19th Level

Going over my notes I'm a little surprised to discover I've had a Call of Cthulhu campaign that's reached a decent length. It seemed reasonable for my own purposes to summarize and it might be of interest to others... The more recent adventures have writeups at this site, the older ones have rougher writeups I might post at some point.

No Man's Land Parts 1-2Setting: October 2-4, 1918; Argonne Forest Investigators:  Radford Brown, Jonathan Clark, Eli Cornish, Antonio Manzi, Fredrick Tardiff 
American soldiers vs. Illoigor
Under the BlackSetting: January 19-20, 1919; Boston and Arkham Investigators: Radford Brown, Jonathan Clark, Eli Cornish, Pietro Gorgonza, Antonio Manzi, Kirk Schroeder (RIP), Fredrick Tardiff
The Great Molasses Flood provides slays a cultist and unleashes out of control Dark Spawn.
The House on the EdgeSetting: March 21-24, 1919; Kingsport Investigators: Radford Brown (RIP), Eli Cornish, Pietro Gorgonza, Antonio Manzi, Fredrick Tardiff
A mystical h…

While Boston has a modern reputation as a liberal bastion (though it pales next to its neighbor, the People's Republic of Cambridge), embedded in its history is a strong undercurrent of conservatism. One example of this is the crusade launched by Anthony Comstock and embraced the New England Watch and Ward Society. Under this regime, books, plays, films, music, etc. of objectionable moral character would be banned in Boston.

Some of the works banned in Boston include:

Leaves of Grass by Walt WhitmanThe Sun Also Rises by Ernest HemingwayOil! by Upton SinclairStrange Interlude by Eugene O'NeillStrange Fruit by Lillian SmithA Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway When I was a kid, the Howard Johnson's restaurant chain was still popular, though by the 1990s they were undergoing a rapid decline and the chain no longe exists today. However, its initial success is due to the Banned in Boston movement - in 1929 the play Strange Interlude being unable to be performed in Boston so it…

The past few months and years have been busy and I'm finally starting to see things loosening up. I've completed my last graduate class and endured a mercifully brief bout of unemployment.

I'm at the point of feeling able to actually plan out a bit more ambitious game. Most of my thoughts are in the Chaosium-family of games.

The most likely is probably a continuation of my ongoing Call of Cthulhu game, which began at the end of World War I and has reached mid-1921. I've some of the original players but, as is typical for Call of Cthulhu, none of the original characters are active. One is still around but after sanity and luck-blasting adventures, has retired from active adventuring. I've toyed with a global-spanning campaign like Masks of Nyarlathotep but find myself thinking a lot about focusing the game on Boston - certainly with forays into the wider world as appropriate.

Frustrated with the lack of an official Boston supplement for Call of Cthulhu, I've be…

Greg Stafford passed away on October 11, 2018.

He was a giant in the gaming industry. He created the world of Glorantha. He founded Chaosium and Issaries. He created or co-created countless role-playing, board, and computer games. Among these are RuneQuest, Ghostbusters, Prince Valiant, Pendragon, and HeroQuest. He helped boil down RuneQuest into its essentials, creating the Basic Role-Playing game. As head of Chaosium, he published the first Call of Cthulhu RPG and made the decision to publish Mythos fiction.

That's an amazing resume. So many of his games are noteworthy. Ghostbusters, written by Chaosium for West End Games, was the origin of the D6 System which went on to power Star Wars - and was a superb game in its own right. RuneQuest was a new way of looking at fantasy RPGs, being entirely skill-based, with no character classes or levels. It is most people's introduction to Glorantha, a world infused with myth and magic. Pendragon was unique in being a generational game…

I recently took my backer draft copy of the DCC Lankhmar set out for a few adventures. It's been fun - I find DCC to be a pretty good system for the setting.

This got me thinking of my own history with Lankhmar - an experience which, judging by articles and interviews, is similar to DCC Lankhmar author Michael Curtis'. I first encountered Nehwon, the world of Lankhmar, in the pages of AD&D's 1st edition Deities and Demigods. It gave stats for Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser, the gods of Nehwon, various creatures, and gave an extremely high level overview of some of the organizations to be found there. It also mentioned the books these stories could be found in. Books I could not find.

A few years later TSR came out with a Lankhmar: City of Adventure supplement for AD&D. I loved it - a guide to Lankhmar and Nehwon. Lots of new rules for PCs. Looking back it did have the oddity of re-skinning white magic to be clerical magic and black magic to be standard magic-user magi…

My first encounter with H.G. Wells' classic The War of the Worlds was as a broadcast of the 1950s film version of it - on WPIX Channel 11 in New York I believe. I later read the novel for a high school book report and greatly enjoyed. It remains a favorite of mine to this day - every few years I find myself rereading it.

The novel tells of the invasion of then-modern England - the suburbs around London in the late 19th century - by Martians. It is told by an unnamed narrator, a journalist by trade, and how he and his wife dealt with the invasion. It also gives a view of the invasion in London from the perspective of the narrator's brother, a medical student.

The Martians arrive in meteor-like cylinders which serve as small bases of operations for their invasion. The Martians march across the landscape on nimble tripods. These tripods carry various weapons - most notably a heat ray and "black smoke" projectors - a type of poison gas. Red weeds from Mars proliferate w…