19th Level

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 Whitman The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway Oil! by Upton Sinclair Strange Interlude by Eugene O'Neill Stran ge Fruit by Lillian Smith A 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 ...

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 ,...

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 generationa...

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-us...

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 prolife...

With my degree pursuit entering the home stretch, posting has been pretty anemic. But I wanted to give a very brief write-up of our first adventure playing with DCC Lankhmar. This is our playing of The Madhouse Meet  from the 2016 Free RPG Day book from Goodman Games.  Cast of Characters: الموت (Almawt) - Daughter of Lankhmarts who settled in the Eastern Lands. Abandoned her designated role as a squire to study magic under Sheelba of the Eyeless Face.  Ганзориг (Ganzorig) - Unlucky and dim-witted Mingol warrior, deadly with his battle axe. Challenge to speak with given his lack of speaking the common Low Lankhmarese.  Phlegm - Lankhmar-native. Smuggler, independent thief who has reached an accommodation with the Thieves' Guild of Lankhmar. Summary:  The trio did not meet in a tavern. They were however all captured from the same tavern, the Heavy Lion, in the slums near the Marsh Gate of the Temple Quarter. The wizard Tulmakiz had been e...

Taking a look at the 2018 ENnie Winners , it seems the Mythos kinda kicked ass. By my count, products in the Cthulhu family won a dozen awards: Best Adventure (Silver) - Delta Green: A Night at the Opera (Arc Dream Publishing) Best Art (Gold) - Harlem Unbound (Darker Hue Studios) Best Electronic Book (Gold) -Delta Green: A Night at the Opera (Arc Dream Publishing) Best Game (Silver) - Delta Green: The RPG (Arc Dream Publishing) Best Monster/Adversary (Silver) - Down Darker Trails (Chaosium Inc.) Best Podcast (Gold) - Miskatonic University Podcast Best Production Values (Gold) - Delta Green: The RPG (Arc Dream Publishing) Best Rules (Gold) - Delta Green: The RPG (Arc Dream Publishing) Best Setting (Gold) - Harlem Unbound (Darker Hue Studios) Best Supplement (Gold) - Reign of Terror (Chaosium Inc.) Best Writing (Gold) - Harlem Unbound (Darker Hue Studios) Product of the Year (Silver) - Delta Green: The RPG (Arc Dream Publishing) In addition, Chaosium collected a ...