely disappointed in myself for waiting so long. It contains so many of the elements that I enjoy in film, not just in horror films, and is a masterpiece of the horror genre. The use of saturated color provides both a reminder that what the viewer is seeing “isn’t real” as well as creating a deeply disturbing visual environment. The combination of imagery and score keeps the viewer in a constant state of unease. The story is relatively straightforward. Young ballet dancer (speaking of which, you need to read ’s latest piece on horror in the ballet) Suzy Bannion seeks to study at an exclusive Tanz Academie, only to discover sinister things are afoot. She flees, returns, and all Hell breaks loose. The film makes a nice companion piece to Burn, Witch, Burn because both deal with witchcraft, but Suspiria does so in ways that create real dread beyond the social commentary.

12) The Exorcist (1973)

Mike Oldfield’s album Tubular Bells contains some of the most beautiful music I’ve ever heard. It’s a masterpiece of progressive rock and I listen to it frequently when I am writing. I find it quite relaxing, which actually surprises me because it is used as the music in one of the most frightening films I have ever seen. William Friedkin hadn’t initially planned on using Oldfield’s song in the film and had hired Lalo Schifrin to compose a score that included elements that evoked Brahms’ Lullaby. Schifrin’s career is filled with memorable scores ranging from Bullitt (1968) and Mission: Impossible (the show) to Magnum Force (1973) and Black Moon Rising (1986), but his composition did not appeal to Friedkin and he selected a beautiful, and at times haunting, obscure progressive rock song instead. It works brilliantly.

I think the reason that the Oldfield song doesn’t fill me with dread is that it isn’t featured at the moments that scare me most in The Exorcist. While a good deal of the film focuses on the eponymous event where Father Merrin (Max von Sydow) and Father Karras (Jason Miller) attempt to exorcise the demon from Linda Blair’s young Regan, those moments don’t frighten me. Father Merrin’s strength in the face of evil, and his knowledge that evil can be defeated, provide hope in the supernatural scenes. Those scenes do generate dread and shock, but I “know” the priests will win in my heart of hearts because of Merrin’s strength. Even Karras’ lack of faith only cracks that armor so much, but it provides room for the truly frightening element…psychiatry in 1973. What the medical profession puts Regan through is as horrifying as anything in Cuckoo’s Nest. The misapplication of science is the real horror and it scares the shit out of me.

The supernatural elements in The Exorcist are handled beautifully, and in a way that makes them feel real. At no point am I pulled out of the film, as I was when a possessed Patricia Arquette asked Gabriel Byrne “how is your faith now” in Stigmata (1999). He stands there stunned, but in the back of my mind, all I can say is “pretty good now. I mean, it’s not faith anymore, it’s knowledge.” The Exorcist doesn’t have a lazy shock moment like that. Karras’ weakness is his desire to prevent an innocent from suffering anymore. He begins a doubter, sees the power of faith, but is still overwhelmed by watching the suffering of the innocent. Friedkin’s film takes faith, and the potential terrors of science, seriously and it is possibly the greatest horror film ever made.

Purchase The Exorcist on Amazon

13) Theatre of Blood (1973)

I had a really difficult time choosing between Theatre of Blood and The Devil Rides Out for my final recommendation. In the end, it was the lack of Vincent Price depth on this Geekshelf that pushed me towards Theatre of Blood. Price is the Maestro of the Macabre and I could create an entire Geekshelf of Vincent Price Films Every Geek Should Watch, and his 1960s partnership with Roger Corman produced some of the best films Corman ever made. Vincent Price’s charisma and talent elevate Corman’s well edited, but very low budget, films from B-Movies to Absolute Cinema. Masque of the Red Death is a phenomenal film and Price is absolute perfection in that film.

In Theatre of Blood, Price plays aged actor Edward Lionheart, an actor who maintains the older tradition of acting with its perfectly performed Received Pronunciation. When he is passed over for an award, he decides to enact his vengeance on the critics who spurned him. He does all of this while delivering what argues is the best version of a Shakespeare speech, the famous ‘to be or not to be’ speech that marks Act III, Scene I of Hamlet. Dr. King argues that the combination of the character’s motivation, and Price’s channeling of that emotion, make it her favorite delivery of that particular speech.

Dr King's Curiosities

Why the best version of a Shakespeare speech is in camp horror classic 'Theatre of Blood'

One of the most irritating experiences I’ve ever had in a theatre was when I saw Written on the Heart, a 2011 play about the creation of the King James Bible produced at the Royal Shakespeare company for the 400th anniversary. Every time one of the characters started quoting a verse, the couple in front of me would nod at each other and…

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2 years ago · 47 likes · 11 comments · Rebekah King

I hadn’t thought of this before I began to write these couple of paragraphs praising Theatre of Blood, but Price’s performance of Lionheart is similar in many ways to that of Boris Karloff as Byron Orlok in Peter Bogdanovich’s underappreciated classic Targets. Price channels all of his acting talent to create an actor who terrifies his victims by reading their damning reviews of his performances. His acting becomes a force of terror. Where Price is the villain of Theatre of Blood, Karloff is the hero of Targets. Bogdanovich’s film makes an argument for the importance of cinematic horrors in a world of very real horrors. The plot of Targets was inspired by the shootings by Charles Whitman at the University of Texas and the real villain of the film is Bobby Thompson, who goes on a killing spree for unspecified reasons. Where some might have the film blame horror films for breaking Bobby’s mind and causing him to choose violence in a Satanic Panic kind of way, Bogdanovich does the opposite. He argues that cinematic horror has a place and when Orlok faces down Thompson in the lot of a Drive-in Theater, he goes even further but I’ll leave it up to you to interpret the final confrontation of Targets.

Brief Final Thought

That’s the list. I think it’s an interesting one that might contain a couple of films you’ve overlooked. The 1960s and 1970s were a rich era for horror films and these only scratch the surface. In fact, they barely nick the surface and the list is a bit Brit heavy. I’ve constrained myself to the Geekshelf rule of 13 though and these are my 13 from the era. They might not be the same tomorrow, but they are what they are today.

Oh, and I think it’s interesting that some of Price’s best work, as well as what is arguably Karloff’s best performance, were in Corman productions. These were low budget affairs that allowed actors towards the end of their careers, and lives, to show us their true talent. Corman may have been a cheapskate, but he provided many a gift to film fans.

An Old Post Revisited

I’ve been at this Substack thing for a while now and my audience has grown significantly. It hasn’t grown as fast or as large as any of the outrage mongers who have migrated here from other spaces and begun to affect the writings of so many voices here in what was a largely collegial discursive space (including some I really care about and read). I still curate and write for collegiality, but with that comes a lack of virality and profit sharing. Such is life, but while my space may lack the topicality and rage that is so popular I believe it will better stand the test of time. Speaking of time, lately I’ve been reading a lot of posts by writers like at , older articles by at , and a number of other solo gamebook and rpg authors lately (more will be mentioned later in the piece).

All of this reading got me thinking about a piece I wrote early in my Substack days, back when I had only 25 subscribers (thank you all). It was a brief essay talking about my first “real” experience playing a roleplaying game. That experience shares a bit with what P.J., Patrick, and others write about, so I thought I’d share my experience in an updated article.

RPGs Don’t Require a Group to Be Fun

My very first experience with roleplaying games was a session of Dungeons & Dragons in which I experienced the full horror of a certain kind of bullying DM. I have discussed that experience in the past and will update it with some of the lessons it taught me about how to DM in the next couple of months. That experience was truly awful, but at least the memory of it resulted in me having ample material when I was hired to write a piece for The Munchkin Book. Needless to say, the most recent D&D movie featured a creature that induced flashbacks to that dreaded first game and not from the creature you are probably imagining.

That horrible Dungeons & Dragons experience wasn’t my first “real” experience with roleplaying games. It was my first “group” experience to be sure, but it was such a bad experience and so unreflective of the hobby that I don’t think of it as my “real” first experience. The honor of first “real” experience goes to Citadel of Chaos by Steve Jackson. This is Games Workshop’s Steve Jackson, and not the Steve Jackson of Steve Jackson Games, though Steve Jackson Games’ Steve Jackson did write (also discussed here) the Scorpion Swamp adventure. The dual Jacksons Steve isn’t confusing at all, especially now that Steve Jackson Games is republishing all the Fighting Fantasy Gamebooks and even has a Satanic Panic post up about them today.

Citadel of Chaos was the second volume in the Fighting Fantasy Gamebook series created by Ian Livingstone and Steve Jackson, but it was the first volume that I purchased. I bought the book at a local bookstore shortly after my parents purchased me the D&D Basic Set for Christmas. I had read the D&D rulebook several times, but I had not yet played the game so there were some gaps in my understanding of just how roleplaying games worked. Sure, there was the excellent example of play within the Basic Set, but it was still hard to imagine the array of choices that are available within a roleplaying game and it was Citadel of Chaos that provided the perfect demonstration of how rules affected narrative.

By the time I picked up Citadel, I’d already read a number of Choose Your Own Adventure books. I was comfortable with interactive fiction as a concept, so the Fighting Fantasy Gamebooks would have interested me even if I hadn’t received the Basic Set as a gift, but there was something that set the Fighting Fantasy Gamebooks apart. They didn’t just have a pick your path narrative, they also had rules for combat, magic, and interacting with the world. At least, Citadel of Chaos did. Warlock of Firetop Mountain, the first Fighting Fantasy Gamebook only has rules for combat and interacting with the world, it lacks a magic system and is more of a Sword & Sorcery tale compared to Citadel of Chaos’ more high fantasy feel. I’ve discussed how well Warlock of Firetop Mountain works as a “full” roleplaying game in a past essay. It works, but only within the magic-less constraints of the tale.

Had Warlock been my first encounter with the genre, I don’t think I’d have had the same excited reaction to the concept. In addition to lacking a magic system, the adventure in Warlock has only a single solution. There is only one way to complete the adventure successfully and the adventure is quite challenging. When I finally played Warlock, it took me more than a few playthroughs to get it right and I still died the first couple of times I was on the proper path for the solution.

That wasn’t the case with Citadel. There are a couple of ways to have a happy ending playing Citadel and this fact kept me coming back to the book and replaying the adventure several times. By having a magic system and multiple paths to a successful conclusion Citadel gave me a better sense of how roleplaying games worked.

Sure, the mechanics of the Fighting Fantasy Gamebooks are simple to the point of being almost simplistic, but they are surprisingly flexible and have resulted in a complete roleplaying game that holds its own and that has a good fanbase. That fanbase has expanded to include members of the Troika! community. Troika!’s mechanics are heavily influenced by Fighting Fantasy and that’s a really cool legacy.

I don’t want to reveal too much about Citadel, only to say that it is worth checking out and that by bridging the gap between Choose Your Own Adventure books and full Roleplaying Games, it makes a perfect introduction. Steve Jackson, unlike that cruel first Dungeon Master, wasn’t arbitrary in his plot design. He wasn’t cruel at all. That doesn’t mean Jackson didn’t provide challenges, he did. He also created an interesting and fun narrative that allowed sufficient choices that multiple plays resulted in different experiences. This fact alone, that the same book could result in different stories, was the revelation I needed to completely understand roleplaying games as a kid. They were stories, often starting in the same place and with the same modules, but where the players shaped what the end story would be.

After that, I was hooked.

A Temporary Genre or Just for Kids?

When I was a kid, I didn’t have the vocabulary to describe the genre that Steve, Ian, and Steve had introduced me to. I hadn’t yet discovered Tunnels & Trolls, with its solo adventures, so I didn’t know that Citadel of Chaos had introduced me to what was to become a rich and sophisticated branch of the roleplaying hobby, solo roleplaying. Even after I discovered Tunnels & Trolls, and had a name for this category of gaming, I thought that I’d leave it behind when I found a regular group to play with. I initially thought it was a genre of gaming that was purely introductory and just for kids. When I did eventually find a regular group to play “elf games” with, I never stopped playing solo games and thankfully neither did the hobby.

The solo side of roleplaying games has continued to grow in options and sophistication and is currently the healthiest I’ve ever seen it in my lifetime. In recent years you’ve seen a rise in not only traditional game books, but new mechanics as well. There are journaling games, oracle-driven adventures, and an entire “#soloRPG” corner of the internet that exploded in size during the pandemic when fans couldn’t meet in person. Though that corner developed during the pandemic, it shows no signs of slowing down in its growth. The benefits of solo gaming that appealed to me when I was younger, are as powerful as they ever were. Solo roleplaying games don’t require a group and so there are no scheduling problems. The rules are often simple on their own, or streamlined versions of more complex games, and thus have a low barrier to entry. Then there’s the greatest benefit, your imagination gets to do all of the work. There is no “misinterpreting” of what happened, no disagreement between players, because you are the only one experiencing the story. Your experience IS the story.

What has changed is the amount of player agency involved in solo games. Where Fighting Fantasy games have a fairly rigid branched path structure that is constrained by the 400 entries in every book, branches that often have a single solution, new games like Shawn Tomkin’s Ironsworn allow for tremendous agency. The Jacksons Steve are no longer the authors in games like Ironsworn, you are thanks to a combination of “oracles” (read…tables) that provide the odds of something being yes or no and provide evocative prompts that you can expand upon. You aren’t merely choosing among existing paragraphs on a branch; you are randomizing events and creating the story as you go. You, and the dice, are the Dungeon Master and not an unseen author. The addition of dice as co-author takes the concept of “random dungeons” in the old Dungeon Masters Guide (sic) and transforms it into narrative game play. Products like the Mythic Game Master Emulator allow you to play nearly any game on your shelf as a solo roleplaying game.

Many modern games, and I’m thinking of Dragonbane in particular here, have expanded on the older solo play examples like those featured in the Mentzer Basic Set (you still suck Bargle and I’m glad you are dead) or Black Box Basic and expanded them into fully solo playable adventures, there for the story and not just the pedagogy. I’ve written at length about the origins of Dragonbane, but I didn’t mention Alone in Deepfall Breach, the solo adventure included in the box to teach you the basics of the game. That adventure is far from a simple pick-a-path adventure and includes an oracle table and a complete set of inspiration tables. In a few short pages, you’ve got a mini campaign of fun. A decade ago, this kind of solo support would have been something a fan created on their WordPress or personal website, maybe their itch.io page, but now it’s something a major publisher thinks is central to the play experience.

One thing to keep in mind about playing Dragonbane, solo or in groups, is to not let the inclusion of Donaldesque Ducks fool you. Bloggers and Substackers who play the game, solo or in groups, have been honest about this. This game can be brutal. It has the potential for high character mortality that was common in Old School games but is rarer today. Even so, it is such a delight to read through the monster attack tables and see how merciless they can be when your character is the only target available. The fact that Dragonbane’s mythical monsters choose their attacks based on evocative and delightful tables, rather than the choices of Game Masters, makes the game highly playable as a solo game. It also makes it fun to run as a GM because if things go bad, players know it wasn’t personal. Sure, Orcs and other humanoid monsters are still fully controlled by GMs, but Dragons and other really lethal foes have their attacks decided by fate. It’s a really nice feature and one that makes it rich for solo play.

Of course, that lethality means that many a solo player has watched their promising characters die fast and early in a gout of Dragon fire or pierced by dozens of Manticore spikes. None of this is a reason to avoid the game. I love the sense of danger and desperation it evokes, but you do have to go in with open eyes and reading reviews of people who’ve actually played the game is much better than basing your expectations on a few “readviews.” Dragonbane can be lethal, but it’s a blast if you know what you are facing.

There are two newsletters I highly recommend following if you are interested in how Dragonbane plays, or in solo gaming in general. ’ Substack has sadly migrated away from the Stack, but it contains a wonderful look at how solo procedures produce meaningful game play in his “Lantern of Solitude” campaign. If you like those, you can follow him to his new site (The Lone Bard) where you can follow his coverage of a multitude of game systems. I’d also recommend ’s site where he’s done a great job discussing Dragonbane, and has been sharing his attempts to complete Caverns of the Snow Witch…a classic Fighting Fantasy Gamebook. Between these two sites, as well as those I mentioned at the top of the piece, you’ll get a good look at the solo gaming hobby.

A Brief Genealogy of Solos

As much as the Fighting Fantasy Gamebook series was my introduction to solo roleplaying, it wasn’t the progenitor of the genre of play. Flying Buffalo shipped Buffalo Castle, the first solo roleplaying game module, six years before Warlock of Firetop Mountain hit the shelves. Rick Loomis, owner of Flying Buffalo, had been running play by mail games (and eventually computer moderated PBM games) since 1970 when he used a Raytheon computer to run games for paying customers. It’s no accident that someone who turned play by mail into a profession would be the one to translate roleplaying games into a solo experience. Ken St. Andre’s and Mike Stackpole’s later T&T adventures, especially Arena of Khazan and City of Terrors, might have been superior play experiences, but they wouldn’t have happened without Loomis’ vision. Loomis himself was building on the Diplomacy PBM games and Tony Bath’s campaign models, but his Starweb PBM game is possibly the first true 4X game.

When I cracked open Citadel of Chaos as a kid, I was joining a gaming tradition that had already existed for decades. The line of solo gaming goes back further than we know, and if we include journaling goes back over a century. That genre gave me a look at how rich the roleplaying game hobby is and I’m still rolling dice alone today.

I think that, more than anything else, is what I’ve come to love about the hobby. The hobby isn’t about games and game styles dying and being replaced, it’s a hobby that keeps so much history alive and builds on the beauty of the past. At least that’s what the best of the hobby does.

What was your first real RPG experience?

Longtime readers of Geekerati Media know that I have long been a fan of Superhero role playing games. It is my absolute favorite roleplaying game genre and I have yet to find a superhero game that hasn’t inspired me in some way as a game master, designer, and player. While there was a time when I could claim to “own every Superhero RPG in print,” those days have long passed into memory. Now, there are so many independent games that it is nigh impossible to keep up with them all. I’m sure there is someone who has managed to “collect them all,” but it’s not me.

Nevertheless, I still own a very large selection of Superhero RPGs that ranges from Superhero 2044 to DC Heroes to the new Invincible RPG (review coming soon), but there are so many Superhero games out there that it is hard to keep up. I’ve read all of the games I own and have played most of them, but there are a few that stand out as able to withstand the test of time. Among those games that I return to again and again is the Classic Marvel Superheroes Roleplaying Game which uses the FASERIP system. The system has a lot of fans, and I’m one of them, but the FASERIP system isn’t perfect and can break down a bit when trying to run an Avengers style lineup facing Avengers style foes. It really struggles with Champions or Defenders style play. Unless you add the Advanced rules, street level heroes have to stay to the sidelines. With those rules, street level (and slightly tougher) characters matter a bit more but are still pushed to the sidelines. There is a reason that Mike Selinker took the approach he did when designing TSR’s next Marvel game (Marvel SAGA). He wanted Cap to matter, and he never really seems to matter as much as I think he should in FASERIP Marvel.

This very small flaw is easily addressable with House Rules, and the overall system is very flexible. In fact, it has quite a few “genius moments,” and is great for getting people gaming quickly. There is almost no learning curve to begin playing the game and it has enough depth that players continue to learn how to bend the system in ways they never imagined possible. This is particularly true with the Advanced version of the rules, but it’s also true of the core set. One key mechanic is the Karma experience system in the game. You get experience (Karma) for behaving heroically, as well as for actually paying attention to your secret identity and your character’s personal life. This experience can be spent to perform better in combat, and one of the ways that Street Level heroes actually excel is that they tend to have more Karma because they tend to have more responsibilities in their private lives. They are the characters who worry about paying rent, and making a work deadline can net you as much Karma as punching Doctor Doom in the face…in THE FACE!

I’ve been trying to convince my daughters and their gaming group to give the game a run for a while and I think that after their recent fantastic experience with B/X (I will be writing about that) they are more amenable. FASERIP is a system that I want to use at the table, but I want to use in a modified form that is even more accessible to the modern gamer. Even though tables and charts like the one FASERIP uses were created to make gaming easier and more accessible “Back when Tigers Used to Smoke” (thanks for a phrase I now frequently use), they don’t vibe with modern gamers. Modern players are used to target number systems and a chart/table, even an easy to interpret one like FASERIP, is out of their normal wheelhouse.

To that end, I’ve been contemplating using a d20 based mechanic that is partially inspired by The Black Hack (which was the Shadowdark of 10 years ago). I want my d20 based mechanic to replace the Universal Table while being intuitive to modern gamers. The Universal Table tells players what they need to roll to get a basic success (green), a substantial success (yellow), and a critical success (red). The division of success into different categories is one of the “genius” moments of the game, but needing to look at the chart to see if you’ve hit the next color (for those who haven’t memorized the chart) can distract from game play.

What I am thinking about doing is taking the character ratings on the chart (which are the names and numerical values of characters’ attributes and powers) and assigning them a Target Number in a range of 1 to 20. As with The Black Hack, players want to roll equal to or less than that number to succeed. Now here is the twist, in the House Rule I’m thinking of adopting, players will roll 3 Twenty-Sided Dice against that target number. If one die is equal to or less than the number, it’s a Green result, if two are then it’s Yellow, and three means a Red result. The idea isn’t completely original to me and was originally proposed a decade ago by Zak Smith for his blog. One of the problems of the basic system is that it makes superheroes less superheroic.

Faserip Universal Table

8KB ∙ XLSX file

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If you take a look at the basic Universal Table, you can see that a person with a “Shift 0” ability in something still has a 35% chance of achieving a Green result or better. When testing success on mundane actions, this means that even low caliber characters can push themselves from time to time when it comes to lifting weights. This allows even Street Level characters to push themselves and works particularly well when you include the “Intensities” rules from Advanced and Revised Marvel rulebooks. In a fight, this means that a person with Fighting of Shift 0 still has a 35% chance of hitting his/her opponent. This somewhat high level of success seems to match with the heroic nature of Supers gaming. The same person has only a 6% chance of some level of improved success (a Yellow or Red result). Low capability characters can push themselves, but extreme successes are rare…though not impossible.

3d20 Pool Success Table

8.45KB ∙ XLSX file

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When you look at the table above that shows the probabilities resulting from the 3d20 system, there are some interesting results. The first is that Shift 0 really sucks. It used to be bad, but now it’s pretty punishing. The second is that at the higher end, the probability of getting a Red result drift away from those of the traditional FASERIP system.

First, let’s look at the chance to succeed at all (you can look at the image below or check out the widget on the Marvel page on my personal website). There are some notable differences at the low and mid-ranges, particularly with regard to Green results. In traditional FASERIP, a character with a Remarkable Fighting score has a 65% chance of a Green result or better and has a 72.5% chance in the 3d20 system. When scores are lower than Good, characters are less frequently successful under the 3d20 system and above Good they are more frequently successful until you get to Shift Z (which is an NPC value anyway). I’m fine with that. It makes the “Street Level” heroes more impressive than they are under the regular system (when facing thugs) and the distinction between tiers continues.

The chance of a basic success is higher, but Yellow and Red results are much more rare in the standard 3d20 system. A person with a Remarkable ability has a 40% chance of a Yellow or better in standard FASERIP, but only a 28.2% chance in the 3d20 system. That’s a reduction of 11.8% and means that the system is pushing heroism down, at least for Street Level characters. They have a higher chance to succeed at the baseline, but a lower chance of “being cool.” That’s not the feel I want for the system. In fact, the disparity gets worse when we look at Red results.

A person with a Remarkable ability in FASERIP typically has a 20% chance of a Red result. That’s a reasonable level and represents how “remarkable” a Remarkable ability score is and lets Street Level characters dominate Typical foes. That’s a good thing and that’s what FASERIP was designed to do. That is not what happens with the 3d20 system. In this simple system, the Remarkable character only has a 4.3% chance of a Red result and this gap persists as the characters become more powerful. There are far fewer critical results in the 3d20 system. If you are playing a more realistic game, that’s probably a good thing. However, I don’t think it’s a good fit for a heroic game.

So what is a game master to do? Well, I played around with a couple of alternatives. One was a 3d6 plus bonus mechanic that I kind of like and might use elsewhere, but I am fond of the elegance of rolling 3d20. So I took a page from the Year Zero Engine. In the baseline version of that system, any roll of 6 or higher is a success. The average character has d6 rank in their attributes (though they may roll more than one), but better characters can roll higher die values like a d10 or d12. In these cases, if a player rolls 10 or more then they score 2 successes.

Yze Standard Reference Document

950KB ∙ PDF file

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That’s an interesting mechanic and can be tweaked to fit the 3d20 system. In this case, I decided to see what would happen if a die that rolled one half or less of the Target Number at a given level (the target levels are in the pictures and excel files above), then it would count as two successes and not one. This system aligns closely at the green level with those who are of Shift 0 to Poor rank doing slightly worse than in standard FASERIP, but with the middle and upper tiers doing slightly better. Under this system, the Remarkable character is still 7.5% more likely to have a Green or better result because the major changes of the “one-half equals two successes” modification has the greatest effect on Yellow and Red results.

This heroic trend continues with both the Yellow or better (with a 7.2% bonus) and Red result (0.4% better at remarkable and increasing from there). If Marvel didn’t have a “stutter” on the Universal Table at Monstrous they would be much closer, but the modified 3d20 roll at the Monstrous level ends up getting a Red “critical” result 10.6% more often than the standard system. This modified system makes most superheroes more likely of getting a Yellow and high end heroes more likely to get a Red. The effect is opposite of the straight 3d20 roll where everyone is less likely to get a critical roll, so the GM would have to choose whether they wanted a more realistic or a “more heroic/wilder” game. I think this demonstrates the flexibility of shifting from the percentage with a table to some form of 3d20 roll. I am still playing around with it, but I am wondering what the difference would be if you added 5 to one die (a “Marvel Die”) in a straight 3d20 roll if the character had the right talent or the GM thought the circumstances were good.

I think the system is intuitive, flexible, and works to a certain degree and I’m likely to use a modified version of it as I try to persuade my daughters to play. I might also use it for a straight adaptation of The Black Hack to the Superhero genre. There are a couple of previous attempts at Black Hack Supers (The Super Hack, The Super Hack Deluxe, and there used to be one called The Powers Hack), but none of those rules sets are as complete as I would like for a rules set intended for campaign use. The first two were written by Simon Burley, who was a co-author (along with Peter Haines) of the very fun Games Workshop Superhero game Golden Heroes, (which I should probably review in both its self-published and final Games Workshop form). Simon’s designed quite a few Superhero RPGs over the past couple of decades and I always love seeing what he comes up with next.

What I want to do is take the “roll under” system from The Black Hack as the base, as I’ve done for my simulations above, in order to have higher stats mean better results and have stats and results be the same number. As with FASERIP, I’ll likely have the damage equal to the set number but that will take some playtesting as having a “Remarkable” power do 7 points damage is very different than having it do 30 points of damage. Some of that is balanced by the fact that a Remarkable Endurance would only add 7 points to Health, but the whole damage curve is flattened at the higher end because the jumps in effect size from Remarkable (30) to Monstrous (75) is a 45 point increase in the older system and would only be 3 points more in my current system. So that would have to have real play experience to fully evaluate and that means it will have to wait until the next time my daughters and their crew are available to play. That is, unless I can find a new gaming group and now that the dissertation is finished I can begin that process.

Since I’m not one to end on a normal “summation” concluding paragraph, I might as well mention that I’m also contemplating adding the “roll x or y and add an interesting effect” rule from the Cypher System to whatever the 3d20 superhero game ends up being. The “x” or “y” in this case would be Yellow or Red results and they will allow the automatic use of some reality bending Power Stunt. I might even do a straight up mix of Cypher’s 1 - 10 difficulty range and “pool expenditure” system, since I think that would mix with FASERIP’s Karma system nicely.

Over the next few weeks, I’ll be fleshing out a full system but I will be using the 3d20 system as the base of whatever system I end up with.

Back in May, I discussed how useful it can be to approach D&D magic from an effects-based or special effect design philosophy as both a player and a DM. Using this approach allows for gamers to add a little of narrative magic without the need to have a deep understanding of the mechanical balance underlying the game system required to make new spells from whole cloth. This is an approach used by the Champions role playing game and by Pinnacle Entertainment Group’s Savage Worlds rpg. The Savage Worlds Adventure Edition rule book describes this approach in the following way:

For Savage Worlds, and for older editions of Champions, the particular manifestation of a spell is primarily descriptive. It allows characters to be “cool” in the way they want to be while being mechanically balanced with other player characters in the game of similar power levels. The baseline damage is the same, but there is some play around the edges when a creature or villain has a particular vulnerability. This is why SWADE, and Champions, require the special effects to be static once chosen and not be variable, though one could create a system for allowing them to be mutable at a cost in both of these games. In D&D games, I have my Wizards “memorize,” and Sorcerers “know,” particular expressions of spells and have those be fixed. Since Wizards can change their spells when they memorize them the next day, they can memorize different “effects” from day to day but only if they’ve got those expressions in their spell books.

All of this may make it seem like coming at magic from a special effects approach is an intimidating process, and you might have begun to doubt my assertions that it can be done without creating a lot of work for players and DMs, but I’m going to attempt to show you how it does just the opposite. It allows for the creation of a lot of imaginative and narrative effects without the need for creating new mechanics. As a part of this argument, I have decided to write a series of D&D 5e Wizards (I’ll also update to 5.5/6e later) based on Power Themes that reflect the use of effects-based spells.

My first character is a Wizard who has dedicated her studies to lightning focused magic. In the Forgotten Realms, she might be a worshipper of Talos or just a character who believes that lightning is really cool…because it is. I haven’t included any magical equipment for this character but have renamed the “reskinned” spells with lightning themed versions. There will be a bit of a discussion of how this interacts with game balance after the stat bloc.

Mystrael Shawk

Human Lightning Wizard (Soldier)

Level 5

Str 8 (-1) Dex 14 (+2) Con 14 (+2)

Int 16 (+3) Wis 10 (+0) Cha 12 (+1)

HP (5d6+10) 32

AC 12 or 15 (Dex; Crackling Aura + Dex)

Init +2 Speed 30 Proficiency Bonus +3

Attacks: Dagger +5 (1d4 piercing), Dagger (ranged) +5 1d4 piercing, Spells +6
Senses: Investigation 16, Perception 10
Saves: Intelligence +6, Wisdom +3
Skills: Arcana +6, Athletics +2, Intimidation +4, Investigation +6, Sleight of Hand +5
Feats: Keen Mind
Human Traits: Bonus Skill (Sleight of Hand), Bonus Feat (War Caster)
Wizard Traits: Spellcasting, Arcane Recovery, Arcane Tradition (Abjuration), Lighting Ward (13 HP)
Spell Casting Ability (Known: 3, 6, 6, 4; Slots: 4, 4, 3, 2; DC 14)

Cantrips: Lightning Ball (Acid Splash), Crackling Illumination (Light), Shocking Grasp

Spells

1 - Arc of Lightning (Burning Hands), Crackling Aura (Mage Armor), Electric Shield (Shield), Synaptic Shock (Sleep), Static Tickle (Tasha’s Hideous Laughter), Plasma Arc (Magic Missile)
2 - Lightning Cloud (Cloud of Daggers), Immobilizing Shock (Hold Person), Electrify Weapon (Magic Weapon), Mystral’s Lightning Arrow (Melf’s Acid Arrow), Clinging Field (Spider Climb), Electrical Flash (Blindness/Darkness)
3 - Electrical Animation (Animate Dead), Sphere of Lightning (Fireball), Ride the Lightning (Fly), Lightning Bolt

As you can see, merely by renaming some of the spells the descriptive effect in play of certain spells is altered without changing their effects. Take Crackling Illumination as an example here. When it comes to game effects, it doesn’t matter whether light is produced by illusory fire, real fire, crackling electricity, or radiant illumination. All that matters is that the spell produces the effect of light. Similarly for Mage Armor, since we aren’t categorizing any kind of damage, the appearance of Mage Armor doesn’t affect game play.

When the character later learns Fire Shield (which will be Lightning Shield natch), there might be some mechanical considerations regarding resistances and immunities. Mystrael’s focus on lightning themed damage spells means that there are mechanical considerations for spells like Lightning Ball (Acid Splash). Any reasonable DM should have their “but that spell already features typed damage, and it might matter” alarm flash a warning. It is very true that there might be some mechanical differences of consequence. Some DMs might merely hand wave such concerns and point out, as Michael Shea at Sly Flourish often does that Dungeons and Dragons isn’t designed to be a balanced game and that imbalance is a part of what we like. As a fan of games like Champions that are heavily playtested to ensure mechanical balance, I won’t do such hand waving here, though it is a perfectly “Folk D&D” thing to do.

Instead, I’m going take a look under the hood of Acid Splash to see what kind of damage it currently does, who is resistant to that, and whether reskinning it as a lightning effect changes anything significantly. No, I’m not going to run a full t-test to determine significance, but I am going to see if there is face validity to the claim that they are pretty much the same.

Range: 60 feet
Damage: Save or Take 1d6 Acid Damage
# Creatures affected: 1 or 2 within 5 feet.

Range: 60 feet
Damage: Save or Take 1d6 Acid Damage
# Creatures affected: All Creatures in a 5 ft. Sphere.

You’ll notice that the 5e version allows for only one or two creatures, while the 6th edition version could affect up to 9 foolish creatures in tight formation. In 5e and 6e, a 5-foot radius is typically treated like a 5-foot cube. If you wanted to treat it more like a true sphere, you could still affect 5. This is a significant increase in power from 2014’s rules set and is one of a thousand minor changes that make 2024 a truly new edition.

While the newer edition is more powerful, the Acid Splash reskinned as Lightning Ball only changes one aspect of the spell, the damage type. In fact, since the spell already can damage up to 2 creatures (5 to 9 in 6e) in close proximity the spell’s mechanics fit nicely with the reskin. The question here becomes, “Does the spell significantly improve if it becomes lightning based?” There are after all different creatures who are resistant/immune to different damage types and affecting a disproportionate number might affect game balance. This criticism only holds so much weight since the Elemental Adept feat allows casters to ignore type resistance (though not immunity). This feat is yet another example of power creep in the latest edition of D&D because in addition to the old benefit, it now includes a stat bump.

So...what are the differences between Acid and Lightning regarding number of creatures affected? Is a lightning skilled spell significantly better than an acid skinned spell?

Here is the rundown of the number of monsters in the Monster Manual (5e) who are resistant (takes half damage), immune (takes no damage), and vulnerable (takes double damage) to Acid and Lightning damage.

5e Acid Resistance/Vulnerability
Creatures Resistant to Acid in Monster Manual: 17
Creatures Immune to Acid in Monster Manual: 15
Number of Creatures Vulnerable to Acid: 0

5e Lightning Resistance/Vulnerability
Creatures Resistant to Lightning in Monster Manual: 34
Creatures Immune to Lightning in Monster Manual: 19
Number of Creatures Vulnerable to Lightning: 0

Since there are no creatures in the 5e Monster Manual who are Vulnerable to Lightning or Acid damage, there is no real effect there. However, the Lightning damage type, the spell is more limited with regard to the number of creatures it can damage. There are 19 creatures immune to Lightning damage vs. only 15 immune to Acid and there are twice as many “resistant” creatures. What about in 6e?

6e Acid Resistance/Vulnerability
Creatures Resistant to Acid in Monster Manual: 25
Creatures Immune to Acid in Monster Manual: 18
Number of Creatures Vulnerable to Acid: 0

6e Lightning Resistance/Vulnerability
Creatures Resistant to Lightning in Monster Manual: 38
Creatures Immune to Lightning in Monster Manual: 19
Number of Creatures Vulnerable to Lightning: 0

The 6e effect is similar. Choosing Lightning over Acid is a net detriment, though the biggest detriment is choosing the Poison damage type. Poison was a frequent tool in earlier editions of D&D, but over 100 of the monsters in the modern game are straight up immune to poison. Woe unto the poison lord in a land of Skeletons. In the end, these are negligent effects and I believe we can see that this won’t change game balance too much in the player’s favor. Though reskinning poison spells as lightning would be a benefit and so might be discussed.

Regardless of the mechanical considerations when analyzing the impact of damage type, describing Sleep as an effect that results from a quick electrical burst that disrupts the circadian rhythm of a foe or Spider Climb as a static field that surrounds the hands and feet of the caster does nothing other than add a narrative touch to play. The same is true for describing Animate Dead as electrical impulses arching through corpses to control their movements.

There are some damage types that are clearly better or worse than average when it comes to this kind of analysis. Very few creatures are resistant to Radiant damage and approximately 100 monsters (in both editions) are immune to poison, for example, and you would have to decide whether or not to do the “it doesn’t really matter” hand wave or ban those as reskinnable trappings in your games. One thing to consider for spells like Sleep is that you might have the creature’s resistance apply to the hit points rolled against the spell. That significantly reduces the power of that particular spell against certain foes, but it adds the illusion of unpredictability to your magic and makes magic more magical.

If I get good response to this, I might stat up some more themed wizards and maybe do multi-system adaptations.

I’m a big fan of the old social media “list” memes. They still show up from time to time when someone shares “Four Books to Know Me,” but their heyday has long since passed. It’s too bad because they were/are a part of what makes social media genuinely social. So much of today’s online communication is the sharing of ragebait stories or attempts to gain virality through controversial statements or cruelty. These kinds of behavior are built into the various algorithms, and toxicity is favored over connection. This is as true of BlueSky as it is for Twitter, and I even see it creep into Substack from time to time as the ragerati wander into these creative social shores.

As you all know, I subscribe to a lot of different writers here on Substack. Some, like , I follow because their poetry and humor remind me of lost friends. I lost some of those friends due to time and distance, but others died far too soon and reading essays and poems by these authors helps me remember the best of those lost friends. Others I follow because they are academics like or who write about areas I study or have interest in. I don’t always agree with their takes/analysis, but that is what academics at their best are about. There are “pop” academics I avoid here, though they tend to be among the ragerati and that hint might give you a clue of whom I mean. Because of my work in non-partisan youth civic engagement and study of polarization, I don’t filter my follows by partisanship. I follow liberal and conservative alike.

While I don’t “like” everyone I follow/read, there are many I do. People like , , , , , and many others are people I either know in real life and care deeply about or are people I consider internet friends. If they are ever in town, I would want to go out of my way to hang with them. falls into this group, first by association, but as time has progressed through online interaction.

Sarah is a part of the “hip journalist” crowd I’ve always envied a little bit. She’ll probably push back and say, “I’m not a hip journalist! That’s reserved for people like Thomas Wolfe and Hunter S. Thompson…maybe Legs McNeil!” She’d be correct, as far as that goes, but it’s also true that she has been able to make a career commenting about society in some way…often by commenting on things she thinks are cool and having others agree. That’s what I mean by being “hip.” The hip journalists I really envy are those who make a career reviewing films or games, in part because I think I often know more about the subject (and sometimes even imagine myself as a better writer) than many of those who make a living at the gig. Let’s just say that my rage at most of Indiewire’s critical team burns with the fire of 1,000 suns, even as Anne Thompson (editor-at-large of said publication) is someone I like and admire. I don’t dislike most hip journalists, but a part of me envies them in the “I am completely fantasizing how carefree their lives are” kind of way. I know most of them work extremely hard, but their profession is SO COOL.

Anyway, Sarah has a new book out called The Only Thing There is to Want: A Memoir of Three Loves. The book, which I will be reading and reviewing at some point that is too late to be topical, engages with the challenges many people (and especially women) face in trying to have it all in career and companion. To promote the book, Sarah has created a new Substack called that unlike so many Substackers today, she is offering for free. Yes, it’s aimed at marketing her book, a book that is distinctly hip journalist because who gets to sell memoirs, but it is free and gives a sense of her humor and charm. In her most recent post, she shares the “Ten Best Love Songs” according to her.

Love Anyway

The Ten Best Love Songs, According to Me

Tom Waits did not make this list. No Beatles, no ELO, no Old 97’s. You have no idea how painful this was for me, and all I can say is that some artists write so many classic love songs that ONE never quite rises to the top. I tried to be thorough, but of course this list is arbitrary…

Read more

2 months ago · 38 likes · 52 comments · Sarah Hepola

It’s a good list, meaning that it’s filled with good songs, and I thought of sharing it as a part of a not-so-Weekly Geekly, but it included a song by Fleetwood Mac (no not that song) and so my mind wouldn’t settle for a mere paragraph or two in response. My mind demanded, demanded I say, that I share a full list of 10 Great Love Songs (you all know how I feel about “best” lists, which is to say that I prefer recommendation lists to top 10s etc.). In other words, I read her combination of community building and marketing as if it was one of those old internet memes. Look at that, I tied it all back together.

So…without further ado, here is a list of 10 songs in no particular order that I think are great love songs.

One Million by Rocket

I’m a sucker for a good Shoegaze band and Rocket is a fantastic shoegaze band. The textures of their musical tone, combined with the haunting voice of Alithea Tuttle, make for a wonderful contrast. You’ve got the fuzzy grind of shoegaze with the lilting high tones of dreampop, and it works beautifully. Their song One Million is about unrequited love and wanting to be noticed and it was one of the reasons I became and insta-fan of this band.

How Long Will I Love You by The Waterboys (as performed by Jon Boden, Sam Sweeney and Ben Coleman in About Time)

About Time is on my list of perfect films. It is a wonderful story of love and time travel. It is a romantic comedy. It is a coming-of-age story. It is a tale of loss and love. It is a tale of familial love. Richard Curtis has directed many wonderful films about love, but this is the one I’ve watched the most. The performance of How Long Will I Love You featured in the film is magnificent and you can see why Curtis chose it over the Ellie Goulding one that is featured on the soundtrack. That’s right, the version of the song in the film is not the one featured on the CD or playlist, which is too bad. The folk version is so much better and heartfelt. The sequence that uses it in the film (not what is in the video) is true Gesamtkunstwerk.

I’ll Follow You Into the Dark by Deathcab for Cutie

It’s hard to believe this song is almost 20 years old. This is a sad and dark song about love and the eternal commitment possible even in the face of uncertainty. It’s a song that says that no matter what comes, the one who loves you will be there if possible.

Clair de Lune by Claude Debussy

While Pachelbel’s Canon is one of my wife’s and my favorite songs, and played at our wedding eons ago, it is a bit overdone now and so I chose Debussy’s Clair de Lune. While Debussy is Edward’s favorite composer, and I’m Team Edward, this song stands strong because it is one of the most beautiful songs ever written. While its subject matter isn’t one of passionate love, it features prominently in the film Frankie and Johnnie and ties together the simple romance at play in the film. The movie is romantic, but only a comedy in the sense that the protagonists become a couple by the end. The dramatic moments overshadow the humorous and this is the song that unites the romance. There is a sadness and mystery in the song that is a fitting musical description of love.

While the songs are very different, I think there is a similar intimacy in Roberta Flack’s performance of First Time Ever I Saw Your Face. Such a beautiful song.

Operator by Jim Croce

Jim Croce’s Operator is one of the saddest love songs out there and a prime example of how fantastic the singer songwriter era of the early 1970s was at giving us songs that were musically complex while telling a story. The song has the requisite pop hook, but there’s depth there that is often lacking in pop of any era.

Always Something There to Remind Me by Naked Eyes

Burt Bacharach wrote banger after banger and Always Something There to Remind Me is just one example. It’s hard to beat a Dionne Warwick version of a song, but this 1980s alt-pop version of the song rises to the top. From its operatic beginning to its much more intimate chorus, this version hits all the right beats. Other versions of the song use backup singers to add depth to the chorus, but this version proves that’s unnecessary.

Farther Down by Matthew Sweet

From the cover albums he did with Susanna Hoffs to his album Girlfriend where he attempted to connect with the MTV crowd, Matthew Sweet has long been one of my favorite artists. He never hit it really big, he did partner with Susanna Hoffs and Mike Myers to create one of the best movie theme songs ever BBC by Ming Tea.

That’s not a romantic song though, for that I’ll go to his song Farther Down from the film Can’t Hardly Wait. When I think about the films released during my daughters’ high school years, it makes me kind of sad. While there is a lot of content aimed at their cohort, there aren’t many films “about” their life experience. Being a teenager in any era is hard, but in the era of polarization and Covid it can be even harder. Generation X had John Hughes films and Millennials had She’s All That, Can’t Hardly Wait, and many more. I think that one of the reasons that the new Spider-Man movie, and Obsession, have done so amazingly well is that they are films about Gen Z (and this is true of It Follows for Millennials). Every generation needs films about their experience. We’ve seen tons of films about the Boomer experience and Gen X had Hughes films (and eventually films like Swingers and more when they began making their own films), but Gen Z has had a hard time of it.

There’s quite of bit of cringe (I know I’m Unc for even using that outdated phrase, but dads are always Unc) in Can’t Hardly Wait, but there’s a lot of truth. It captures all the anxieties that dominate the high school experience but also shows how shallow they really are. Many of the people I thought disliked me in high school, due to high school politics, ended up being great friends later in life. At my reunions, you could tell those who peaked in high school, but it wasn’t many people. Most had moved on and remembered everyone fondly.

Kiss Me by Sixpence None the Richer

Okay, I’m really picking too many songs from romantic comedies. I mentioned She’s All That in the prior post, but it’s a great romantic comedy and it features a lovely song by Sixpence None the Richer. Sure, the film is implausible in that it tries to present Rachel Leigh Cook as anything other than stunningly beautiful. I’m sorry, glasses and overalls don’t take away from her beauty, they just make her a beautiful tomboy. The film’s performances are fun, but simple. The song on the other hand is one that will endure.

Fire and Rain by James Taylor

Not all love songs are about romance. Some are about friendship and James Taylor’s sad Fire and Rain is one of the best in that genre. Like Croce, Taylor is a powerful singer/songwriter. If you had asked me in 1970 (if I had been alive then) which of the two would live to be 78 (and hopefully even older), I would have picked Croce. James Taylor struggled with heroin addiction and his song Carolina in My Mind is a song about his longing for home as he felt isolated and contemplated his struggles with heroin addiction. It’s a song about the love he has for his home and family; Fire and Rain is a song of love about those he lost far too young. It’s the musical equivalent to the Author’s Note Philip K. Dick wrote for A Scanner Darkly:

A Lifetime by Better than Ezra

While the official meaning behind the band name Better than Ezra is still a mystery, there is no mystery to what A Lifetime is about. The song was inspired by the theft and cremation of Gram Parson’s body, but the story this song tells is a little different. Like James Taylor’s song this is a song about a dead best friend, but the cause of death is unknown, and it doesn’t matter. I’ve lost friends to age, disease, and suicide. All of them were gone too soon. Of all of them, the one that hit the hardest was my friend Ron Peck. He was the coolest guy I ever knew. He was self-assured and had truly refined taste. He had a wonderful sense of humor, but he had an eternal melancholy. Years before he died, he told me how he would kill himself. He described it in great detail as a criticism of someone who had attempted and failed. He said they chose the wrong method and described how he would do it right. That’s what he did, and I miss him every day. We are getting close to October 7th, the anniversary of my mom’s death from heroin addiction, and Ron helped me get through some of the initial pain of that when we reconnected after a couple of years of “I’m in college now” distance. That made losing him even harder, but we had a lifetime of fun together.

As is often the case here, I am a little late on finishing off a series of posts, but I am still within my regular “one article a week” schedule. I’ll be aiming for two a week starting in September, but I am adjusting to a new job and my daughters are starting college so there are a bunch of life changes going around.

As I mentioned before, I have picked up on Professor Dungeon Master’s concept of July as Independent Gaming Month and curated a list of games that appeal to the whole spectrum of gamer types that Robin Laws presents in Robin’s Laws of Good Game Mastering. Dividing gamers into this kind of taxonomy originated with early game theorists and roleplaying enthusiasts in the California Scene. Steven Horst and Glen Blacow discussed the concept in Different Worlds #10, where Horst described gaming styles using the term “Theory of Play,” while Glen Blacow called them “Aspects of Adventure Gaming.” In issue #11 of Different Worlds, Jeffrey A. Johnson (who would later go on to design the Temple of Apshai series of games) used Blacow’s “Aspects” as dimensions for a kind of “ideological gaming space” where players weren’t seen as absolutist in their aspects, rather as falling somewhere in an ideological map. Essentially, the roleplaying game equivalent of the famous DW-Nominate Scores we use in political science. Tools like this let you see if politicians have multi-dimensional beliefs or if their beliefs (measured by voting patterns) change over time.

While I really like the Cartesian model that Jeffrey A. Johnson designed, I think that broad classifications are much easier to imagine and design for than specific places on a grid. I might have my students take the Political Compass survey every year, but it is much easier for them to understand Pew’s categories than placement on the Compass. Feel free to take these quizzes and report your results, you’ll get no judgement from me.

Looking at the various articles, you can see a nice expansion of the concept over time, and I tried to provide games for all these groups.

Steven Horst's "Theory of Play"

     1. Personality Projection
     2. Role-Assuming
     3. Directed Development
     4. Undirected Development

Glenn F. Blacow's "Aspects of Adventure Gaming."

     1. Power Gaming
     2. Role-Playing
     3. Wargaming
     4. Story Telling

Robin Laws’ Player Types:

     1. The Power Gamer
     2. The Butt Kicker
     3. The Tactician
     4. The Specialist
     5. The Method Actor
     6. The Casual Gamer

Discussion of what each of these types means within each taxonomy will be the topic for a future post, where I will also likely add a couple additional types to Robin’s list in order to incorporate more recent developments in roleplaying like what the BROSR are doing with perpetual Braunsteins and adversarial play. This style of play is unique enough to warrant its own term, even as it would fall somewhere within a Cartesian ideological space.

It’s the Final (Indie) Countdown!!!

July 1 — Colonial Gothic (It’s the 250th Anniversary of the United States after all. His Kickstarter didn’t succeed, but it’s a great game and you should 100% check it out.)
July 2 — Good Guys Finish Last
July 3 — Champions
July 4 — Dragon Warriors (I’m a big fan of Dave Morris and Oliver Johnson’s work and will be reviewing their Blood Sword gamebooks and the RPG I backed on Kickstarter back in the day soon. I’ll also be reviewing Mortal Combat and Dagon Warriors.)
July 5 — Troika
July 6 — Savage Worlds
July 7 — Castle Falkenstein
July 8 — Fantasy AGE role playing
July 9 — Inspectres
July 10 — Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay (Which will have a new edition soon)
July 11 — Traveller
July 12 — Hero Kids (Gaming isn’t just for Grownups)
July 13 — Beach Patrol (Combine this and Tiny Spies and you’ve got Miami Vice)
July 14 — Runequest (from the creator of the Perrin Conventions)
July 15 — Dragonbane
July 17 — Villains & Vigilantes Monkey House Games Edition 2.1 (I’ll be reviewing all three editions soon)
July 18 — Age of Sigmar: Soulbound (I honestly don’t know why Brandon Sanderson didn’t just license this system for his Cosmere RPG)
July 19 — Masks: A New Generation (Second edition coming soon)
July 20 — Mazes
July 21 — Symbaroum (Traditional “Faerie” Fantasy done right)
July 22 — Leagues of Adventure (Paul “Wiggy” Wade Williams is one of my all-time favorite designers)
July 23 —My Life with Master
July 24 — Shiver
July 25 — Mothership
July 26 — Never Going Home
July 27 — Tunnels & Trolls may technically break the “in
July 28 — Vaesen

July 29 — Lasers and Feelings

Lasers and Feelings

With the recent release, and disappearance of Critical Role’s Candela Obscura roleplaying game, there has been a bit of chatter about John Harper as a game designer. I know people who play a variety of games, but I don’t know anyone who plays Candela Obscura. Even Beadle & Grimm’s support, a pdf expansion, has been lukewarm. All that said, I think it is an interesting game, but it’s hard to compete with Call of Cthulhu and Vaesen in the horror space.

Harper was discussed because he designed Blades in the Dark, a game that stands on the shoulders of many indie rpg giants like Apocalypse World and Inspectres (see the earlier entry above). Blades in the Dark incorporates a number of player agency and troupe play mechanics in a way that deeply merges mechanics and genre. If you haven’t checked that game out, do so. It was one of the major mechanical and style influences for Candela Obscura and is worth your time, so much so that many accused Critical Role of ripping it off. This accusation tied to the fact that early release pdfs of the game did not include reference to Harper’s creation, but as noted in the section on Inspectres Harper himself neglected to mention all of his influences. Controversy aside Candela Obscura is worth checking out, but I don’t know if it will catch on.

As for John Harper, when he isn’t designing independent games that result in very successful Kickstarter campaigns, he’s out there providing robust roleplaying game material for free. One of the best examples of his design philosophy, and of a subset of story gaming in general, is his game Lasers and Feelings. This game is a one-page role playing game that allows you to play adventures that explore strange new worlds and go where no one has gone before in minutes.

The base conceit for design in Lasers and Feelings is that most of the conflicts in everyone’s favorite weekly version of Wagon Train among the stars are resolved either with Lasers or with Feelings. Our rogue captains, be they Kirk, Burnham, or Pickard, are either blasting the crap out of foes, engaging in romantic interludes, or persuading the aliens to be peaceful with heartfelt appeals. It really is an elegant, if reductive, examination of the genre.

Because of this assumption, the game only needs one statistic, LaserFeelings. This is a number that ranges from 2 to 5. Any roll above that number succeeds at actions that require lasers (fighting etc.), which any roll below that number succeeds on actions that require feelings (romance/persuasion). If you roll the number exactly, you experience “Laser Feelings” and not only succeed but get some additional insight into the conflict/story you are engaging in at the moment. It’s a very simple, but very powerful system. There is a little more to the system, but the key innovation and genius is in this part of the mechanic. One could have designed it it by having two complementary stats (Lasers and Feelings) that must total 7, mirroring Pendragon’s Pagan vs. Christian virtues, but having it be a single number is quite elegant.

There are a HUGE number of Lasers and Feelings derivative games, including the superhero game Zam! Pow! Spork! and tons of games on itch.io. This is a game designed with the Method Actor in mind.

July 30 — When the Wolf Comes

I love me some Ragnarok themed roleplaying games and When the Wolf Comes by Ian Stuart Sharpe takes that them and combines it with Robert Schwalb’s excellent Shadow of the Demon Lord role playing game. After Rob Schwalb left Wizards of the Coast, post-4th edition D&D, he did two things. First, he wrote a great article that convinced me that one of the major reasons people “hated” 4th edition so much was the layout. The other major reason I believe people hated 4e was that it had marketing that told D&D fans that they sucked. The more things change, the more they stay the same (I’m looking at you OGL debacle). The second thing Rob did was design a game that proved his point.

Shadow of the Demon Lord is one of three excellent games based around mechanical innovations in the 4th edition D&D game, the other two are 13th Age and the 4e based Gamma World. Interestingly enough, Schwalb’s game may be based on, and inspired by, the mechanical innovations of 4e, but the game plays vastly differently. Yes, both use d20s and players gain levels which give them powers, and that’s a lot of similarity, but it is very much a different game. One of the key differences is in the initiative system. In traditional D&D, you roll for initiative. That is not the case in Shadow powered games like When the Wolf Comes. In Shadow games players select whether they want to act “Fast” or “Slow.” If they chose to act fast, their characters go first but must choose between moving and taking an action for their turn. If they choose to go slow, they can both move and take an action, but they go after GM characters. It’s a simple system that adds player agency while also making players take tradeoffs into account.

Thematically, When the Wolf Comes really shines. Imagine if you will that Odin wanted to stop/delay Ragnarok and so he gifted his worshipers the gift of gunpowder in the 9th Century, at the peak of Viking exploration. The “Dane” raiders subsequently wipe out Christianity and explore the stars. It’s a great premise and the combination of back story and art give the game a very Cosmic Kirby feel. Imagine if Kirby’s version of Asgard had started on Midgard and you’ve got a slight sense of what the game looks and feels like. I admit that I have a soft spot for “Odin stalls Ragnarok” stories. I played in a GURPS Supers game where we played the Asgardian Gods fighting Ragnarok in modern America, only to discover that we were clones fighting a false Ragnarok and in doing so we delayed the real one. It was a campaign that echoed the Eternals crossover storyline in the Thor comics in Thor Annual #7 and The Mighty Thor #283. My own personal take is that the Völuspá is all a ploy by Odin to fool the giants into thinking they will win Ragnarok no matter what so that Odin can buy time to build the armies of Valhalla large enough to win. He is a trickster after all, like his blood brother who may just be in on the ruse.

All that aside, I love the setting for this game and have enjoyed reading the pdf. I cannot wait until the physical version is available.

July 31 — Marvel Multiverse Role-Playing Game

I’ll be posting a review of Free League’s Invincible Roleplaying Game soon, but it is entering the market in an era of strong superhero inspired competition. Matt Forbeck’s Marvel Multiverse Role-Playing Game is the latest entry in a long string of high-quality games based on the property. The game was written and designed by my friend Matt Forbeck, so take my recommendation with a dose of “friend flavored salt.” Matt has worked on a ton of roleplaying games that include the TSR Marvel FASERIP system, Champions/Hero System, Brave New World, and the more recent Marvel Heroic Role Playing Game from Margaret Weis Productions.

The new Marvel Multiverse Role-Playing Game is a fantastic combination of the concepts and mechanics of all of those games in a way that allows for both tactical and theatre of the mind play. I promise that I will have a long, very long, formal review of the game soon where I will touch upon many of its influences and address why I think some of the people critical of the game are wrong. When the majority of complaints are disagreements regarding stat blocks, and not how the game plays, you know one of two things. Either the game plays just fine and is encouraging discussion, or that too many people only read roleplaying games and don’t actually play them anymore.

What’s Coming Soon on Geekerati

In the coming weeks, I’ll be reviewing two movies (Private Detective 62 starring William Powell and The Lady in the Lake starring and directed by Robert Montgomery). The first is a depression era detective story that includes a dash of prewar espionage, romance, and a twist on a classic con artist plan. William Powell is, as always, delightful, but you’ll have to wait for the rest of my commentary.

Robert Montgomery’s film is an adaptation of the Raymond Chandler novel of the same name, and it features Chandler’s iconic detective Philip Marlowe. The basic plot of the film is solid, but what sets this film apart for good or ill is the fact that it is filmed entirely in the first person. That’s right, before there was Hardcore Henry, there was The Lady in the Lake. The film has received a lot of flak for the gimmick, but like most such criticism the critics are making too much of the gimmick while ignoring the craft behind it. And there is craft behind it. Is it enough the save the film? You’ll have to wait for the review.

Last, but not least is my upcoming review of the Invincible Roleplaying Game. While the game is based on the comic book and Amazon series, the game is designed to be flexible enough to play any comic book setting. I’ll have comments on the quality of the game, how it plays, and some character write ups from Marvel and DC. The Kickstarter raised enough money that the company promised to release an Open License for the Superhero adaptation they did to the Year Zero Engine, but that has yet to be included in the current System Reference Document. When it is, I might just use it for my own game, though I am currently working on a Fighting Fantasy Gamebook inspired system.

A few years ago, Games Workshop launched two new Warhammer related book series under the Warhammer Adventures label aimed at younger readers. One of the series took place in the Age of Sigmar dimensional fantasy setting and the other took place in the GrimDark expanses of the Warhammer 40k science fiction setting. Games Workshop has a long history of publishing media tie-in fiction for their game lines, and you can find Warhammer related novels and short stories dating back to the late 1980s with titles like Ignorant Armies and Konrad. As of this blog post there are well over 100 Warhammer related novels with a number of standout series like Gotrek & Felix (though I still haven’t forgiven them for what they did to Felix) and Dan “Guardians of the Galaxy” Abnett’s Gaunt’s Ghosts. Games Workshop, like TSR/Wizards of the Coast, have shown themselves to be excellent providers of genre fiction.

The publication of a new line of books often passes without controversy. Maybe there’s some discussion about how it might affect the metafiction or change canon (I’m looking at you again Gotrek & Felix), but these books were Games Workshop’s first foray into Young Reader Chapter Book fiction. Past Games Workshop fiction has been aimed at an older reading audience, but these new series are aimed at readers aged 8-12. At the time, the publication of these books caused a bit of a stir on social media as some longtime fans complained that children’s stories might dilute the brand. Since I grew up on TSR’s Endless Quest and Super Endless Quest series, I was a little less skeptical. Heck, old TSR even had Heart Quest YA pick a path romantasy books. I don’t know if those brought any new people into the hobby, but of all the things that have led D&D away from its Sword & Sorcery roots those books aren’t in the top 10 offenders.

Whether TSR reached out to young readers or not back in the day is beside the point in many ways because Games Workshop has not reached out to this audience in the past. The company’s founders did with the Fighting Fantasy Gamebook series, but Games Workshop itself has shied away from younger readers. There is a pretty good reason that GW has not appealed to this audience historically.

Game Workshop’s settings are very iconic examples of the “GrimDark” genre in fantasy and science fiction. GrimDark tales feature settings that are filled with despair and violence and leave little room for hope and niceties. Some pre-GW authors who informed this genre before Games Workshop entered the publishing world are Michael Moorcock with his Elric Saga (let’s just say your average parent wouldn’t want their 10- to 12-year-old reading Neil Gaiman’s introduction to the latest omnibus) or better yet Karl Edward Wagner with his Kane stories. Though the GrimDark genre predates Games Workshop, there can be little doubt that the neologism GrimDark has its origins in the tagline of the Warhammer 40k Universe, “In the Grim Darkness of the Future, there is Only War.” That line sets the tone for all of Games Workshop’s game universes, so what room does that leave for fiction aimed at Chapter Book readers?

The simple answer to this question is, “plenty.” As grim and dark as the Games Workshop settings are, they also have a history of adjacent silliness. Games like Blood Bowl and GorkaMorka take place in horrifically terrifying worlds, but they are extremely lighthearted. Games like these show a more kid friendly face, but this kind of appeal isn’t limited to spinoffs.

Games Workshop Grognards who followed the development of the Brettonian army in Warhammer Fantasy can testify to how the game became more kid friendly in the 90s. While the Brettonia of the Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay Game of the 1980s was a place of corruption, debauchery, and vice that made Game of Thrones look civilized, by the time the Brettonians received their own book for the Warhammer Fantasy Battle Game they had been transformed into the noble knights of Howard Pyle and Roger Lancelyn Green rather than extras from Flesh + Blood. The company has always pursued younger players and has altered the tone of their setting to accommodate both young and old. I call their most successful attempts to bridge this gap “DimDark.” It’s grim enough that adults can enjoy it and see that it reflects the overall setting, while also being innocent enough that 9-year-olds don’t get nightmares.

So how do they fare this time? Do these new books manage to capture the feel of the setting, while still being “appropriate” for younger readers? The answer to this question is, “Yes, for the 40k inspired series and we’ll have to see how the series develops for the Age of Sigmar inspired series.” In a way, the answer reflects the depth of the settings themselves. The Warhammer 40k setting is long-standing and rich with detail, where the Age of Sigmar setting is newer and was not completely flushed out when the novels were being written. To demonstrate this, I’ll be reviewing the first book in the Age of Sigmar young reader series in this post. I’ll be reviewing the 40k series later. I think it demonstrates the balance of DimDark better and gives a glimpse of what it’s like to live in the Imperium from an actual citizen’s perspective, rather than the anti-Imperial Chaos driven propaganda that oozes in the rule books.

Warhammer Adventures: The City of Lifestone

Because it’s the weaker of the two storylines, I’ll start with Warhammer Adventures: The City of Lifestone by Tom Huddleston. Not to be confused with the actor who plays Loki who has a similar name, Huddleston is an established author of young reader fiction who has written original fiction and media tie-in fiction for the Star Wars setting. Capturing DimDark in a setting as new and controversial as Age of Sigmar was at the time is a more difficult hurdle to clear, and of this series manages then it bodes well for the other series.

The City of Lifestone begins its tale on a world of fire and fury called the Plane of Aqshy. For those not versed in SF/F lore, a plane is a universe in its own right. Aqshy is one of the many “Mortal Realms” of the Age of Sigmar setting and it is also known as the Plane of Fire. The book’s protagonist, Kiri, is currently enslaved by Chaos worshiping Darkoath Barbarians. These barbarians are similar to the Bloodreavers featured in the Shadespire Boardgame. Kiri’s mother is dying and tells her that she must flee this realm and find the city of Lifestone, located on Ghyran the Plane of Life, using the Realmgate recently unearthed by the Darkoath Barbarians. Lifestone is a place of scholarship and healing from which Kiri’s mother fled due to a mysterious, and as yet unexplained, cataclysm. Though under normal circumstances, such an escape would be impossible, a company of Stormcast Eternals arrive and attack the Darkoath Barbarians providing a perfect distraction. The Stormcast Eternals, Champions of Sigmar and Opponents to Chaos, want to keep the gate out of the hands of the Darkoath Barbarians. This conflict provides Kiri with a chance to escape, even as she leaves her dead mother behind.

As an aside, this also provides a perfect segue into the Shadespire Boardgame, since that game’s introductory units are the very Darkoath-esque Bloodreavers and the Stormcast Eternals. Though the game takes place at a location far from Kiri’s slave camp, it really does make a nice tie-in to bring in new gamers, and the Shadespire game is young gamer friendly in the highest.

After fleeing Aqshy, Kiri eventually finds the City of Lifestone, only to find that the city is not the vibrant and happy paradise she imagined. It is a solemn and dying city, who’s once great fountain of healing has long since dried up. Kiri is on the edge of despair when she gets caught up in the machinations of two individuals a mysterious hooded woman and a sinister Shadowcaster. The hooded woman warns Kiri that the Shadowcaster kidnaps children, including her own child, but when Kiri meets those children (Kaspar, Thanis, Alish, and Elio) they don’t behave like kidnap victims and instead tell her that they are fated to be together. Was the hooded woman a liar, or is the Shadowcaster using magic to enslave the children as a kind of wizardly Fagin?

The book is engaging on many levels and has at its core a good adventure spark. There are suggestions that the children are indeed linked by marks they bear, one for each of the Mortal Realms, and that their link might be connected with the cataclysm that overcame Lifestone a generation ago. The character mix has all the elements of a fantasy party.

There is our protagonist Kiri, who is untrusting of others and wants to go it alone.

She is joined by the warrior girl/woman Thanis, who sadly only has armored gloves and no sword.

The mechanically minded Alish, who has a giant hammer that she uses to good effect.

The sneaky Kaspar, who may or may not be the child of the mysterious hooded woman.

Finally there is Elio, the proto-witch hunter though a more scholarly witchhunter than one typically imagines in the Warhammer Universes.

It’s a good mix of characters for an epic adventure, but due to the young age of the protagonists Huddleston’s adventurer’s actions are decidedly non-lethal. Kiri, for example, wields a slingshot (called a catapult in the book) which is effective at hurting, but not at killing, foes. Given that the setting is DimDark, this lack of lethality hurts the plausibility of the storyline and undermines an otherwise epic tale. Edgar Rice Burrough’s Martian books are perfectly appropriate for kids of the same age, and they feature deaths a plenty. The key to DimDark is to not wallow in the description. For some storylines, the lack of lethality by young protagonists would be fine, but this particular story has a scene where the adventurers fight a pack of Skaven. Given that the Skaven are portrayed as a lethal threat, the characters non-lethal weaponry seems unrealistic. It’s a small flaw given that the book is written for 11 and under, but it is a flaw nonetheless. The book needs a little more “Grim” on the part of the protagonists to successfully pull off the new “Dim-Dark” genre.

Overall, the book is a quick and engaging read, but it suffers from the fact that the Age of Sigmar setting was still lacking in mythopoetic worldbuilding at the time. The setting has grown since then, but the “Mortal Realms” diverges from many standard fantasy tropes, even as it uses them as a foundation. The Mortal Realms require more exposition of the mythic setting than is possible in a book this length. One cannot, for example, use their rough knowledge of the Holy Roman Empire to serve as a proxy for The Empire when reading these books. The “Celestial Realm” where the Stormcast Eternals live shares more with Marvel’s Asgard than with any other proxy, and even then, the connection is not strong enough for the reference to serve as a real proxy. The closest fiction I can pull from my mind that is analogous to the Mortal Realms is Brandon Sanderson’s Cosmere. The Stormcast Eternals are very similar to Roshar’s Knights Radiant, but I don’t know a lot of 10-year-olds who’ve read deep into the Cosmere lore. 14-year-olds? Sure, but 10? If this series really wants to work, then as the series continues the author will have to bring in more lore to make the world feel real. It can be done, and I enjoyed the book and look forward to reviewing the rest and the 40k series.

What do you think? Is it a mistake for roleplaying game companies to write books for kids? Share your answer in the survey and your thoughts in the comments.